Annabel Brett, James Tully, Holly Hamilton-Bleakley-Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought-Cambridge University Press (2006) PDF
Annabel Brett, James Tully, Holly Hamilton-Bleakley-Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought-Cambridge University Press (2006) PDF
Annabel Brett, James Tully, Holly Hamilton-Bleakley-Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought-Cambridge University Press (2006) PDF
Edited by
Annabel Brett and James Tully with
Holly Hamilton-Bleakley
cambridge university press
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Contents
Part I Introduction
1 The context of The Foundations 3
mark goldie
2 Linguistic philosophy and The Foundations 20
h o l ly h a m i lt o n - b l e a k l e y
v
vi Contents
Bibliography 262
Index 288
Contributors
vii
Preface
The present volume has its beginnings in a conference of the same title held at
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 2003 – the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the publication of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. We would
like to start by thanking everyone involved in making that event a success.
To Holly Hamilton-Bleakley we owe both the original idea for the conference
and an enormous amount of the work involved in organising it. Aysha Pollnitz
and Jacqueline Rose helped us out with exemplary efficiency and cheerfulness.
But our greatest thanks are, of course, due to our speakers, whose uniformly
excellent papers and comments made for such a memorable and stimulating
intellectual occasion. We can only regret that for reasons of space we were
not able to include all their contributions in this volume, and we would like to
express our gratitude in particular to David Colclough, Tim Hochstrasser, Kari
Palonen and Joan Pau Rubies for their part in the proceedings. We would like
to express our special gratitude to John Salmon, whom we remember for his
generous help with the project and outstanding contribution to the history of
European thought.
There are several reasons why, twenty-five years on, Quentin Skinner’s Foun-
dations presented an apt subject for the kind of rethinking we wanted to encour-
age. It was in many ways an act of rethinking itself. One of Skinner’s stated
aims in the preface to that volume was simply to write ‘a more up-to-date sur-
vey’ of the transition from medieval to early-modern political thought, taking
into account the new research and approaches which had evolved since what
he viewed as the last such attempt, Pierre Mesnard’s L’essor de la philoso-
phie politique au XVIe siècle of 1936. The episodes, figures and categories he
deployed bear the distinctive mark of a prior tradition of analysis, going back to
the work of his Cambridge predecessor John Neville Figgis at the beginning of
the twentieth century. But his ambitions for the two volumes did not rest solely
with integrating new research into an inherited analytical framework. As his
Preface goes on to make plain, he wanted to rethink this material in such a way
as to demonstrate two major new ideas of his own: one, that the story of this
transition is the story of the genesis of the modern concept of the state; two, that
to write this story means writing not, in the first instance, about the ‘great texts’
viii
Preface ix
of the Western canon, but about the normative vocabularies or ideologies that
constituted the political discourse of the time. Only within these vocabularies,
Skinner famously postulated, do the great texts find their intentionality and their
sense; only in this context can continuity, change and transition be located.
In this sense, Skinner’s book looked both backward, towards a by-then classic
tradition of writing, and forward, towards a new vision of what the history of
political thought could look like. The success of his Janus-faced Foundations
is as remarkable as it is well known. Skinner effectively reconfigured the field
of late-medieval and early-modern political thought, and a subsequent genera-
tion of scholars has gone to work within its outlines, inspired by his map and
his method. Nonetheless, as they have done so, they have inevitably pushed
at some of the boundaries he set out, questioning, refining or expanding both
the substantive analyses and their methodological premises. Indeed, Skinner
himself has to some extent done the very same thing. In the spirit of the orig-
inal, the aim of the conference and of this volume was both to look back at
these developments and assess their significance, and at the same time, more
importantly, to look forward to where these new developments point us now at
the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was not a book about method
in itself, but it was one that self-consciously aimed to exemplify a method.
Accordingly, the first two chapters of this book devote themselves, by way
of introduction, to that theme. Mark Goldie situates Foundations within the
intellectual context of Cambridge in the 1970s, while Holly Hamilton-Bleakley
views the work from the perspective of Skinner’s methodological dialogue
with Collingwood, Wittgenstein and Austin. The following four chapters centre
largely on volume I of Foundations and are concerned with two themes to
which Skinner has continued to devote a great deal of attention: Renaissance
civic humanism and liberty. John Pocock goes back to the book’s founding
moment to characterise its original dialectical intentions and critically to assess
some of the directions Skinner’s work on these themes has taken since. Marco
Geuna begins by examining the reconstruction, in Foundations, of an Italian
pre-humanist rhetorical culture, and goes on to consider its implications for
Skinner’s later work on Machiavelli and on the ‘neo-Roman’ idea of liberty
in Liberty before Liberalism. Warren Boutcher looks at the period through a
different lens, questioning the possibility, within Renaissance print culture, of
recovering the intentions of authors and hence the moment of historical agency
on which Skinner’s method ultimately turns. Finally, Cathy Curtis takes an
author who looms large in Skinner’s story of Renaissance political thought,
Thomas More, re-examining the nature of his republicanism and questioning
the explanatory power of ‘neo-Roman’ terminology in relation to his work.
The next three chapters take up the major themes of the second volume of
Foundations, Skinner’s original and powerful reinterpretations of scholastic
x Preface
Introduction
1 The context of The Foundations
Mark Goldie
I
Quentin Skinner’s early work was devoted as much to questions of method
as to substantive historical exposition. Indeed, he became known to far wider
audiences through his methodological essays than through those in his first
field of research, the political thought of the English Revolution.1 His most
cited article, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, published
in 1969, was strikingly polemical in the anathemas it pronounced upon the
practices of his colleagues.2 Accordingly, when The Foundations of Modern
Political Thought appeared in 1978, its reviewers were as much concerned
to assess the book in relation to its author’s methodological injunctions as to
judge its contribution to its historical topic. Foundations was, among much else,
a heroic hostage to fortune, and there was no little Schadenfreude among those
reviewers who claimed it had failed its author’s own tests.
