Historical Context And Political Language: A Study Of The Research Methods Of Pocock's Political Thought History

As a well-known historian and historian of political thought in the contemporary West,J.G.A.Pocock advocates a historical contextualism and political language analysis research path of the history of political thought,he explores a new research method in the field of the history of political thought and make it become increasingly popular in the discipline.He assumes that the interpretation and writing of the history of political thought cannot be regarded as a history of ideas,philosophical history or political theory.Instead,it should focus on exploring the writing intention of the text author and place it in a specific historical context and linguistic context in order to study the "language" and "speech" mode used by the author.It is not so much a "history of political thought",Pocock prefers a "history of political discourse" or a "history of political speech." In Chinese academia,however,Quentin Skinner,another historian of the "Cambridge School",either from the translation of his work or from his research methods and perspectives are more than Pocock.Moreover,the research literature about Pocock mainly focuses on his republicanism,and there are few explanations and researches on his methodology.Although they belong to the same school,their emphasis on research methods is still slightly different: Skinner focused on exploring the writer’s intention and the historical and social context,while Pocock emphasizes more on the linguistic context,the paradigm of language and the process of changing the meaning of specific linguistic terms.Therefore,this dissertation takes Pocock’s methodology as its research object and expounds it in three aspects: First,it elaborates the traditional research methods of the history of ideas,which are the research methods of the history of ideas and the methods of textualism respectively;As well as Pocock’s critique of the traditional research methods of the history of ideas,points out the defects of the traditional research and Pocock’s understanding of this issue,and emphatically discusses the evolution of Pocock’s historical contextualism and political language research methods and highlights the features of Pocock’s research methods,that is,the relationship between language and speech and the paradigmatic nature of language;Second,take England’s "ancient constitution" and "feudal law" as examples to explain Pocock’s research methods of the history of ideas.By incorporating these two languages into the historical context and linguistic context of the 17 th century England,showing the changing process of the legal language meaning;Third,Iappraise Pocock’s methodology,point out its limitation and value,as well as the significance of studying the change of meaning of a particular language term and the research on the history of Chinese political thought.In short,Pocock’s research methods have opened up the research field in the history of Western political thought.Although his methodology has some limitations,that is not enough to prevent this method from becoming an explicit one in the field of political thought history.And in any given era,there are various fulcrums(language,mentalités,geistesgeschichte,etc.)that intertwine with each other to explain historical thought.Pocock takes "language or discourse" as a fulcrum for the study of the history of political thought,as a way of presenting the state of historical knowledge,may provide a new possibility for us to reinterpret the history.