The Cambridge School

The Cambridge School is the name for a tradition for the writing of the history of political thought which emerged in the University of Cambridge in the 1960s and which has since become the name of a now fairly standard historical way of writing about the great canon of political classics. The School operates at the intersections of politics, philosophy and history—all of which are vexed engagements—and may be considered part of a shift whereby the nineteenth-century Whiggish or progressive tendency to write history towards a culmination in the present was replaced by a twentieth-century tendency to write history more “politically” in order to emphasize the complications of context, especially the continuous context of ideological conflict. This tradition had some ancestry in the writings of others but came to its height in the self-conscious attempt by John Pocock, John Dunn and Quentin Skinner to establish a method or prospectus for a heightened historical engagement with the Western political and philosophical canon. Especially in the writings of Skinner may be found a template for a beguiling form of writing which would be historically correct in paying adequate attention to the contexts of canonical works but which would also be more relevant politically or philosophically exactly because it was historically correct. Though this remains controversial, the Cambridge School has flourished first because it has correctly supposed that politics, history and philosophy should not be separated as forms of study and, second, because it has continued to serve as an institutional and literary reminder that erudition and learning are as necessary as wit and acuity if anything is to come of the academic study of politics.