History in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Richard Bourke · Quentin Skinner

Dec 2022 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

This interdisciplinary volume explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches within these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences, such as statistical, analytical or empirical approaches, secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.

About the author

Richard Bourke is Professor of the History of Political Thought and a Fellow of King's College at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely in the history of political ideas and intellectual History, including Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (2015) and, as co-editor, The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution (Cambridge, 2022).

Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge 1996-2008. He is the author of numerous books on Renaissance and modern intellectual history, most recently From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018).