Modern Intellectual History, 6, 2 (2009), pp. 343367 C 2009 Cambridge University Press doi:10.

1017/S1479244309002121 Printed in the United Kingdom

quentin skinners hobbes and the neo-republican project

jeffrey r. collins
Department of History, Queens University E-mail: collinsj@queensu.ca

For nearly half a century, Quentin Skinner has been the worlds foremost interpreter of Thomas Hobbes. When the contextualist mode of intellectual history now known as the Cambridge School was rst 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.1 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 T nnies.2 For o Skinner, he was thus an ideal subject, providing a space for original research on a major gure, 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 Hobbess Political Thought.3 The latter of these remains to this day one of the most widely cited scholarly articles in the fty-year run of Cambridges Historical Journal.4 Among other results of these early efforts was the scholarly controversy

2 3

I would like to thank Mark Kishlansky, John Morrill, Andrew Jainchill, Jeffrey McNairn, Matthew Maguire, Ana Siljak, and the editors of Modern Intellectual History for comments on this essay. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960); John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1696). Ferdinand T nnies, Hobbes: der Mann und der Denker (Stuttgart, 1910). o Quentin Skinner, History and Ideology in the English Revolution, Historical Journal 8 (1965), 15178; and idem, The Ideological Context of Hobbess Political Thought, Historical Journal 9 (1996), 286317. Both have been revised and republished in idem, Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge, 2002). Mark Goldie, Fifty Years of the Historical Journal, Historical Journal 51 (2008), 851.

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during which Howard Warrender chided Skinner for having reduced the classic texts in political philosophy to mere tracts for the times.5 Needless to say, Skinner was undaunted. His articles of the 1960s and 1970s launched modern Hobbes scholarship, and made Hobbes a central subject of research within the entire Cambridge School project. As a result, few gures in the history of European political thought have been treated so regularly and so well by contextualist historians. The past four decades have seen biographical studies of Hobbes, reception studies, linguistic contextualizations, and contextual interpretations variously concerned with political, social and religious questions. Quentin Skinner, in many respects, presided over the entire enterprise. His own original interpretation of Hobbes stimulated a great deal of new work. Previous studiesif they attended to context at allhad tended to portray Hobbes as a political theorist who either wrote in the kind of splendid isolation betting a grandee of the philosophical canon, or whose absolutist account of sovereignty was intended straightforwardly to serve the royalist cause during the English Civil War. Hobbes was also implicitly cast as John Lockes interlocutor, as foil to the Anglo-American constitutionalist tradition, and as court theorist for Europes ancien rgime. e Skinner upset this tidy conventional wisdom by taking a fresh look at Hobbess interactions with the actual texts and debates of the English Civil War. He foregrounded the dispute about political obligation that roiled England after the regicide of Charles I.6 As a rights-oriented contractualist, Hobbes rejected divine-right legitimism and emphasized the link between political obedience and protection. This deference to de facto power-holders marked Leviathan in particular, and served to justify accommodation with the post-regicidal Commonwealth. Skinners careful reconstruction of the revolutionary debates over obligations that informed Leviathan opened up whole new angles of vision on Hobbess writings and their political implications. Hobbes scholarship since that time has largely been constructed on this cornerstone achievement.7 The publication of Skinners monumental The Foundations of Modern Political Thought in 1978 marked an inection point in his career, one that would redirect his Hobbes scholarship in fundamental ways. The Foundations was a work in
5

To consign them to their contemporary milieu, with whatever honours, is to bury them. Howard Warrender, Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Professor Skinner on Hobbes, Historical Journal 22 (1979), 93140. Also opening up this subject was John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (New York, 1968). For an excellent overview of Hobbess place within post-regicidal debates over political obligation, one that charts Skinners modications to his original position, see Kinch Hoekstra, The De Facto Turn in Hobbess Political Philosophy, in Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau, eds., Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford, 2004), 3374.

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two volumes, the rst dedicated to the political thought of the Renaissance and the second to that of the Reformation era. The latter volume contained some of Skinners most original arguments; it remains the only major work of his career centrally oriented around religious categories.8 From this point on, however, it was the Renaissance and the intellectual patterns of humanism that would dominate his scholarship. Indeed, for the next decade he wrote chiey on Machiavelli and republicanism, a topic that had been anticipated a few years earlier by J. G. A. Pococks masterpiece, The Machiavellian Moment. Skinners interests in republican humanism and in Hobbes nally conjoined in the 1990s. The conjunction, in fact, produced two very different (although compatible) contextualizations of Thomas Hobbes. The rst, presented in Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), charted Hobbess participation in Renaissance debates about the political and philosophical implications of rhetoric. The book posited a shift in Hobbess understanding of rhetoric, which moved him from an unalloyed hostility to it for its lack of scientic transparency, towards a regretful acceptance of rhetoric as necessary to the art of persuasion. Skinner thus presented Hobbes as he had earlier presented Machiavelli, as a thinker driven by the scholarly categories and disputes of humanism. The English Civil War played a causal role in Reason and Rhetoric, forcing Hobbes to reconsider his views about the place of rhetoric in public debate.9 The book, in fact, had little to say about the Civil War, but Skinner tentatively theorized in its conclusion that Hobbess re-evaluation of rhetoric had been forced by the malignant rhetorical effectiveness of religious zealots and the parliamentary republicans (or democraticall gentlemen).10 Skinner thus imputed a certain foundational importance to Hobbess anti-republicanism, but his book did not present a sustained reading along these lines. Indeed, though the Civil War and its political factions functioned as something of a backdrop to Reason and Rhetoric, the books attentions were largely directed towards the chronologically and geographically broad context of humanist intellectual culture. Increasingly, however, Skinner was signalling an engagement with republicanism (or, in his then-preferred terminology, neo-romanism) as a particular tradition of thinking about liberty. This was not a new interest per se. Indeed, early approaches to the topic had appeared in articles of the 1980s, and in his classic essay of 1990, The Republican Ideal of Political

9 10

Mark Goldie, The Context of The Foundations, in Annabel Brett and James Tully, with Holly Hamilton Bleakley, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), 319. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 431. Ibid., 435.