In this essay I revisit some aspects of Skinner’s approach to intellectual
history, taking note of early reactions to Foundations. My aims are threefold.
First, I explore some of the impediments, within the historical profession in
the 1960s, which Skinner believed stood in the way of the study of intellectual
history. Second, I consider a specific criticism of Foundations, that it was overly
committed to a teleological account of the emergence of the modern theory of
the sovereign state. Third, interwoven throughout, I stress the extent to which
Skinner’s work was indebted to the German social theorist Max Weber. In this
discussion it should be kept in mind that a principal context for Foundations
lay in the practice of history in Britain in the 1960s, for the book’s origins lay
in lectures which Skinner first delivered in Cambridge in 1965.
For their comments on an earlier draft of this essay I am indebted to Holly Hamilton-Bleakley,
Clare Jackson, Jacqueline Rose and Sylvana Tomaselli.
Short reviews of Foundations are cited by author and journal title only.
1 Many of Skinner’s essays are now collected, in revised form, in Quentin Skinner, Visions of
Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). His principal early essay on the
seventeenth century was ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 8
(1965), pp. 151–78, repr. in Skinner, Visions, III.
2 Quentin Skinner, History and Theory 8 (1969), pp. 3–53; repr. in Skinner, Visions, I.
3
4 Mark Goldie
3 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), I, p. x. Max Weber, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive
Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978). The Weberian element in Skinner’s work is well brought out in Kari Palonen,
Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
4 Quentin Skinner, ‘“Social Meaning” and the Explanation of Social Action’, in Peter Laslett, W. G.
Runciman and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy, Politics, and Society, 4th series (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1972), repr. in Skinner, Visions, I; Quentin Skinner, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis
of Political Thought and Action’, Political Theory 2 (1974), pp. 277–303; repr. in Skinner,
Visions, I.
5 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practices of Opposition: the Case of Bolingbroke versus
Walpole’, in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Political Thought
and Society (London: Europa, 1974), pp. 93–128, repr. in Skinner, Visions, III.
The context of The Foundations 5
Skinner’s withering criticism of Elton, the senior professor in his own univer-
sity, did not appear until much later, in 1997. He pointed to Elton’s ‘cult of the
fact’, his narrow veneration of political history, his insistence that intellectual
history was ‘removed from real life’ and the striking lopsidedness of his views
about what kinds of history were ‘hard’ and ‘real’.6
Namier and Elton were historians of whom it might almost be said that their
guiding principle was the rejection of historical agents’ own accounts of what
they were doing. Namier regarded ideology, the exposition of normative ideas
about social and political life, as pathological, a systematic distortion of how
things really were. For him, the historian was an unmasker of ideology, who
lays bare the material foundations of political action. The fault of intellectual
historians was that they were naive enough to take seriously the utterances
of historical agents. The arguments which princes, courtiers, statesmen and
intellectuals put forth were so much sophistical self-justification, incidental to
the dynamics of power and to the ‘real’ motives and interests of the actors.
Ideologies were, in Namier’s memorable term, mere ‘flapdoodle’.7 They were,
to use more technical jargon, ‘epiphenomenal’. The latter term was familiarly
used by Marxists, and this points to the paradox that conservative practitioners
of ‘high’ politics shared a fundamental assumption with Marxists, that what was
argued and published by people in the past was not the vital material of history.
Historians of ideas accordingly belonged, in Elton’s words, in the ‘scullery’ of
the historical profession and not in the ‘drawing room’.8
Namierite and Eltonian canons of historical rectitude had two conse-
quences for ordinary practice in historical research and writing. By their lights,
manuscript archives were privileged above printed sources. Typically, the cor-
respondence of politicians should assume precedence over the treatises, tracts
and sermons of their times. A properly professional historian went to the Public
Record Office and the county record office and not to the rare books library.
While it was impossible to evade the obvious thought that nearly all historical
work depended on studying the utterances of past agents, it was held that utter-
ances in private correspondence were less compromised than those in public
speech. Public speech was characteristically described as ‘propaganda’, and
hence judged to be inherently distorted. Any historian who inhabited only the
milieu of rhetorical affect and public persuasion was fundamentally debilitated.
It was an argument which entailed a view about the authenticity of private utter-
ance, as if private speech were exempt from ‘ideology’.
6 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Practice of History and the Cult of the Fact’, Visions, I, pp. 8–26, originally
published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1997), pp. 301–16.
7 L. B. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1930), p. 95.
For his general reflections on method see Personalities and Power (London: Macmillan, 1955).
8 G. R. Elton, Return to Essentials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 12; quoted
in Skinner, ‘The Practice of History and the Cult of the Fact’, p. 14.
6 Mark Goldie
9 Skinner, Visions, I, ch. 1. On the uses and limits of ‘interpretative charity’ see ibid., I, ch. 3;
and Quentin Skinner, ‘The Rise of, Challenge to, and Prospects for a Collingwoodian Approach
to the History of Political Thought’, in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds.), The
History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
pp. 175–88, at pp. 185–6.
