William W. Fisher III 32 historian to diagnose the disease (the mind-limiting linguistic system) that afflicted the culture from which the text earnedMembers of the second group commonly describe themselves as “Contextualists.” They take the position that, because the meaning of a document is radically dependent upon the systems of words and concepts in which the author moved when he or she was writing it, the central job of the intellectual historian is to reconstruct that context, and then to interpret the text in light of it. What they typically write (and consider most worth writing) are histories of the “discourses” (by which they mean the language systems and associated belief-systems) of particular communities. So, for example, they have sought to explicate the vocabularies and outlooks of seventeenth-century NewEngland Puritan clergymen, eighteenth-century English “opposition” pamphleteers, and nineteenth-century English geologists. What fascinates Contextualists is how the conversations among the members of such a group were organized and bounded by set of common assumptions of which the members themselves often were not even aware.For some - likeJ. G. A. Pocock - the point of excavating those assumptions is to understand the ways the members of the community thought and behaved — on the theory that “[m]en cannot do what they have no means of saying they have done; and what they do must in part be what they can say and conceive that is.”''* For others, like Quentin Skinner, the point is to enable one to interpret accurately and “authentically” a great text that emerged fromsuch a community - on the theory that the meaning of a given text is equivalent to the intent of its author, which can only be ascertained once one knows the author’s conceptual vocabulary, what she considered straightforward, what she considered problematic, and how she sought to modify or transcend the conventions with which she worked.Important See Hayden White, “Foucault Decoded: Notes from the Underground,” Historyand Theory 12 (1973): 27, 31; Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode ofProduction versus Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), especially chap. 3. See, for example, Hollinger, supra n. 11, 42-63; Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991) (emphasizing the mentally imprisoning power of American social scientists’ common commitment to a set of exceptionalist assumptions). Daniel Rodgers is the most vocal of the critics of this aspect of contextualist intellectual history. See Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11; idem, “Fine for Our Time,” Intellectual History Neivsletter 13 (1991): 43-44. Joyce Appleby, “Ideology and the Historv of Political Thought,” Intellectual History Newsletter 1 (1980): 11 (quoting Pocock); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentive Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975). See, e.g., Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in James Tully, ed.. Meaning and Context: Quentin Skiner and his Critics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 29-67; idem. The Foundations of ModemPolitical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978); David Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 3-4 (on WilliamJames).
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