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Liberty.11 Here Skinner formulated a critique of the dominant polarized model of positive and negative liberty most famously sketched by Isaiah Berlin. Concerned that modern liberalism was sweeping the public arena bare of any concepts save those of self-interest and individual rights, but unwilling to join more foundationalist communitarians in espousing traditional common meanings and purposes, Skinner presented what he took to be a third concept of political freedom. This republican tradition protected individual liberty but demanded civic participation. It eschewed any common, comprehensive denitions of human ourishing, but relied upon a shared understanding of civic virtue. Republican law forces us to exercise honestly our civic responsibilities (it is a positive liberty in this limited sense), but in the service of our own private freedom, rather than of a single moral vision.12 In his 1998 Liberty before Liberalism (derived from his inaugural lecture as the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge), Skinner expanded on this thesis. He adopted a claim by the political theorist Philip Pettit that republican theorists did not merely espouse what would become the classic liberal denition of freedom as non-interference. Instead, they dened freedom as non-dependency, a denition which forbade any dependency on the good will of another, even dependency in the case where there is no actual coercion.13 Republican concern to prevent interference in individual freedom was thus supplemented by a concern to root out the mere possibility of arbitrary domination in political life. Discretionary powers invariably serve to reduce free nations to the status of slaves. This doctrine, more than a hostility to monarchy, an attachment to mixed constitutions, or devotion to classicizing civic virtue, marked republicans out as protagonists of a particular ideology. This ideology, in turn, rose to prominence in the course of the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and animated the political thought of supporters of the parliamentary cause.14 After the regicide, we nd the neo-roman theory

11

12

13

14

Quentin Skinner, The Idea of Negative Liberty, in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984); 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), 293311. Skinner, Republican Ideal of Political Liberty, 3049. For Skinners engagement with the communitarian critics of liberalism see Marco Guena, Skinner, Pre-humanist Rhetorical Culture and Machiavelli, in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 669. Philip Pettit, Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin Skinner, Political Theory 30 (2002), 33941. More fully in idem, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, 1997). Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), x, 10, 49.

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at the heart of the propaganda commissioned by the new government in its own defence.15 Liberty before Liberalism thus made some strong claims, holding that a non-domination understanding of liberty was the glue that held the seventeenth-century English republican cohort together, and that their neoRomanunderstanding of liberty was a major discourse of political opposition during the English Revolution.16 In his efforts to reconstruct, and to commend, the republican idea of liberty, Skinner had from the start taken Hobbes as a foil. There has been a long tradition of reading Machiavelli and Hobbes as the twin progenitors of modern statecraft, but Skinner has sought to pit them in opposition. In Liberty before Liberalism Hobbes gures as the primary alternative to the neoRoman understanding of liberty as non-dependence. As a staunch absolutist and an uncompromising materialist, Hobbes rejected any denition of liberty that rendered it more than a mere absence of physical constraint. He believed that republicans, by characterizing slavery as mere dependence (even in the absence of actual interference), had spawned both an ontological and a political absurdity. This Hobbesian doctrine, in Skinners account, became hegemonic in utilitarian liberalism, and has left us moderns with both a reduced sensitivity to the dangers of servility and a worrisome tolerance for liberal authoritarians.17 Hobbes has thus long functioned as an important interlocutor in Skinners account of neo-Roman liberty in England, and this anti-republican reading of Hobbes has proven inuential.18 In spite of this, however, Hobbes was rather schematically portrayed in Liberty before Liberalism. The text treated Leviathan in isolation (neglecting Hobbess other works), and it merely gestured at the specics of Hobbess presumed engagement with the republican theorists of the Revolution. Skinners latest book, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, is his effort to thicken this contextual reading of Hobbes as an anti-republican. For the

15 16

17 18

Ibid., 13. Skinners denition of English republicanism differs signicantly from those of Pocock, who emphasizes republican attachment to civic virtue, and Blair Worden, who has convincingly portrayed English republicanism as a tful 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, 14501700 (Cambridge, 1991), 44364. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 5960. In virtually all accounts of English republicanism, Hobbes is deployed as a foil. See, for examples, David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Ethics, and Politics, 1627 1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 35; Sarah Barber, Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution, 16491659 (Edinburgh, 1998), 192; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 15701640 (Cambridge, 1995), 12.

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rst time he has argued in detail for a dynamic process of development, whereby Hobbess hostility to republican liberty gathered force during the 1640s and 1650s. Underdeveloped in the manuscript Elements of Law and in De Cive (1642), Hobbes rened his own denition of liberty in Leviathan in order to counter the increasingly assertive efforts of the republicans. Leviathans new understanding of liberty constituted a powerful attack on a number of new opponents of absolute sovereignty who had risen to fatal prominence in England during the period since the publication of De Cive in 1642. In Skinners account, Hobbess riposte to republican notions of liberty is the fundamental innovation in Leviathan. This claim, in turn, sustains his argument that such notions of liberty rose to unparalleled prominence in English public debate during the Revolution itself. Skinner construes the dialogue between Hobbes and the republicans as nothing short of an epoch-making moment in the history of Anglophone political thought.19 This is, at base, a historical argument. It may be sufcient for a theorist such as Pettit to isolate Hobbess theory of liberty, bundle it together with utilitarian liberalism, and allow the whole to function as a foil for his own advocacy of a republican theory of liberty as non-domination. Skinners historical contextualist methodology requires more. In a familiar vein, he writes,
I approach Hobbess political theory not simply as a general system of ideas, but also as a polemical intervention in the ideological conicts of his time. . . I try to bring Hobbes down from the philosophical heights, to spell out his allusions, to identity his allies and adversaries, to indicate where he stands on the spectrum of political debate.20

These are the problems, neglected somewhat in Liberty before Liberalism, that Skinner seeks to address in Hobbes and Republican Liberty. He has certainly produced a typically insightful book. Nevertheless, what was often said of Liberty before Liberalism might be equally well said of its successor. As an analysis of Hobbess account of liberty and its incompatibility with the classical republican tradition, the book is compelling. As an attempt to recover Hobbess writings as artefacts of the broader English Revolution, it is awed. Turning rst to the books considerable virtues, there can be no doubt that Skinner has here provided an exceptionally deft analysis of Thomas Hobbess distinctive account of human liberty. The account was most fully argued in the twenty-rst chapter of Leviathan, where Hobbes offered a perversely narrow denition of liberty as the mere absence of external impediments of motion. Hobbes was an uncompromising materialist and a determinist, and he thus held that liberty and necessity were consistent. Human will, determined by the motions of appetites and aversions, enjoyed only the liberty that, say,
19 20

Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), 138, 142, 149. Ibid., xvi.

