The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance The Age Reformation

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Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie

politique et sociale, Vol 3, No. 3 (Fall/ Automne, 1979) .

RECONSTRUCTING THE TRADITIONS : QUENTIN


SKINNER'S HISTORIANS' HISTORY
OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
J.G.A . Pocock

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought:


Volume One, The Renaissance; Volume Two, The Age ofReformation,
Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp . xxiv + 305, vi + 405, cloth
$29 .50, paper $9 .50 each .

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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QUENTIN SKINNER AND HISTORY

historians using historical means for historical purposes. There must be a


separation of functions ; the theorist or philosopher must be asked to accept
separate but equal status, and abstain from the practice of history if he/she is
unwilling to accept its discipline.
With the historicist philosopher or theorist, who wants to disclaim the disci-
pline of history with one hand while writing pseudo-history with the other,
there is nothing to be done - nothing, at least, that has not been done many
times already. A more subtly intractable problem arises, however - and I
suspect this will soon be evident in the responses to Skinner's book - with
theorists and philosophers who, while anxious to avoid the perpetuation of
pseudo-history, are intent upon using texts from the past for legitimately non-
historical purposes in the present . This is the problem of information . Such a
theorist too easily appears as one who already knows enough history for his/her
purposes, and is thrown into confusion by the wealth of new information which
the historian conveys unbidden to colleagues in other disciplines . This appears
both as impoverishing - because it seems to challenge, by removing them
from historical reality, many familiar interpretations which the theorist has
grown accustomed to using - and as embarrassingly rich, because it compels
awareness of many new meanings borne, and effects exerted, by texts in
history, which the theorist has not heard of before and does not yet know how
to exploit for non-historical purposes. The theorist will now be tempted to
condemn such information as theoretically and (however wrongly) historically
"insignificant" (Shklar, 1978), and it is to be feared that we shall soon be
reading attacks on Skinner similarly inspired. This seems a pity, since the
historians' information was not intended to embarrass the theorist ; but it is an
aspect of reality, and the theorist should not stand aghast, complaining of
being told truths which he/she does not know how to use . Such problems in
communication, however, are hard to avoid when a rigorous separation is made
between two modes of enquiry into the same field. It is evidence of our un-
derlying historicism that the theorist should be dismayed by being informed
that he /she is not a historian, after insisting all along that he/she is not .
Meanwhile Skinner, under attack from theorists and philosophers who will
accuse him of excessive erudition, must expect to face the scrutiny of his fellow
historians, who will need to assure themselves that he is not impoverishing the
complex realities of history for the sake of theoretical or philosophical clarity .
Here there arise a new'set of problems, and to investigate these we must
consider just what a rigorously historical exegesis must entail and how Skinner
has carried it out .
In the same preface he tells us that the method he advocates "enables us to
characterise what their authors were doing in writing" these texts (I, xiii) . The
history of political thought is histoire evenementielle; it consists of actions
performed by individuals in contexts which render them intelligible, and a

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J. G.A. POCOCK

' `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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QUENTIN SKINNER AND HISTORY

context prior to stressing the political or the social .


"It will now be evident", says Skinner (I, xiii), "why I wish to maintain
that, if the history of political thought were to be written essentially as a history
of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links
between theory and practice" . "Theory" is to denote understanding of the
linguistic context within which an action must be specified if it is to be per-
formed; and the agent as theorist finds himself obliged to explore the language
in which he is to verbalise the action which as practitioner he desires to per-
form. But the word "ideology" is commonly employed to intimate some
relation between (1) conceptual and verbal structures and (2) social experience
and reality viewed in considerable depth and complexity . That does not seem
to be quite how Skinner is using it here. The account which he has just given us
seems to confine it to (1) the agent, (2) some action he desires to perform, (3)
the language or languages available to him in which the action may be ex-
pressed ; and if that is indeed all, then "ideology" may be a political but has
not become a cultural or social reality, and in fact connotes little more than
"rhetoric" - the employment in action of the available resources of
recognised public speech . Time would be wasted in attempting to demonstrate
that this is all Skinner takes it to be; we know better than that . But we can, I
think, define - or perhaps delimit - the scope of this book by saying that it is
a history of how publicists and theorists explored and exploited the resources of
language available to them, but that it does not concern itself very much with
the reasons why these languages, and not others, were available to them.
Though Skinner alludes to the concept of mentalite (I, xii), he does not make
much attempt to depict mental and verbal structures as existing for a whole
constellation of social and cultural reasons ; and one may suspect that his
concern with action as the central historical reality has led him to confine
himself, at times rather rigorously, to what named individuals did with the
more formal vocabularies available to them - with the parole rather than the
langue . One might say, in other terminology, that his concern is with the verb:
with verbum as factum rather than as logos . (The same, for what it is worth,
might be said of Hobbes, on whom Skinner wrote the essays which made him
an acknowledged master.)
All this can be very easily justified . Too much concern with logos, as we have
seen, can lead to the construction of ideal histories, in which the potentialities
of language are explored without regard to the actualities of history. And if
Skinner seems at times to be writing with Ockham's razor, severely restricting
the number of language-contexts in which individuals can be seen to have
acted, that very economy has permitted him to mobilise and present an
astonishing number of individuals and their performances . Some theorists and
philosophers, I have already suggested, will certainly find the forest too dense
for their methods of survey ; and those historians who will on the contrary be

