Quentin Skinner and Lawrence Stone at Princeton University

 

Reading footnotes is a long-established habit of mine. They are often an invaluable guide to the work of the historian in question and to their academic contacts. Checking them is a practice I have followed for almost as long a period. Recently, I read some of the contributions to the conference on Three British Revolutions held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in May, 1976. It was at this conference that the late Lawrence Stone claimed that a consensus had then been reached on the origins of the English Civil War as a reaction against a corrupt Caroline Court. As a contention, this was dubious and as a conclusion has been falsified by subsequent scholarship. I shall be writing about this in a later piece. But what struck me incidentally was his conscription of his colleague, John Murrin, and of Quentin Skinner for their most helpful suggestions as “friends” in the footnotes to his own published piece in the resulting published volume.[1] John Murrin, a former pupil of J.H.Hexter, was one of Stone’s junior colleagues in the History Department at Princeton while Quentin Skinner was already a distinguished figure in the University of Cambridge on long-term leave from the banks of the river Cam.

This description is nonetheless a puzzle. It is not clear in what sense Lawrence Stone meant the term. Stone and Skinner and their wives were evidently on civil terms. But, if Stone meant to imply that there was some sort of intellectual rapprochement between them, it is more difficult to agree.  In fact, Quentin Skinner has commented in more than one place on his relationship with Stone while both were at Princeton. In 1995 in an oral history interview, Skinner observed that “I don’t think Lawrence has ever been interested in the sorts of things I do, although he has always been courteous about them. But while I was here he was on one hand the great Annalist (it was before he was Geertzified) and on the other hand he appeared to think intellectual history the name of a non-subject. And so  although he was always very nice to me personally I didn't have anything interesting to say to him nor did he to me.”[2]

The fullest account of his relations with Stone was given in an interview with Alan Mcfarlane in January, 2008. The gulf between the two men was evidently large according to Skinner. “When at Princeton Lawrence Stone was an extremely powerful presence there; I recall that he was very generous to me and my wife but he thought that the kind of history that I was interested in was just absurd; that there was no study of intellectual history that was going to be of any autonomous interest; he seemed to think it was epiphenomenal to some kind of real history that we should be studying; he was not merely uninterested in what I was doing but was actively hostile to it; that was the tone in the department of history at Princeton at that time; it likes to think of itself in retrospect as having been concerned with cultural history in that period in a Geertzian way but that was not my experience of it; I kept out of their way, which has always been my instinct as I've never much enjoyed talking about my work until I have done it; I never once went to the Davis Center seminars in all the years I was at Princeton; I could just sense when I looked at what was going to be talked about that it would make me miserable as I would find them of very little interest and they would take a similar view of me; just got on with my writing on my own.”[3]

Rather later in discussing his experiences at Princeton and the attitude of economic and social historians to intellectual history, Skinner argued that “It was said to follow that social and political principles can have no independent explanatory role in accounting for the processes of social change. The study of intellectual history thus came to seem of marginal significance. I remember that, when I arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1974 (where I stayed for four years) I discovered that intellectual history was regularly dismissed by Princeton historians like Lawrence Stone in precisely these terms.”[4]

If there was no meeting of minds between Skinner and Stone, the latter’s claim that they were ‘friends’ reads oddly. Skinner clearly kept well clear of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center where Stone presided as its first Director and where confrontational seminars were frequently held. His refined scholarship was alien  to the rough and tumble of the Center. So why did Stone claim they were ‘friends’? Was it true in a personal sense or was this a form of intellectual name-dropping?

                                                                                                                                                6th July, 2021

 


[1] Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776. Edited by J.G.A.Pocock (Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A. 1980), page 100. Cf., ibid., page 105, note 46.

[2] Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center. Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. Oral History Project. Interview Transcript. Quentin Skinner interviewed by Elliott Shore (February 17th, 1995), page 26. For Skinner’s comments on the seminars at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, see ibid., pages 10-11.

[3] Quentin Skinner interviewed by Alan Macfarlane. 10th January, 2008.

[4] Ideas in Context: Conversation with Quentin Skinner (Interview conducted by Hansong Li), page 126.

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