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free-owing water did. In either case, only actual physical restraint could hinder liberty. Completing this austere account, Hobbes explicitly afrmed that fear and liberty are consistent. Fear would certainly strongly determine human will and would thus direct action, but all human will was determined in any case, and thus it was absurd to claim that fear, uniquely among the passions, deprived agents of liberty.21 To scholastics, and indeed to the broader intellectual culture that scholasticism had shaped, this argument conated liberty with mere physical spontaneity. But Hobbess account of the human will, his ontology of matter in motion, nullied such traditional distinctions. His insistence that he was merely rening the proper signication of the word liberty was a classic example of his notorious rhetorical gamesmanship. In Skinners account, Hobbes deployed his denition of human liberty primarily on two fronts: to describe the natural liberty of bodies in motion, and to characterize the liberty of subjects living under sovereignty. In truth, only the former was properly called liberty, and Hobbess main polemical point was to efface the distinction between the liberty of men (as physical bodies) and the liberty of subjects. What it means, summarizes Skinner, to be deprived of your liberty, and hence to lose the status of being a free-man, is simply to be stopped by some external impediment from exercising your powers your strength and witat will.22 Skinner effectively exposes this as a piece of rhetorical effrontery, repellent to scholastic denitions of free will, and incompatible with political understandings of free-men as agents enjoying some level of self-mastery. No one, writes Skinner, had
previously offered an explicit denition of what it means to be a free-man in direct competition with the denition put forward by the writers of republican liberty and their classical authorities. But Hobbes states as plainly as possible that what it means to be a free-man is nothing to do with being sui iuris or living independently of the will of others; what it means is simply to be unopposed by external impediments from acting according to ones will and powers.23

Having reduced free subjects to mere free bodies, Hobbes was positioned to recast drastically the traditional denition of free states. On the one hand, Hobbes essentially equated free states with sovereign states, acting as articial persons in a state of natural liberty. Skinner presents this as a feint on Hobbess part, and argues that the real polemical thrust of Hobbess redenition of free states attended to the internal workings of states (rather than their external,

21

22 23

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, 1994), 1367. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 151. Ibid., 157.

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geopolitical condition). Following from his narrow understanding of liberty itself as physical liberty, Hobbes argued in Leviathan that any actions undertaken for fear of the law were done willingly, and thus freely. Even under absolute sovereigns, we are not (as a matter of course) physically prevented from acting, from which it follows that we are always entirely free to obey or disobey as we choose. Fear of the law will doubtless often determine our actions, but does not restrain our freedom.24 There is a great deal to be said for this analysis, and perhaps for Skinners suggestion that it represents the original sin of modern, anglophone political thought.25 If the pitiless specics of Hobbess account of human liberty were generally abandoned by later liberals, they nonetheless set a template according to which liberty was fundamentally cast as non-interference. This was particularly the case in the utilitarian tradition. Skinner has beautifully explicated Hobbess contribution to the tradition of enlightened despotism (a tradition that Isaiah Berlin, infamously, reconciled with liberalism). He caps his discussion of Leviathan with a subtle account of those rights (more extensive than traditionally recognized) that Hobbes deemed inalienable, and those liberties that a wellordered society would shelter under the Silences of the Law. Commentators, from Leo Strauss to Carl Schmitt, who have been interested in casting Hobbes as a founding liberal, have typically Hobbesied liberalism in an effort to critique it in various ways. Skinner, though clearly disenchanted with aspects of the modern liberal order, is honest enough to liberalize Hobbes.26 But these aspects of Skinners interpretation, if more fully presented in his latest book, are not new. The fresh contribution of Hobbes and Republican Liberty is its historical case for a process of evolution in Hobbess account of liberty, an engagement with the republican tradition of the Revolutionary era that is supposedly revealing and signicant because of its dynamism. Such a claim for the contextual primacy (not just the analytic interest) of Hobbess antirepublicanismimplicates a larger interpretation of the English Revolution itself. The Revolution is cast as an episode in a metanarrative that is deeply engrained in our modern political imaginary, according to which the rival discourses of proto-liberalism and republicanism war for the soul of the modern state.

24 25

26

Ibid., 15761. Although Charles Larmore, among others, has cogently criticized the PettitSkinner republican school for overstating the differences between republicanism and nonutilitarian liberalism. Liberals from Locke to Rawls have worried about reliance on the arbitrary will of sovereignty, and even a gure such as Constant (who formatively distinguished ancient from modern liberty) voiced such concerns. See Charles Larmore, A Critique of Philip Pettits Republicanism, No s 35 (Oct. 2001), 22943. u Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 1669.

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The historical claims of Hobbes and Republican Liberty, however, are only imperfectly sustained. Partly this may be blamed on the brevity of the volume. Quentin Skinner is one of the great historical essayists of our time, but it is regrettable that his books on the republican tradition of liberty have been largely essayistic in scale. Such compression forces him to sustain large arguments with impressionistic evidence. This is particularly true when he is documenting the broad discourses of the Revolutionary era, but even his discussion of Hobbes himself is at times surprisingly thin. For instance, Skinner makes very little use of Hobbess correspondence or his minor writings, some of which contain highly relevant evidence. Nor does Skinner discuss Hobbess biography, or say very much about the reception of his work. In this volume, at least, Skinners contextual method has produced a juxtaposition of Hobbess main works against the productions of canonical writers such as Henry Parker, James Harrington, and John Milton. The political narrative against which all of these texts emerged is scarcely discussed at all (Oliver Cromwell is mentioned once in passing). Skinners approach does not allow for a full reconstruction of the ideological conicts of Hobbess time, and it leaves him vulnerable to the charge of interpretive selectivity. This is not to suggest that his historical case is completely faulty, merely that it relies on some disputable generalities and elisions. Hobbes and Republican Liberty makes two large and necessarily interlocking claims for historical change: rst, that Hobbes dramatically revolutionized his understanding of liberty during the 1640s; and second, that Hobbes was driven to these conceptual innovations by a rising republican tradition that he wished to counter. These claims may be evaluated in turn. Hobbess analysis of liberty in Leviathan, Skinner writes, represents not a revision but a repudiation of what he had earlier argued, and this development reects a substantial change in the character of his moral thought.27 Through exceptionally close and typically shrewd readings, he certainly demonstrates some shifts. The Elements of Law had offered Hobbess basic view (intrinsic to his materialist determinism) that the determined will (resulting from deliberation) was indeed free. But the manuscript had not specically discussed whether acting under duressthough clearly wilfulshould be characterized as free. Discussing free subjects, the Elements had atly denied that a sovereigns subjects could preserve meaningful liberty. De Cive reiterated these points, but in the works ninth chapter Hobbes devised a more generic denition of liberty as the absence of impediments to motion. Crucially, according to Skinner, De Cive offered two categories of such impediments: external impediments (actual blockages), and arbitrary impediments (our passions, particularly fear). Both

27

Ibid., xvi.