The context of The Foundations 7
Throughout Foundations, the verb ‘legitimate’ and its cognates were perva-
sive. The twelfth century, Skinner remarked, saw ‘the formation of an ideology
designed to legitimate the most aggressive of the Papacy’s claims to rule’. The
Huguenots set out to ‘legitimate the first full-scale revolution within a modern
European state’. Pierre du Moulin helped to ‘legitimate the rule of absolute
monarchy in France’.11 Theorists were seen to be doing ideological work on
behalf of some specified cause. They were said to meet ‘pressing ideological
10 Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. 12–13. 11 Ibid., I, p. 14; II, pp. 241, 264.
8 Mark Goldie
investigate a wide body of texts in order to establish the moral norms embedded
in the ordinary language of debate. The study of ideologies required the investi-
gation of genres, schools, traditions and shared beliefs rather than singular texts.
The range of hitherto hidden authors recovered in Foundations was remarkable,
from Azo to Zasius and Accolti to Zabarella. It was a striking feature of the
book that no chapter heading contained a person’s name. Rather, chapters had
such titles as ‘The Florentine Renaissance’ or ‘The Duty to Resist’. This ele-
mentary fact about the book’s plan liberated it from the litany of pedestalled
classics that structured most textbooks: Machiavelli, More, Bodin, Hobbes,
Locke. Foundations was, as one reviewer remarked, ‘collectivist’ history of
political thought.16 For those reviewers who were attached to a more heroic
conception of political philosophy, Skinner’s book was demeaning to philoso-
phy. It flattened the distinction between, in Michael Oakeshott’s words, genuine
‘philosophical reflection’ and the ‘forensic’ jousting of pamphleteers engaged
in ‘mere justification’. Judith Shklar likewise wished Skinner had distinguished
more strongly the ‘continuously interesting political theorists from those who
only concern us as part of the general scenery’.17
Foundations implicitly posed large questions about canonicity and about the
genres that should fall within the purview of the ‘history of political thought’.
Foundations based itself primarily, and more or less traditionally, on treatises
and tracts which addressed politics as a distinctive field of human activity and
moral difficulty. At the same time, it drew attention to less familiar sources.
It encompassed works by theologians, diplomats, lawyers and educationists,
together with advice books, panegyrics, city chronicles, annotations in the
Geneva Bible and plays by Shakespeare and John Bale.18 As Shklar remarked,
once the canon is broadened there is unavoidable slippage towards highly unsta-
ble territory as regards genre.19 In the decades since Foundations was published,
generic expansiveness has become much more comprehensive. Skinner’s inti-
mations, for example, of the importance of the history of curricula are carried
forward more fully, not least in his own study of the context of Hobbes’s civil
science.20 He also argued, in an essay of 1987, for a major enlargement of genre
in his account of the political theory of the frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico
16 C. Trinkaus, American Historical Review 85 (1980), p. 79n.
17 Michael Oakeshott, Historical Journal 23 (1980), pp. 450–1; Judith Shklar, Political Theory 7
(1979), p. 551n. I have dwelt thus far on positivist deprecations of intellectual history: some
critics, however, within intellectual history, have found Skinner’s own position to be prejudicial
to the proper autonomy of the history of thought.
18 For the two last see Skinner, Foundations, II, pp. 99, 222.
19 She wrote that, for Skinner, the political theorist is ‘seen as the necessary partner of the his-
torians, jurists, theologians, and poets of his age. For reasons not altogether clear, scientists,
metaphysicians, deviant and mystically inclined religious seers, and dabblers in magic are not
included’: Political Theory 7 (1979), p. 551.
20 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
10 Mark Goldie
in Siena.21 Generic expansiveness is, inter alia, the product of the impact of
literary ‘new historicism’, which has brought to the attention of historians of
political thought the poetry and drama of the past. By the 1990s some of the
humanist and republican themes essayed in Foundations were being explored
in work on, for instance, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and the poetry of the
English Civil War.22 A signal instance of this advent is the study of the Boling-
brokean assault on Walpole. The three decades since Skinner’s essay of 1974
on this topic saw a remarkably fertile range of research, much of it by literary
scholars. The topic now involves consideration of the novels of Jonathan Swift,
the poetry of Alexander Pope and James Thomson, the plays of John Gay and
Henry Brooke, the cartoons of Hogarth and the oratorios of Handel.23 Generic
expansiveness has eroded the orthodox boundaries of ‘the history of political
thought’, and, a quarter-century after Foundations, it is less clear whether the
subject survives other than as subsumed into intellectual history more generally,
and in turn into cultural history.
The emphasis in Foundations on ideologies rather than ‘classic’ authors has
latterly carried with it further hazards in the practice of the discipline. As the
‘linguistic turn’ across the whole of the humanities made its impact, and as
Marxism retreated, the term ‘ideology’, which was conspicuous by its presence
in Foundations, gave way to the ubiquity of the preferred terms ‘language’ and,
above all, ‘discourse’. Postmodern doubt about authorial agency, and emphasis
upon the reception of texts, has had the effect of rendering the world of ideas
less the production of authors than the common, unowned, vernacular of their
time. Ambient ‘discourses’ are apt to replace individual authors and texts. Iron-
ically, the result can be a variety of intellectual history which is rather like the
old history of ideas which Skinner had set out to castigate, in which Platonic
ideas float free of authors and historical contingencies. Biancamaria Fontana
has recently complained, apropos a collection of essays on early-modern
republicanism, of
surreal battlefields, where languages and vocabularies, jargons and paradigms joust
strenuously against each other, like the empty armours of non-existent knights in Italo
Calvino’s Our Ancestors. The result is little different from the struggle of opposing ‘isms’
in the old (pre-Cambridge-method) textbooks of the history of political thought.24
21 Quentin Skinner, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti: the Artist as Political Philosopher’, Proceedings of the
British Academy 72 (1987), pp. 1–56; repr. in Skinner, Visions, II.
