The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance The Age Reformation
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance The Age Reformation
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance The Age Reformation
These volumes have been keenly awaited, and will doubtless be the occasion
of a good deal of controversy . The author's methodological writings (cited at I,
286-7) have made him a central figure in what has been called "the new history
of political thought", and though it should not be too readily inferred that he
has written this long-range study of several centuries (c. 1250-1600) with the
intention of exhibiting all his methods in practice, it is certain to be read with
an eye - not always friendly - to seeing what these have achieved .
In the preface Skinner describes his approach to the study of texts and says
that "if it were practised with success, it might begin to give us a history of
political theory with a genuinely historical character" (I, xi) . On the jacket this
becomes: "The work aspires, in this sense, to give the first genuinely historical
account of the political thought of the period" : and, readers and reviewers
being what they are, we may soon find ourselves supposing that it claims to be
the first genuinely historical account of the history of political thought or
theory (terms, by the way, which ought not to be used as if they were in-
terchangeable) . Such a claim would be greeted with indignation, and there is
probably going to be indignation anyway; so it is desirable to be as clear as
possible in understanding exactly what Skinner is claiming. He certainly does
not assert that no one before him has written "genuinely historical" history of
political thought . He is seeking to establish, and to practise, a method which
will assure us that what we are getting is history ofpolitical thought written in a
manner rigorously confined to the discipline of history ; an assurance which
even the great historians (Figgis, Maitland, Woolf and Laski) who preceded
him did not always provide . There are legitimate non-historical, and perhaps
transhistorical, approaches to the study of political thought ; but these cause
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J. G.A . POCOCK
confusion when they intrude themselves upon the writing ofhistory. Skinner is
claiming that it is necessary, and possible, to delimit a method which will
require the historian to write history and the non-historian to practise his/her
activity at a distance .
What is it that is frequently unhistorical about works which claim to be
histories of political thought? The answer depends upon a careful distinction
between what is merely not historical and what is falsely historical . A reader -
let us call him/her "political theorist" or "philosopher" - may read a text
from the past and find that it suggests many trains of thought worth pursuing
as part of the discipline of political theory or philosophy. To pursue them is a
wholly legitimate activity ; it does not invalidate, and is not invalidated by, the
historian's activity of seeking to establish what trains of thought were being
pursued - or what other intellectual or linguistic performances engaged in -
by the author who wrote the text, or by persons who read and responded to it in
his time or thereafter . Should the historian suggest that the thoughts which
interest the philosopher had no existence in the author's time, or even at any
moment in history preceding the philosopher's own, the latter may
legitimately reply (1) that he/she is reading the text at this moment and not at
any other ; (2) that he/she is using it as a stepping-stone to the thinking of
thoughts which (a) are the philosopher's rather than the author's, (b) are not
immediately dependent, for their truth or even their meaning, on the con-
ditions obtaining at any historical moment .
At this stage the theorist or philosopher is merely thinking non-historically,
in the sense that he/she is using the text for purposes and in ways which can be
satisfactorily distinguished from those of the historian . There can be - and
there has been - no objection to this. What cannot be legitimised, but is for
several reasons very difficult to avoid, is that he/she should proceed as if in-
terpretations of the text so constructed could be made the foundations of
historical interpretation : as if meanings discovered by non-historical means and
for non-historical purposes could be treated as meanings borne by the text, or
intended by its author, in history; and as if histories of political thought could
be constructed in terms of the being and becoming of meanings and intentions
so discovered . Once this happens we pass from non-history to pseudo-history,
or at best to the construction of ideal histories or historical myths. How this
happens was lately shown by John G. Gunnell in his admirable study of "the
myth of the great tradition" (Gunnell, 1979), though in the end he was not
willing to extricate himself from the activity he studied . "History" constructed
in this way has no place in the writing of historians, but it has a marked ten-
dency to arise when theorists or philosophers write history. Skinner and others
have been labouring to eliminate such pseudo-history and have concluded that
the prime necessity is to establish a method of writing history of political
thought which shall contain no statements not constructed and examined by
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' `genuinely historical" history must concentrate upon uncovering these actions
as performed by individuals . Typically, the individual whose action must be
studied is the author, though we may also find ourselves studying the action of
some individual in reading, understanding (or misunderstanding) and
responding to the author's performance . In either case, however, our attention
will be focussed upon thought as (or in) action ; and the act of the agent's
consciousness which we desire to understand will typically (though not in-
variably) be an act of utterance, articulation, verbalisation in script or print.