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constrain liberty, and in the latter case they seem to explain why terror of the law or of God might constitute restraints on liberty. Leviathan is more expansive than Hobbess other writings on the question of human liberty. There Hobbes innovated still further, by more reductively dening restraints on liberty as the absence of external impediments to motion. Such a renement rendered it impossible for Hobbes to continue categorizing an emotion such as fear as a constraint upon liberty. This, according to Skinner, was the crucial, epoch-making innovation in Hobbess account, one of the most remarkable developments in his civil philosophy.28 It enabled him to expand still further his counterintuitive notion of what it meant to be a free subject, and thus to offer a theory of liberty that xated on interference (rather than domination) in an extremely reductive, physical sense. Skinner claims that these changes were more than mere renements, but this is far from obvious.29 The distinctiveness of the account of liberty in The Elements is largely attributable to its brevity. De Cives more general account of liberty (in all senses of the term) is not inconsistent with the earlier text, except perhaps for its consideration of so-called arbitrary impediments to liberty. But Hobbess discussion of arbitrary impediments, Skinner concedes, is confused, and seems to contradict his overall desire to reduce both wilful and free actions to appetites and aversions. It may also be correct that, when discussing civil liberty, The Elements had somberly emphasized the loss of natural liberty under sovereignty, while De Cive more optimistically foregrounded the civil liberty enjoyed by virtue of the silence of the law. But these are compatible propositions distinguished by relatively minor differences in tone. Leviathans account of liberty is more internally consistent than Hobbess previous treatments, and it is more expansive. Skinner makes a great deal of the fact that the concept of liberty receives its own chapter in Leviathan but not in De Cive, but it is worth noting that the former text has forty-seven chapters, and the latter only eighteen. Leviathan expanded on a great many Hobbesian topics. It is surely interesting that Hobbes streamlined his denition of liberty in Leviathan, shedding the concept of arbitrary impediments and casting all restraints on liberty as external impediments. But little of signicance in De Cive had depended on the notion of arbitrary impediments, and Skinner concedes that Hobbess abandonment of the idea may have been merely an effort to resolve certain inconsistencies in his systematic discussion of liberty.30 It is important to note that in all of Hobbess main writings, he expressly denies that covenants
28 29

30

Ibid., 127. Philip Pettit has also dissented from this claim of dramatic evolution in Hobbess account of liberty. See his Republicanism, 168, n. 15. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 138.

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motivated by fear are unfree. Silently dropping the confused category of arbitrary impediments removed a contradiction. Likewise, Hobbes may only have atly equated free actions and wilful actions in his Latin Leviathan of 1668, but in this he was only more clearly stating what was an obvious implication of his previous work. Skinners most compelling observation is that Hobbess brutally reductive denition of liberty in Leviathan permitted him more effectively to rile certain defenders of civil freedom by dening a free-man as any subject capable of wilfully acting when unconstrained physically. The perverse suggestion that those willing to act in the face of terrifying law were free paralleled Hobbess mordant remark that, even under heathen despots, Christians enjoyed a perfect freedom to martyr themselves.31 By 1651, Hobbes was no longer willing to concede that the freedom of subjects was the just wage demanded by sovereignty. By more narrowly dening what counted as a restraint upon civil freedom, he permitted himself a more radical formulation: civil liberty and political subjugation were compatible. No trade-off was required. This paradox was only expressed in its most bracing form in Leviathan, and Skinner is surely right to ag it as a signicant rhetorical feature of Hobbess masterpiece. In particular, Hobbess crabbed denition of liberty would prove consequential later as part of the doxa of utilitarian liberalism. That said, Skinner overstates the extent to which Leviathan represented a repudiation of Hobbess earlier theories of civil liberty. Those earlier discussions had been rather rudimentary and self-contradictory, and one might well read their gestures towards a more traditional understanding of civil liberty as a vestigial use of conventional terminology. The more forceful discussion of civil liberty in Leviathan, after all, was an all but inescapable consequence of Hobbess long-standing account of both the determined natural will, on the one hand, and the nature of original political covenants, on the other. In both cases, Hobbes had already exploded the traditional opposition between necessity and freedom. Thus, on the topic of civil liberty, Leviathan perhaps offered not a theoretical departure, but rather a sharpened argumentative strategy. To present these shifts as a revolution in Hobbess thinking about liberty is implausible. And if this is the case, some of the cogency of Skinners efforts to synchronize Hobbess conceptual revolution with the actual English Revolution is lost. This raises the second of Skinners historical claims. Leviathan may well have further distilled Hobbess account of liberty (albeit in arguably minor ways), but the role of republicanism in forcing this conceptual development is unclear. As Skinner himself concedes, Hobbess nal version of the proper signication

31

Hobbes, Leviathan, 410.

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of liberty did not rst appear in Leviathan, but was instead developed in the mid-1640s during Hobbess famed dispute with Bishop Bramhall over free will. Bramhall was a staunch throne-and-altar man, and was, needless to say, not a notable advocate of the non-domination theory of civil liberty.32 That Hobbes clearly and forcefully expressed his most reductive denition of liberty in the context of his dispute with Bramhall strongly suggests that natural philosophical considerations rst forced the change.33 Skinner tries to massage this implication by noting that Hobbes rst published his new account of liberty in Leviathan, but this does nothing to diminish the import of the Bramhall dispute as evidence of a context for Hobbess discussion of liberty that had nothing to do with republicanism. In this sense it is crucial to recognize that, while Hobbes could and did deploy his innovative understanding of liberty against democraticall gentlemen, he also deployed it against scholastic notions of free will, defenders of the liberties of Parliament and the common law courts, advocates of a robust right to free conscience, and defenders of the ecclesial liberty of the corporate church. Indeed, as we will see, these latter targets greatly outranked the readers of ancient political texts on his roll of intellectual enemies. It is also true that, where Hobbes assailed constitutional positions that we might characterize as broadly republican, he was not always targeting the nondependency account of liberty that Skinner believes most clearly delineated that republican tradition. Skinners account seems to claim, in essence, that non-domination accounts of liberty begin to attach themselves by degrees to republican constitutional positions during the unfolding of the Revolution. Before this, the paramount distinction in civil associations between those who enjoy the status of liberi homines or free-men and those who live in servitude is found in a spectacular array of sites: among the ancients, in the Digest of Justinian, in Henry de Bracton, in Magna Carta and the common-law tradition, in Cardinal Contarini, in Machiavelli, in late Tudor parliamentarians, in early Stuart constitutional royalists, in Henry Parker, in William Prynne, in the Levellers, and elsewhere. The rhetoric of liberi homines and enslavement was

32

33

Indeed, and somewhat ironically, Skinner elsewhere (at 156) quotes Bramhalls 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 denition of freedom.) 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 signicance of De Cives mention of arbitrary impediments.

