Abstract
Emergent from the previous discussion of socioeconomic and symbolic contextualization is the suggestion that there exists an epistemological space wherein to accept the specificity of landscape studies as its own discourse,1 and yet at the same time not to abandon the openness to context which historical inquiry fosters. The aim, then, is a rigorous intellectual history: intellectual in its recognition of the vitality of the landscape idea, that it is not a mere cipher for something else; and historical in its adoption of a specific contextual method.
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Notes
James Tully (ed.) Meaning and Context: quentin skinner and his critics (Cambridge, 1988), p. 37.
Thus, in political thought this was central to Tully’s response to C.B. Macpherson’s thesis. Literary studies have seen an increased concern with history in analyses of publishing history and also, at least at a rhetorical level, amongst the new historicists: see, for example, H. Aram Veeser (ed.) The New Historicism (London, 1989); more generally, see J.J. McGann (ed.) Historical Studies and Literary Criticism (Wisconsin, 1985); and J.R. de J. Jackson, Historical Criticism and the Meaning of Texts (London, 1989). The history of philosophy has also seen the permeation of such ideas; see Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: a study in moral theory (2nd edn, London, 1985). In geography, a number of calls for contextualization have been made: see Felix Driver, The historicity of human geography, in Progress in Human Geography, 12, 1988, pp. 497–506; David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: episodes in the history of a contested enterprise (Oxford, 1992); and V. Berdoulay, The contextual approach, in D.R. Stoddart (ed.) Geography, Ideology and Social Concern (Oxford, 1981), pp. 8–16.
See Edward Relph, Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography (London, 1981). 7. See Chapter 1.
This does not, of course, preclude a contextual approach to the history of appropriations of an idea: for a classic study of this variety, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, 1975).
See for example Bertrand H. Bronson, When was neoclassicism? in his Facets of Enlightenment: studies in English literature and its contexts (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 1–25, at pp. 23–24; Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: aesthetic practice in England, 1700–1820 (New Brunswick, 1989), p. 4.
The meaning-significance division was one which E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967) developed. Similar binaries are proposed in: E.H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: studies in the art of the Renaissance II (London, 1972), introduction; T. Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge, 1990); and Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge, 1992).
John Barrell, The public prospect and the private view, in Simon Pugh (ed.) Reading Landscape: country — city — capital (Manchester, 1990), pp. 19–40; and idem, The birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (London, 1992).
Similar reservations, built from a Skinnerian perspective, are expressed by John Dixon-Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: studies in the history of landscape architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 171–74.
John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: the rural poor in English painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 6, 16–18. See also David Solkin, Richard Wilson: the landscape of reaction (London, 1982) who argues that Wilson would not have been able to articulate the interests his pictures served (p. 34), and that his patrons may not have been able to say why they found his pictures so appealing (p. 70), but that in both cases class interests explain matters.
Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge, 1933), p. 145. See also F.H. Bradley: ‘history is the testimony of the past to the past’ in The Presuppostions
of Critical History (Oxford, 1874), p. 26. 20. Michael Oakeshott, History and the social sciences, in Institute of Sociology, The Social Sciences: their relation in theory and in teaching (London, 1936), pp. 71–81, at pp. 72–75. 21. See Michael Oakeshott, The voice of poetry and the conversation of mankind, in Rationalism in Politics and other Essays (rev. and expanded edn, Indianapolis, 1991), pp. 488–541.
See Isaiah Berlin, The concept of scientific history, in idem, Concepts and Categories: philosophical essays (Oxford, 1978), pp. 103–42. See also Arthur Schopenhauer, On History, in The World and Will and Representation, trans., E.F.T. Payne (2 vols, New York, 1966 ed.), ii. pp. 439–46.
For Oakeshott and idealism, see David Boucher, The creation of the past: British idealism and Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy of history, in History and Theory, 23, 1984, pp. 193–214. My approach to Oakeshott’s view of history prefers to dissociate it from Hegelianism in favour of the view of history as a constructed form of life: see Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations, trans., G.E.M. Anscombe (3rd edn, Oxford, 1967) and Nelson Goodman Ways of Woridmaking (Indianapolis, 1978). The similarities between Oakeshott and Wittgenstein have been pointed out by Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London, 1990), pp. 14, 49, 111–12, and by Harwell Wells, The philosophical Michael Oakeshott, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 55, 1994, pp. 129–45 at p. 136 and p. 141.
Oakeshott, Experience, p. 159. Wittgenstein also argues that ‘misunderstandings concerning the use of words, [are] caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language’. (Philosophical Investigations, §90, cf. also p. 232).
J.L. Auspitz, Michael Joseph Oakeshott (1901–90), in A. Jesse Norman (ed.) The achievement of Michael Oakeshott (London, 1993), pp. 1–25, at p. 13. This view has affinities with Macintyre’s notion of ‘practices’ in After Virtue, p. 187.
Oakeshott Experience, pp. 131–32; see also Michael Oakeshott On History and other Essays (Oxford, 1983) p. 67: ‘there is no explanans of a different character from the explanadum’.