The Putney Debates, when a shorthand-writer happened to be present, provide
almost the only case of a major document of political thought not the product
of a conscious act of literary creation on some author's part. There is a real sense
in which "the history ofpolitical thought" is coming to be a conventional term
for what is really a history of intellectual-verbal-literary-typographical per-
formances.
The historian's aim is to recover the action ; whether the action behind the
text, or the text as action, is a problem in hermeneutical and literary theory ;
and the division between historian and theorist recurs when we see that the
theorist may extract meanings and implications from the text without needing
to ask whether these ever formed part of the actions of historical individuals .
The historian is concerned exclusively with those implications which he/she can
show were intended or understood by individuals at some point or other in the
history being studied ; and though these implications may in principle be as
numerous and diverse as those which the theorist, philosopher or critic extracts
from the text, they are not necessarily coincident with them. The historian
must hold to this distinction as a city to its walls, because it is the only
safeguard against the construction of historical myth, pseudo-history and ideal
history. Even should the historian engage in the construction of some ideal type
of political theory as having historical existence, it will be with a view to
erecting hypotheses concerning the actions, performances and thoughts of
agents in history .
But actions are performed in contexts which give them meaning; evinements
take place in moyenne duree ; and the context which gives meaning to an act of
political and theoretical utterance may be defined both as "political" and as
"linguistic" . Skinner rehearses the situation with which his own and others'
writings have familiarised students: it consists (I, xi-xiii) of (1) an agent, (2) a
political phenomenon on which he desires to comment, (3) an existing
structure of language which constrains his capacity to comment, (4) his speech
act or performance which may result in modification of (2) or (3) or both. The
history to be written now consists of both ivinement and moyenne duree, both
parole and langue ; of the intellectual and verbal acts oftheorists as agents, and
of the durable language-structures (or paradigms) within which and upon
which they are performed . It will be noticed that this is to stress the linguistic
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aware of the economies and austerities that have been practised will be well
advised to consider the book for what it offers them : a drastic rearrangement,
and at the same time an enrichment, of the accepted paradigms used in
presenting the subject. New traditions are presented, and our own traditions
are altered.
action ; secondly, that the way in which we have seen Skinner using the word
"ideology" is a little inclined to suggest that it is so limited . One of the
characteristics that leads me to describe this as a very "Cambridge" book is its
determination to operate from phenomena, not from models . Skinner does not
begin by erecting a macrocosm to show what thought was like when it was
"medieval" and not yet "modern", or to generalise about the conceptual
conditions under which republican ideology was required to develop - as is
done, for example, in the first three chapters of The Machiavellian Moment.
He establishes a relatively simple and microcosmic "moment", in which the
"ideological" need was to rebut the Emperor's claim (and after him the
Pope's) to imperium in Italy, and proceeds to explore the ways in which this
rebuttal was made and to consider their consequences . He now pursues modes
of thought in action, and their existence has consequences which soon bring
him to escape from the initial context . The latter, it is true, does not explain
either the existence or the consequences of the languages of thought in which
its needs were met ; and there may be a price to be paid for Skinner's decision to
use microscope first and telescope second. For the present, however, we are
considering his rhetoric, the strategy of exposition which he has chosen in order
to mobilise his material .
