(Modern French identities 38) Camus, Albert_ Foxlee, Neil_ Camus, Albert - Albert Camus's _The new Mediterranean culture_ _ a text and its contexts-Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenscha.pdf

38
Neil
Foxlee
•
Albert
Camus’s
‘The
New
Mediterranean
Culture’
M o d e r n F r e n c h I d e n t i t i e s M o d e r n F r e n c h I d e n t i t i e s
38
P
e
t
e
r
L
a
n
g
Neil Foxlee
Albert Camus’s
‘The New
Mediterranean
Culture’
A Text and its Contexts
On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural
lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre,
in Algiers. Entitled ‘La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne’ (‘The New
Mediterranean Culture’), Camus’s lecture has been interpreted in
radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an
incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding
his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression
of his so-called ‘Mediterranean humanism’ or as an early indication
of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality.
These various interpretations are based on reading the text of ‘The
New Mediterranean Culture’ in a single context, whether that of
Camus’s life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the
Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that
country). By contrast, this study argues that Camus’s lecture – and
in principle any historical text – needs to be seen in a multiplicity
of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand
properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camus’s lecture
as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical
justification of this ‘multi-contextualist’ approach.
Neil Foxlee is a Visiting Research Fellow at Lancaster University and
a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, where his teaching
has included MA modules on Political Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of
Narrative and Image. His published work includes several articles
on Camus and a study of the campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama.
He is also a contributor to (and co-editor of) G. McKay et al. (eds),
Subcultures and New Religious Movements in Russia and East-Central
Europe (Peter Lang, 2009).
ISBN 978-3-0343-0207-4
www.peterlang.com

Albert Camus’s
‘The New Mediterranean Culture’

Modern French Identities
Edited by Peter Collier
Volume 38
Peter Lang
Oxford l
Bern l
Berlin l
Bruxelles l
Frankfurt am Main l
New York l
Wien

Neil Foxlee
Albert Camus’s
‘The New
Mediterranean
Culture’
A Text and its Contexts
Peter Lang
Oxford l
Bern l
Berlin l
Bruxelles l
Frankfurt am Main l
New York l
Wien

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2010
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ISSN 1422-9005
ISBN 978-3-653-00468-7
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Foxlee, Neil, 1953-
Albert Camus’s “The new Mediterranean culture” : a text and its
contexts / Neil Foxlee.
p. cm. -- (Modern French identities ; v. 38)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0353-0026-0 (alk. paper)
1. Camus, Albert, 1913-1960--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Camus,
Albert, 1913-1960--Philosophy. 3. Camus, Albert,
1913-1960--Knowledge--Mediterranean Region. 4. Mediterranean Region--In
literature. 5. East and West in literature. 6. French
literature--Mediterranean influences. I. Title.
PQ2605.A3734Z6435 2010
848‘.91409--dc22
2010023517

This book is dedicated to my mother
and to the memory of my father

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach 7
Chapter 2
‘The New Mediterranean Culture’: An Annotated Translation 37
Chapter 3
Humanist and Postcolonial Approaches 51
Chapter 4
The Context of French Discourses on the Mediterranean 75
Chapter 5
Gabriel Audisio’s Mid-1930s Writings on the Mediterranean 111
Chapter 6
The Interwar French Intellectual Debate on Culture 139

viii
Chapter 7
The Interwar East–West Debate 163
Chapter 8
The Algerian Political Context 205
Chapter 9
Biographical Contexts 223
Chapter 10
The Legacy of ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’ in
Camus’s Later Work 261
Conclusion 285
Appendix: ‘Reflections on Generosity’ (1939) 293
Bibliography 303
Index 325

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for their invaluable assistance in my
research: Catherine Camus, for kindly giving me permission to translate
‘La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne’ and ‘Réflexions sur la générosité’;
Hilary Higgins, lately of the University of Central Lancashire Library, who
helped me to obtain a number of hard-to-find items; Marcelle Mahasela of
the Centre de Documentation Albert Camus in Aix-en-Provence for her
helpfulness and hospitality; Christiane Chaulet-Achour, for sending me a
copy of her book Albert Camus et l’Algérie when I had difficulty in obtain-
ing a copy; Raymond Gay-Crosier for sending me a copy of Albert Camus
21 after it had just been published; and Toby Garfitt, Michel Levallois,
Philippe Régnier and Quentin Skinner for their courteous replies to my
enquiries concerning Jean Grenier, Ismaÿl Urbain, le Père Enfantin and
his own work, respectively. Special thanks are due to Terry Hopton and
Brian Rosebury, my supervisors for the doctoral thesis on which this book
is based: the first, for introducing me to Skinner’s approach and his guid-
ance throughout; the second, for his prompt, detailedandexpertfeedback;
and both, for their unstinting encouragement and support. Finally, my
wife Anne, for her support, encouragement and interest: without her this
project would never have been started, let alone finished. My apologies to
anyone I have inadvertently omitted to mention.

Abbreviations
Full publication details will be found in the bibliography.
Works by Albert Camus
I–IV Œuvres complètes, I–IV
Corr. JG Albert Camus – Jean Grenier. Correspondance
E Essais (1981 printing)
Standard Abbreviations
AC1 Albert Camus 1, etc. (numbers of theAlbert Camus series of the
Revue des Lettres Modernes)
CAC1 Cahiers Albert Camus 1, etc.
MLN Modern Language Notes
NRF Nouvelle Revue Française
The use of other abbreviations from time to time is noted in the text.

Introduction
This book applies a multi-contextualist approach to ‘La nouvelle culture
méditerranéenne’ (‘The New Mediterranean Culture’),1 an inaugural lec-
turegivenbytheFrench-AlgerianwriterAlbertCamustomarktheopening
of a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers in 1937.
As an early and ephemeral text, Camus’s lecture has usually been viewed
against the background of his life and work as a whole, where it is seen as
one of the first expressions of what is regarded either as his ‘Mediterranean
humanism’ or his essentially colonialist mentality. Whereas some critics of
both a humanist and a postcolonial persuasion have thereafter adopted a
predominantly text-focused approach to the lecture, there have been two
corresponding approaches which contextualize the lecture at a discursive
level: while humanist critics have placed it in the context of French dis-
coursesontheMediterranean,postcolonialcriticshavestudieditinrelation
to French colonial discourses on Algeria. In adopting a multi-contextualist
approach, however, my study suggests that an adequate account of Camus’s
lecture also needs to take account of other contexts, notably the argumen-
tative contexts provided by interwar French intellectual debates on culture
and the East/West question, the contemporary Algerian political context
and the biographical context provided by Camus’s personal background
and intellectual development. In so doing, this study sheds new light on
a number of important themes that recur in Camus’s later work, both fic-
tional and non-fictional.
1 For the benefit of non-French-speaking readers, all passages and, where appropri-
ate, titles in French have been translated into English. Except where indicated, all
translations are mine. The terms Occident and Orient, it should be noted, have been
translated as ‘West’ and ‘East’ respectively.

2 Introduction
Given the vast amount of secondary literature on Camus,2 it should be
notedattheoutsetthat‘TheNewMediterraneanCulture’wasdescribedin
an article published by Ray Davison in 2000 as ‘under-discussed’3 and that
the only previous study of the work in its own right is an article I myself
published in 2006.4 That said, previous critics have frequently referred to
Camus’s lecture, especially in studies of his early writings and his much-
discussed ‘Mediterraneanism’.5 This has become a central focus for Camus
studies,asisshownbythefactthatnofewerthanfiveconferencesonCamus
and the Mediterranean were held between 1997 and 2006: two in Algeria
and the others in France, Israel and the United States.6 This makes it all the
2 See Robert F. Roeming, Camus: A Bibliography Microform, 15th edn (Milwaukee:
Computing Services Division, University of Wisconsin, 2000), and, for more recent
studies, Raymond Gay-Crosier, Selective and Cumulative Bibliography of Recent
Studies on Albert Camus <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gaycros/Bibliog.htm>
accessed 18 May 2010.
3 Ray Davison, ‘Mythologizing the Mediterranean: the Case of Albert Camus’, Journal
of Mediterranean Studies 10 (2000), 77–92 (p. 80). Davison’s study, however, is pri-
marily a critical examination of Camus’s ‘Mediterraneanism’, and his own treatment
of the lecture (pp. 80–84) is predominantly descriptive.
4 Neil Foxlee, ‘Mediterranean Humanism or Colonialism with a Human Face?
Contextualizing Albert Camus’ “The New Mediterranean Culture”’, Mediterranean
Historical Review 21:1 (June 2006), 77–97. Part of Chapter 3 and most of Chapter
8 of the present study are based on this article. See also my notice ‘“Un manifeste
dégradant” comme objet de la polémique camusienne dans “La nouvelle culture
méditerranéenne”’, Bulletin de la Société des Études Camusiennes 77 (2006), 28–30,
which I draw on in Chapter 6.
5 To take a recent example, Peter Dunwoodie begins a study of Camus’s early writings
with a long introductory paragraph on the lecture, as a way into examining what
he describes in his conclusion as Camus’s ‘problematic méditerranéité ’ See ‘From
Noces to L’Étranger’, in Edward J. Hughes, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Camus
(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,2007),pp.147–64(p.162).Foranoverview
of studies of Camus and the Mediterranean written up until the turn of the century,
see Paul-F. Smets, ‘Albert Camus. Sa vraie Méditerranée: “la vérité avant la fable, la
vie avant le rêve”’, L’Europe et la Méditerranée. Actes de la Vième Chaire Glaverbel
d’études européennes, 2000–2001 (Brussels: PIE–Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 249–67.
6 See <http://webcamus.free.fr/conferences.html>. In chronological order, the con-
ferences were: ‘Albert Camus: parcours méditerranéens’ (Jerusalem, 1997), the