J.G.A. Pocock Politics, Language and Time: essays in political thought and history (New York, 1971) saw Oakeshott’s view as akin to Taoist or Heraclitan views of history as flux. Oakeshott’s source for this view was Aristotle, Physics, V 227a (see On History, p. 113).
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (rev. edn, Jan van der Dussen, Oxford, 1993), pp. 269–70; see also Arthur C. Danto Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965), p. 105.
Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education (ed. Timothy Fuller, New Haven, 1991), p. 44.
See P.L. Janssen, Political thought as traditionary action: the critical response to Skinner and Pocock, in History and Theory, 24, 1985, pp. 115–46, at p. 119. This view distinguishes Oakeshott and Skinner from the approach to ‘otherness’ of Edward Said, Orientalism: Western conceptions of the orient (London, 1978), and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: the wonder of the new world (Oxford, 1991), for whom the otherness of cultures in time and space appears to be insuperable.
D. Harlan, Reply to David Hollinger, in American History Review, 94, 1989, pp. 622–27, p. 624.
Boucher, The creation of the past, p. 206, argues that Oakeshott’s project is different in seeing history as a constructed activity from Skinner’s view of history as recovery. But Skinner’s methodological work shows him to be aware of the constructedness and conditionality of historical inquiry. Equally, it is hard to see how a concern like Oakeshott’s for the past for its own sake can avoid a process of recovery. The very fact that this is a recovery shifts the effort from the practical to the historical mode, but Skinner has not denied this. As such, Skinnerian historical recovery and Oakeshottian historical construction can be seen as partners rather than the opposites.
J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: essays on political thought and history, chiefly in the eighteenth century (Cambridge, 1985), p. 8.
Oakeshott moved towards such a discursive/linguistic view in his later writings on history, arguing in On History, p. 30, that past utterances must be understood in terms of ‘universes of discourse’.
See Skinner’s discussion of Defoe’s The Shortest Way with Dissenters in Tully (ed.) Meaning and Context, pp. 270–71.
Skinner is explicit about this (ibid., p. 105, 276): Skinner is distinguished from Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (trans., London, 1972), pp. 95–96, in his refusal to deny the importance of authorial intention in history. His position is closer to Wittgenstein’s view of intention as a term our public language designates as ‘privately’ sanctioned (see Philosophical Investigations, §247). As such, the third person perspective of communication which Kant called philosophical anthropology is the relevant one to an historical inquiry into meaning.
John Dunn, Political Obligation in Historical Context: essays in political thought (Cambridge, 1980), p. 18.
J.G.A. Pocock, A discourse of sovereignty: observations on the work in progress, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds) Political Discourse in Early Modem Britain (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 377–428, at p. 394.
See J. Arthos, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (London, 1949).
See Charles Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: form and convention in eighteenth-century travel literature (Berkeley, 1978).
M. Bevir, The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism, in History and Theory, 31, 1992, pp. 276–98, at p. 293.
J.E. Toews, Intellectual history after the linguistic turn: the autonomy of meaning and the irreducibility of Experience, in American History Review, 92, 1987, pp. 879–907, at p. 906.
Tully (ed.) Meaning and Context, p. 68. See also Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 36.
See Janssen, Political Thought, p. 141; and Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, pp. 21–22.
Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscapes (Baltimore, 1982); and Barrell, Idea of Landscape.
See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: changing attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth, 1983); and Charles W.J. Withers, Geography, natural history and the eighteenth-century enlightenment: putting the world in place, in History Workshop Journal, 39, 1995, pp. 137–63.
D. Harlan, Intellectual history and the return of literature, in American History Review, 94, 1989, pp. 581–609, at pp. 594–5.
R.E. Atkinson, Knowledge and Explanation in History: an introduction to the philosophy of History (London, 1978), p. 75: ‘the notion of “the whole truth” …is incoherent. It is not a huge totality that is very difficult to encompass; it is not a finite, homogeneous totality at all.’ See also Danto, Analytical Philosophy, p. 18.
Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: texts, contexts, language (Ithaca, 1983) and Hayden White, The Content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical representation (Baltimore, 1987).
Oakeshott, Experience, pp. 91, 93. Wittgenstein also made this point; language is formed by usage and it makes no sense to speak of a division of objects from ways of designating them (Philosophical Investigations, §293). But as Kripke points out, ‘Wittgenstein proposes a picture of language based, not on truth conditions, but on assertability conditions or justification conditions: under what circumstances are we allowed to make a given assertion?’ (Saul A Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Oxford, 1982, p. 74.) The assertability conditions for language can be discovered as they lie in public usage (see Philosophical Investigations, §77). Foucault, Archaeology, also saw history as the recovery of conditions in which statements could be made (pp. 57–60).
J.V. Femia, An historicist critique of ‘revisionist’ methods for studying the history of ideas, in Tully (ed.) Meaning and Context, pp. 156–75, at p. 158. See also Harlan, Intellectual History, p. 603.
This point was made by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957 [1986 ed.]) p. 150.
Kenneth Minogue, Method in intellectual history: Quentin Skinner’s Foundations, in Tully (ed.) Meaning and Context, pp. 176–93.
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Mayhew, R.J. (2004). Landscape History: An Essay in Historiographical Method. In: Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660–1800. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504196_2
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