The claims of the republics were put forward in two languages : the one
rhetorical, the other scholastic and juristic . Though not new - Skinner is
following Kristeller (1961), Garin (1965), Baron (1966) and others - this is in
many ways the central and crucial assertion of the whole book. It needs to be
stressed that the rhetorical and scholastic modes of "political thought" differ
in regard to their linguistic, even more than oftheir conceptual, structure. The
mere presence of rhetoric ensures that "the history of political thought" tends
to become a "history of political speech" ; the rhetoricians were not merely
saying different things from the scholastics, or saying them in a different way,
but claiming to modify, and actually modifying by their presence, the role of
speech in political life . Not all rhetoricians were republicans, but every republic
needed to advance the claims of rhetoric . Long before the great humanists of
the quattrocento, Boncompagno da Siena, John of Viterbo and Brunetto Latini
(all figures of the thirteenth century) were declaring that virtues must be ac-
tualised in actions and expressed in speech, and that the republic or community
of citizens was the only political form in which speech, action and virtue were
possible.
Cicero was the master ancient of the rhetoricians ; Aristotle of the scholastics ;
Justinian (perhaps) of the jurists . In expounding the second, or scholastic-
jurist, mode of republican assertion, Skinner stresses how the thirteenth-
century revival ofpolls values in the course of the renaissance of Aristotelian
studies joined forces, on the one hand, with the affirmation of Roman civic
action being carried out by the rhetoricians and, on the other, assisted the jurist
J. G.A . POCOCK
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so close together that it was necessary to clarify their relationship ; and in much
ofthat journey the classical republic plays no visible role whatever .
Perhaps this is why J.H. Burns found The Machiavellian Moment "an oddly
unconvincing book" (Burns, 1977) and J.H . Hexter was troubled by its refusal
to explore the relationship between two concepts of liberty (Hexter, 1979) . In
the light of Skinner's paradigm - the duality of the rhetorical-republican and
the scholastic-juristic modes - it can be seen as a tunnel history, a mining of
the republican seam from Machiavelli to Madison which opens up no lateral
galleries into the alternative mode . If so, its relation to The Foundations of
Modern Political Thought is complementary ; for Skinner's second volume is a
tunnel driven through the scholastic and populist seam to approximately the
year 1600. But because he steadfastly refuses to set foot in the seventeenth
century, he does not reach the point where the seams begin again to converge
and republican ideas are taken up outside Italy (Fink, 1945 ; Robbins, 1959 ;
Venturi, 1971) ; and his account of the republican tradition ends with it
suspended like Mahomet's coffin . A chapter headed "The Survival of
Republican Values" concludes with a section headed "The End of Republican
Liberty" . We hear of Paolo Paruta (I, 142) but not of Paolo Sarpi; of Traiano
Boccalini (1, 168, 188-9) but not of Scipione Ammirato or Virgilio Malvezzi ;
there is, in short, less about Venetian thinking (Bouwsma, 1968), or Tacitean
(Levy, 1967 ; Schellhase, 1976; McKenzie, 1979), than there would have been
had Skinner chosen to carry his story past 1600. This undoubtedly does
something to the balance of the book and the operation of its paradigm ; to see
what, we must explore Volume II: The Age ofthe Reformation.
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Bodin acceptance ofthe sovereign, the only remedy to the power of Fortune (II,
278-9, 292-3) . There is the withering philological analysis of Roman law, in
which legal humanism (Kelley, 1970) succeeds in altering the whole perception
of law's place in society and history (I, 201-08) . The anti-scholasticism and anti-
monasticism of the Erasmians lays an egg for Luther to hatch . Finally, the
vocabulary of northern humanism, even at its most conventional, seems vastly
to enhance the counsellor's capacity to recognise, verbalise and perhaps act
upon the processes taking place in court, church and society . Though citizen
and counsellor seem very different things, Arthur B. Ferguson can use (and
Skinner cite) the title The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance ; and
Volume I concludes with a study ofthe desperately radical Utopia of the deeply
conservative More.