Introduction 3
more surprising that there has been no detailed study of the lecture, which
– apart from an untitled 1933 poem (I, 976–78) – represents Camus’s first
sustained piece of writing on the Mediterranean.
In the course of my discussion of the various contexts in which the
lecture needs to be situated, I bring a considerable amount of fresh evi-
dence to bear, not only on the text itself and the development of Camus’s
ideas, but also on the discourses and debates in which the lecture partici-
pates. The other main claim to originality of this book is, of course, the
multi-contextualist approach itself, which is based on a critical synthesis
of existing methodologies in the history of ideas. In Chapter 1, I examine
the approach to textual interpretation developed by the leading intellectual
historian Quentin Skinner and the related approaches of J.G.A. Pocock
and Reinhart Koselleck. (The fact that Skinner’s, Pocock’s and to a large
extentKoselleck’sapproacheshavehithertobeenappliedtotextsoftheearly
modern period constitutes a further claim to the originality of this study.)
In his theoretical writings, Skinner rejects both ‘textualism’ – the view that
it is sufficient to study the text itself to understand its meaning – and a
crude ‘contextualism’ (the view that the meaning of the text is determined
by external factors). Instead, he argues that texts need to be understood in
relation to not only their sociopolitical context but also their argumenta-
tive context: the context of previous texts on the same subject. In practice,
however, Skinner also refers to other contexts as a guide to interpretation:
the biographical context, the context of the author’s work as a whole and
the context of reception. Since different parts of a text may best be illu-
minated with reference to different contexts, I therefore argue that only a
multi-contextualist approach can do justice to the text as a whole, avoiding
the reductivism inherent in mono-contextualist approaches.
proceedingsofwhichwerepublishedinPerspectives:revuedel’Universitéhébraïquede
Jérusalem5(1998);‘Camusetlerêveméditerranéen:del’AlgérieàlaGrèce’(Marseille,
2003); ‘Les valeurs méditerranéennes dans l’œuvre d’Albert Camus’ (Algiers, 2003);
‘Albert Camus : Oran, l’Algérie, la Méditerranée’ (Oran, 2005) and ‘Albert Camus,
précurseur:Méditerranéed’hieretd’aujourd’hui’(UniversityofMadison-Wisconsin,
2006), the basis for a collection of the same name edited by Alek Baylee Toumi (New
York: Peter Lang, 2009).

4 Introduction
Chapter 2 consists of an annotated translation of ‘La nouvelle culture
méditerranéenne’, while in Chapter 3, I examine the two main existing
approaches to interpreting the lecture, humanist and postcolonial. At the
level of an immanent reading, both approaches illuminate various aspects
of the text and indeed both can be taken further than hitherto. Ultimately,
however, neither is satisfactory. Whereas the humanist approach fails to
take account of the lecture’s Mediterranean particularism and the colo-
nial context in which it was written, the crude contextualist version of
the postcolonial approach glosses over Camus’s positive emphasis on the
Mediterranean as the meeting-point of East and West, which contradicts
the view that the lecture expresses a purely Eurocentric, colonialist perspec-
tive. At a more sophisticated level, postcolonial critics have placed Camus’s
lecture in the context of French literary and paraliterary discourses on
colonial Algeria, seeing it as a manifesto for the utopian Mediterraneanism
of the so-called École d’Alger (‘Algiers School’), centred round Camus and
Gabriel Audisio. This reading, however, fails to take account of the text’s
status as an inaugural lecture for the Maison de la culture in Algiers and of
Camus’s stance on the colonial issues that the text is alleged to evade.
In Chapter 4, I discuss the humanist discursive contextualisation of
the lecture in terms of French discourses on the Mediterranean. From this
perspective, the lecture is seen as part of a tradition of discourse, going
back to the Saint-Simonians of the 1830s, which promoted an idealistic
vision of the Mediterranean as the meeting-point of East and West. From a
postcolonial viewpoint, however, French discourses on the Mediterranean
from Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt to the end of the Algerian War were
inextricablyboundupwithFrenchcolonialisminNorthAfrica,aviewpoint
which is confirmed by an investigation of the tradition in question.
Chapter 5 examines contemporary writings on the Mediterranean
by the most important influence on Camus’s lecture, Gabriel Audisio.
A study of articles on the subject that Audisio wrote between the two
volumes of essays published as Jeunesse de la Méditerranée (‘Youth of the
Mediterranean’) reveals the polemical context(s) in which they were writ-
tenandidentifiesthemanifestoontheEthiopianwarwhichCamusattacks
in his lecture as Henri Massis’s ‘Pour la défense de l’Occident’ (‘For the
Defence of the West’). Although a close examination of Audisio’s writings

Introduction 5
confirms the similarities between the views of Camus and Audisio, it also
shows significant differences between them.
In Chapter 6, I argue that the beginning and end of Camus’s lec-
ture in particular are polemical responses to some of the central tenets of
MaurrassianideologyandtoMassis’s‘Pourladéfensedel’Occident’respec-
tively. Massis’s manifesto itself is discussed in the context of an interwar
French debate in which left- and right-wing intellectuals clashed over their
attempts to appropriate concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘mind’
for their respective political causes – concepts that Camus similarly tries
to reappropriate from the right in the final section of his lecture.
Chapter 7 identifies a further, overlapping debate on the relationship
between East and West as part of the argumentative context for Massis’s
manifesto and ultimately Camus’s lecture. Massis’s manifesto took its title
from a book that he had published in 1927 as a contribution to this debate,
which reached its high point with a special double issue of the periodical
Les Cahiers du Mois entitled Les Appels de l’Orient (‘The Calls of the East’).
This title was itself borrowed from an earlier article by Camus’s mentor
Jean Grenier, while other contributors to the debate included Audisio and
André Malraux, a hero-figure for Camus in his youth. The importance of
this debate as a context for Camus’s lecture is confirmed by its references
to the relationship between East and West, and specifically to India, where
his remarks echo Grenier’s writings on the subject.
InChapter8,IplaceCamus’slectureinitsimmediateAlgerianpolitical
context. Although he was expelled soon after, Camus was still a member
of the Communist party at the time, and the Maison de la culture that his
lecture inaugurated was a Popular Front organization. In attacking the
doctrine of Latinity in what was essentially an anti-fascist cultural-political
polemic, Camus was indirectly taking issue with the exploitation of this
notion by European Algerian political groups sympathetic to fascism.
Although the lecture makes no reference to colonialism, the Maison de
la culture that it inaugurated adopted a pro-Muslim stance that extended
to supporting equal rights for the indigenous population, as shown by a
manifesto in favour of the reformist Viollette Bill that was published in
the second issue of its monthly newsletter.

6 Introduction
Chapter 9 situates Camus’s lecture in the context of his earlier life and
intellectual development. I begin with a critique of a biographical contex-
tualization that interprets the lecture in terms of Camus’s eventual expul-
sion from the Communist party, showing that the passages it discusses can
best be understood in relation to other writings by Camus. I then examine
the impact of Camus’s family background on the attitudes he expresses in
the lecture, specifically his rejection of jingoistic rhetoric and his attitude
towards intelligence, the development of which is explored through a
selection of his early writings. The influence of Nietzsche, Grenier and
(possibly) Bakunin on the lecture is also investigated.
Chapter 10 looks at the legacy of Camus’s lecture in his later work.
After discussing the editorial that Camus wrote for the first issue ofRivages
(‘Shores’), a review of Mediterranean culture, I focus on two important
aspects of his Mediterraneanism that continued to shape his thinking in
later life. First, I examine how the lecture’s Mediterranean particularism –
its pro-Mediterranean and anti-Nordic bias – is also reflected in ‘La pensée
de midi’ (‘Noonday Thought’), the final part of Camus’s historico-politico-
philosophical essay L’Homme révolté (Eng. tr. The Rebel, literally ‘Man in
Revolt’). Second, I investigate how, during the Algerian War, Camus both
retained and modified his view of the Mediterranean, and North Africa in
particular, as the meeting-point (confluent) of East and West.
On the face of it, ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’ may seem a slight
text, and the degree of contextualization it receives here disproportion-
ate to its length and its lowly status in the canon of Camus’s writings.
This study will show, however, not only that the lecture is a seminal text
in Camus’s development, but also that it is in large part constituted by
– to borrow Camus’s own metaphor – a confluence of discourses and
debates, which need to be reconstructed if the text, its meaning and its
broader significance are to be properly understood. That these discourses
and debates are of considerable interest in themselves is another reason
why ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’ is such a fascinating and reward-
ing text to study.

chapter 1
Towards a Multi-Contextualist Approach
The Choice of a Methodology
Contrary to what one might expect from its title,1 Camus’s lecture on ‘The
New Mediterranean Culture’ demands to be read, not as a polite talk on
contemporary artistic or social trends, but as a highly charged piece of
political rhetoric. From the outset, Camus emphasizes that he is speaking
onbehalfofagroupofleft-wingintellectualsagainstthose,suchasMaurras,
he attacks as right-wing doctrinaires. And in his subsequent references to
Hitler, Mussolini, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil
War, he makes it clear that he is speaking out specifically against fascism
and in favour of what he calls a ‘Mediterranean collectivism’, concluding
by affirming the possibility of a new Mediterranean culture that will be
compatible with the social ideal he shares with his comrades.
Given Camus’s self-identification as an intellectual, his explicit ref-
erences to the historical context in which he is speaking and the overtly
political nature of his speech, ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’ would
seem well suited to the approach developed by Quentin Skinner, the pre-
eminent theorist and practitioner of intellectual history in the political
sphere (in the English-speaking world at least). Together with J.G.A.
Pocock, Skinner is the leading figure in the so-called ‘Cambridge School’
of intellectual historians. His major publications, which have been widely
1 As noted in my introduction to Chapter 2, Camus’s lecture was printed under the
heading ‘La culture indigène’ (‘Native Culture’). See Chapter 8 for a discussion of
the significance of this.

