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Political Languages and the Politics of Languages. The Russian Perspective on the Cambridge School

Yanovsky O.S.,

postgraduate student, Department of Political Theory, MGIMO University, olegyanovsky@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2020.01.13

Rubric: Reflecting on Matters in Print

For citation:

Yanovsky O.S. Political Languages and the Politics of Languages. The Russian Perspective on the Cambridge School. – Polis. Political Studies. 2020. No. 1. https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2020.01.13

Abstract

The review examines the collections of essays about the Cambridge School of history of political thought. By analysing the methodological approaches of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock, the authors carried out an in-depth exploration of the problem of how political thought can be studied best by putting it inside a relevant context and using historical methods. The authors believe that the methodological approaches of the Cambridge School can successfully be applied in examining Russian history and Russian political thought. Thus, the work also includes a collection of translated essays written by Pocock and Skinner as well as by respected commentators reflecting on the Cambridge School. The book offers a critical perspective on the practical application of the methods discussed, which is laid out in a chapter devoted to a rather new approach of looking at Russian history. It includes a number of works presented by Russian authors who explicate their vision on how the Cambridge school methodologies can be applied in the context of the history of Russian political thought. The reviewed work adopts an imaginative and polemical approach to the scientific piece as a whole. Particularly, its publication serves the crucial purpose of attracting attention towards scientific methods as being appropriate to the current challenges in human sciences. 

Keywords

Cambridge School, J.G.A. Pocock; Quentin Skinner, history of political thought, intellectual history, political language, history of political discourses.

 Full Text 

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