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J. G.A . POCOCK

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.

Volume I: The Renaissance is a study of political humanism, especially in its


republican form . Starting as far back as the late twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies, it traces the growth of an ideal of liberty, whereby Italian city republics
affirmed, first, their political autonomy as against the Empire and sub-
sequently the Papacy ; second, their internal character as communities of in-
dividuals living together in citizenship, which they affirmed partly as a means
of asserting the autonomy they desired and partly as an ideal desirable for its
own sake. This libertas, the re-affirmation of a classical ideal, is one of the two
modes in which "liberty" has been asserted throughout the early modern
period - the other being the legal, moral and economic liberty of the in-
dividual as against the encroachments ofpower (Hexter, 1979, pp. 293-303) -
and its assertion we take to be one of "the foundations of modern political
thought" . Skinner, however, is not primarily concerned to explicate his title, or
to expound in detail wherein it is that "modern" differs from "medieval" or
from "ancient" . This is in many ways no bad thing . To erect a complex model
of "medieval political thought", is almost inescapably to write the kind of
ideal history which, as we have seen, philosophers tend to demand but Skinner
is determined to avoid; and we have enough knowledge by now of the
distortions and fanaticisms which can arise when "modernity" is treated as
itself a historical category. Yet there the word is in his title, and we are entitled
to ask what use is to be made ofit. His answer will emerge in due time, and has
little to do with the shaping of his first chapters or even his first volume . What
may be said at this stage, however, is that Skinner gives an essentially simple
account of the "ideology" with which the Italian cities had to contend : it was
the claim of some Bolognese jurists that the Emperor possessed merum im-
perium over the regnum Italicum (I, 4-8) . The suggestion, dear to so many
historians from Burckhardt to Baron, that there was a pre-existing cosmos of
medieval ideas about universal authority, regnum and sacerdotium, from
which the republics had to break free, is not rendered much further explicit .
There is no predetermined requirement that the history of political ideas,
merely because they are capable of macrocosmic extension, must be shown
taking place in a context of macrocosmic change . But it might on the other
hand be argued, first, that the context in which a linguistic action takes place is
not inherently limited to that which is necessary to make it intelligible as an
QUENTIN SKINNER AND HISTORY

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

Bartolus of Saxoferrato (in the spelling he prefers) in declaring that a republic


