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QUENTIN SKINNER'S HOBBES AND THE NEO-REPUBLICAN PROJECT*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2009

JEFFREY R. COLLINS
JEFFREY R. COLLINS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Queen's University E-mail: collinsj@queensu.ca
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Extract

For nearly half a century, Quentin Skinner has been the world's foremost interpreter of Thomas Hobbes. When the contextualist mode of intellectual history now known as the “Cambridge School” was first asserting itself in the 1960s, the life and writings of John Locke were the primary topic for pioneers such as Peter Laslett and John Dunn. At that time, Hobbes was still the plaything of philosophers and political scientists, virtually all of whom wrote in an ahistorical, textual-analytic manner. Hobbes had not been the subject of serious contextual research for decades, since the foundational writings of Ferdinand Tönnies. For Skinner, he was thus an ideal subject, providing a space for original research on a major figure, and an occasion for some polemically charged methodological manifestos. Both of these purposes animated his 1965 article “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” and his 1966 article “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought”. The latter of these remains to this day one of the most widely cited scholarly articles in the fifty-year run of Cambridge's Historical Journal. Among other results of these early efforts was the scholarly controversy during which Howard Warrender chided Skinner for having reduced the “classic texts in political philosophy” to mere “tracts for the times”.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , August 2009 , pp. 343 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Locke, John, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar; Dunn, John, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge, 1696)Google Scholar.

2 Tönnies, Ferdinand, Hobbes: der Mann und der Denker (Stuttgart, 1910)Google Scholar.

3 Skinner, Quentin, “History and Ideology in the English Revolution”, Historical Journal 8 (1965), 151–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought”, Historical Journal 9 (1996), 286–317. Both have been revised and republished in idem, Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge, 2002).

4 Goldie, Mark, “Fifty Years of the Historical Journal”, Historical Journal 51 (2008), 851CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 “To consign them to their contemporary milieu, with whatever honours, is to bury them.” Warrender, Howard, “Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Professor Skinner on Hobbes”, Historical Journal 22 (1979), 931–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Also opening up this subject was John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (New York, 1968).

7 For an excellent overview of Hobbes's place within post-regicidal debates over political obligation, one that charts Skinner's modifications to his original position, see Hoekstra, Kinch, “The De Facto Turn in Hobbes's Political Philosophy”, in Sorell, Tom and Foisneau, Luc, eds., Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford, 2004), 33–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Goldie, Mark, “The Context of The Foundations”, in Brett, Annabel and Tully, James, with Bleakley, Holly Hamilton, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 431CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid., 435.

11 Skinner, Quentin, “The Idea of Negative Liberty”, in Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J. B. and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; idem, “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty” (Cambridge, 1985); Quentin Skinner, “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1990), 293–311.

12 Skinner, “Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” 304–9. For Skinner's engagement with the communitarian critics of liberalism see Marco Guena, “Skinner, Pre-humanist Rhetorical Culture and Machiavelli”, in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 66–9.

13 Philip Pettit, “Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin Skinner”, Political Theory 30 (2002), 339–41. More fully in idem, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, 1997).

14 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), x, 10, 49.

15 Ibid., 13.

16 Skinner's definition of English republicanism differs significantly from those of Pocock, who emphasizes republican attachment to civic virtue, and Blair Worden, who has convincingly portrayed English republicanism as a fitful and late-developing reaction to constitional crises. See, for instance, Worden, “English Republicanism”, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), 443–64.

17 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 59–60.

18 In virtually all accounts of English republicanism, Hobbes is deployed as a foil. See, for examples, Norbrook, David, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Ethics, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 35Google Scholar; Barber, Sarah, Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution, 1649–1659 (Edinburgh, 1998), 192Google Scholar; Peltonen, Markku, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), 138, 142, 149Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., xvi.

21 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan: with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Curley, Edwin (Indianapolis, 1994), 136–7Google Scholar.

22 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 151.

23 Ibid., 157.

24 Ibid., 157–61.

25 Although Charles Larmore, among others, has cogently criticized the Pettit–Skinner “republican” school for overstating the differences between republicanism and non-utilitarian liberalism. Liberals from Locke to Rawls have worried about reliance on the arbitrary will of sovereignty, and even a figure such as Constant (who formatively distinguished ancient from modern liberty) voiced such concerns. See Charles Larmore, “A Critique of Philip Pettit's Republicanism”, Noûs 35 (Oct. 2001), 229–43.

26 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 166–9.

27 Ibid., xvi.

28 Ibid., 127.

29 Philip Pettit has also dissented from this claim of dramatic evolution in Hobbes's account of liberty. See his Republicanism, 168, n. 15.

30 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 138.

31 Hobbes, Leviathan, 410.

32 Indeed, and somewhat ironically, Skinner elsewhere (at 156) quote's Bramhall's The Serpent Salve (1643) for evidence of a broader discourse denying the foundational claim of the non-domination republicans (i.e. that “living independently of others” was the definition of “freedom”.)