8 chapter 1
translated, include: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,2 a two-
volumestudythatestablishedhisinternationalreputation;monographson
Machiavelli, Hobbes and pre-nineteenth-century conceptions of liberty;
and, most recently, the essays – on methodology, republicanism and the
political thought of Hobbes, respectively – collected in the three volumes
of Visions of Politics.3 Skinner is also the co-editor of two important series
published by Cambridge University Press: Ideas in Context, of which over
seventy volumes have appeared so far, and Cambridge Texts in the History
of Political Thought, whose more than a hundred volumes to date seek to
offer an outline of the entire evolution of political thought in the West.
As Pocock noted in a 2004 review of Visions of Politics, the work done
by the Cambridge School has been mainly concerned with the history of
political thought between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in the
English-speaking world (the thought of the Italian Renaissance is a notable
exception). Assuming that it remains the case, as Pocock puts it, that ‘[a]
Skinnerian approach to the modern and the postmodern has not yet been
tried’,4 applying this approach to a twentieth-century French-language
text will therefore provide an opportunity to test its broader validity. For
an account of Skinner’s methodology, I shall refer to both his theoreti-
cal writings and his historical studies.5 Rather than repeating Skinner’s
detailed theoretical justifications of his approach, however, which draw
primarily on the post-analytic Anglo-American philosophy of language, I
shall focus on its fundamental principles and practical application. I shall
also argue that in certain respects, it should be refined and supplemented
2 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978).
3 Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Quentin Skinner: the History of Politics and the Politics of History
(2004)’, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 123–42 (p. 141).
5 A selection of Skinner’s original methodological essays, together with ‘A Reply to My
Critics’, was published in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner
and his Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). Substantially revised versions appear in
Visions of Politics, I: Regarding Method. Where appropriate, subsequent references
to these editions will be abbreviated to M&C and RM respectively.

with the complementary approaches of Pocock and the German school of
Begriffsgeschichte or conceptual history associated with the late Reinhart
Koselleck. First, however, I shall give a brief account of the emergence of
the Cambridge School.
The Origins of the Cambridge School
The origins of the Cambridge School can be traced back to the pioneering
editorial work of the historian Peter Laslett.6 In 1949 and 1960 respec-
tively, Laslett produced authoritative editions of two key seventeenth-
century political texts: Patriarcha by Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke’s
Two Treatises of Government, in which, as Laslett emphasized in his intro-
duction, Locke made Filmer’s work his main polemical target.7 What
Laslett demonstrated was that both works had been written significantly
earlier than had previously been supposed. Patriarcha was first published
by a group of activists in 1679, together with Filmer’s other political works,
which had originally appeared between 1648 and his death in 1652. Laslett,
however, argued persuasively that what was then the only known manu-
script of Patriarcha dated from between 1635 and 1642 – between six and
seventeen years before the publication of Filmer’s other political writings.8
This implied a corresponding broadening in the gap between, on the one
hand, the context in which Patriarcha had originally been written and to
6 See Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity,
2003), pp. 14–15.
7 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1949); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
8 The rediscovery of an earlier and significantly different manuscript version of
Patriarcha subsequently led Richard Tuck to conclude that Filmer’s work can be
dated even earlier, to between 1628 and 1631. See ‘A New Date for Filmer’sPatriarcha’,
The Historical Journal 29: 1 (1986), 183–86.

10 chapter 1
which it referred, and on the other, the context in which it was published
and read, most notably by Locke. Similarly, Laslett showed that although
Locke’s Two Treatises were published – anonymously – after the English
Revolution of 1688, they had in fact been written some years before it, in
about 1681. This meant that Locke’s treatises, far from being a retrospective
justification of the events of 1688 – as he had claimed in his Preface – were
in effect written as a call for revolution: they were not so much works of
political theory or philosophy, in other words, as political acts. In its own
way,theeffectofLaslett’sscholarlyeditorialworkwasequallyrevolutionary,
forcing historians to consider not only Patriarcha and the Two Treatises,
but the whole of seventeenth-century English political thought in a radi-
cally different light.
Both Pocock and Skinner have acknowledged Laslett’s seminal influ-
ence on their different, but complementary approaches to intellectual
history.9 In his 2004 review of Visions of Politics, Pocock gave his own
account of the emergence of the Cambridge School. He stated that his
own research in the wake of Laslett’s edition of Filmer’s political writings
led him to conclude that the republication of these writings in 1679 had
given rise to two different debates in two different fields: one in the field
of political theory, to which Locke’s Two Treatises was a contribution, and
another, equally political in its nature, but conducted in the field of English
history, in which Locke did not participate.10 In turn, this led Pocock to
postulate the existence of a plurality of ‘languages’ of political thought, by
which he means not national languages, but what are nowadays more com-
monly known as discourses. Thus Pocock has stated that in his usage – and,
he claims, in that of Skinner and others: ‘a language or discourse is […] a
9 Laslett also influenced a third important figure in the original Cambridge School,
John Dunn, whose postgraduate research on Locke was supervised by Laslett. See
Dunn’s The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1969).
10 Pocock, ‘Quentin Skinner’, Political Thought and History, pp. 126–27. It was this
latter debate that Pocock studied in his doctoral dissertation and subsequent book
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1957).

complex structure comprising a vocabulary; a grammar; a rhetoric; and a
set of usages, assumptions and implications existing together in time and
employable by a semi-specific community of language-users for purposes
political, interested in and extending sometimes as far as the articulation of
a world-view or ideology.’11According to Pocock, although a ‘language’ in
this sense can exist by itself, ‘more commonly, a number of such languages
exist concurrently, in confrontation, contestation, and interaction with
one another’. He has also emphasized that a single complex text may be
not only written, but also read in ‘a diversity of languages’.12 (The notion
of reading a text in a ‘language’ is perhaps best exemplified by the variety
of theoretical approaches – deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial, psy-
choanalytic and so on – that academic critics apply, sometimes in combi-
nation, to literary works.)
For Pocock, then, Laslett’s editorial work on Filmer and Locke led to
a way of writing history that was both essentially pluralistic and focused
on the reception, rather than the production of works. The historian, in
Pocock’s view, was ‘less an interpreter than an archaeologist of interpre-
tations performed by others’.13 This Laslett-inspired approach, Pocock
wrote, had two characteristic emphases: ‘first, on the variety of idioms
or “languages” […] in which political argument might be conducted […]
and second, on the participants in political argument as historical actors,
respondingtooneanotherinadiversityoflinguisticandotherpoliticaland
11 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Concepts and Discourses: A Difference in Culture? Comment on a
PaperbyMelvinRichter’,inHartmutLehmannandMelvinRichter,eds,TheMeaning
of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte (Washington,
DC: German Historical Institute, 1996), pp. 47–58 (p. 47).
12 ‘The Concept of a Language and the Métier d’Historien: Some Considerations on
Practice (1987)’, Political Thought and History, pp. 87–105 (p. 95).
13 ‘The Reconstruction of Discourse: Towards the Historiography of Political Thought
(1981)’, Political Thought and History, pp. 67–86 (p. 83). The term ‘archaeology’,
it should be noted, is associated with the early approach of Michel Foucault. See
L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), translated as The Archaeology of
Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972).

12 chapter 1
historicalcontexts[…]’.14 Thissecond emphasis wasexemplifiedinPocock’s
best-known work, The Machiavellian Moment,15 in which he studied the
revival of the ‘language’ of classical republicanism, first by Machiavelli
and a number of his Italian Renaissance contemporaries, then by James
Harrington and his followers in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-
century England and finally by the Founding Fathers of the United States.
Pocock showed in this way how one ‘language’ had been appropriated in
three very different socio-historical contexts, contexts which nevertheless
shared a certain structural similarity (the ‘moment’ of the title).
If Pocock drew much of his initial inspiration from Laslett’s edition
of Filmer in particular, Skinner was stimulated to adopt a rather different
approach by Laslett’s edition of Locke’s Two Treatises.16 In his introduc-
tion, Laslett made clear that his aim was ‘to establish Locke’s text as he
wanted it read, to fix it in its historical context, Locke’s own context, and
to demonstrate this connection of what he thought and wrote with the
Locke of historical influence’.17 But whereas Pocock, as we have seen, is
interested in the question of historical influence in the sense of the dif-
ferent ways in which a political discourse has been appropriated, Skinner
has been consistently suspicious of the very notion of influence.18 And
although Skinner once wrote that ‘[t]he historian primarily studies what
Pocock calls “languages” of discourse’, he immediately went on to recall his
own ‘stated aim of recovering what individual writers may have intended
or meant’ (M&C, 266–67). In this respect, as he has acknowledged, he
14 ‘Introduction: The State of the Art’, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1–34 (pp. 2–3).
15 The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican
Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
16 Skinner has also acknowledged the influence of – among others, notably R.G.
Collingwood – Pocock himself. As Skinner puts it: ‘One way of describing my
original essays would be to say that I merely tried to identify and restate in more
abstract terms the assumptions on which Pocock’s and especially Laslett’s scholar-
ship seemed to me to be based’ (‘A Reply to My Critics’, M&C, p. 233).
17 Laslett, ‘Introduction’, in Locke, Two Treatises, p. 4.
18 See ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, Philosophy 41 (1966), 199–215 and RM,
75–76.

is indebted to Laslett’s introduction to the Two Treatises in two ways:
‘First for [Laslett’s] insistence that Locke was basically replying to Filmer,
a claim that served to highlight what Locke was doing in the Two Treatises.
Second, for the consequential emphasis on the specific and local character
of Locke’s arguments, and on the need to undertake a detailed study of
their intellectual context in order to explain their distinctive emphases and
shape.’19 For Skinner, then, the importance of Laslett’s edition of Locke was
to underline that, rather than being studied in isolation, individual politi-
cal texts needed to be seen as responding to other texts in the context of
debates about contemporary political issues.
The Choice of Skinner’s Approach and the
Question of Intention
AlthoughthepresentstudywillretainPocock’sresolutelypluralistperspec-
tive, there are three reasons why I will broadly follow Skinner’s approach
rather than Pocock’s. First, and most obviously, although I shall be exam-
ining the role of various discourses in both Camus’s lecture and its sub-
sequent critical reception, the primary focus of this study is a single text.
The second reason has to do with the methodological priority of textual
interpretation over a reception-history approach such as Pocock’s. For
although a text only acquires meaning in the minds of its readers (begin-
ning with its author), those readers do not approach the text as a series of
blank pages on to which they can project whatever meanings they please,
but as embodying an intentional act of communication by another human
being (however they may subsequently interpret it).
Conversely, of course, the minds of readers are not blank slates on
whichauthorsinscribetheirintendedmeaningormeanings:differentread-
ers approach texts with a whole host of different presuppositions, ranging
19 M&C, 327, note 12.