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spectacularly promiscuous.34 Within England, it was only after the regicide of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649 that writers were cautiously willing to draw the explicitly republican inference that, if we wish to evade such servitude, we must be sure to establish a free state by abolishing the ofce of king.35 Hobbess nal account of liberty, however, had set by 1645 (if not earlier). Thus, if it is to be construed primarily as a response to the constitutional implications of a non-dependency account of liberty, it must have been targeted primarily at mixed constitutionalism. The difculty is that mixed constitutionalism, within England, was primarily a discourse of common-law traditionalism, and not a republican discourse. Quite naturally, given the limited nature of the English parliament as a representative body, mixed constitutionalism was not primarily built on accounts of liberty that valorized non-dependency for all free subjects. Nor did Hobbess hostility to mixed constitutions typically foreground any debate about the liberty of freemen in this sense. Hobbess constitutional theorizing tended to xate on the question of stability, and the impossibility of establishing a single sovereign will in conditions of institutional plurality. In fact, democracy was theoretically acceptable in Hobbess terms. Likewise, English constitutionalists could look to shelter the liberties of liberi homines under the wing of good lordship, and could thus accommodate both a robust notion of royal prerogative and a fundamentally negative understanding of their own freedoms. Their complaints about monarchical incursion were often, perhaps usually, concerns about interference with either individual liberty or the liberty of institutions such as parliament and the common-law courts. Thus not every invocation of the liberties of freemen and the evils of slavery will suit Skinners purposes. He is naturally aware of this, and he does, valuably, recover some evidence that the mere existence of arbitrary monarchical power was at times a concern in the early years of the Civil War. Such concerns do, for instance, seem to have fuelled opposition to the royal veto. But just as often, Skinners evidence begs the question. It proves very difcult to distinguish between opposition to the mere existence of arbitrary power and its ill exercise. For instance, he places great weight on the struggle against Ship Money. It is certainly true that opposition to this hated levy, both inside and outside Parliament, deployed the distinction of free-men and slaves. But most opponents of Ship Money accepted the prerogative rights of the monarch to collect it. The outrage was that Charles I had abused this prerogative by collecting Ship Money in peacetime, or on inland counties that were traditionally exempt. The
34

35

For a similar criticism see J. G. A. Pocock, Foundations and Moments, in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 467. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 143.

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kings tyranny lay in the ill exercise of his prerogative, not in its mere existence. Even Henry Parker, who went further than most in condemning the absolute discretion of kings, accepted the exercise of prerogative powers when they were good and protable for the people. English royal prerogative needed to be balanced so as not to oppresse the people in unjust things or to disable the King in just things.36 The test, even for one as radical as Parker, was often the justice of the exercise of prerogative power, not its mere existence. Indeed, the same could be said for much of the opposition to Charles I. The Militia Ordinance, for instance, whereby Parliament asserted control over the kingdoms militias, was perhaps the most polarizing political act of the fraught year of 1642. Skinner interprets this ordinance as an example of rising concern about the mere existence of arbitrary power. In fact, most parliamentarians understood the Ordinance as a temporary measure forced by necessity. Indeed, in later negotiations with Charles, Parliament typically demanded control of the militias for a ten- or twenty-year period. The problem was thus not the traditional royal control of the militia, but the failures of a particular king in exercising that control (most agrantly by threatening Parliament itself, it was alleged by Charless enemies).37 Likewise, the heavy reliance of parliamentarians on the theme of evil counsellors implied a critique of misdirected power and of a failure of good lordship, not a crusade against arbitrary power per se. Skinner asserts that the case against arbitrary power (as such) found its clearest summary in John Goodwins Anti-Cavalierisme of 1642. Here Goodwin supposedly condemned discretionary powers and dened liberty as the disposal of self and property at ones own will. But this is at best a very partial reading of Goodwins text, which in fact dwelt chiey (and with near hysteria) on the Jesuitical and Cavalierish conspirators who had, through some black art or other gotten the chiefe treasure of the Land, the King, into their possession, setting him still in front of all their desperate designs. Royal prerogative per se was not the chief concern of Goodwin, indeed he afrmed the legitimacy of any constitutional form (including unmixed monarchy) that ruled in accord with justice and Godliness. Divine providence, showing its face against Antichrist, sanctioned resistance to the Cavaliers. Goodwins infatuation with a providentially active divine law is hard to reconcile with republican notions of self-mastery. The bulwarks of freedom were not self-governing, republican free-men, but the

36

37

Henry Parker, The Case of Ship-Money Briey Discoursed. . . (London, 1640), 69, emphases added. Quentin Skinner, Classic Liberty and the English Civil War, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), 2: 929.

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purity of religion, and the parliamentary worthies of the land, to whose zeale and expense. . . you and your whole Nation owe your lives and liberties, both spiritual and temporall.38 This is not a language of non-dependence. Goodwins text does not recall Livy and Sallust so much as Godly reform, English constitutionalism and the feudal resistance theory of the sixteenth century. Skinner has not sustained the view that the English Revolution was triggered by a coherent tradition of thinking about liberty as non-dependency, rather than non-interference. He cannot compellingly construe the constitutional cause of Parliament, the common lawyers, and the hot protestants in this way, nor does he convincingly supplant those actors as the primary foils of Hobbess political theory.39 Skinner nds more hospitable terrain when he attends to those textual passages in which Hobbes specically ays the democratical writers of antiquity and their modern dvots. But here again, not every piece of evidence will advance his e case. Hobbes condemned the ancient historians and moralists for any number of sins. He rejected the mixed constitutionalism of authorities such as Polybius and Aristotle. He feared the capacity of ancient literature to conjure grandiose delusions in the imaginations of political actors. His preference for single-man rule made him contemptuous of democraticall gentlemen. But none of these positions necessarily depended upon a non-domination account of liberty. Skinners argument thus requires more specic evidence than a mere Hobbesian contempt for the readers of the Greek and Latin authors. To be sure, he does nd some evidence in chapter 21 of Leviathan. There, Hobbes rejected the notion that the moralists and historians of antiquity upheld the liberty of particular men, and instead he construed free-states as merely sovereign states. In this respect a republic such as Lucca and a despotism such as Constantinople were equally free. In this passage Hobbes seemed to be redeeming, rather than repudiating, the teachings of the ancients (in that he accuses contemporaries of misreading them). But Hobbes also heaped contempt on the ancients for falsely teaching that all who lived under monarchy were slaves.40 Hobbes reinforced this critique in a few passages of his history of the Civil War, Behemoth. There is thus no doubt that at times in Leviathan Hobbess account of liberty was a useful weapon against the democratical ancients and the notion of

38 39

40

John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme. . . (London, 1642), 27, 4041. Emphasis added. 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, 624, 1056. 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.