22 Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New
Haven: Yale University Press 1996); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry,
Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
23 For a survey see Mark Goldie, ‘The English System of Liberty’, in Mark Goldie and Robert
Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 70–4.
24 Biancamaria Fontana, ‘In the Gardens of the Republic’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 July
2003, reviewing Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: a Shared
European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
The context of The Foundations 11
II
A central purpose of Foundations was to elucidate the emergence of the modern
concept of the state. Skinner defined the state in explicitly Weberian terms as
‘the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory’.27 Within
the body of the book his definitions tended more toward the juridical, for he
accented the emergence of the idea of legal sovereignty, and turned to the glos-
sators of Roman law to find its earliest expressions, notably in Bartolus of
Saxoferrato.28 In this respect the book constructed an arch from Bartolus to
Bodin, from the fourteenth-century jurist who responded to the overweening
claims of the emperor to the sixteenth-century jurist who reshaped the idea of
sovereignty in the circumstances of the French Wars of Religion. The framing of
the Foundations as a search for origins prompted the most persistent complaint
by reviewers, that it tended towards the teleological. John Salmon remarked on
the ‘tension between two of the professed aims of the book, between the exem-
plification of a newly prescribed historicist method in the history of ideas and
the somewhat Whiggish intent to illuminate the process by which the modern
concept of the state came to be formed’.29 Oakeshott, engaging in a piece of tu
quoque, asked,
is it not ‘unhistorical’, anachronistic, to think of [the concept of the state] as a con-
struction erected on ‘foundations’ laid by Marsiglio, Bartolus, Machiavelli, Beza, etc.?
These writers were not laying foundations; they were casuistical moralists and lawyers
fumbling for circumstantial arguments to support their clients.30
Similar criticism has resurfaced more recently. James Alexander has sug-
gested that while John Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment (1975) might be called
31 James Alexander, ‘An Essay on Historical, Philosophical, and Theological Attitudes to Modern
Political Thought’, History of Political Thought 25 (2004), pp. 116–48, at pp. 137–8.
32 Koikkalainen and Syrjämäki, ‘On Encountering the Past’, p. 53. Cf. Palonen, Skinner, pp. 71–2.
33 Skinner, Foundations, e.g. II, pp. 339, 347, 358.
The context of The Foundations 13
34 Skinner, Foundations, I, ch. 2. The theme is yet stronger in later work: Visions, II, passim.
35 Quentin Skinner, ‘Who are “We”?: Ambiguities of the Modern Self’, Inquiry 34 (1991), pp. 133–
53 (on Charles Taylor).
36 Skinner, Foundations, II, pp. 147n., 239; cf. pp. 328, 338–9, 347. For similar ellipses between
Bodin, Filmer and Bossuet, see II, pp. 114, 301.
14 Mark Goldie
37 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1955); Skinner, Foundations, I, p. 69 and passim.
38 Notably Puritanism and Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958); Society and Puri-
tanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964); and Intellectual
Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
39 Skinner, Foundations, II, pp. 114ff, 135ff. 40 Ibid., pp. 44, 340.
The context of The Foundations 15
Skinner judged that ‘the main foundations of the Calvinist theory of revolu-
tion were in fact constructed entirely by their Catholic adversaries’. He noted
that, consequently, his account was ‘at odds with the sort of Weberian analysis of
Calvinism as a revolutionary ideology which has recently come to be so widely
accepted’.41 He rejected the notion of Calvinist radicalism radiating downwards
‘to the political thought of modern times’, carrying with it a set of ‘modernising’
political tendencies.42 By demonstrating the Catholic and medieval roots of
theories of constitutionalism and resistance, Skinner dismissed a cardinal tenet
of the modernisation thesis held by liberals and Marxists alike, that early-
modern Protestantism was the midwife of modern political thought. It was,
Skinner concluded, ‘a mistake . . . to think of the development of this modern
“liberal” theory of constitutionalism essentially as an achievement of the seven-
teenth century’. Indeed, ‘the radical Saints of the seventeenth century [did not]
hesitate to make use of the dialectical weapons which had thus been fashioned
for them by their papist enemies’.43
As this last remark hints, there are, oddly enough, parallels between
Skinner’s argument in Foundations and histories of political thought written
by Royalists and Tories in Restoration and post-Restoration England. Writing
in reaction against the ruination wrought by the civil wars and regicide, these
writers sought to demonstrate that the Parliamentarians and Whigs inherited
their ‘king-killing’ doctrines from the papists. They dwelt, it is true, not upon
Catholic conciliarist constitutionalism, but rather on a different Catholic doc-
trine, no less dangerous to kingly authority, the doctrine of the papal ‘deposing
power’. In their formidable erudition they revealed a deep familiarity with a wide
range of medieval and sixteenth-century Catholic authors. One such polemi-
cist, Mary Astell, writing in 1704, pronounced that, in whatever its guises, ‘the
deposing doctrine . . . is . . . rank popery’. She proceeded to reveal the origins
of the ‘poison of rebellious principles’ and the doctrine of the ‘mutual com-
pact between king and people’ in the works of Bellarmine, Mariana, Molina,
Soto and Suárez, and in turn in ‘John Major, a Scotchman, and Buchanan’s
master’.44 Skinner invoked precisely the tradition within which Astell wrote,
for he cited the Civil War Royalist John Maxwell, whose contention was that
it was a mistake to find the roots of revolution only in the Calvinists, in Knox
and Buchanan, for the rebels against King Charles I ‘borrowed their first main
tenet of the Sorbonnists’, and particularly from William of Ockham and Jacques
Almain.45
It is worth observing at this point that it continues to be a surprise to some