14 chapter 1
from expectations regarding the text, its genre and its author to fully blown
theories(‘languages’inPocock’ssense).Inpractice,however,evenhistorians
of reception give priority to ‘author meaning’ and authorial intentions –
which,itshouldbeemphasized,arealwaysinferredandimputed,andnever
simply given (assuming they can be relied upon, even explicit statements
of intention by authors need themselves to be interpreted and contextual-
ized). This is because, as Martyn P. Thompson has pointed out, the sources
that historians of reception study ‘are themselves texts […] which have to be
decoded in terms of their authors’ (the recipients’) intended meanings’ (my
emphasis).20 Thereisnoontologicaldifference,inotherwords,betweenthe
‘primary’ text and the ‘secondary’ texts that respond to it and constitute
thedataforreception-historians(whoseownresponsestothese‘secondary’
textstaketheformoffurthertextsthatarethemselveshistoricallysituated).
The third reason is related to the second and has to do specifically with
Pocock’s focus on discourses. From a historical viewpoint, Pocock rightly
stresses the logical priority of discourses over texts: as he points out, the
‘language’ an author employs ‘is already in use’.21 From a methodological
viewpoint, however, the order of priority is reversed: as the very title of
Pocock’s article ‘The Reconstruction of Discourse’ implies, the discourses
which Pocock studies have to be reconstructed from texts.
Some forty years ago, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault famously
announced the ‘death of the author’.22 In practice, however, everyone who
studies texts, and particularly historical texts, tacitly acknowledges the
primacy of the author in at least one respect, insofar as they base their
20 Martyn P. Thompson, ‘Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical
Meaning’, History and Theory 32: 3 (1993), 248–72 (p. 257).
21 Pocock, ‘Introduction’, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 6.
22 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), in Image–Music–Text, ed. and
trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–48; Michel Foucault,
‘What Is an Author?’ (1969), in Josué V. Harari, ed.,Textual Strategies: Perspectives in
Post-Structuralist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 141–60. See Sean Burke,
The Death and Return of the Author, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1998), which provides an invaluable corrective to over-literal Anglo-American
interpretations of the pronouncements of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida on the
subject.

interpretations on what they believe to be reliable editions and – in the case
of foreign-language texts – reliable translations of the works they study.
‘Reliable’ here can only mean ‘in conformity with the author’s intentions’
– or rather what, on the best available evidence, are presumed to be the
author’s intentions. A good example here is George Orwell’s 1984. As Peter
Davisonpointsoutinanotetothe1989Penguineditionofthenovel,there
was a serious error in the 1951 printing of the Secker & Warburg text that
was repeated in all subsequent editions. The ‘5’ in the famous formula ‘2 +
2 = 5’ at the end of the novel dropped out of the printer’s forme, giving the
false impression that Winston has not submitted entirely to Big Brother –
an impression that clearly affected interpretations of the novel as a whole
for over forty years.23 Similar considerations apply to translations, a fact
that monoglot Anglo-American scholars whose interpretations are based
on English-language renderings of primary or theoretical texts would do
well to bear in mind.24 Inaccurate translations can sometimes have far-
reaching effects: Jeremy Bentham’s highly influential utilitarian principle
of ‘thegreatesthappiness ofthegreatest number’,for example, wasbasedon
a faulty rendering of the Italian jurist Cesaria Beccaria’s phrase la massima
felicità divisa nel maggio numero, or ‘the greatest happiness shared among
the greatest number’ – a very different proposition.25
Ifeveryinterpretationofatextisbasedontheimplicitassumptionthat
the text faithfully reflects its author’s intentions, however, it would be futile
to insist that every interpreter should restrict themselves to constructing
persuasive hypotheses as to what those intentions were. Once an author
has published a text, it becomes public property and can be appropriated
23 Peter Davison, ‘A Note on the Text’, in George Orwell, 1984 (London: Penguin,
1989), p. xx. The ‘2 + 2 = 5’ formula in question appears on p. 303.
24 For a study of how the reception of one of Camus’s best-known works was and may
have been affected by the way it was translated, see Konrad Bieber, ‘Traduttore,
traditore. La réception problématique de L’Homme révolté aux États-Unis’, AC19,
pp. 143–48.
25 SeeRobertShackleton,‘TheGreatestHappinessoftheGreatestNumber:theHistory
of Bentham’s Phrase’,Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century90 (1972), 1461–
82. I owe this example to Terry Hopton.

16 chapter 1
by its readers for their own purposes: as Pocock reminds us, a text can be
(re)interpreted in a variety of contexts and reinscribed in a variety of dis-
courses.26 It is these diverse appropriations that are studied by historians of
reception. By contrast, the approach of the historically minded interpreter
of texts as products is to relocate them in the contexts, discursive and oth-
erwise, in which their authors wrote them. It is a question, as Skinner puts
it, of ‘seeing things their way’ – or at least attempting to do so.
‘Seeing Things Their Way’:
The Need for a Properly Historical Approach
In the general preface to Visions of Politics, Skinner gives the following
outline of his approach:
to write the history of ideas in a properly historical style, we need to situate the texts
we study within such intellectual contexts and frameworks of discourse as enable
us to recognise what their authors were doing in writing them. […] My aspiration
is not of course to perform the impossible task of getting inside the heads of long-
dead thinkers; it is simply to use the techniques of historical enquiry to grasp their
concepts, to follow their distinctions, to recover their beliefs and, so far as possible,
to see things their way. (RM, vii)
Fromaviewpointthatcanberegardedaseitherradicallyscepticalorsimply
realistic,itcanofcoursebeobjectedthatSkinnercanneverknowforcertain
when or whether he has achieved this aim. Although he acknowledges that
it is impossible to ‘get inside the heads’ of long-dead thinkers, his stated
aspiration – ‘to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to recover
their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way’ – might seem
26 As Brian Rosebury has argued, the authors of some kinds of literary work in particu-
lar take this fact into account when writing, deliberately designing their works to
be self-sufficient and open to various interpretations (‘Irrecoverable Intentions and
Literary Interpretation’, British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (1997), 15–27 (pp. 26–27).

to require precisely this. Equally, however, we can never be certain that we
have not managed to understand the thinkers of the past more or less on
their own terms: in practice, as we do in our dealings with other people in
everyday life, we have to rely on inference.
Bytheverynatureofthings,then,whatSkinnerisdoingisnot‘recover-
ing’ the actual beliefs, concepts and distinctions of the thinkers he studies,
butrather–andinthefullsenseoftheword–reconstructingthem,working
on the assumption that the best evidence for this will be provided by situ-
ating the texts he studies in their intellectual and discursive contexts. The
results may be more or less persuasive, but inevitably they will only be an
interpretation, a construction placed on the texts in question. As Skinner
himself observes: ‘Even our most confident ascriptions of intentionality are
nothing more than inferences from the best evidence available to us, and as
such are defeasible at any time’ (RM, 121). In this respect, the position in
which Skinner finds himself is no different from any other historian or any
otherinterpreterofhistoricaltexts.BygivingtheintroductiontoRegarding
Method the subtitle ‘Seeing Things Their Way’, however, Skinner makes
clear that his whole approach is based on the rejection of two commonly
held beliefs. First, the belief that it is impossible to (metaphorically) see
things the way people in the past saw them – something, as we have seen,
that cannot be proved either way – and second that even if this were pos-
sible, it should not be the aim (or one of the aims) of the historian to try
to do so.27 Although Skinner is aware, in other words, that anachronism is
an occupational hazard for historians, he firmly rejects the belief that it is
either unavoidable or unimportant: on the contrary, Skinner regards the
avoidance of anachronism as one of the historian’s prime duties.
27 There is an obvious parallel here with the literary-critical notion of the ‘intentional
fallacy’, according to which, as the ‘New Critics’ Wimsatt and Beardsley argued in a
famous1946article,‘thedesignorintentionoftheauthorisneitheravailablenordesir-
able’ as a guide to either evaluating or interpreting a literary text. See W.K. Wimsatt
and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in David Newton-De Molina,
ed., On Literary Intention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976), pp. 1–13
(p. 1). For Skinner’s discussion of this and related issues, see ‘Motives, Intentions and
Interpretation’, RM, 90–102.

18 chapter 1
The importance of this point may best be brought out by substituting
a cultural for a historical perspective, recalling the famous opening line of
L.P.Hartley’s TheGo-Between:‘Thepastisaforeigncountry:theydothings
differently there.’ What Skinner is attacking is the historical equivalent of
the belief that it is impossible to see things the way people in another cul-
ture see them, and that even if this were possible, it would not be desirable
to do so. For a historian to embrace anachronism, in other words, would
be the equivalent of an anthropologist embracing ethnocentrism or of a
professional Orientalist embracing ‘Orientalism’, in the pejorative sense
that Edward Said uses the term.28 For if we do not even try to ‘see things
their way’, we will inevitably be restricted to seeing things our way, even as
we acknowledge that ours is not the only way of seeing. (How could we
knowthisifwecannotinfactgetoutsideourownheads?)Itisnotablethat,
as Kari Palonen has pointed out, Skinner himself has explicitly justified a
historicist approach in quasi-anthropological terms: ‘The investigation of
alien systems of belief provides us with an irreplaceable means of standing
back from our own prevailing assumptions and structures of thought […]
[S]uch investigations […] enable us to recognize that our own descriptions
and conceptualizations are in no way uniquely privileged.’29 A historicist
approach, in other words, offers us a way out of what would otherwise be
a perverse form of solipsism. To pursue the analogy suggested earlier, it is
like learning the language of a country we are visiting, rather than obsti-
nately persisting in speaking our own.
28 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin,
1985 [1978]).
29 Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, M&C, p. 286, quoted by Palonen, Quentin Skinner,
p. 26. See also RM, p. 125.