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freedom that they had spawned. By 1651 the Revolution had outstripped the constitutional formulae of the common law. The English state had been abruptly rendered kingless, and its defenders necessarily moved beyond traditional constitutionalism. In this context, Skinner nds more evidence of a classically inected discourse against dependency within English radicalism. Here we nd John Hall, for instance, speaking of advancement wrung from monarchs as but a more splendid and dangerous slavery, and John Milton excoriating those whose liberties depend on the gift and favour of a single person. Skinner nds some useful evidence in the writings of the Levellers as well. Not all republicans, however, were equally dedicated to notions of non-dependence. This was not, for instance, a consistent theme for Marchamont Nedham, who alloyed his republicanism with a hard-nosed de-factoism and an expansive accommodation of interest. And while Skinner nds some compelling evidence in the writings of John Milton, Miltons fulminations against enslavement to kings often targeted monarchs lack of wisdom in exercising power, and he occasionally conceded at least the theoretical possibility of a virtuous king. Even in his most republican tract, his preferred constitution was a perpetual senate of the gravest authorities, who would acts as keepers of our libertie.41 Milton, and Skinner, might rejoin that non-domination need not imply broad political participation. But this begs the neo-republican question. If rights and liberties can be secured by a permanent committee of the wise, why not equally by an enlightened king? To construe such closed regimes as non-arbitrary implies not a politics of active self-government, but an older understanding of arbitrary power as wilful, irrational and self-interested, no matter what its constitution or the extent of its prerogatives. Hostility to the latter sort of arbitrary power could have commanded the agreement of King James I. This is not to deny that Skinner has found evidence for his more robust understanding of non-domination in the writings of men such as Goodwin and Milton, but merely to observe that the commitment of these men to the independence of free-men often seems subordinate to their highly specic understanding of civic virtue. Even the most zealous of English republicans was capable of suggesting that it was the duty of subjects to emulate just government, rather than participate in its direction. Nevertheless, Hobbes and Republican Liberty nds its surest footing in the years between 1649 and 1651, when Hobbes did at times deploy his understanding of liberty against what might be construed as a rival non-domination account. But
41

John Milton, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. . . (1660), 4550, 556, 72, emphasis added. On these aspects of Miltons republicanism see Paul A. Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (Cambridge, 2008).

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Skinners case for the vast signicance of this nding requires that it be not a detail of Leviathan, but a central thematic component, driving a revolution in Hobbess previous account of liberty and explaining the timing and structure of Hobbess masterpiece. This considerably overstates the case. Arguably, Hobbess account of liberty did not signicantly evolve after 1640, and it certainly did not after 1645, long before republican accounts of liberty had a major public presence in England. Leviathan, furthermore, pre-dated the major theoretical works that might be read as contributing to a tradition of republican non-domination. There are, in sum, three rotating parts to Skinners thesis in Hobbes and Republican Liberty: evolving republican constitutional theories during the 1640s and 1650s (moving from mixed constitutional to anti-monarchical), Hobbess varied complaints about the intellectual authority of the ancients, and competing accounts of civil liberty as either non-dependency or non-interference. Making his argument work requires that Skinner synchronize these three gears, but the alignment is imperfect and the gears slip. Hobbess blasts at the ancients were too scattershot. The constitutional positions that concerned him were often not derived from the republican tradition. Neither the parliamentarians of the 1640s nor the republicans of the 1650s reliably espoused libertys third way of non-domination. The former often laboured to hedge liberties that we would understand as fundamentally negative. The latter deployed denitions of virtue and of human ourishing that were often decidedly positive. For his part, Hobbess own account of liberty found polemical uses in such diverse contexts that it is reductive to classify it simply (or even primarily) as anti-republican. Hobbes and Republican Liberty certainly enriches our understanding of one of the many contextual resonances of Hobbess account of liberty, but the stronger claims of the book, its broader reading of the Revolution and of Hobbess reaction to it, rely on a reductive account of radical thought in the 1640s and 1650s, and on a reading of Hobbess own thought that exaggerates the dynamism and prominence of his account of the liberty of subjects. In the nal analysis, it is this lack of proportion in Skinners account that is most problematic. Even if we grant (as many will not) that the discussion of civil liberty in Leviathan marks an innovation in Hobbess thinking on that matter, his direct exploration of the liberty of subjects consumes approximately six pages in modern editions that run to nearly ve hundred pages in length. Hobbesian invective against the ancient democrats and their modern students is likewise limited to a few passages.42 When Hobbes began composing Leviathan (likely in
42

This is also the case in Hobbess 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,

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1649), he was returning to his civil science for the third time, thereby interrupting work on the already much delayed natural-philosophical aspects of his system. This was the rst time that he had framed his political thinking for an English audience, and Leviathan was his rst philosophical production to be published (in authorized form) in London. Leviathan was more than twice the length of De Cive, was full of new material, and had radically different political overtones than Hobbess earlier work. Hobbes knew before its publication that it would anger his royalist associates. It immediately did so, and ensured his banishment from the exiled royalist court. A compelling contextualization of Leviathan must plausibly account for these basic historical features of its production. An explanation which foregrounds the texts relatively brief discussion of civil liberty will not do the trick. The royalists clearly did not take this to be the point of the book, nor did Hobbes expect them to do so. And if Hobbes had intended Leviathan primarily as a rebuke to the republicans, he presumably would have lingered on this theme at more length, and signalled its importance with more vigour. Indeed, one of the striking features of Hobbes and Republican Liberty is its failure to account for what Thomas Hobbes himself actually said about Leviathans political signicance. The cause of my writing that book, Hobbes would recall of Leviathan, was the consideration of what the Ministers before, and in the beginning of the Civill War, by their preaching and writing did contribute thereunto. In the Latin translation of Leviathan (1668) he reiterated that the book had been animated by the belief that the civil war which was being waged then throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, had no other cause than the disagreement, rst between the Roman church and the Anglican, and then in the Anglican church between the Episcopal pastors and the Presbyterians concerning theological matters.43 As any reader of either Leviathan or Behemoth will immediately see, Hobbes understood the English Revolution as a religious war. A great deal could be said on this topic, but sufce it to say that Hobbes loathed both the supposedly destabilizing otherworldliness of orthodox Christian theology, and what he took to be the seditious designs of Christian clergy to erect dualist structures of temporal and spiritual power. In all of his major works, and in private correspondence, he held that the dispute for precedence between the spiritual and the civil power, has of late more than any other thing in the world, been the

43

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. See Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques. . . (London, 1656), 56; idem, Leviathan, 5389.