might claim de facto to exercise the imperium otherwise belonging to the
Emperor, and so to be .cibiprinceps. The ideological strategies of the fourteenth
century ensured that when the scholastic Marsiglio of Padua affirmed a similar
doctrine, he was arguing for the independence of municipal authority from
papal control, and so using a republican argument to the temporary profit of
the Emperor. The republic which was .cibi princeps and the king who was
imperator in regno ruo, however, were to be the ultimate beneficiaries of this
revival of a local secular autonomy ; or rather, what the republics of the
Renaissance began the kings of the Age of Reformation continued, and what
kings began militant Protestant associations were to continue in claiming to
resist even kings themselves. This story has been told before, but Skinner is to
tell it in new language and with new insights .
We have now before us the image of a republican ideology part rhetorical
and part juristic, interacting with an anti-papal ideology part juristic and part
scholastic . It is from the latter that Skinner is to draw the main connecting
thread of his entire pattern ; the concept of a "radical scholasticism",
originating in the via moderna of William of Ockham, carried on by Marsigho
of Padua, conciliarists such as Jean Gerson and Sorbonne theorists such as John
Mair and Jacques Almain, to the ultimate benefit of Lutherans, Calvinists,
Anglicans and monarchomachs . Before we pursue this pattern, however, we
must consider that Volume I is principally concerned with an Italian republican
civic humanism which was rhetorical rather than scholastic, Ciceronian and
Stoic rather than Aristotelian. It is at this point that we have moved decisively
away from the traditional organisation of the history of political thought as a
history of political philosophies; for rhetoric, though it may convey many
messages pertaining to theory and philosophy, is by its nature distinct from
either. We must realise, also, that the subject-matter of rhetorically-based
political thought is frequently sui generic, and remote from the juristic and
scholastic pattern of ideas so easy to associate with formal philosophy. The
rhetorician's concern was with morality and style, with virtue as speech in
action ; what he took up from the traditions of the polis, therefore, was the idea
ofvirtue as expressed in civic actions and in the relationships obtaining between
citizens . His ideal Roman, Cicero, was an orator and not a jurist, and the great
tradition of ideas about ius and imperium -- the true legacy of Rome in
political thought - he left largely in the hands of the jurist and his ally the
scholastic . This great division in the Latin legacy persisted in both medieval and
neo-classicist thinking, and a consequence is that republican humanism, with
its stress upon virtue, corruption and liberty in the sense of participation, is
conceptually and linguistically discontinuous with the juristically-based modes
of thought and speech which stress right, authority and liberty in the sense of
immunity . Francesco Guicciardini was a doctor of laws, but one would hardly

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Q UENTIN SKINNER AND HISTORY

guess it from his writings on citizenship and action .


Skinner seems to produce only one theorist at home in both the republican
and the juristic vocabularies : Mario Salamonio (I, 148-52 ; 11, 131-34), a Roman
patrician with Florentine political experience . He shows that rhetorical and
scholastic (Ciceronian and Bartolist) modes of republican expression ran
parallel, but not that they converged ; he is not anxious (1, 149) to take up the
possibility that Savonarola used an apocalyptic vocabulary to link citizenship
with grace. He is, however, able to exploit this dichotomy so as to clarify in a
most valuable manner our understanding of the European response to
Machiavelli . Anti-Machiavellism, it turns out, was principally a scholastic
creation, the work of Italian and Spanish Dominicans and especially Spanish
Jesuits (the Huguenot anti-Machiavellism of Innocent Gentillet was a minor
affair, local and chauvinistic) . Reading Machiavelli in a scholastic context, they
were able to attribute to him a systematically normative doctrine of ragione di
.rtato which he had never called by that name, and which existed more to be
attacked than to be adopted (I, 248-51) ; and the Jesuit revivers of Thomism
were able to bracket a "Machiavellian" heresy that dominion was founded in
necessity with an "Ockhamist" and "Lutheran" heresy that it was founded in
the direct command of God (II, 143, 171-2) . It cannot be called illegitimate to
read Machiavelli in a scholastic context, and yet we have to recall that he had
never addressed himself to that context or used the words attributed to him
when his speech was translated into that vocabulary. The scholastics, after all,
were heresy-hunters and inquisitors, and the essence of the inquisitor's art is
showing that you meant what you did not intend, and must have intended
what you did not say. In the school ofLeo Strauss the domini canes have found
their modern successors; but they are not the only students of political thought
to proceed by treating as philosophy that which was never spoken as such . It is
hard for even the most resolute to avoid this.
There is a vitally important difference between the rhetorical and the juristic
modes of attributing liberty and autonomy to the local community . The one is
republican; the other is better described as populist . The one asserts the moral
centrality of the relations among citizens, and is concerned with virtue,
equality, participation and their corruptions . The other employs the complex
vocabulary of Roman law to elaborate the idea that the populss is capable of
generating imperium and conferring it upon princes and magistrates : that the
people are under God the origin of all just power. But the classical republic
does not rest upon a grant of imperium, and the lex regia sets up principates
and monarchies rather than republics . We have consequently a very long
journey to make, through modes of thought essentially magisterial and
monarchic - in which the popular origin of power either does or does not
modify the imperium of the ruler - before we reach the era of Rousseau and
Madison, when the concepts of republican and representative government lay

10 3
J. G.A. POCOCK

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.