But in fact northern humanism plays only an auxiliary role in the interplay of
political vocabularies which makes up the true subject of this book . Volume II
has for plot the impact of Reformation upon a world of scholastics and jurists .
Here we must become especially aware of the ex-I.--- e economy which Skinner
displays in selecting the contexts in which the events of his history are to take
place . The expansion of the idea of counsel occurred in a universe of existing
ideas about kingship and law, regnum et sacerdotium, and we might expect to
find some general exposition of the vocabulary of late medieval monarchy,
designed to tell us what contexts northern humanism had to penetrate and
modify . Yet on the whole Skinner avoids doing this . Perhaps he wished - and
we might sympathise - to avoid the ideal history likely to arise from any
confrontation of "medieval" and "modern" . But in France, England, Ger-
many, Spain, Geneva and Scotland - his horizon does not extend east to
Poland or Hungary - the humanism of counsel encountered powerful and
idiosyncratic national and regional societies, possessing institutions and
speaking languages of their own ; and this is a point at which Skinner's con-
ception of "ideology" might have been deepened and clarified . If he had
explored these regional traditions, he might have supplied a historical
geography of political thought, showing why it developed in different ways and
took shape in some regions and not in others; but on the whole he has not
pursued this opportunity . The course of events in the sixteenth century obliges
him to spend so much time in France that humanists and legists are to be seen
debating their kingdom's structure and its history (II, 259-75, 309-18) ; the
scholastic John Mair writes a History ofGreater Britain; and we hear something
of the historiography of the Anglican Church established by Bale and Foxe (II,
489, 99-100, 107-8) . Yet it comes as something of a shock to realise that Sir
John Fortescue appears only (II, 54-6) as one who used the idiosyncrasy of
English customary law to suggest that civil and canon law had no place in that
realm. That he was the author of a doctrine of kingship regale etpoliticum, of
crucial importance in all Elizabethan and Stuart constitutional debate, is never
mentioned at all .
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civil authority and confined to spiritual functions, while secular princes and
magistrates acquired some part of the divine authority displayed by judges and
kings in Israel . In terms ofHellenic political philosophy, the via moderna was a
little less Aristotelian than it was Stoic, since the latter school had tended to
find the origins of political society in discovered necessity rather than innate
rationality .
Ockhamist and nominalist thinking played its part in preparing the spiritual
crisis which convinced Luther that only faith in God's unbidden grace could
connect the believer to his salvation ; and from this crisis Luther emerged with
the conviction that the authority ofthe civil magistrate was directly ordained by
God as a means to the punishment of human sin, so that even the tyrannous
ruler might in no circumstances be resisted or disobeyed . But conciliarists of the
via moderna - such as Jean Gerson, whose teaching was carried on at Paris by
Mair and Almain - while concurring in the view that civil society, since it
could not be the creation of natural reason, must have arisen as a consequence
of sin, had developed a view of its origin far more secular, anthropocentric and
even populist . In order to control evil-doers, the people had incorporated itself
as a community and conferred imperium on the magistrate ; and where Thomas
Aquinas held that in so doing it had established an authority of a kind not
previously existing and so could not bind the magistrate in its exercise, the
radical scholastics affirmed that the people could give nothing which was not in
it already, and so retained authority over the magistrate whom it created . What
the radicals had affirmed of the Church in their attempt to render the Pope
subject to conciliar authority, they did not hesitate to re-affirm of civil society ;
but what the secular ruler lost by finding himself the people's creature was at
first more than made up by finding himself wielding an authority which God
had not conferred on Pope or bishop. The advent of Protestantism, however,
was to set him new problems.
