History like an argument: The Norman conquest in Levellers’ and Diggers’ texts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46661/revintpensampolit.1489Keywords:
parliament, history, levellers, Cromwell, diggersAbstract
The aim of this paper is to arise some objections to Quentin Skinners three part thesis that for the Levellers and his allies (i) history and, in particular, the Norman conquest, is used only as a means of illustrating a number of arguments also capable of being more abstractly stated, (ii) that they treat the historical evidence as carrying no prescriptive force and (iii) that they recognise instead that, as Hobbes was to put it, history can offer only examples of fact, never argument of Right. It appears, however, that on the basis of the evidence furnished by the study of the political vocabulary of some Levellers and Winstanleys tracts that propositions (i)-(iii) can no longer be maintened as a correct historical explanation of the main political claims those tracts are meant to support.
Downloads
References
Quentin Skinner, he Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol I, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, p. xi.
Quentin Skinner, “History and ideology in the English Revolution” en el vol. III de isions of Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 238-263.
Searle, o. Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, pp. 177-182
Overton, A. "Remonstrance of many housand citizens" en The English Levellers, Sharp (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 34.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2015 Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Político
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Open access policy
Free and open access is allowed to any interested party to all the contents of the journal issues, free of charge, being able to print and transfer all the articles, with the only condition of specifying the source and authorship.
The journal: a) does not charge authorship costs for the processing of articles or for their submission, b) maintains copyright for authors without restrictions, c) facilitates authors to keep their publication rights without limitations.
The International Journal of Political Thought is an original work of the Laboratory of Political Ideas and Practices of the Pablo de Olavide University. All articles included in the Journal are original work of their respective authors. This Journal is freely offered to the scientific and academic community at no cost and releases the contents according to the license "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 CC BY-NC-SA" of the Creative Commons project available in the following url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode
If you wish to translate or compile any of the articles available here, please contact us at contacto