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Symposium: Assessing and Extending The Logic of the History of Ideas
With his 1999 book, The Logic of the History of Ideas, Mark Bevir made an ambitious, controversial, and tightly woven argument in favor of a particular approach to the study of the past.1 The book quickly garnered a good deal of scholarly attention, especially in Europe, and was the subject of a number of extended discussions and debates.2 The purpose of this symposium is not only to reflect critically on the substance of Bevir' s ongoing contribution to the study of the history of ideas more than a decade after the Logic's initial publication, but also to consider its importance for contemporary political theory and practice.
To that end, this editorial introduction seeks to achieve three aims. The first is to set forth the general argument of The Logic of the History of Ideas , especially for readers who will be engaging with it for the first time. The second is to situate briefly the book's conclusions, and to suggest the reasons for their importance within recent debates. Like Be vir, I am a political theorist interested in the history of political thought, so my framing of his work as a "middle way" operates within the interpretive parameters set by our shared field of study. Here, I argue that The Logic of the History of Ideas can be seen as occupying a space between foundational and poststructural positions to the history of political thought, or Straussian and deconstructive approaches to past texts, respectively. However, Bevir also distinguishes his view from the most influential claimants to this terrain, the so-called "Cambridge School" of intellectual history, most closely associated with Quentin Skinner and J.G. A. Pocock. It is this attempt to mark out a new way for studying the history of ideas, I think, that makes the book both influential and controversial. Third, and finally, I will sketch the relationship that the essays in this symposium bear to the case put forth in the Logic. Of course, it falls to Mark Bevir to respond to this particular set of interlocutors, which he does in a concluding essay.
THE ARGUMENT
Perhaps what strikes the reader most immediately and forcefully about The Logic of the History of...