ABSTRACT
The term “Cambridge School” is a curious piece of academic shorthand. It is used to refer to an intellectual community whose members are bound neither by a singular disciplinary or national context, nor by any specific methodological commitments. Furthermore, the term has been questioned by those whose work it is intended to describe. When asked recently about his and J. G. A. Pocock’s status as the most notable members of the “School,” Quentin Skinner replied: “I’m not sure if there is really a ‘Cambridge School,’ and I’m not sure that John Pocock and I agree except at the most general level about historical method.”1
Nonetheless, despite Skinner’s misgivings, we must caution against throwing the baby out with the terminological bathwater, for in the 1960s Pocock, Skinner, and others launched a similar history-based offensive on historians of political theory. This offensive involved criticizing the anachronistic “Great Books” approach employed by contemporaries, and pronouncing on the proper subject matter of the history of political theory and the proper techniques for studying this subject matter. While the differences in their arguments certainly cast doubt on the existence of a “Cambridge School,” these authors (who passed through the History Department at Cambridge more or less contemporaneously) reveal clear affinities, arising from shared intellectual influences and the reciprocal influence that they have exerted on one another’s work.2