Skinner’s Approach
I shall now examine Skinner’s approach more closely. The first point that
needstobemadehereisthatSkinner’spracticeoftendepartsfromhistheo-
reticalpronouncements,manyofwhichwereoriginallymadeinapolemical
context. In the original version of his seminal 1969 article ‘Meaning and
Understanding in the History of Ideas’,30 for example, Skinner mounted
a scathing attack on orthodox approaches to the history of ideas, accus-
ing them of imposing a false coherence on their subject-matter, whether
they focused on ideas in themselves or the thought of individual thinkers.
It was a mistake, Skinner concluded, ‘even to try either to write intellec-
tual biographies concentrating on the works of a given writer, or to write
histories of ideas tracing the morphology of a given concept over time’
(M&C, 63). In 1981, however, Skinner published Machiavelli, which took
the form of an introductory intellectual biography, and in 1998, Liberty
before Liberalism, which traced the history of different conceptions of
liberty in the early modern period.31
The two broad approaches that Skinner attacked in ‘Meaning and
Understanding’ were textualism (the view that it was sufficient to study
the text itself to understand its meaning) and a crude ‘contextualism’ (the
view that the meaning of the text was determined by external factors).
Although he conceded that a knowledge of the social context of texts was
essential, Skinner argued for a third approach, which focused on what he
emphatically described as ‘the linguistic context’. This he defined as ‘the
whole range of communications which could have been conventionally
performed on the given occasion by the utterance of the given utterance’
(M&C, 63–64; cf. RM, 87). The key to interpretation was to establish the
relationship between the utterance and this broader linguistic context.
30 ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8: 1 (1969),
3–53, reprinted in M&C, 29–57.
31 Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Liberty before Liberalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

20 chapter 1
Once this had been done, a study of ‘all the facts’ about the social context
could be undertaken, with this serving, if necessary, as the ultimate crite-
rion for deciding between incompatible interpretations.
This early and decidedly abstract formulation of Skinner’s approach
raised the obvious question of how it could be applied in practice. By
referring to ‘the’ linguistic context and using the technical term ‘utterance’
(which could be taken as referring to anything from a single statement to
an entire text), Skinner glossed over the fact that, as Pocock puts it, ‘[a]
complex text may turn out to contain a wide range of “languages” and be
interpretableasperformingawiderangeofactsofutterance’.32 Insaying,on
the other hand, that we should not only attempt to determine the ‘whole
range’ of communications that make up the linguistic context, but also that
we should study ‘all the facts’ about the social context, Skinner seemed to
be setting an impossibly ambitious task, involving nothing less than the
reconstruction of the entire linguistic and social universe in which texts
were written.33 What Skinner offered, in short, was an ideal programme
rather than a practical methodology.
In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), Skinner
dropped the term ‘linguistic context’ in favour of what he now called the
‘ideological’ and ‘intellectual’ contexts. And however he may have arrived
at his interpretations of the individual works he examined, Skinner pre-
sented his study in a format that was the exact reverse of the procedure he
had outlined in ‘Meaning and Understanding’. His starting-point in The
Foundations was not the relationship between the texts and their linguistic
context, but the social context, on the assumption that ‘political life itself
sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range
of issues to appear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to
become the leading subjects of debate’ (Preface, p. xi).
32 Pocock, ‘The Reconstruction of Discourse’, p. 84.
33 Cf. the conclusion of ‘Motives, Intentions and Interpretation’: ‘We need, in short,
to be ready to take as our province nothing less than the whole of what Cornelius
Castoriadis has described as the social imaginary, the complete range of the inherited
symbols and representations that constitute the subjectivity of an age’ (RM, 102).

As in ‘Meaning and Understanding’, however, Skinner rejected crude
social contextualism, arguing that the ‘intellectual context’ of the major
textsalsoneededtobestudied:‘thecontextofearlierwritingsandinherited
assumptions about political society, and of more ephemeral contemporary
contributions to social and political thought’ (Preface, p. xi). According
to Skinner, another factor in determining the ways in which particular
questions came to be singled out and discussed was ‘the nature and limits
of the normative vocabulary available at any given time’. This normative
language constituted what Skinner termed the ‘ideological context’ of the
major works – and, by implication, of the other works that helped to make
up the intellectual context. Instead, then, of beginning with texts and plac-
ing them first in their linguistic context, and then in their social context,
Skinner started with the social context, then examined the ideological and
intellectual contexts and only then the texts themselves. (To be fair, this
apparent inconsistency in Skinner’s approach may simply reflect the kind
of book he was writing – a history of political thought, rather than a study
of an individual thinker or work.)
In ‘A Reply to My Critics’ (1988, M&C 231–88), Skinner gave a
carefully considered restatement of his theoretical and methodological
position. The final section of this essay was later adapted and developed
for ‘Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts’, which Skinner
describesintheintroductiontoRegardingMethodaslayingouthisapproach
to interpretation (RM, 3). In what he therefore presumably regards as the
definitive formulation of this approach to date, Skinner summarizes his
case as follows, using the term ‘argumentative context’ to replace the earlier
‘intellectual context’:
My contention, in essence, is that we should start by elucidating the meaning, and
hence the subject matter of […] utterances […] and then turn to the argumentative
context[…]todeterminehowexactly[Skinnerpresumablymeans‘exactlyhow’]they
connect with, or relate to, other utterances concerned with the same subject-matter.
If we succeed in identifying this context with sufficient accuracy, we can eventually
hope to read off what it was that the speaker or writer […] was doing in saying what
he or she said. (RM, 116)

22 chapter 1
Twopreliminaryobservationscanbemadehere.First,Skinnerabandonsthe
order of procedure he used in The Foundations and reverts to that outlined
in ‘Meaning and Understanding’, beginning with the text (or utterance)
rather than its context. Second, Skinner’s reference to ‘the’ meaning and
subject matter of utterances and ‘the’ argumentative context seems, once
again, to foreclose the possibility raised by Pocock: that complex texts may
contain a wide range of utterances and that, as a result, they may have not
only many meanings, but also more than one subject matter, and be taking
part in more than one argument. Skinner himself appears to acknowledge
this point later. Using the terminology of J.L. Austin’s theory of speech
acts,34 he talks about having encouraged a misconception by often having
oftenspoken,‘grammaticallyinthesingular,abouttherecoveryofintended
illocutionary force’ (RM, 123) – what, in other words, the writer or speaker
was doing in saying what they said. Any text of any complexity, he stresses,
‘will contain a myriad of illocutionary acts, and any individual phrase in
any such text […] may even contain more acts than words’ (RM, 124).
The formulation of Skinner’s approach that I have quoted, however,
still leaves at least three crucial problems unresolved. First, it glosses over
the problem of elucidating meaning at the textual level, in effect reducing
thistoaquestionofidentifying‘the’subject-matter.Second,itassumesthat
the meaning of the other texts which make up the argumentative context
is unproblematic, for otherwise they too would need to be contextualized,
and so on. Third, it emphasizes the argumentative context at the expense
of all other contexts, whether social, biographical or otherwise. It is these
problems that I shall now address.
34 J.L.Austin,HowtoDoThingswithWords,ed.J.O.UrmsonandMarinaSbisà(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980 [1962]).

Refining Skinner’s Approach
In an article published three years before theFoundations, but not included
in either Meaning and Context or Regarding Method, Skinner explicitly
acknowledged the logical priority of textual over contextual interpreta-
tion. In so doing, he identified a contextualist version of the hermeneutic
circle, according to which we understand the meaning of a text as a whole
by understanding the meaning of its parts, and the meaning of those parts
inrelationtothewhole.‘Beforewecanhope’,Skinnerobserved,‘toidentify
the context which helps to disclose the meaning of a given work, we must
already have arrived at an interpretation which serves to suggest what con-
texts may most profitably be investigated as further aids to interpretation’.35
Despite the unfortunate implication that a work has only one meaning,
which only one among a variety of contexts can help to disclose, this is a
crucial point.
For Nathan Tarcov, however, reviewing both the Foundations and
Skinner’searliertheoreticalwritings,Skinner’sstatementmerelyhighlighted
the inadequacy of his method: ‘it is only a set of reflections and procedures
useful in the contextual arc of the hermeneutic circle unaccompanied by
reflections or procedures for the prior textual interpretation itself’.36 Given
that Tarcov himself tends towards textualism but does not offer his own
reflections on, or procedures for textual interpretation, this criticism seems
churlish. In fact, I would argue, Skinner’s characterization of the problem
suggests an obvious solution: if the meanings of a text at the time it was
written are a function of the various contexts in which it was written, the
historically minded interpreter must focus on those aspects of the text that
call, implicitly or explicitly, for contextualization.
35 ‘Hermeneutics and the Role of History’, New Literary History 7:1 (Autumn 1975),
209–32 (p. 227).
36 Nathan Tarcov, ‘Quentin Skinner’s Method and Machiavelli’s Prince’, Ethics 92
(1982), 692–709 (p. 701). Tarcov’s chapter of the same name in Meaning and Context
(pp. 194–203) is an abridged version of this.

24 chapter 1
Seen in this light, the task of the historically minded interpreter
becomes an extension of that of the editor of a critical edition of a histori-
cal text. Apart from providing a reliable text, the task of such an editor is
to illuminate the text in question by providing readers with the appropri-
ate critical apparatus. This may include some or all of the following: an
introduction giving details of the genesis of the text and its initial recep-
tion, and situating it in relation to its literary or intellectual antecedents,
the period in which it was written and the author’s life and œuvre; notes
explaining references or allusions and pointing out echoes of or in the
author’s other writings; draft passages and variants; relevant extracts from
the author’s correspondence, diary and notebooks; a glossary and so on.
Similarly, an intellectual historian focusing on an individual work should
seek to elucidate it by situating it in whichever contexts – biographical,
ideological, intellectual, socio-historical and so on – prove most helpful
for understanding its various parts, and ultimately the work as a whole.
Another useful perspective on the problem of intellectual-historical
textual interpretation is provided by Skinner’s discussion of the role of
normative vocabulary, or what he originally called ‘evaluative-descriptive
terms’.37 For Skinner, the use of these terms to express approval or disap-
proval has ‘an overwhelming ideological significance’, since it is largely
through their rhetorical manipulation that ‘any society succeeds in estab-
lishing, upholding, questioning or altering its moral identity’ (RM, 149).
To put it another way, it is these normative terms that are used to do much
of the ideological work in language, a phenomenon perhaps most clearly
illustrated by the vocabularies of so-called ‘political correctness’ and ‘politi-
cal incorrectness’ (themselves pejorative and meliorative terms in current
usage). In interpreting political texts such as Camus’s lecture – but not only
political texts – it is therefore obviously vital to focus on the rhetorical use
of these normative terms, which tend not to be employed in isolation, but
to be reinforced by similar or contrasting terms.
37 ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, M&C, pp. 97–118
(pp. 111–12). Cf. RM, 148–49.