The investigation of humanist thought outside the ideology of city


republicanism (which never became fully established in Antwerp, Nuremburg
or Berne) is actually contained in the last three chapters of Volume I, headed
"The Northern Renaissance" . Here a classical rhetoric of public morality, with
Erasmus rather than Petrarch (or Machiavelli) as its ruling spirit, is seen making
its way on royal and imperial ground. Instead ofIl Principe and the Dialogo del
Reggimento di Firenze, we have The Book Named the Governor and the
Dialogue of Counsel; instead of treatises on the vivere civile and its virtu, we
have literature designed to teach a new cognition of values to princes and the
courtiers and clerics who desire to be their counsellors . The counsellor is
obedient to established and Christian authority, and we expect to hear less
about the moral ambiguities of action; only as the theorist of ragione di stato
does Machiavelli find much place in the world of the kings . But northern
humanism is not without its critical and subversive possibilities . Ragione di
stato is discussed (1, 248-255 ; 11, 171-3): Montaigne thinks stoic obedience, and

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Q UENTIN SKINNER AND HISTORY

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 .
105
J. G.A. POCOCK

We must understand, however, the deliberate austerity with which these


volumes, for all their richness of detail, are planned . Their sustained intention
is to distinguish between the rhetorical, scholastic and juristic traditions of
political thought, and to study the interactions between them . These traditions
were held in common by all of Latin Christendom, a cultural area in which
humanists, scholastics, civilians - and soon we must add Protestant and
Counter-Reformation ideologues - constituted a series of freely circulating
intellectual communities . It has therefore been possible to plan this book on a
"European " scale, selecting "Latin" rather than "national" contexts in which
the principal styles of thought may be shown in action . Should we insist upon
the thesis that this was an age in which the universe ofLatin Christendom broke
apart to form a diversity of nation-states, we should merely be asking for a
history of political thought written upon an alternative pattern . Skinner has not
set out to map and explore the cultural diversity of early-modern political
thought in all its richness of texture, so much as to persuade us to revise the
paradigms which have been governing our understanding of its history. His
enterprise is highly programmatic, and is conducted by means of an extremely
rigorous selection of texts and contexts . The wealth of detail cannot blind us to
this, or alter the fact that the notion of "ideology" is at times heavily attracted
towards the notion of "paradigm" .
Volume II: The Age ofReformation displays Skinner at the height of his
powers, organising a most complex picture with masterly skill . Its chosen theme
is the relation between Lutheranism and Calvinism on the one hand, and on
the other that "radical scholasticism" which was mentioned earlier and now
emerges as the guiding thread that Skinner uses to organise the history of early
modern political thought . This is a large claim and - though Figgis, Laski and
others are acknowledged as predecessors (II, 123n) - a disturbing innovation
in the established wisdom ; the rest of the book and the rest of this essay will be
devoted to vindicating it. Where the via antiqua of Thomas Aquinas upheld
the harmony between natural reason and God's will, the via moderna traceable
from Duns Scotus through William of Ockham, and his conciliarist and
Sorbonnist successors, denied the capacity of human reason to organise itself to
a level where reality and morality could appear as anything except the im-
penetrable will and command of God. In political terms, this meant that
community and authority, which appeared in the via antiqua as the natural
outcome ofright reason, needing no divine action to bring them into existence,
seemed to those upon the via moderna the necessary consequences of human
sin, enjoined upon men by divine command which the limitations of their
being left them incapable of fully comprehending . Civil authority was rooted
in necessity and was therefore partly mysterious; and the direct command of
God which established it had been given only once and had not been reiterated
in the case of ecclesiastical authority . The Church was therefore excluded from

106
Q UENTIN SKINNER AND HISTORY

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"

