Quentin Skinner

Visions of Politics: Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas

The task of the historian of ideas is to study and interpret a canon of classic texts. The value of writing this kind of history stems from the fact that the classic texts in moral, political, religious and other such modes of thought contain a ‘dateless wisdom’ in the form of ‘universal ideas’. As a result, we can hope to learn and benefit directly from investigating these ‘timeless elements’, since they possess a perennial relevance. This in turn suggests that the best way to approach these texts must be to concentrate on what each of them says about each of the ‘fundamental concepts’ and ‘abiding questions’ of morality, politics, religion, social life. We must be ready, in other words, to read each of the classic texts ‘as though it were written by a contemporary’. It is indeed essential to approach them in this way, focusing simply on their arguments and examining what they have to tell us about the perennial issues. If instead we become sidetracked into examining the social conditions or the intellectual contexts out of which they arose, we shall lose sight of their dateless wisdom and thereby lose contact with the value and purpose of studying them. These are the assumptions I wish to question, criticise and if possible discredit in what follows. The belief that the classic theorists can be expected to comment on a determinate set of ‘fundamental concepts’ has given rise, it seems to me, to a series of confusions and exegetical absurdities that have bedevilled the history of ideas for too long.

III. Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action

h AM MOST GRATEFUL to Professors Schochet and Wiener not just for their generosity in commenting on my work, but also for their accuracy in reporting my arguments and their perceptiveness as critics. It seems possible to respond to their remarks in one of two ways. One would be to pursue the implications of Wieners article and try to provide some more historical information about the context of Hobbess political thought. This strikes me as an attractive alternative, especially since I agree with his suggestion that I ought to devote more attention to analysing the nature of the social pressures which helped to prompt Hobbes and his sympathisers to espouse their peculiar brand of absolutism. (He does not mention, however, that this theme has already been brilliantly explored by K. V. Thomas, 1965.) The other alternative is to say something more about my general approach to the study of political theory, of which my work on Hobbes (as Schochet and Wiener both acknowledge) has mainly been intended to serve as an example. This strikes me as even more attractive, and it is this line of argument which I shall pursue.

Machiavelli and Republicanism

Part I. Machiavelli and the Republican Experience: 1. Machiavelli and Florentine republican experience Nicolai Rubenstein 2. Machiavelli and the crisis of the Italian republics Elena Fasano Guarini 3. Florentine republicanism in the early sixteenth century Giovanni Silvano 4. Machiavelli, servant of the Florentine republic Robert Black 5. The controversy surrounding Machiavellis service to the republic John M. Najemy Part II. Machiavelli and Republican Ideas: 6. Machiavellis Discorsi and the pre-humanist origins of republican ideas Quentin Skinner 7. Machiavelli and the republican idea of politics Maurizio Viroli 8. The theory and practice of warfare in Machiavells republic Michael Mallett 9 Civil discord in Machiavellis Istorie Fiorentine Gisela Bock Part III. Machiavelli and the Republican Heritage: 10. The Machiavellian moment and the Dutch Revolt: the rise of neostoicism and Dutch republicanism Martin Van Gelderen 11. Miltons republicanism and the tyranny of heaven Blair Worden 12. A controversial republican: Dutch views of Machiavelli in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Eco Haitsma Mulier 13. Montesquieu and the new republicanism Judith Shklar Part IV. The Morality of Republicanism: 14. The ethos of the republic and the reality of politics Werner Maihofer 15. The republican ideal of political liberty Quentin Skinner.

The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their Critics: A Plague on Both Their Houses

NE OF THE MOST PROMINENT CASUALTIES of the recent attack on the possibility of a purely empirical and value-neutral political science has been the so-called “empirical theory of democracy.’’ The empirical theorists still claim, as Dahl (1956a: 86) puts i t , that they are simply investigating “the actual facts of political life” by means of “methods, theories and criteria of proof that are acceptable according to the canons, conventions and assumptions of modern empirical science” (Dahl, 1961a: 767). I t has by now become one of the commonplaces of current political science, however, that their theories have never achieved -and may never have been intended to achieve-such purely neutral and scientific results. This criticism has involved two distinct claims. The first is that even though the empirical theorists may have investigated the workings of democratic political systems in a wholly neutrd spirit, these inquires have nevertheless hod “nonnative implications” (Walker, 1966: 39 1 ). Some of the critics have pressed their accusations no further than this point

III. The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought

The modern reputation of Hobbess Leviathan as a work ‘incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory’ has concentrated so much attention on Hobbess own text that it has tended at the same time to divert attention away from any attempt to study the relations between his thought and its age, or to trace his affinities with the other political writers of his time. It has by now become an axiom of the historiography that Hobbess ‘extraordinary boldness’ set him completely ‘outside the main stream of English political thought’ in his time. The theme of the one study devoted to the reception of Hobbess political doctrines has been that Hobbes stood out alone ‘against all the powerful and still developing constitutionalist tradition’, but that the tradition (‘fortunately’) proved too strong for him. Hobbes was ‘the first to attack its fundamental assumptions’, but no one followed his lead. Although he ‘tried to sweep away the whole structure of traditional sanctions’, he succeeded only in provoking ‘the widespread re-assertion of accepted principles’, a re-assertion, in fact, of ‘the main English political tradition’. And the more Leviathan has become accepted as ‘the greatest, perhaps the sole masterpiece’ of English political theory, the less has Hobbes seemed to bear any meaningful relation to the ephemeral political quarrels of his contemporaries. The doctrine of Leviathan has come to be regarded as ‘an isolated phenomenon in English thought, without ancestry or posterity’. Hobbess system, it is assumed, was related to its age only by the ‘intense opposition’ which its ‘boldness and originality’ were to provoke.

