High politics' and the 'new political history

Craig, David

doi:10.1017/s0018246x10000129

High politics' and the 'new political history

Craig, David

Authors

Dr David Craig d.m.craig@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Abstract

Recent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.

Citation

Craig, D. (2010). High politics' and the 'new political history. Historical Journal, 53(2), 453-475. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x10000129

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Jun 1, 2010
Deposit Date	Sep 12, 2012
Publicly Available Date	Sep 12, 2012
Journal	Historical Journal
Print ISSN	0018-246X
Electronic ISSN	1469-5103
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	53
Issue	2
Pages	453-475
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x10000129

Files

Published Journal Article (139 Kb)
PDF

Copyright Statement
© Copyright Cambridge University Press 2010. This paper has been published by Cambridge University Press in "Historical journal" (53: 2 (2010) 453-475) http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=HIS