modern readers that Catholic theology produced radical political outcomes. It
has been a surprise to Protestant and secular minds alike ever since nineteenth-
century Catholics, in flight from the French Revolution, transformed Catholi-
cism into a fortress against liberalism and socialism. And indeed a surprise ever
since seventeenth-century Catholics, in appalled reaction against the assassi-
nation of Henri IV by the monk Ravaillac, turned Catholicism into a bastion
of monarchical absolutism. Bossuet, around 1700, and De Maistre, around
1800, decisively separated modern Catholic political thought from the ‘king-
killing doctrine’ of ‘the Sorbonnists’ and Mariana. The Catholicism of the post-
French Revolution era in turn reinforced in the Protestant liberal, and socialist,
mind of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe an instinctive association
between the Reformation, revolution, liberty and modernity. This was not least
for Weber himself, who wrote under the shadow of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf,
in a Germany where the contrast between northern Protestant progressivism
and southern Catholic reaction seemed palpable.46 It was similarly the case for
historians like Christopher Hill, who belonged to the generation whose leftism
was forged in the face of Franco’s Catholic fascism: the Protestant and often
Nonconformist or Methodist ethic within English Marxism has been noticed
by its historians.47 By contrast, to insist, historically, as Skinner did, upon the
phenomenon of Catholic political radicalism marked Skinner’s sharpest devi-
ation from Weberian models in Foundations.48 His move was strongly anti-
Whig, hostile, that is, to an orthodox teleology about modernity and liberty.
Herbert Butterfield, in his classic indictment of the Whig Interpretation of
History (1931), rightly dwelt on the Protestant character of the Whig mind-
set. One is tempted to say that Skinner recovered the Catholic political tradition
in order to dispose of Protestant theories of liberal modernity. He did so not of
45 John Maxwell, Sacro-Sancta Regum Maiestas (1644); Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 123. A better-
known Royalist who pursued the same theme was Sir Robert Filmer, in the opening pages of
Patriarcha (Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991)).
46 Anthony Giddens, Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber (London: Macmillan,
1972); Norman Stone, ‘The Religious Background to Max Weber’, in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Perse-
cution and Toleration (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 393–407.
47 Raphael Samuel, ‘British Marxist Historians, 1880–1980’, New Left Review 120 (1980),
pp. 21–96.
48 A parallel development over the past thirty years has been the recovery of what would once
have been regarded as an oxymoron, the Catholic Enlightenment. For a survey, see Dale Van
Kley, ‘Piety and Politics in the Century of Lights’, in Goldie and Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, pp. 110–46.
The context of The Foundations 17
course in order to recommend Catholicism, but rather to clear the ground for a
quite different route into the history of concepts of liberty, a subject upon which
so much of his more recent work has dwelt.49
In making his move into the terrain of late-medieval Catholic political the-
ology, Skinner returned to an older historiographical tradition which had iden-
tified just such a line of development from Catholic conciliarism to Calvinist
constitutionalism. It was a minority tradition, yet one which produced some of
the earliest works to emerge in the history of political thought as an organised
university discipline. In Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), John
Neville Figgis had written that the decree which Gerson had penned for the
Council of Constance was ‘probably the most revolutionary official document
in the history of the world’, for it prefigured the arguments of early-modern
revolutionaries.50 Figgis’s claim is echoed in the useful historical catchphrase,
‘the road from Constance to 1688’.51 A number of reviewers of Foundations
were struck by its resemblance to Figgis’s book and to a body of work written
about the same time. ‘There is nothing here’, wrote Keith Thomas, ‘which Otto
Gierke or John Neville Figgis or A. J. Carlyle or J. W. Allen would not have
recognised.’52
Figgis was one of the earliest teachers of history in Cambridge after the
founding of the undergraduate course in 1873. The parallel between Skinner
and Figgis points to a key aspect of the context of Foundations, namely that,
for all the scepticism about intellectual history exuded by Geoffrey Elton in the
Cambridge of the 1960s, the Cambridge history school had, from the outset,
allotted a privileged place to the history of political thought. The subject was at
first compulsory in the degree course, a fact owing largely to Sir John Seeley’s
influence in the creation of the course. Seeley provided one prospectus for the
emerging faculty of history, oriented towards providing a school of statesman-
ship, within which the understanding of political theories and institutions in
historical perspective was central. It was a position defended in often quar-
relsome contention against those who held the Rankean view that the history
course should be a professional apprenticeship in archival research. True to its
49 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
50 J. N. Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625 (Bristol:
Thoemmes, 1998), p. 63.
51 Francis Oakley, ‘On the Road from Constance to 1688’, Journal of British Studies 2 (1962),
pp. 1–31. See also Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought,
1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and cf. Skinner, Foundations, II,
p. 123. Oakley’s many works on conciliarism themselves stand within the tradition they describe,
for they seek to vindicate a liberal Catholic’s dislike of contemporary papal monarchy. See, most
recently, Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church,
1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
52 Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books, 17 May 1979, p. 27; cf. Denys Hay, Journal of
Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980), pp. 223–6; S. T. Holmes, American Political Science Review
73 (1979), pp. 1133–5.
