Martin Jay: An Encounter Between Philosophy and History

Abstract

Martin Jay in the course of this interview addresses the links between Critical Theory, Cambridge School, and Conceptual History, giving special attention to an "event" as a limited category, critical rationality and the contextual genealogies of the different branches of historical studies mentioned before. Jay concludes that one of the possible limitations of the "in context' work of authors such as Quentin Skinner and the socalled Cambridge School is given by the impossibility to reduce the perlocutionary effect of events to the illocutionary intentions of the authors. In line with Claude Romano, in the interpretation of Jay, an 'event' always has an "an-archic" condition that makes its limitation to previous networks of meaning impossible.