The use of a sub-group of normative terms especially characteristic of
political discourse also repays particularly close attention. These are what
W.B. Gallie38 originally described as ‘essentially contested concepts’ and
are now generally referred to simply as ‘contested concepts’: normative
concepts whose use, far from being agreed, is often the subject of intense
debate, particularly in periods of ideological and political conflict or crisis.
Obvious examples here would include ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’,
or outside politics, ‘art’. The most commonly accepted general definition of
‘democracy’,forexample,is‘rulebythepeople’,butwho‘thepeople’areand
how their ‘rule’ is exercised in practice has varied considerably from time to
time and place to place. In ancient Athens, where the concept originated,
‘democracy’ was exercised directly, rather than through representatives,
with the electorate being restricted to adult males who were full citizens,
definedasthosewhoseparentswereboththemselvesAthenian:immigrants,
slaves and women were excluded. And although ‘democracy’ is nowadays
generally regarded as a good thing – though not, notably, by supporters
of theocratic forms of government – members of the Athenian elite used
‘democracy’ in the sense of ‘mob rule’, a pejorative usage which survived
in some quarters at least as late as the mid-twentieth century.
Thehistoricalstudyofcontestedsocio-politicalconceptsinaparticular
socio-historicalcontext–theperiodoftransitiontomodernityinGermany
and France between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries – is
the special province of the German school ofBegriffsgeschichte, or concep-
tual history, whose leading figure was the late Reinhart Koselleck.39 The
38 ‘EssentiallyContestedConcepts’, ProceedingsoftheAristotelianSociety,n.s.,56(1956),
167–98.
39 Koselleck was one of the co-editors of a monumental nine-volume historical lexicon
of fundamental socio-political concepts in Germany: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze
and Reinhart Koselleck, eds, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur
politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 9 vols (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1990).
For a translation of an entry written by Koselleck, see ‘Crisis’, trans. Michaela W.
Richter, preceded by an introduction by Melvin and Michaela W. Richter, Journal
of the History of Ideas 67 (2006), 343–400. Other translations of Koselleck’s work
include The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, tr.
Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)

26 chapter 1
most important theoretical contribution of Begriffsgeschichte, for the pur-
poses of this study at least, is the principle that, as Rolf Reichardt has put it,
‘historicalconceptsdonotdevelop[…]inisolationbutratherwithconcepts
– both complementary and antithetical – with which they form common
semantic fields’.40 In Ancient Athens, for example, the term ‘democracy’
drew its meaning from being used in opposition to monarchy, oligarchy (or
rule by the few) and tyranny (rule by a usurper who had seized power by
force). Today, however, the most common counter-concept of ‘democracy’
is‘dictatorship’,whichisusedinadecidedlydifferentsensethanitoriginally
had in Ancient Rome, where it referred to a limited period of rule by an
appointed individual during a state of emergency. (It was in this and not
the modern sense that the classically educated Marx used the term in the
oft-misunderstood phrase ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.) ‘Monarchy’,
on the other hand, is opposed to ‘republic’ (another Roman term), in the
sense of a state headed by a president: for modern-day republicans, indeed,
monarchy is incompatible with their conception of democracy, whereas
others see no contradiction between the two. In all of these cases, the
meaning of a particular concept is relative to other concepts and depends
on its use in a particular socio-historical context by groups with different
ideological viewpoints.
The need to study concepts and texts respectively in both their dis-
cursive and socio-historical contexts is fundamental to the approaches
of both Begriffsgeschichte and the Cambridge School. Responding to the
suggestion by Melvin Richter that the two approaches were not only com-
patible but complementary, however, Pocock disagreed, alluding to and
and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, new edn, tr. Keith Tribe (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
40 Reichardt, ‘Historical Semantics and Political Iconography: the Case of the Game
of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karen Tilmans and Frank van
Vree, eds, History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 1998), pp. 191–226 (p. 225). The German word Begriff, it should
be noted, means both ‘concept’ and ‘term’, and following criticisms by the linguist
Dietrich Busse of the concept of a concept in Begriffsgeschichte, Reichardt now sees
himself as practising semantic rather than conceptual history.

endorsing Skinner’s assertion that ‘there can be no histories of concepts as
such; there can only be histories of their uses in argument’ (M&C, 283). In
addition, Pocock argued for the logical priority of his own approach over
Koselleck’s: according to Pocock, the history of concepts needed to be
seen as part of ‘an ongoing history of discourses arranged [sc. ‘arraigned?]
against each other in constant and continuing debate’.41 In reply, however,
Koselleck suggested that the history of discourses and the history of con-
cepts were interdependent:
Although basic concepts always function within a discourse, they are pivots around
which all arguments turn. […] A discourse requires basic concepts in order to express
whatitistalkingabout.Andanalysisofconceptsrequirescommandofbothlinguistic
and extra-linguistic contexts, including those provided by discourses.42
Perhaps surprisingly, on the other hand, Koselleck agreed with what
he described as Skinner’s ‘rigorous historicism’: concepts had no autono-
mous history of their own, insofar as they were the product of ‘speech
acts within a context that cannot be replicated’ and were thus unique to
that context. As Koselleck saw it, however, the history of concepts was
concerned with how the uses of concepts ‘were subsequently maintained,
altered, or transformed’.43 Begriffsgeschichte, said Koselleck,
registers more than sequences of unique speech acts set within specific situations;
it also registers that set of long-term, repeatable structures stored in language that
establish the preconditions for conceptualizing events. […] The task of begriffs-
geschichte [sic] is to ask what strands of meaning persist, are translatable, and can
again be applied; what threads of meaning are discarded; and what new strands are
added.44
41 Pocock, ‘Concepts and Discourses’, p. 58.
42 Koselleck, ‘A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, tr. Melvin
Richter and Sally E. Robertson, in Lehmann and Richter, eds, The Meaning of
Historical Terms and Concepts, pp. 59–70 (p. 65).
43 Koselleck, ‘A Response’, pp. 62–63.
44 Ibid., pp. 67–68.

28 chapter 1
Koselleck cited the example of the concept of democracy, which once it
had been created, began to acquire its own history. Over time, he pointed
out, some concepts came to be treated as if they were autonomous entities:
they were made into substantives – ‘History’, ‘Progress’ and ‘Revolution’,
for instance – and used as the subjects of sentences.
As Koselleck’s account makes clear, Begriffsgeschichte can be seen as a
formofreceptionhistory,45 focusednotontextsor(asinPocock’sapproach)
discourses, but on concepts. Insofar as one of the more recent focuses of
Skinner’s work has been the process of conceptual innovation through
rhetorical redescription46 – the appropriation and resemanticization of
concepts to serve different ideological ends – there is an obvious affinity
between his approach and Koselleck’s, as Skinner himself has acknowl-
edged. In the concluding chapter of Regarding Method, indeed, Skinner
has described himself as ‘not unhappy’ with Kari Palonen’s suggestion that
muchofhis(Skinner’s)ownresearchmightbeseenas‘acontributiontoone
aspect of the vastly more ambitious programme pursued by […] Koselleck
and his associates’ (RM, 186–87).47
Pocock, on the other hand, fails to see that, despite different units of
analysis – discourses and concepts respectively – he and Koselleck share
the same focus on reception. In ‘The State of the Art’, for example, Pocock
describes one aspect of the history of texts as their ‘constant adaptation,
translation and reperformance […] in a succession of contexts by a suc-
cession of agents’48 – a description which, as he makes clear elsewhere,
also applies to the history of discourses (cf. The Machiavellian Moment).
Similarly, Koselleck states that the history of concepts can be reconstructed
through studying ‘the reception, or more radically, the translation of
45 See Keith Tribe’s ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Koselleck, Futures Past, pp.
xvii–xviii.
46 See ‘Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change’, RM 175–87.
47 More recently, however, Skinner has described the relations between his work and
Koselleck’s as a ‘minefield’. See J.F. Sebastián, ‘Intellectual History, Liberty and
Republicanism: An Interview with Quentin Skinner’, Contributions to the History
of Concepts 3 (2007), 103–23 (p. 114).
48 ‘Introduction: the State of the Art’, p. 21.

concepts first used in the past but then pressed into service by later gen-
erations’.49 Combining these two accounts, we have a picture of contested
conceptsastheideologicalpivotsoftextsinscribedincompetingdiscourses,
withconcepts,textsanddiscoursesalikehavingtheirownhistoriesofactive
reception – of appropriation, expropriation and reappropriation by dif-
ferent agents employing different discourses in different socio-historical
contexts. (Again, an illuminating parallel is provided by different critical
and literary-theoretical approaches to interpreting the same literary text,
or indeed the different interpretations of the same sacred text by different
religious groups.)
Ishallbeexaminingthedifferentwaysinwhich‘TheNewMediterranean
Culture’ has been interpreted – and thus reinscribed within different dis-
courses – in my examination of the secondary literature on Camus’s lec-
ture. As previously noted, however, the primary focus of this study is on
elucidating Camus’s text itself. Here a parallel may be drawn between the
approach of Begriffsgeschichte to concepts and the Skinnerian approach
to texts. For just as Koselleck and Reichardt study individual concepts in
relation to other concepts occupying the same semantic field, so Skinner
studies individual texts in relation to previous texts with the same subject-
matter. (The same principle can of course be applied to competing dis-
courses contesting the same issue or issues – the discourses of newspapers
or political parties, for example.) And just as Begriffsgeschichte divides the
concepts related to the concept under examination into complementary
and counter-concepts, so, I would argue, the argumentative intertexts of
a primary text can be divided into what might be called, for lack of better
terms, antecedent pro- and counter-texts: texts, in other words, which
either influence the primary text or against which it reacts as polemical
targets.50 As regards Skinner’s own theoretical and methodological writ-
ings, for example, philosophical texts by J.L. Austin, R.G. Collingwood
49 Koselleck, ‘A Response’, p. 65.
50 In some cases, the two functions may be combined within a single text or even a
wholegenre.Skinner,forexample,arguesthatMachiavelli’s ThePrincebothconforms
to and deviates from the generic conventions of humanist advice-books to princes
(Foundations, pp. 118–38).