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cause of civil wars in all places of Christendom.44 It is not an exaggeration to say that defusing the political threat of Christian theology and ecclesiology was an obsessive theme in Hobbess writing. It was also a dynamic theme, rising in prominence as the English Revolution unfolded, until in Leviathan the effort to resolve the problem of religious sedition consumed literally hundreds of pages. Hobbes was always perfectly clear that these religious sections constituted the most innovatory and unsettling aspects of his masterpiece.45 They were themes that he clearly and persistently linked to the context of the Revolution itself, and they dwarf Hobbess sporadic comments on the republicans. No contextualization of Leviathan that fails to account for its religious dimensions can be fully convincing.46 The point of this criticism is not to chide Quentin Skinner pedantically for ignoring a subject that the present reviewer nds interesting. The point is, rather, that due attention to the religious context of Hobbess theoretical productions directly implicates, and in some measure undercuts, Skinners reading of Hobbes as an anti-republican rst and foremost.47 This is true in two respects. To begin with, Hobbess doctrines on politics and religion very much complicated republican reactions to Leviathan. Though they disliked his addiction to monarchy and his condescension toward the ancients, virtually all of the major republicans of the 1650s, with the notable exception of Milton, eagerly endorsed Hobbess anti-clerical and staunchly Erastian teachings. James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, John Hall, Francis Osborne, William Petty, William Rand, Henry Stubbe: all of these important republicans reacted to Hobbes in this schizophrenic manner. Furthermore, it is by no means evident that, in contextual terms, their admiration for his ecclesiology was less signicant than their distaste for his absolutism. And as historians such as Justin Champion and Noel Malcolm have demonstrated, the positive appeal of Hobbess ecclesiological

44

45

46

47

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. Resistance to this fact can be remarkably dogged, particularly among political theorists. For one recent and particularly unconvincing attempt to explain it away see Deborah Baumgold, The Difculties of Hobbes Interpretation, Political Theory 36 (2008), 839, 8447. Revealingly, Skinners work has always been difcult 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), 15578. Here and below I borrow from my own The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), chap. 5 and conclusion.

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doctrines remained a major inuence within later, Enlightenment republicanism. Indeed, the former has argued that the fundamentally Hobbesian project of disabling Christianity eventually trumped the anti-monarchism of English republicans.48 But even in the 1650s, the major republicans and Hobbes agreed that Englands religious wars should be resolved by abolishing clerical power, providing some room for a passive religious liberty, and subordinating public religious power to the purposes of the state. A common dedication to the tradition of civil religion went some way towards reconciling both Hobbes and the republicans to the rule of Oliver Cromwell. No discussion of either Hobbesian or republican notions of liberty can overlook these dimensions of the question. On matters of individual religious liberty, the pernicious institutional liberty of the corporate church, and the liberty of sovereignty to act independently of religious strictures, Hobbes and the republicans were in broad accord. And for Hobbes in particular, these were issues of all-engrossing concern. Skinners inattention to religious questions raises a second problem for his general interpretation of Hobbess revolutionary importance. If we step back and take the broadest view of Skinners project, what emerges as its clearest theme is his discomfort with the absolutizing tendencies of modern sovereignty. He dislikes the atomization and privatization implicit in liberal theories of the state. He nds its notions of freedom and its account of civil society impoverished. He seeks a political model that will preserve individual rights and interests, but will sustain more robust notions of participatory obligations and of the conditions required to maintain liberty. In the neo-republican project, Skinner believes that he has found a tradition capable of nudging liberalism in these directions, without moving unacceptably close to more traditionally minded communitarians. He writes: The Aristotelian or Thomist assumption that a healthy public life must be founded on a conception of eudaimonia is by no means the only alternative to contemporary liberalism. We need not, he elaborates, try to slip back into the womb of the polis.49 Here is the promise of libertys third way. Skinners historical interest in republicanism has been increasingly animated by this contemporary political engagement. It is fair to wonder, however, whether the model of liberalism and republicanism in endless strugglewhatever the merits of the latter as an ideology for the European Unionis an appropriate

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49

Noel Malcolm, Hobbes and the Republic of Letters, in idem, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 51417; Justin Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies (Cambridge, 1992), 1345; idem, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 16961722 (Manchester, 2003), 111 et passim. Skinner, The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty, 667.

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interpretive device for understanding the political theory of the seventeenth century. Such a model, placing Hobbes at one axial end and a Machiavellian republicanism at the other, entails a false polarization on critical issues. It misses essential commonalities, and ignores the broader struggle against the dualist structures of Christendom that united a proto-liberal such as Hobbes and a republican such as Harrington. For contemporary critics who defended an Augustinian or Thomistic (or Laudian) religious corporatism, Hobbes and the Interregnum republicans spoke the common language of sovereignty. Alike they sought to disable what had for centuries been the primarily institutional check on unfettered statecraft. This struggle, for Hobbes certainly, became denitive as the English Revolution progressed. And if, a century later, a republican such as Rousseau could condemn Hobbess philosophy of right as a theory of enslavement, he was also capable of honouring him as the rst thinker who dared to propose the reunication of the two heads of the eagle.50 Skinners neglect of Hobbess religious context, in other words, does not just sacrice historical comprehensiveness. In fact, it veils the real context in which developed exactly those aspects of modern sovereignty that he dislikes. Nor will it do to acknowledge this point for its antiquarian accuracy, but then sideline the religious context of early modern political thought as an arcane question, dead to us post-religious moderns. Geopolitically, the struggle between modern liberal sovereignty and traditional religious doctrines retains the power to swing elections and iname wars. In the West, to be sure, religious and political authorities long ago made their peace, but the status of religion in the public sphere remains a bitterly contested matter. Jurisprudence, in the United States particularly, continues to haggle over the ne points of churchstate separation.51 Much recent political theory has obsessively disputed the moral foundations of liberalism, the implications of its lineage in traditional Judaeo-Christian thinking, and whether its latter-day notions of neutrality and public reason constitute a sectarian secularism.52 If liberalisms modern critics were once provoked chiey by its political economy, they are now more prone to engaging with the ethical assumptions embedded within liberalism. Of course, it is inaccurate and unjust
50

51

52

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in idem, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis, 1987), 222. 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. For one version of the debate, conducted civilly by iconic gures, see J rgen Habermas u and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularism: On Reason and Religion (NY, 2007); also Habermass Religion in the Public Square, European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2006), 125.