107
J.G.A . POCOCK

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

108
QUENTIN SKINNER AND HISTORY

populares magistratus whose right of resistance may be retained by the popular


assemblies, or assemblies of estates, in which they were elected . Skinner,
however, is emphatic that there is nothing particularly original about the ideas
put forward by the Calvinists; at best, they were only completing what the
Ockhamists and Lutherans had begun before them . The nearest we come to a
distinctively Calvinist contribution is in the doctrine of covenant, whereby a
people undertake with God that they will maintain true religion and the
structure of magistracy that it implies (II, 236-38) . But, says Skinner, a
covenant may be the source of a duty to resist (chapter 7, at large) ; it can never
be the source of a right to do so, and our problem is to trace the process
whereby not only resistance, but the revolutionary reconstitution of govern-
ment, became a right established in the people at the very foundation of civil
society . To understand this (which is the business of his ninth and last chapter)
we must understand how the notions of magistracy, law, history and covenant
itself came to be pervaded by populist doctrines of social origin which were in
every case of radical-scholastic foundation. The process is completed by Mornay
(taken at 11, 305, n. 3, to be the author of the Defence of Liberty against
Tyrants) in whom a complex pattern of both covenants and contracts becomes
the substance of a doctrine which appears to ground the whole structure of
authority in civil society upon a series of acts of institution by the people (II,
325-37) . From Mornay we look ahead to Locke, characterised (following Dunn,
1969) as author of "the classical text of radical Calvinist politics" (II, 239) - a
judgment which must raise problems for those concerned with his place in a
Whig context .
Part of Skinner's intention in advancing this interpretation is to call in
question "the sort of Weberian analysis of Calvinism as a revolutionary
ideology which has recently come to be so widely accepted" (II, 322-23) . There
could be no better illustration of the gap which exists between Skinner's own
use of "ideology" at I, xiii, and the sense in which he uses it here . Weber
(1958), Tawney (1929), Hill (1964), Walzer (1966) and George (1961) all
proceeded by asserting the existence of a Calvinist or Puritan mentalite, ex-
plaining it as "ideology" on Marxist or Weberian premises, and presenting it
as a plausible source of the political ideas propounded by those said to possess
it. For Skinner, with his fiercely exact eye for political thought as evenement,
this is unnecessary . To speak of "ideology" is to assert no more than the
presence of a political attor who needs to say something, and of a variety of
languages available to him in which things may be said. And this means not
only that Skinner's methodology is as Ockhamist as his history, and that he is
telling us that mentalites and ideologies non runt multiplicanda praeter
necessitatem ; it means also that the pursuit of languages is not the same en-
terprise as the pursuit of mentalitis, and may lead to the discovery in historical
reality of important and operative modes of thought and speech which are not

109
J.G.A. POCOCK

coincident with what is often meant by "ideologies" . We may dismiss from


consideration those who regard it as a moral and ideological offence that one is
not engaged in the pursuit of ideology (Ashcraft, 1975 ; Wood, 1976) ; but it is
not contested that a mentaliti may be established as a historical reality and an
act of political speech shown to be part of its configuration . We may then set
about juxtaposing this way of looking at the act with Skinner's ; but he will
insist on the autonomy ofhis approach, and perhaps ofthe other as well.
Skinner has returned to the position ofFiggis (1923), who held that there was
a high road "from Gerson to Grotius", and of Laski (1936) and Oakley (1962)
who held that there was another "from (the Council of) Constance to (the
Revolution of) 1688" (II, 123, n . 1). Not Thomas Aquinas (to say nothing of
the Devil) but William of Ockham was the first Whig . There is a superb
chapter . on "The Revival of Thomism", which demonstrates that the
restoration of the natural-law theory of society was a majestic act of intellectual
reaction by Spanish Jesuits, desirous in the name of the Counter-Reformation
of refuting Ockham, Luther, Machiavelli and Erasmus in a single auto da raxon
(even Sepulveda, it turns out, was rejected less because he denied the humanity
of the Indians than because he seemed to suggest that dominion might be
founded in grace ; 11, 168) . James I and the Anglicans were wrong in supposing
that Jesuits and Puritans were allied against them; Mariana's justification of
resistance is a borrowing of conciliarist ideas otherwise repudiated (II, 346-47) .
An important step in the development of a theory of resistance as a right is
said to have been the adoption from Gerson of the doctrine of subjective right
(11, 116-117) . lur or right could inhere only in the individual, who exercised it
as an unlimited potestas over a thing, so that it could not possibly form the
basis of a ruler's imperium over a res publica. Here is the origin of all property
theory and possessive individualism, but we observe (II, 328-29) that it did not
stem from the need to vindicate the private ownership of goods so much as
from the need of a formal definition of the role of imperium ; the individual
must be proprietor if he was to retain possession of the rights which he
delegated to the magistrate . At this point the student trained in contemporary
neo-Aristotelianism may detect that crucial transition from "classic natural
law" to "modern natural right" which he has been taught to consider the key
to the history of political philosophy; and he may note that via antiqua and via
moderna were opposed in the sixteenth century over this very question . But a
doctrine derived from the via moderna cannot have been founded by those
fiendish "moderns" and "teachers of evil" , Machiavelli and Hobbes - even
though Hobbes had much to do with its later growth, it took a scholastic
training to make one suppose that Machiavelli ever heard of it. Via moderna
was as scholastic as via antiqua, and as ancient ; both originated in the thir-
teenth-century revival of Aristotle, and it was the latter which had to be revived
at the Council of Trent . The difference between them, furthermore, was that
Q UENTIN SKINNER AND HISTORY