18 Mark Goldie
Rankean roots, the latter camp took its cue from a conception of Realpolitik in
which the evidence of the chancelleries was the essence of history. Elton was
heir to that tradition, just as Skinner inherited that of Seeley. Seeley’s version
had gained renewed impetus with the creation of a chair in political science
within the history faculty in 1928, the chair to which Skinner was elected in
1979, following the publication of Foundations.53
If Ranke was godfather to one historical tradition within Cambridge, the
Figgisians were no less Germanic in their chosen inspiration, for behind Figgis
and Seeley lay Gierke, whose Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht (1868) remains
unsurpassed.54 Gierke told a medieval story, of a Catholic political theology in
which Roman law was incorporated into canon law. That system of law gave rise
to a conception of corporate bodies as plenary legal entities, having authority
independent of, and superior to, any individual person. Such corporate bodies,
whether councils, cities or parliaments, came thereby to possess the ideological
means with which to challenge the authority of popes, emperors and princes
alike.
Skinner’s thesis in Foundations, by virtue of its decisive investigation of
Catholic political theology, entailed its author keeping unexpected historio-
graphical company. Figgis, who eventually withdrew to a monastery, was a
high Anglican at odds with the sovereign state of his day. There was an element
of nostalgia in his dismay at the shape of modernity and he leaned toward a
kind of communitarian medievalism.55 This of course could hardly be further
removed from Skinner’s political preferences. What the two men shared was a
general conviction that the history of political thought was central to the his-
torical enterprise, and a particular conviction that there were reasons to doubt
the prevailing political doctrines. By writing intellectual history, Skinner has
53 For the early history of the Cambridge history school see Stefan Collini, ‘A Place in the Syllabus:
Political Science at Cambridge’, in S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrow (eds.), That Noble Sci-
ence of Politics: a Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983); Stefan Collini, ‘Disciplines, Canons, and Publics: the History of “The
History of Political Thought” in Comparative Perspective’, and Robert Wokler, ‘The Professori-
ate of Political Thought in England since 1914’, both in Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk (eds.),
History of Political Thought in National Context; and Mark Goldie, ‘J. N. Figgis and the History
of Political Thought in Cambridge’, in Richard Mason (ed.), Cambridge Minds (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
54 English editions: Otto von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F. W. Maitland
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900); and Otto von Gierke, Natural Law and the
Theory of Society, 1500–1800, trans. E. Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934).
55 Figgis’s politics and that of his contemporaries in the early decades of the twentieth century
(‘the political theory of pluralism’) have recently attracted extensive attention. See Paul Hirst
(ed.), The Pluralist Theory of the State (London: Routledge, 1993); Julia Stapleton, English-
ness and the Study of Politics: the Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994); David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
The context of The Foundations 19
argued, we come to see the often parochial contingencies that gave rise to our
presiding and apparently permanent doctrines. He has written that:
we are prone to fall under the spell of our own intellectual heritage . . . [for] it is easy
to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking . . . bequeathed to us by
the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them.
Given this situation, one of the contributions that historians can make is to offer us a
kind of exorcism.56
Holly Hamilton-Bleakley
I am very grateful to Jim Tully and Mark Goldie for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this
essay.
1 See for instance the discussion in Quentin Skinner, ‘Interpretation and the Understanding of
Speech Acts’, in Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), I:
Regarding Method, pp. 103–27, at 117–19.
2 Ibid., p. 118.
20
Linguistic philosophy and The Foundations 21
he not only emphasises through his methodology, but also practises himself
with his methodology.
The canonist approach as it was practised in the early 1960s was, according
to Skinner, characterised by the view that there was a canon of classic texts in
the history of philosophy, which contained ‘“timeless elements”, in the form
of “universal ideas”, even a “dateless wisdom” with “universal application”’.3
Thus, these texts remained perennially relevant and could therefore be read in
order to address our contemporary political concerns.4 Indeed, they must be
read to address our problems, for their relevance to our concerns justified their
study.5
This approach demoted the agency of the author of the text in several ways,
but for reasons of space I shall mention only one: it encouraged a kind of
isolation of certain ideas or doctrines from the authors who generated them.
This tendency could take the form of A. O. Lovejoy’s ‘unit-ideas’ approach,6
or find expression in the more common injunction to study only the ‘problems’
of political philosophy rather than the theorists who articulated them.7 However,
this bifurcation of the author from her utterances could also be found in a more
subtle way in the general methodology of the canonists. This methodology was
founded on the assumption that an author’s position concerning a particular
doctrine was sufficiently understood by focusing on what that author had said
concerning that doctrine. The key to the meaning of an author’s utterances was
to be found within the utterance itself, because the utterance was understood
through an understanding of ‘the sense in which [the author was] using words’.8
3 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in James Tully (ed.),
Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1988), pp. 29–67, at p. 30.
4 Ibid., p. 30. For a restatement of Skinner’s characterisation of the canonist approach, see
P. Koikkalainen and S. Syrjämäki, ‘On Encountering the Past: an Interview with Quentin Skinner’,
in Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 6 (2002), pp. 34–63, at p. 38.
5 See for instance the argument in A. Hacker, ‘Capital and Carbuncles: the “Great Books” Reap-
praised’, American Political Science Review 48 (1954), pp. 775–86, at pp. 784 and 786.
6 A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: a Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 3–23, esp. 15.
7 For an example of this injunction see Hacker, ‘Capital and Carbuncles’, p. 786.
8 J. Plamenatz, Man and Society, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1963), I, p. ix. Here
Plamenatz makes a classic case for the textualist method employed by the canonists: ‘Those who
say that to understand a theory we must understand the conditions in which it was produced
sometimes put their case too strongly. They speak as if, to understand what a man is saying, we
must know why he is saying it. But this is not true. We need to understand only the sense in which
he is using words. To understand Hobbes, we need not know what his purpose was in writing
Leviathan or how he felt about the rival claims of Royalists and Parliamentarians; but we do need
to know what he understood by such words as law, right, liberty, covenant, and obligation. And
though it is true that even Hobbes, so ‘rare’ at definitions, does not always use a word in the
sense which he defines, we are more likely to get the sense in which he does use it by a close
study of his argument than by looking at the condition of England or at political controversies in
his day.’