30 chapter 1
and Wittgenstein, and intellectual-historical texts by John Dunn,51 Laslett
and Pocock would fall into the category of pro-texts, and similar texts by
Arthur Lovejoy, Leo Strauss and Raymond Williams into the category of
counter-texts.52
Textual analysis focusing on the rhetorical manipulation of normative
terms and key concepts, then, needs to be complemented by an analysis
of the relationship between the target text and its antecedent pro- and
counter-texts, which themselves need to be placed in a broader historical
perspective.53 As Pocock puts it, the historian has to ‘move between explor-
ing [the text’s] structure as a synchronously existing artifact to exploring its
occurrence and performance as an incident in a diachronously proceeding
continuum of discourse’.54 The target text’s antecedent pro- and counter-
texts, in other words, need themselves to be contextualized. In this way, it
will be possible to build up a picture of an argumentative context focused
not just on ephemeral polemics, but debates extending over a generation
or more, the central terms of which – as in the case of ‘democracy’, for
example – may originate as far back as the Classical world. (An analogy
may be drawn here with Fernand Braudel’s tripartite division of historical
time into events, medium-term conjonctures and the longue durée.)
51 See, in particular, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy 43 (1968),
85–104, rpt in Political Obligation in its Historical Context: Essays in Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 13–28.
52 Lovejoy and Strauss were two of Skinner’s principal targets in ‘Meaning and
Understanding’, while Williams was the object of an equally harsh critique in ‘The
Idea of a Cultural Lexicon’, Essays in Criticism 29 (1979), 205–24 (revised version
in RM, 158–74).
53 In some cases, these texts may have been written many centuries before. Skinner has
shown, for example, that at various points in The Prince, Machiavelli is directly taking
issue with Cicero’s De Officiis (On Moral Obligation), which was a locus classicus for
humanist advice-books to princes. See Machiavelli, pp. 40 and 43–46.
54 Pocock, ‘The State of the Art’, p. 28.

Two Critiques of Skinner
As its title indicates, the present study adopts a multi-contextualist
approach. Before outlining this approach, I shall therefore briefly discuss
two critiques of Skinner’s original methodological writings from what is, in
effect, a multi-contextualist perspective. In a joint article, Lotte Mulligan,
Judith Richards and John Graham argued that the historian of ideas needs
to consider ‘a number of both wider and more specific issues than those of
Skinner’s focus’.55 They singled out five such issues:
(a) ‘the general conventions of speech and writing within which the
writer was set and which he [sic] needed to invoke in order to
communicate with their audience’;
(b) ‘thespecifichistoricalcircumstancesinwhicheachoftheauthor’s
works were produced’;
(c) ‘the relationship of his specific writings to the whole corpus of
his work’;
(d) ‘the degree of novelty or traditionality of the writer’s concepts’;
and
(e) ‘(ideally) the writer’s psychology’.56
Twoobservationsneedtobemadehere.Thefirstisthat,astheirrepeatedref-
erences to the writer or author suggest, the approach proposed by Mulligan
et al. is author- rather than text-centred: as regards point (c), for example,
they state that we need to grasp the relationship of a text to the corpus
of an author’s writings ‘in order to understand the author’s intellectual
evolution’.57 Thesecondisthatatvarioustimes,Skinnerhimselfhasstressed
55 Lotte Mulligan, Judith Richards and John Graham, ‘Intentions and Conventions: A
Critique of Quentin Skinner’s Method for the Study of the History of Ideas’, Political
Studies 27:1 (1979), 84–98 (p. 97).
56 Mulligan et al, pp. 97–98.
57 Ibid., p. 98. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this: it depends on what one is
doing.

32 chapter 1
the importance of points (a), (b) and (d) – conventions,58 the (socio-)his-
torical context and conceptual innovation. Although Skinner would prob-
ablybewaryofwhathemightseeasthepsychologizingapproachproposed
in point (e), on the other hand, he seems to have nothing in particular to
say either way on point (c), the relationship between a particular text and
the author’s work as a whole.59
A very similar, albeit largely indirect critique of Skinner’s methodol-
ogy was made by Dominick LaCapra, who also stressed the need for a
multi-contextualist approach. As LaCapra pointed out, ‘an appeal to the
context is deceptive; one never has – at least in the case of complex texts –
the context’, but rather ‘a set of interacting contexts whose relations to one
another are variable and problematic’.60 He then gave what he described
as a ‘non-exhaustive’ list of six contexts that might need to be taken into
account:
(1) the relation between the author’s intentions and the text;
(2) the relation between the author’s life and the text;
(3) the relation of society to texts;
(4) the relation of culture to texts;
(5) the relation of a text to the corpus of a writer;
(6) the relation between modes of discourse and texts.
Under the heading of (3), the relation of society to texts, it should be noted,
LaCapra includes the relationship of the text to ideologies, discursive prac-
tices and social processes as these affect both the genesis of the text and its
58 See, in particular, ‘Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts’, Philosophical
Quarterly20(1970),118–38,notincludedineitherMeaningandContextorRegarding
Method.
59 As noted earlier, Skinner’s initial dismissal, in ‘Meaning and Understanding’, of
‘intellectual biographies concentrating on the works of a given writer’ (M&C, 63)
was later contradicted by his study of Machiavelli.
60 DominickLaCapra,‘RethinkingIntellectualHistoryandReadingTexts’, Historyand
Theory 19 (1980), 245–76 (254). Further references to this article are incorporated
in the body of the text.

impact. There is obviously an overlap here with (4), the cultural context,
on which he comments: ‘intellectual history should be a history of intel-
lectuals, of the communities of discourse in which they function, and of
the varying relations […] they manifest towards the larger culture’ (264).
A similar overlap is evident when, having referred to ‘conventions of inter-
pretation’ (262) in his discussion of the social context, LaCapra includes
‘structures of interpretation, and conventions’ (269) under the heading of
(6), the relation between modes of discourse and texts.
LaCapra only mentions Skinner in relation to the first of his six con-
texts,thatoftheauthor’sintentions,criticizingSkinner’sapproachforwhat
he sees as a tendency ‘to assume a proprietary relation between the author
andthetextaswellasaunitarymeaningforanutterance’(254).Insodoing,
however, he ignores Skinner’s own explicit reference, in the introduction
to the Foundations, to the social, ideological and intellectual contexts of
texts and his emphasis elsewhere on the role of conventions. Each of these
corresponds to aspects of three of the five remaining contexts (3, 4 and 6)
identified by LaCapra,61 which in turn overlap substantially with the issues
identified by Mulligan et al. (the exception being the writer’s concepts).
The only contexts that Skinner can be legitimately accused of failing to
adequately address in his methodological writings are the biographical
context, the context of the writer’s œuvre and the context of reception. In
practice, however, and in spite of his polemical emphasis on the intellectual
or argumentative context, Skinner refers to all these contexts at various
times, both in examples that he discusses and in his non-theoretical writ-
ings, notably Machiavelli.62
61 In addition, LaCapra says that (5), the relation of a text to the corpus of a writer also
raises ‘the problem of the relationship between a text and the texts of other writers’
(268), which corresponds to Skinner’s ‘intellectual’ context.
62 See, for instance, Skinner’s discussion of the question of Hobbes’s and Bayle’s attitude
to religion (RM, 80–82), where he refers to both biographical information and the
response of their peers as possible evidence of their scepticism.

34 chapter 1
The Multi-Contextualist Approach
The broad approach on which this study is based – though inevitably, this
will not be reflected in the way its findings are presented63 – can be sum-
marized as follows:
First, conduct a close analysis of the text, taking account of its genre
and the immediate context of its production and reception,64 establishing
what it is about, what is at stake and its central arguments, focusing on the
rhetorical manipulation of key concepts and normative terms, and paying
particular attention to loaded oppositions.65
Second, identify items that require contextualization, especially ref-
erences to ideological allies or opponents and other texts or writers, and
follow up the leads they provide.
Third, situate the text in its immediate argumentative and discur-
sive context by comparing and contrasting it with antecedent pro- and
counter-texts identified in the text itself and contemporary texts with the
same subject-matter.
Fourth, contextualize these texts in turn in order to reconstruct the
debates in which they and the target text intervened, and the discourses
in which they were articulated.
63 To take the most obvious example, the reconstruction of a text’s argumentative
context requires working backwards from the text itself, whereas the natural order
to present the debate or debates in which it intervenes is chronological.
64 It should be noted, however, that in some (exceptional?) cases, the context of imme-
diate reception may be highly misleading. To borrow one of Skinner’s own examples,
the irony of Defoe’s anonymously published pamphlet The Shortest-Way with the
Dissenters (1702) – which argued, apparently seriously, that the best and quickest
way to deal with religious dissent was to make it a capital offence – was initially lost
on both dissenters and the High Tories whose intolerance it satirized. Defoe’s hoax
was only exposed when it became known that the pamphlet’s author was himself a
dissenter.
65 Koselleck refers to the negative terms in loaded oppositions (e.g. ‘barbarism’ as
opposedto‘civilization’)as‘asymmetriccounterconcepts’.See‘TheHistorical-Political
Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts’, Futures Past, pp. 155–91.