33 It is also interesting that Hobbes did not reformulate the discussion of “arbitrary impediments” in the 1647 edition of De Cive, despite this intervening discussion with Bramhall and despite many other textual additions. This suggests either that Hobbes was vacillating on the question of liberty (unlikely), or that Skinner is overstating the significance of De Cive's mention of “arbitrary impediments”.

34 For a similar criticism see J. G. A. Pocock, “Foundations and Moments”, in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 46–7.

35 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 143.

36 Parker, Henry, The Case of Ship-Money Briefly Discoursed. . . (London, 1640), 6–9Google Scholar, emphases added.

37 Skinner, Quentin, “Classic Liberty and the English Civil War”, in van Gelderen, Martin and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), 2: 9–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Goodwin, John, Anti-Cavalierisme. . . (London, 1642), 2–7, 40–41Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

39 His effort to construe the absolutism of the “Elements of Law” as primarily a rejoinder to Contarini, rather than English constitutionalists, is impressionistic and inconclusive. He concedes that De Cive was more concerned with English constitutionalism. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 62–4, 105–6.

40 Hobbes, Leviathan, 140. With this last remark, Hobbes put his boot on the neck of a straw man. No one among the ancients or moderns condemned monarchy this hyperbolically.

41 Milton, John, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. . . (1660), 45–50, 55–6, 72Google Scholar, emphasis added. On these aspects of Milton's republicanism see Rahe, Paul A., Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 This is also the case in Hobbes's history of the Civil War, Behemoth, which Skinner mines for anti-republican sentiment. He cites two passages, both of which rail against “readers of ancient texts” who prefer democracy to monarchy. The theme is certainly there to be found in Behemoth. See Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth: or, the Long Parliament (Chicago, 1990), 26, 204. The work as a whole, however, is structured as a scathing attack on clerical usurpation and religious dualism. Behemoth must be primarily understood within this vastly more important context of religious polemic.

43 See Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques. . . (London, 1656), 56; idem, Leviathan, 538–9.

44 Hobbes to Devonshire, 23 July 1641, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994), 120. See also Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998), 81; also Hobbes, Leviathan, 228.

45 Resistance to this fact can be remarkably dogged, particularly among political theorists. For one recent and particularly unconvincing attempt to explain it away see Baumgold, Deborah, “The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation”, Political Theory 36 (2008), 839, 844–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Revealingly, Skinner's work has always been difficult to reconcile with the best general interpretations of the English Revolution, most of which heavily emphasize its religious dimensions. See, most pertinently, the work of his Cambridge colleague, John Morrill, particularly “The Religious Context of the English Civil War”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 34 (1984), 155–78.

47 Here and below I borrow from my own The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), chap. 5 and conclusion.

48 Malcolm, Noel, “Hobbes and the Republic of Letters”, in idem, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 514–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Champion, Justin, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies (Cambridge, 1992), 134–5Google Scholar; idem, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), 111 et passim.

49 Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty”, 66–7.

50 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in idem, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis, 1987), 222.

51 For one example among many, see Hein v. the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the 2007 Supreme Court case that unsuccessfully challenged funding for “faith-based initiatives” initiated by President George W. Bush and strongly supported in principle by President Barack Obama.

52 For one version of the debate, conducted civilly by iconic figures, see Habermas, Jürgen and Ratzinger, Joseph, The Dialectics of Secularism: On Reason and Religion (NY, 2007)Google Scholar; also Habermas's “Religion in the Public Square”, European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2006), 1–25.

53 On which see Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, 1995), chap. 1.

54 Quentin Skinner, “Surveying the Foundations: a retrospect and reassessment”, in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 237.

55 Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 6–16, 437CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas“, in idem, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002) 62Google Scholar.

57 Ibid., 78.

58 Pocock, J. G. A., “The Concept of Language”, in Pagden, Anthony, ed., The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1987), 28Google Scholar; Quentin Skinner, “Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts”, in idem, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 116–20, 125.

59 Quentin Skinner, “Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change”, in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method, 175–87.

60 Skinner himself rejected Darnton's critique in “On Intellectual History and the History of Books”, Contributions to the History of Concepts 1 (2005), 29–36.

61 See, for instance, Drolet, Michael, “Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on Power and the State”, History of European Ideas 33 (2007), 234–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Skinner on Foucault see his “Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts”, 118; on Nietzsche see his “Surveying the Foundations”, 244.

62 Skinner, “Moral Principles and Social Change”, in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method, 145–57.

63 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 6.

64 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 15. Jeremy Waldron recently made a similar point when he defended the intellectual value of “texts-in-context” for offering a “richer and more interesting source of ideas for modern deployment, or a richer and more provocative reproach to modern assumptions”. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge, 2002), 11.

65 Skinner is still prone to deriding such quests for intellectual origins (see, for instance, his “Surveying the Foundations”, 237). But in many respects his most recent book is exactly such a history.