The Research Of Quentin Skinner’s Historical Contextualism

"The Cambridge School" has been regarded as the mainstream in the history of Western Political Thought, Quentin Skinner, as the representative of "Cambridge school", has made an outstanding contributions to the study of thought history research,He is not only an outstanding contemporary western thinker,but also a famous historian thinker. He reflected on the research method of the centered textualism in traditional history of ideas, and put forward the "Historical Contextualism"based on the previous ideas. He used the historic method to recover linguistic context produced by context, viewed specific and changing "concept" as the research object, and introduced the language rhetoric theory into it as well, and investigated the connotation of the concepts in the different context from the perspective of speech acts, in order to achieve the correct interpretation of text meaning and intention of the author. His study of "nation" and "freedom" concepts can be said to be an effect attempt to this theory.This article mainly introduced three characteristics of "Historical Contextualism", and on this basis, it has discussed its significance and value of the current study from the perspective of philosophy of science.The first part of the article introduces the defects of the traditional research methods and then raises the skinner’s idea of "Historical Contextualism"; The second part is mainly introduced the characteristics of the "Historical Contextualism" from three aspects,They are complementary to each other and they constitute the theories and methods that skinner always adheres to use in the research on the history of political thought; In the third part of the article, it not only investigates the important role of the theory of "Historical Contextualism" in the study of political thought but also the guide value On other subjects and the social issues.Based on the detailed analysis of background, characteristics and significance of foundation of "Historical Contextualism"theory, especially discusses its problems and shortcomings in the conclusion part, in order to have a comprehensive and overall introduction of this thought, so as the readers can take an accurate, objective and fair understanding of the theory of "Historical Contextualism".