Fifth, explore other contexts: biographical (including the author’s
previous reading); the context of the author’s work as a whole (including,
for the purposes of triangulation, not only earlier, but also later writings);
and, last but not least, the socio-historical context.
Three final points need to be made. First, a detailed knowledge of
the primary text itself is essential to guide the detective-work of contex-
tual research, so that, for instance, intertextual echoes can be recognized
in earlier texts (to this extent, pace Skinner, it is necessary to read the text
‘over and over again’).66 Second, the procedure outlined does not provide
a magic recipe for textual interpretation, but rather a heuristic framework:
the contexts that shed most light on a text or part of a text may not be
immediately obvious, and much may depend on attention to apparently
trivial detail, serendipity and wide-ranging research (a task immeasurably
facilitated by on-line searches and electronic texts, which can throw up
previously unsuspected connections). Third, and pace Skinner’s polemical
emphasis on the intellectual or argumentative context, when it comes to
elucidating how various contexts contribute to an understanding of vari-
ous parts of the text and ultimately the text as a whole, no single context
or set of contexts has methodological priority over all the others. In the
final analysis, what matters most is the quality and quantity of the evidence
that can be brought to light.
66 This is Skinner’s characterization of the textualist approach: see Foundations, Preface,
p. xiii.

chapter 2
‘The New Mediterranean Culture’
An Annotated Translation
My reasons for including an annotated translation of Camus’s lecture are
twofold. First, to remedy the defects, including omissions, of the two exist-
ing translations of the lecture,1 both of which – like the text in the Pléiade
edition – lack a critical apparatus, and second, to provide an easily acces-
sible version of the text for reference purposes. I would like to express
my gratitude to Catherine Camus for giving me permission to make this
translation.
As its subtitle makes clear, Camus’s lecture was given to inaugurate
a new Maison de la culture (community arts centre) in Algiers, of which
Camus was the general secretary. Forerunners of the eponymous postwar
state institutions introduced by André Malraux when he was the French
Minister of Culture, the Maisons de la culture were communist-inspired
Popular Front organizations that sought to bring culture to the masses
(Camus was a member of the Algerian Communist Party at the time). The
text of Camus’s lecture was originally published in the first issue of Jeune
Méditerranée(‘YoungMediterranean’),2 thenewsletterofthe Maison,under
the heading ‘La culture indigène’ (‘Native Culture’); as the reappearance
1 ‘Native Culture. The New Culture of the Mediterranean’, in Albert Camus: Lyrical
and Critical, ed. and trans. by Philip Thody (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967),
pp. 188–94. ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’, in Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical
Essays, ed. Philip Thody, tr. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970),
pp. 189–98. The most egregious errors in Thody’s and Kennedy’s translations are
noted below.
2 ‘La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne’, Jeune Méditerranée 1 (May 1937).

38 chapter 2
of this heading in the second issue of the newsletter confirmed,3 however,
this was not part of the title of the lecture. Nor, apparently, was ‘The New
Mediterranean Culture’ the original title of the lecture itself, since the
local communist party newspaper, La Lutte sociale, had announced that
the Maison de la culture would be inaugurated with a lecture on the topic
‘Is a Mediterranean Culture Realizable?’4 With the addition of the word
‘new’, this is the same question that Camus asks at the end of both his
introduction and the text as a whole.
*
Native Culture
The New Mediterranean Culture
Outlines of the inaugural lecture given at the House of Culture
8 February 1937
I. – The House of Culture, which is being introduced to you
today, aims to serve Mediterranean culture. In accordance with
the general regulations concerning such institutions, it wishes
to contribute to the creation, within a regional framework, of a
culture whose existence and greatness no longer need to be dem-
onstrated.Inthisconnection,itisperhapssurprisingthatleft-wing
intellectuals can place themselves in the service of a culture that
does not seem in any way to concern their cause, and that may
even, in some cases, have been monopolized (as is the case with
Maurras)5 by right-wing doctrinaires.
3 Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (London: Picador, 1981), p. 133.
4 See Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, ‘L’engagement culturel’, AC5, pp. 83–106 (p. 95).
5 Charles Maurras (1868–1952), the co-founder of both the neoclassical École romane
or Romanic school of poetry and the far-right Action française movement, whose
central principles were anti-Semitism, Catholicism, monarchism and nationalism.
See Chapter 6.

‘The New Mediterranean Culture’ An Annotated Translation 39
To serve the cause of a Mediterranean regionalism may seem,
indeed, to be restoring a futile traditionalism that has no future,
or else to be exalting the superiority of one culture over another
and, for example, taking up fascism in reverse,6 to be setting Latin
peoples against Nordic peoples. There is a constant misunder-
standing here. The aim of this lecture is to try and clear it up. The
whole mistake comes from people confusing the Mediterranean
and Latinity,7 and placing in Rome what began in Athens. For
us the matter is clear: it cannot be a question of a sort of nation-
alism of the sun.8 We cannot be a slave to traditions and bind
our living future to exploits that are already dead. A tradition
is a past that distorts9 the present. The Mediterranean that sur-
rounds us is, on the contrary, a living region,10 full of games and
smiles. On the other hand, nationalism has been judged by its
acts. Nationalisms always appear in history as signs of decadence.
When the vast edifice of the [Holy] Roman Empire11 crumbled,
when its spiritual unity, from which so many different regions
derived their reason for living, disintegrated, then and only then,
6 Reprenant le fascisme à rebours.
7 The doctrine of Latinity, of which Maurras was one of the leading proponents, can
best be described as the Roman equivalent of Hellenism, seeing imperial Rome as the
fons et origo of Western civilization, and hence civilization in general. See Chapter
6.
8 Both Thody and Kennedy mis-translate this as ‘our only claim is to a kind of nation-
alism of the sun’ (my italics). The original French reads: ‘il ne peut s’agir d’une sorte
de nationalisme du soleil’ (I, 566).
9 Contrefait, literally ‘counterfeits’.
10 Pays. Except where it refers to an individual country or countries, this has been
translated as ‘region’ (cf. vin de pays, ‘regional wine’).
11 While the original French text refers simply to l’Empire romain, it is clear from the
context that Camus means the Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), which he men-
tions a few lines later. Cf. an entry in Camus’s notebooks apparently dating from
November 1936: ‘Nationalities appear as signs of disintegration. Religious unity
of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire no sooner broken: nationalities’ (II, 812; cf.
817).

40 chapter 2
at the time of its decadence, did nationalities appear. Ever since
then, the West has failed to regain its unity. At the present time,
internationalism is trying to give the West back its true meaning
and its vocation. Only the principle is no longer Christian, it is no
longer the papal Rome of the Holy Roman Empire. The principle
is man. The unity is no longer in belief, but in hope. A civiliza-
tion is only lasting to the extent that, when all nations have been
done away with, its unity and its greatness come from a spiritual
principle.India,almostasbigasEurope,withoutnations,without
a sovereign, has kept its own character, even after two centuries
of English domination.12
That is why, without further consideration, we will reject the
principle of a Mediterranean nationalism. Moreover, there can
be no question of a Mediterranean culture being superior. Man
expresses himself in harmony with his region. And superiority,
in the cultural sphere, lies solely in this harmony. There is no
greater or lesser culture. There are cultures that are more true or
less true. We only wish to help a region to express itself. Locally.
Nothing more. The real question is: is a new Mediterranean cul-
ture realizable?
II. – OBVIOUS FACTS. – a) There is a Mediterranean sea, a
basin that links ten or so countries. The men who yell out in the
cabarets13 of Spain, those who wander around the port of Genoa,
along the Marseille waterfront, the strong and curious race that
lives on our coasts, come from the same family. When one travels
12 Camus’s remarks here draw on ‘L’Inde imaginaire’ (‘Imaginary India’), an essay by his
philosophy teacher and mentor Jean Grenier, included in Les Îles (‘Islands’) (Paris:
Gallimard, 1977 [1933]), pp. 111–42. See Chapter 7.
13 Cafés chantants, literally ‘singing cafés’. Camus is drawing here on his experience of
such an establishment in Palma, which he had visited in 1935. See ‘Amour de vivre’
(‘Love of Living’), in L’Envers et l’endroit (Eng. tr. The Wrong Side and the Right
Side), I, 64–66.

‘The New Mediterranean Culture’ An Annotated Translation 41
in Europe, coming back down towards Italy or Provence,14 it is
with a sigh of relief that one returns to men who are unrestrained,
to this strong and colourful life with which we are all familiar. I
spent two months in Central Europe, from Austria to Germany,
wondering where that strange awkwardness that weighed on my
shoulders, that dull anxiety that haunted me, came from. I real-
ized not long ago. These people were always buttoned up to the
neck. They didn’t know how to let themselves go. They didn’t
know what joy is,15 which is so different from laughter. And yet
it is with details such as this that one can give a valid meaning to
the word Homeland.16 The Homeland is not the abstraction that
precipitates men into massacre,17 but a certain taste for life that
is common to certain beings, through which one can feel closer
to a Genoese or a Majorcan than to a Norman or an Alsatian.18
That is what the Mediterranean is, that smell or scent that it is
pointless to express: we can all feel it with our skin.
b) There are other obvious facts, historical ones. Every time
that a doctrine has encountered the Mediterranean basin, in the
resulting collision of ideas it is always the Mediterranean that
has remained intact, the region that has defeated the doctrine.
Christianity was originally a moving but closed doctrine, Judaic
14 Again, Camus is drawing on his personal experience, in this case a trip he made to
Europe in the summer of 1936. In ‘La mort dans l’âme’ (‘Death in the Soul’), another
essay in L’Envers et l’endroit, for example, he describes his sense of relief at leaving
Central Europe and entering Italy, ‘a land made for my soul’ (I, 60).
15 In a footnote to ‘Amour de vivre’, Camus – who had Catalan blood on his mother’s
side – wrote: ‘There is a certain ease in joy that defines true civilization. And the
Spanish people is one of the rare peoples in Europe that is civilized’ (L’Envers et
l’endroit, I, 64).
16 Patrie, literally ‘Fatherland’.
17 Camus was almost certainly thinking of the First World War here, in which his own
father had died the year after Camus was born. See Chapter 9.
18 Camus mistakenly believed that his father’s family came from Alsace (in fact they
came from Bordeaux); his mother’s family came from Minorca. See Lottman, Albert
Camus, pp. 8, 12.

(Modern French identities 38) Camus, Albert_ Foxlee, Neil_ Camus, Albert - Albert Camus's _The new Mediterranean culture_ _ a text and its contexts-Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenscha.pdf

(Modern French identities 38) Camus, Albert_ Foxlee, Neil_ Camus, Albert - Albert Camus's _The new Mediterranean culture_ _ a text and its contexts-Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenscha.pdf

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(Modern French identities 38) Camus, Albert_ Foxlee, Neil_ Camus, Albert - Albert Camus's _The new Mediterranean culture_ _ a text and its contexts-Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenscha.pdf