the "ancient" held Greek philosophy to be in accord with Christian revelation,


whereas the "modern" did not ; and it follows that for both the historical
moment separating "antiquity" and "modernity" was that of Christ's in-
carnation, when the Old Law had come to an end (II, 150). The via moderna,
like the devotio moderna, held that faith had decisively superseded
philosophy; and the twentieth-century legend of the "great tradition" and the
"modern" conspiracy against it (Gunnell, 1979) is a historical myth designed
to carry on the warfare of Aristotelian philosophy against both science and
faith .
Skinner concludes with a disquisition on "the acquisition of the modern
concept of the State" (11, 349), with which "as an omnipresent yet impersonal
power, we may be said to enter the modern world : the modern theory of the
State remains to be constructed, but its foundations are now complete" (II,
358 ; explicit liber) . This is the sum of what he has to say to us concerning the
transition to "the modern world", and since I have praised his book as not
overmuch concerned with this mode of presentation, it would be ungracious to
cavil at the end. The Conclusion consists largely of semantics, in which the
sixteenth-century use of status, stato, etat, "estate", and "state" is said to
have changed in ways which reveal the emergence of "the modern concept" .
Perhaps they do, though it would be easy to allege counter-examples in which
non-modern usages persisted . A more general criticism would be that this is an
odd way to end a book whose second volume has been devoted to the growth of
theories of resistance and revolution . In Mornay and Buchanan, the theorists
with whom the book essentially concludes, we might be said to have something
much more like a "modern conception" ofcivil society : a complex of activities
originated by a people, generating and conferring the authority which they
both necessitate and limit. One can see how "civil society" in this sense might
be said to entail the existence of "the state" in the sense in which Skinner is
using the word; but it might have been better to let the book end in the
dialectic between the two .
To say so, however, entails a further ingratitude : the book ends too soon .
There is need of a further volume, carrying the story forward another hundred
years, and if Skinner will not write it someone else will have to . In the century
separating Mornay and Buchanan from Locke and Pufendorf, republican
humanism underwent its northern revival ; religious and civil theories of
resistance and authority were convulsed and restated ; doctrines of natural law
and ius gentium advanced and expanded ; and the word "modern" began to
be used in its modern sense . A great deal of this happened in England, and it is
noteworthy that Skinner's account of English political thought breaks off about
1560. We are not systematically introduced to Hooker, and though we meet
Suarez, Bellarmine and Mariana, the Jesuit adversaries of James 1, we hear
nothing of the works of that academically sound monarch himself. The reason
J. G.A . POCOCK

is plain : there is no dealing with James or Hooker without entering the


mammoth cave of Puritan studies, from which one could not hope to emerge
for at least a hundred years . It may also be inferred, from Skinner's citation of
the forthcoming books of Richard Tuck and James Tully (both 1977), as well as
from Duncan Forbes's recent study of Hume (1976), that Cambridge
scholarship has in store for us a massive revival of an interpretation of the
seventeenth century from a viewpoint stressing jurisprudence and the
resurgence ofius gentium, which Forbes has pitted against civic humanism as a
key to the Scottish Enlightenment . There is then no danger of starvation, and it
would be churlish to complain that Skinner has left us much to do. The
paradigms are upheaved, and the work goes forward .

History
Johns Hopkins University

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