It is the populist component in radical scholastic thought which Skinner
contends was the means of converting the Protestant belief in non-resistance
into an ideology of revolution . When the Lutherans of Germany (long before
there were any Calvinists to join the debate) reluctantly made up their minds to
justify resisting the Emperor, they got around the Pauline injunction to obey
the higher powers ordained of God by pointing out that power was in fact
distributed widely and diversely among men, so that one magistrate might
perhaps resist another who was behaving unjustly . There were two directions
which this argument could take. One, favoured by a group of jurists around
Philip of Hesse (II, 195-96), was simply Bartolist ; it sought means of showing
how the inferior magistrate might be said to hold an imperium not im-
mediately dependent on the Emperor. Not even among the outspoken
resistants of Nuremberg do we seem to find German republicans who held that
their city was sibi princeps ; but through the door marked "inferior magistrate"
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all kinds of constitutionalism could enter into Protestant resistance theory . Not
only Roman law (II, 124-28) but feudal and customary law of many varieties (II,
129-30) could be employed in defence of the rights of inferior magistrates,
though since the English "ancient constitution" does not in fact exemplify the
union of constitutionalism with resistance theory, I may be permitted to sound
a warning against its mention in this context (Skinner is cautious in doing so;
II, 311) . In France, where the king's authority was animatedly discussed in
relation to both Roman and customary law, and neo-Bartolist jurisprudence
tended to make him imperator in regno suo while denying imperium to in-
ferior magistrates, constitutionalism, legal humanism and Huguenot resistance
theory entered upon a memorably complex debate (Church, 1941 ; De
Caprariis, 1950; Kelley, 1970) . This is the context in which Skinner sets up his
main analysis ofBodin (II, 284-301) .
But the prescriptive and historical search after the origins of magisterial
authority would not of itselfgive rise to any theory ofpopulism . It was a group
of Saxon jurists (11, 197-99) in the first Lutheran debate about the justification
of resistance who propounded what Skinner describes as the "private law"
thesis . This contained the explosive implication that should a magistrate
behave unjustly, he might be resisted and slain by a private individual of no
magisterial authority at all, since he had forfeited title to be treated as anything
more than such an individual himself. Here was the germ of all future debate
about dissolution of government, state of nature and social contract; but
Skinner would have us look to the previous history ofradical scholastic thought .
The implication that civil society could be reduced to the relations obtaining
between individuals before the constitution of authority was readily intelligible
in terms of the perception - more Stoic than Aristotelian, more Ockhamist
than Thomist - that it had arisen when individuals incorporated themselves as
a people in response to the necessities of existence; and it presented the process
whereby "the powers that be are ordained of God" as one in which the people
took part at the foundation of civil society . Lutheran and Calvinist theorists of
resistance displayed a very understandable reluctance in adopting this
argument rather than the more conservative alternative advanced by the
Hessians ; but as it made its way into accepted speech, both the authority of
inferior magistrates, and the historic origins of institutions which the new
constitutional antiquarians were seeking out, could increasingly be presented as
enacted by popular election. We begin to see why Hotman's Francogallia is an
essay in populist history, while an English panegyric upon the immemorial
antiquity of custom is not .
As the Hessian and Saxon modes of argument merge, the advocacy of
resistance passes from Lutheran to Calvinist hands . Calvin's theory ofephors -
which he acquired from Cicero, Melanchthon and Zwingli (II, 231-32) - is one
move in the pattern, since ephors are not mere inferior magistrates, but
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History
Johns Hopkins University
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Values in the Age ofthe Counter-Reformation (Berkeley) .
Burns, J .H. (1977) : Review of The Machiavellian Moment in English Historical Review,
92, p. 137.
Laski, Harold J . (1936) : "Political Theory in the Later Middle Ages", in The Cam-
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ofJohn Major and George Buchanan", TheJournal ofBritish Studies, 2 (1962) .
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Walzer, Michael (1966) : The Revolution of the Saints : A Study in the Origins of
RadicalPolitics (Cambridge, Mass .) .
Weber, Max (1958) : The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by
Talcott Parsons (New York).
Wood, Neal R. (1976) : final sentence only of review of The Machiavellian Moment in
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