International Law and Justice Working Papers - IILJ

When sociologically interested lawyers turn to the past of their discipline, they should do so with
some caution, at least in order to avoid becoming (bad) amateur historians. As a minimum,
familiarity with and internalization of methodological debates in the science of history is
required. A leading contemporary author on the methods of writing intellectual history, Quentin
Skinner, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, has emphasized the
importance of situating historical texts in their intellectual and linguistic context, in order to
establish the purpose their authors had in mind when advancing their arguments. 3 In his work,
Skinner has discussed several fundamental problems that arise from interpreting old texts.
One such problem, for instance, is whether the historian of ideas should characterize certain
beliefs or statements of historical agents as “false” or erroneous. 4 Skinner claims not and argues
that the only standard such statements and beliefs should be measured with is some generally
accepted standard of epistemic rationality. Historians would merely be reporting that it was not
an appropriate belief for that particular agent to have espoused in that particular society at that
particular time. 5 A related difficulty is the temptation to judge somebody in the past not on the
basis of what he or she knew but what we subsequently know.
Skinner argues that all serious utterances are characteristically intended as acts of
communication: “But to argue is always to argue for or against a certain assumption or point of
view or course of action. (…) To put the point in another way, there is a sense in which we need
to understand why a certain proposition has been put forward if we wish to understand the
proposition itself. We need to see it not simply as a proposition but as a move in an argument.
3 Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
4 For instance, Bulmerincq called Kant’s project of a Staatenstaat (today we would say: international organization) a
‚mistake’ since international law had to be founded on the independence of States. Die Systematik, p. 144.
5 Skinner, op. cit., p. 37-38.