22 Holly Hamilton-Bleakley
The consideration of the wider context of why the utterance was issued need
not be considered.9 In this ‘textualist’ method, authors themselves need not be
considered in the meaning of their utterances; divorced from why it was issued,
the utterance becomes removed from its author.
Skinner asserted that this separation of what was said from why it was said
led to the writing of a history of philosophy which was ‘nonsense’.10 He pro-
posed a new methodology which would lead to a genuinely historical history of
philosophy, at the centre of which was the re-uniting of an utterance with, first,
its author, by identifying what an author ‘meant’ by his utterance with authorial
intention and, second, the context within which it was uttered, by emphasis-
ing the need to discover intentions through the conventions within which they
are expressed. Thus, the new methodology was nothing less than a philosophy
about meaning, where ‘meaning’ is interpreted as what an author meant by
what he said in his text.11
The first casualty in Skinner’s theory of meaning was the canonist assumption
that the great texts of political philosophy all addressed in some way a set of
perennial questions, and could therefore be used to address our current political
problems. He drew on the work of Collingwood to assert instead that any text
must be seen as being written in response to particular questions or problems
at a particular time.12 Collingwood had put forward the notion of a ‘logic of
question and answer’,13 in which he argued that in order to understand what a
man means by what he has said, one must know not only what he has said, but
‘also what the question was to which the thing he has said or written was meant
as an answer’.14 The logic of question and answer was meant as a refutation
of propositional logic, the main characteristic of which Collingwood saw to
be the assignation of the properties of truth and falsehood to free-standing
propositions.15 Instead, ‘truth . . . was something that belonged not to any
single proposition, nor even . . . to a complex of propositions taken together;
but to a complex consisting of questions and answers’.16
In appropriating this idea, Skinner came to assert that what an author means
by what he says in his text is bound up with identifying the questions to which
the text is an answer, the context of argument in which it is meant as an inter-
vention.17 He further innovated within Collingwood’s logic of question and
answer by asserting that not only was a text meant as an answer to a question,
but that this concept could be translated into identifying the text as a response
to a specific political problem. In this way, Skinner moved the text away from
the largely dialectical context of Collingwood’s and later Gadamer’s ‘question
and answers’, and located it within a more practical framework.18 Thus, the text
is not timeless, but as particular and contingent as the problems it answers.19
This notion of context thrust his concept of the author to the forefront of his
methodology, for if a text is written as a response to a particular, contingent
problem, what becomes important in understanding it is not just the text itself,
but also what the author, as agent, is doing in writing it. In this way, the notions
of context and agency cannot be disentangled in Skinner’s methodology, where
‘context’ requires a recovery of the particular problems to which the text is an
answer, and ‘agency’ asserts that authors are actors because in their texts they
are responding to particular situations and particular other texts.20
It will be clear by now that Collingwood’s insights were useful in attacking
not only the canonists’ notion of timeless audiences, but also their textualist
method, as Collingwood’s description of propositional logic was not unlike the
textualist assertion that the meaning of an utterance is contained within the
utterance itself.21 Skinner saw in the textualists what Collingwood had seen
in the adherents to propositional logic: they both failed to recognise that the
meaning of an utterance is not sufficiently understood through the definitions of
17 See for instance Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, pp. 56–8. For a more recent, and more
elaborate, discussion of this point see Quentin Skinner, ‘The Rise of, Challenge to, and Prospects
for a Collingwoodian Approach to the History of Political Thought’, in Dario Castiglione and
Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds.) The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 175–88. See also the concise treatment in Skinner,
‘Interpretation’, pp. 114–16.
18 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 363–
71, for his discussion of the logic of question and answer.
19 The word ‘problem’ here should not be understood in the Kantian sense as an abstract concept
which stands outside history, but rather, on the contrary, as a particular problem that comes about
in historically situated political life. For a critique of Kantian problems through an affirmation
of the logic of question and answer, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 368–70.
20 It is, to a great degree, this Collingwoodian notion of agency, of connecting what an author may
be responding to – and thus what his intentions are – in writing his text with its meaning, that
has been criticised in the work of postmodernists, with the claim that authorial intentions are
irrecoverable, or unimportant because texts have a public meaning that need not refer to the
intentions of their authors. See the discussion in Skinner, ‘A Collingwoodian Approach’, esp.
pp. 177–81. The notion of intention and its relation to agency in Skinner’s work is discussed
below.
21 See Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 31.
24 Holly Hamilton-Bleakley
the words of that utterance.22 Rather, what Skinner saw as more important for
discerning the meaning of a word was the way it was being used by the author
within a wider linguistic context, particular to the time and place of the author,
of which the text was a product. Thus, in order to restore the historical context
of the text, Skinner worked out his own philosophy about meaning around the
notion of the meaning of a word as its use. In this, Skinner drew heavily upon
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, most notably his Philosophical Investigations.
