Damn the Consequences? Quentin Skinner, Political Thought and Communicative Effects

Abstract

Politics involves action and political action involves intentions and consequences which need accounting for, since without intentionality the action reduces to an event and without effect something of a non-event (Dunn 1990: 3; Geuss 2008: 11-12). The transformation of the study of the history of political thought over recent decades under the influence of the ‘Cambridge school’, uniformly acknowledged if not uniformly embraced, has centred on identifying political thought as a form of political action (Skinner 2006; Pocock 2009). ...