History, Critique, Politics:Contribution to the Construction of a Historical Materialist Approach to Political Theory and the History of Ideas

My paper is a reflection on and contribution to the development of a Marxist approach to the history of ideas, focusing in particular the history of political thought. It commences with an outline of the relevance of historical materialism to the study of the history of ideas and interrogates the reasons for its historical marginalization within the discipline. More specifically, Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School, whose implicit dismissal of Marxism and contextualist approach to the history of ideas has dominated the discipline since the sixties. The paper then introduces and engages one of the most successful attempts at constructing a Marxist approach to the history of ideas, namely Ellen Meiksins Wood’s “social history of political theory,” which it nonetheless suggests remains marred by certain contradictions. However, these contradictions can be traced back to Skinner’s influence and may be resolved via the conceptual resources of Marx’s historical materialism. The paper concludes by briefly outlining a novel Marxist approach to the history of ideas, combining Marx’s historical materialism with Wood’s social history of political theory and exemplifying how this approach may be deployed.