Legal history and intellectual history work undertaken on the latter set of premises include Skinner’s study of Machiavelli, John Dunn’s and Peter Laslett’s explications of Locke, and the effort of AllanJanik and Stephen Toulmin to situate Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the intellectual culture offin-de-siecle Vienna.*^ Members of the third group style themselves Postmodernists or “Textualists.” Their work is inspired and shaped by the following objections to Contextualism- which they regard (rightly) as their principal methodological rival. First, languages are not the tight systems of interrelated signs the Contextualists presume them to be; consequently, each document produces, not a single determinate meaning, but a multiplicity of meanings. As David Harlan, invoking Derrida, says: “language ... is a play of unintended self-transformations and unrestrained self-advertisements.” As a result, texts will always escape the efforts of both their authors and intellectual historians to tie themdown.'^ Second, it is futile to try to give meaning to an ambiguous text by looking to its co;7text, because the context is equally dependent on interpretation for its meaning.’*^ Dominick LaCapra explains: “For the historian, the very reconstruction of a ‘context’ or a ‘reality’ takes place on the basis of ‘textualized’ remainders of the past.”’^ Third, contextualist readings of great works are tc'>o often reductive, treating them as nothing more than expressions of or responses to the ideas of their authors’ contemporaries, and neglecting their transcendent potential.2° Fourth, an historian can never escape either her own concerns or the layers of prior interpretation that have encrusted all substantial texts - and so recoverv of the “original” meaning or context of any given text is impossible. The historian completes the text, at least provisionally, and cannot avoid her responsibility for doing so by invoking its context.-' Finally, Contextualismruns the risk of depoliticizing intellectual history, both by obscoring the extent to which texts and their conventional interpretations consist of politically loaded privilegings of particular views over others and by abandoning the effort to bring old texts to bear on contemporary concerns. In the words of John Keane: 33 Sec Quentin Skinner, Machutvelli (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981; rev. ed., 1985); John Dunn, Locke (NewYork: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government cd. Peter Laslett, 2d ed (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), 3-120; Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (NewYork: Simon &Schuster, 1973). David Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 585. See also Jay, supra n. 9, 83; John Keane, “More Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Meaning and Context, supra n. 15, 206, 211-12. See Jay, supra n. 9, 80-82. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), 27. See, e.g., LaCapra, supra n. 19, 84 ff. (criticizing Wittgenstein’s Vienna, supra n. 16). Dominick LaCapra, “Canons and their Discontents,” Intellectual History Newsletter 11 (1991): 3, 10. Harlan, supra n. 17, 587-89.
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