In this essay I will seek to provide an introduction to the philosophical ideas behind the methodology which Quentin Skinner practised in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. I will do this through an analysis of the ways in which Skinner drew on the work of R. G. Collingwood, Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin to develop two concepts which are at the heart of his early work on method: context and agency.

These concepts pervade Skinner's work and have presented themselves at times as a pair related through an inherent tension, where an emphasis upon one leads to an escape from the other. Yet Skinner's early work on method emphasised the agency of the author, precisely because it emphasised the context in which he wrote, or so I will argue here. The ‘canonist’ method of studying the history of political philosophy which prevailed when Skinner started his work demoted authorial agency in several ways, largely because it ignored the wider social, intellectual and linguistic context out of which a text arose, and Skinner's advancement of his own method against this approach showed him to be deeply concerned to recover this agency. I will discuss two ways in which this recovery was accomplished: first, by showing that the meaning of a text was bound up with the way the author was intentionally using particular conventions of language to either affirm or change prevailing normative concepts of her time and, second, by revealing the author as a political practitioner through an insistence upon the direct relationship between political thought and political action.