The Limits of Historical Explanations

Although the literature on the logic of historical enquiry is already vast and still growing, it continues to polarise overwhelmingly around a single disputed point—whether historical explanations have their own logic, or whether every successful explanation must conform to the same deductive model. Recent discussion, moreover, has shown an increasing element of agreement—there has been a marked trend away from accepting any strictly positivist view of the matter. It will be argued here that both the traditional polarity and the recent trend in this debate have tended to be misleading. The positiviste (it will be conceded) have been damagingly criticised. But their opponents (it will be suggested) have produced no satisfying alternative. They have tended instead to accept as proper historical explanations whatever has been offered by the historians themselves in the course of trying to explain the past. But a further type of analysis must be required (and will be attempted here) if some account is to be given of the status, and not merely the function, of the language in which these explanations are offered. Such an analysis, moreover (it will finally be suggested) has implications of some importance in considering the appropriate strategy for historical enquiries.

Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State

Hobbes prefaces Leviathan with a letter in which he dedicates the work to Francis Godolphin and at the same time offers him a summary of the theory of public authority contained in the book. ‘I speak’, Hobbes explains, ‘not of the men, but (in the Abstract) of the Seat of Power.’ This seat, he adds in his Introduction, is occupied by ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE’. The essence of Hobbess theory of public power is thus that the person identifiable as the true ‘subject’ of sovereignty in any lawful state must be the person of the state itself. Hobbess opening remarks allude to what has proved to be one of the most enduring puzzles in our inherited theories of government. On the one hand, most contemporary political philosophers would agree with Hobbes that the state is the seat of sovereignty. As Hobbes expresses the claim later in Leviathan , it is ‘the Reason of this our Artificiall Man the Common-wealth, and his Command, that maketh Law’, so that civil law is nothing other than ‘the Will and Appetite of the State’. But on the other hand, most contemporary philosophers would also agree with Hobbes when he adds that the state amounts to nothing more than an artifice. To quote Hobbess way of expressing this further point, the state has no capacity ‘to doe any thing’; it is ‘but a word, without substance, and cannot stand’. There, then, is the puzzle.

I. History and Ideology in the English Revolution

Ideological arguments are commonly sustained by an appeal to the past, an appeal either to see precedents in history for new claims being advanced, or to see history itself as a development towards the point of view being advocated or denounced. Perhaps the most influential example from English history of this prescriptive use of historical information is provided by the ideological arguments associated with the constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century. It was from a propagandist version of early English history that the ‘whig’ ideology associated with the Parliamentarians—the ideology of customary law, regulated monarchy and immemorial Parliamentary right—drew its main evidence and strength. The process by which this ‘whig’ interpretation of history became bequeathed to the eighteenth century as accepted ideology has of course already been definitively labelled by Professor Butterfield, and described in his book on The Englishman and his History . It still remains, however, to analyse fully the various other ways in which awareness of the past became a politically relevant factor in English society during its constitutional upheavals. The acceptance of the ‘whig’ view of early English history in fact represented only the triumph of one among several conflicting ideologies which had relied on identical historical backing to their claims. And despite the resolution of this conflict by universal acceptance of the ‘whig’ view, the ‘whigs’ themselves were nevertheless to be covertly influenced by the rival ideologies which their triumph might seem to have suppressed. It is the further investigation of the complexity and interdependence of these historical and ideological attitudes which will be attempted here.

Hermeneutics and the Role of History

AS A NUMBER of the contributions to this issue1 of New Literary History serve to illustrate, the general retreat from empiricism and positivism in recent analytical philosophy has had a markedly beneficial effect on current discussions about the theory of interpretation. Two aspects of this trend have proved to be of particular relevance. One has been the attack on empiricist epistemology, with the consequent rejection of the belief in sense data which are capable of being directly perceived and embodied in a noninterpretative observation language. It is coming to be widely accepted that Quine, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, in their different but converging ways, have all succeeded in undermining any attempt to build up a structure of empirical knowledge on a basis purporting to be independent of our judgments.2 The next move which a number of analytical philosophers have thus been prompted to make is to appeal directly to the tradition of hermeneutics, as revived by Gadamer, Ricoeur, and especially Habermas, and to argue for a more interpretative model of the natural, as well as the human, sciences.3 The other influential development has been the abandonment, in the theory of meaning, of any positivist disposition to assert that meaningful statements must refer to facts, and thus that the meaning of a sentence must be given by its method of verification. The main challenge to this key concept of logical positivism was of course issued by Wittgenstein in the Investigations, with his famous injunction not to ask directly about the meaning of propositions but rather about how they are used in particular language games. More recently, the underlying assumption of this approach-that the analysis of meaning needs to be connected with the use of language for purposes of communication-has been refined and extended in two connected ways. First, J. L. Austin and his followers, in developing the theory of speech acts, have concentrated on the idea that, as a given utterance has a meaning, a given agent will characteristically be doing something-and may thus be said to mean something-in or by the act of issuing that particular utterance.4 Secondly, H. P. Grice, followed by a number of theoretical linguists as well as philosophers of language, has gone on to offer an analysis of the concept of meaning which is at issue when we speak of someone meaning something in or by saying something.5

Thomas Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England

When Thomas Hobbes arrived in France at the end of 1640, “the first of all that fled” from the growing threat of civil war in England, he began an exile which was to last eleven years, an exile which was moreover to prove the most intellectually fruitful period of his whole life. In Paris he was to reach the height of his polemical powers, conducting his debates with Descartes on the existence of secondary qualities, and with Bishop Bramhall on free will. In Paris he was also to bring to fruition a lifetime of speculation about the science of politics, completing the De Cive and writing the whole of Leviathan.