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to characterize such modern debates as a reignition of early modern Europes theologico-political problem.53 They do, however, echo that original context, and cannot be fully understood if that context is forgotten or veiled. By contrast, and despite the erudite reconstructive efforts of Skinner, Pettit and others, it is the republican tradition that appears like a museum piece these days. Indeed, those who deploy the term republican to characterize their dissent from the more soulless aspects of liberalism seem to come in two camps: communitarians sympathetic to traditional religion (Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel) and those who are effectively socially democratic liberals (Philip Pettit, Maurizio Viroli). One thus wonders if the apparatus of neo-republicanism has advanced us very far beyond familiar intellectual struggles. It is a further question whether Quentin Skinners interest in neorepublicanism has led him, a touch ironically, into the construction of a useful history. He is, these days, less prone than he once was to methodological broadsides against all who dare impose a coherence of continuity on the past. He now seeks more than mere incommensurability in history. I have become, Skinner has recently written, more interested of late in the contrasts between our past and present systems of thought, and have even come to believe that this kind of history can have a practical signicance.54 Many will appreciate this turn towards engaged history. But if the old perennial debates and transhistorical themes of yesteryears intellectual history were prone to mythologizing, so too is a contextualism that is overly selective and partial. That is particularly the case if the historians partiality mirrors his or her current political engagement. It is striking that a great deal of Quentin Skinners writing in the latter stages of his career has been informed by his strongly held philosophical and political commitments. His attempts to trace the prehistory of neo-republicanism are obvious examples of this. So too, one might argue, was Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, where his effort to establish Hobbess manner of writing philosophy as one of his enduring legacies not only exemplied Skinners historical methodology, but also sought to establish the prehistory of the twentieth-century language philosophy that undergirded that methodology.55 In and of itself, engagement of this kind is inevitable in most historical work and is often unproblematic, even valuable (although in the present context it might raise a wry grin from those venerable historians of ideas who were ayed by a more

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55

On which see Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, 1995), chap. 1. Quentin Skinner, Surveying the Foundations: a retrospect and reassessment, in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 237. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 616, 437.

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youthful and polemical Quentin Skinner for trying to trace the morphology of some given doctrine.56 ) What may be problematic, however, is how such an engaged historian reconciles him- or herself to the interpretive methodologies of Cambridge School contextualism. It may be that context as dened by that school is too uid to ground impartial historical reconstruction. Following its master practitionersJ. G. A. Pocock and Skinner himself, above allCambridge School intellectual historians have insistently dened context linguistically. They seek to account for ideas as speech acts and printed utterances, variously deploying or manipulating traditions of discourse.57 Their histories seek to establish whatever language context enables us to appreciate the nature of the intervention constituted by such utterances. Such histories are thus heavily textual, and essentially linguistic.58 Skinner, in particular, has cast his historical method as an implication of the language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin.59 It has been often observed that the sheer textuality of Cambridge School intellectual history has oddly replicated one feature of the old history of ideas that served as its original foil, namely a xation with self-reective, printed works of theorization. We need not indulge the complaint of elitism levelled by social historians such as Robert Darnton to see how such a focus may pose difculties for a compelling contextualization of any given text.60 Linguistic context discourse traditionscan become remarkably expansive both chronologically and geographically, and can crowd out attention to more immediate and material features of context, such as authorial biography, immediate textual reception, the social and political situation of given texts, their history as circulating material objects. But it is precisely in these latter dimensions of context that the historian nds xity, a stable body of evidence permitting a relatively neutral reconstruction of past meanings and textual situations. Linguistic contextualization, by contrast, can become easily unmoored. The universe of discourses available to an author such as Hobbes is almost innitely varied. Interpretation thus becomes more selective, and, too often, with selectivity comes partiality.
56

57 58

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60

Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, in idem, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002) 62. Ibid., 78. J. G. A. Pocock, The Concept of Language, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1987), 28; Quentin Skinner, Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts, in idem, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 11620, 125. Quentin Skinner, Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change, in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method, 17587. Skinner himself rejected Darntons critique in On Intellectual History and the History of Books, Contributions to the History of Concepts 1 (2005), 2936.

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There is no need to exaggerate the point. The best historical work will avail itself of various methods and source materials synthetically. Nor would it be fair to accuse Quentin Skinner of a free-oating hermeneutic technique, constructing discourse traditions with Derridean riot. His methodological reduction of all ideas into ideology has sometimes been criticized as postmodern, and he has perhaps invited this with gestures towards Nietzsche and Foucault.61 However, Skinners understanding of ideology is probably better characterized as Weberian,62 and if this sociological inheritance may partly explain the reexive secularity of his work, it also lends it considerable evidentiary rigor. His recent work, nevertheless, has often sought to trace the origin of some aspect of modernity that currently interests him. In doing so, he tends to locate past thinkers in far-ung contexts, rather than in their own. Thus does Hobbes become either a contributor to a series of debates about the moral sciences in Renaissance culture, or a prototype of Benthamite, utilitarian liberalism.63 Skinners latest book has attempted to ground this latter reading of Hobbes in a historical account of his life and times, but with only partial success. The antirepublican reading of Hobbes pits him interestingly against antique republican thinkers, and reads him, perhaps still more interestingly, in the light of various modern theorists of liberty. But this interpretation does not offer what Skinner promised it would: a clear account of Hobbess allies and adversaries and his position on the spectrum of contemporary debate. If we allow ourselves to approach the past with a less importunate sense of relevance, Skinner once wrote,
we may nd our studies taking on a relevance of a different and more authentic kind. We may nd, in particular, that the acquisition of a historical perspective helps us to stand back from some of our current assumptions and habits of thought, and perhaps even to reconsider them. The study of the past need not be any the less instructive when it uncovers contrasts rather than continuities with the present.64

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62

63 64

See, for instance, Michael Drolet, Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on Power and the State, History of European Ideas 33 (2007), 23455. For Skinner on Foucault see his Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts, 118; on Nietzsche see his Surveying the Foundations, 244. Skinner, Moral Principles and Social Change, in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method, 14557. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 6. 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 Lockes Political Thought (Cambridge, 2002), 11.

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This is a compelling apology for the value of intellectual history. It is fair to wonder, however, whether a reductively linguistic understanding of context is a sufcient methodological tool for the reconstruction of authentic historical contrasts. Often, the immense reach and exibility of discourse traditions leaping between countries and centuries in single boundsseems better suited to the recovery of continuities and origins (authentic or otherwise).65 And the relevance of any account of origins is a relevance dened by present-day imperatives. In this sense, Hobbes and Republican Liberty is a history written at least partially in the service of the modern, neo-republican project. Skinners commitment to this project has encouraged him to focus tightly on the small differences between the liberal and the republican accounts of sovereignty as they emerged in the seventeenth century. He thus neglects the epochal shift in religious and moral understanding that the notion of sovereignty itself entailed. Given his broader concerns about the lordly autonomy of the modern state, this is not a negligence that his history can afford.

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.