Intellectual historians' proclivity for linguistic analysis had been evident in contemporary work outside the realm of post-structuralism. The work of two British historians of political thought, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, has been emblematic of a deliberate effort to conduct sustained critical analysis of linguistic history, particularly the language of politics.23 While focusing on the coherence of texts and the intentions of authors instead of the free play of signifiers, Pocock and Skinner drew on a different tradition within linguistics, namely the “speech act” theory of John Austin. Speech act theory suggested that speech was comprised of two aspects: the “locutionary force” of speaking or writing something, and the “illocutionary force” of intending to communicate. A classic example of this theory in action in Skinner's work involves Machiavelli's “advice to princes.” Skinner suggests that Machiavelli's advice deliberately foiled expectations available from conventional advice literature of the time, which advocated “acting virtuously.” In order to see the historical impact of this unconventional advice, Skinner argued, the historian must read not only “The Prince” but also the contemporary advice literature to which it was a response. In other words, the context of advice literature and humanist ideology in the Renaissance provides an essential foundation for understanding a “classic” text of political thought. The text cannot be fully understood in or on its own terms, since those terms are themselves drawn from the social context in which Machiavelli lived. These “conventions,” as Skinner referred to them, provide normative constraints on the author's intentional communication. A status quo is thus necessary for any political innovation. Critics of Skinner's and Pocock's “contextualist” and “conventionalist” approaches find their conception of the author's role as badly limited as that of the post-structuralists. Mark Bevir saw linguistic historians as allowing authors “to creep back on the historical stage, only to restrict them to bit parts as the mouthpieces of script-writing paradigms which constitute their conceptual frameworks.”24 While they would insist on their differences, both Skinner and Pocock have pursued a history of linguistic and conceptual change through textual analysis.