Björn Östbring

Judith Shklar, Political Thought & Political Thinkers, s.351.

Political theory is not subject, as it is often said, to the forces of some external reality. It is itself a part of general intellectual crosscurrents, of the languages of the republic of letters, and of the divisions within it. ”Climate of opinion” is far too vague a phrase to be useful. It is by attending carefully to all imaginative and scholarly literature that one can establish the historical identity of ideas.