In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein had put forward a notion of
language as a ‘multiplicity of tools’.23 Just as a tool could be used in a variety
of ways, Wittgenstein asserted that there was a countless variety of different
‘kinds’ of words and sentences, by which he meant ‘countless different kinds
of use’ of words and sentences.24 Because we can, and do, use words in many
different ways, Wittgenstein argued that we simply cannot think of words as
merely ‘names of objects’.25 In this he was arguing against the traditional view
in the philosophy of language, where the meaning of a word was identified with
an object of some kind which it was meant to signify, and the function of a
sentence was therefore thought to be one of making a statement, describing a
state of affairs.26 Wittgenstein, however, saw the meaning of a word as ‘its use
in the language’.27 The different uses to which we can put words and sentences
can all be thought of as different ‘language games’,28 and our language as a
whole consists of a collection of language games. Indeed, language in general
is likened to a game, where a game is an activity that is governed loosely by
rules, in the sense that as games are played the players seek at times to alter
the rules, or make them up as the game progresses.29 Thus, the meanings of
words are not fixed, but can change depending upon the rules of the particular
language game in which they are being used. Furthermore, particular language
games are in a state of flux themselves, in that the rules in any language game
are continually being altered by the players.30
Through building his own philosophy of meaning upon Wittgenstein’s notion
of the meaning of a word being largely determined by its usage within a partic-
ular language game, Skinner was able to argue against the textualist method of
the canonists which sought to understand a philosopher’s ideas solely through
studying what that philosopher said about them. Because our language is noth-
ing more than a collection of language games, any idea, when it appears, is
appearing within the context of a particular language game being played at a
22 See Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, p. 55.
23 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1968), para. 23. See also paras. 11–14.
24 Ibid., para. 23. 25 Ibid., para. 27.
26 P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), pp. 125–6.
27 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 43.
28 Ibid., para. 23. 29 Ibid., para. 83. 30 Ibid., para. 82.
Linguistic philosophy and The Foundations 25
that will have the most significant of effects upon those actions.55 In order to
advance this claim, Skinner employed conceptual resources from Max Weber,
and from the philosophy of language inspired by the work of Austin.56 From
Weber, Skinner borrowed the idea of the legitimation of an action, using it to
emphasise the distinction – but close connection – between an agent’s desire to
perform a particular action, and his desire to show that action to be legitimate.57
To explain how this legitimation takes place, Skinner turned to recent devel-
opments in the theory of speech acts, borrowing the notion that there exists
a special group of terms ‘which performs an evaluative as well as descriptive
function in the language’.58 That is, there is a group of terms which are used to
describe actions or states of affairs; but to employ them as descriptions is also
to perform the speech act of evaluating those actions or states of affairs. This
group of terms is very wide ranging, but examples would be words such as coura-
geous, honest, treacherous, disloyal, democracy, justice, etc.59 Skinner sought
to associate closely the evaluative function of these terms with his notion of an
illocutionary act, arguing that when an agent uses these terms, which Skinner
called ‘evaluative-descriptive’, he also performs certain illocutionary acts, such
as showing, expressing or inviting approval or disapproval of ‘the actions or
states of affairs which he uses them to describe’.60 Thus, an agent uses these
terms with the intention of either legitimating or repudiating a particular action.
Therefore, because of the evaluative character of this set of terms, any agent
who wishes to legitimate his own actions to others in his society must in some
way draw upon them to describe his behaviour.61 This desire to legitimate one’s
actions, however, carries with it important constraints on those actions, precisely
because the legitimation must be done through these normative terms.62 Like
any linguistic resource, the ways in which these normative terms are used are
governed by conventions which enable a shared understanding between an agent
and the others in his society. In specifying the various limits on the usages of
these terms, convention specifies the various limits on the range of actions
which can be described under them.63 Thus, only a certain range of actions can
be considered legitimate under any particular normative vocabulary.64 And this
means that any agent is bound in an important way by that vocabulary, in the
55 Skinner, ‘Some Problems with the Analysis of Political Thought’, p. 111.
56 See the discussion, ibid., pp. 111–16.
57 As Mark Goldie discusses in this volume, pp. 7–8.
58 Skinner, ‘Some Problems with the Analysis of Political Thought’, p. 111. 59 Ibid., p. 112.
60 Ibid., p. 111. 61 Ibid., p. 112; see also Skinner, Foundations, p. xii.
62 Skinner, Foundations, pp. xii–xiii.
63 See Skinner, ‘Some Problems with the Analysis of Political Thought’, p. 112, and Skinner,
Foundations, p. xii.
64 Skinner, ‘Language and Social Change’, pp. 132–3, and Skinner, Foundations, p. xii; see also
Skinner, ‘Some Problems with the Analysis of Political Thought’, p. 117, for his assertion about
the application of constraints of convention even in the face of those who wish to push past those
constraints (see also the discussion below concerning the ‘innovating ideologist’).
30 Holly Hamilton-Bleakley
sense that he must conform his actions so that they ‘fit the available normative
language’.65
In this way there are crucial links between political theory and political
practice, for the political theory of any given time is comprised of a normative
vocabulary, and understanding the conventions of this vocabulary will enable
one to discover the range of behaviour available to political actors at that time.
However, if the context of normative vocabularies enables one to understand
how individuals are constrained in their actions, and therefore offers one expla-
nation of those actions, it also enables one to emphasise the agency of those
individuals who attempt to revise normative vocabularies. Although Skinner’s
insistence upon the relationship between theory and practice was meant in large
part as a repudiation of historians who asserted that political actions could not
be explained through normative principles,66 much of his work deriving from
this insistence both before and after Foundations has been driven by the idea that
changes in a normative vocabulary will result in an alteration of the boundaries
constraining social and political behaviour.67 Thus, a crucial figure in Skinner’s
philosophy has been that of the ‘innovating ideologist’ – the individual who,
as Goldie explains, in an attempt to legitimate an otherwise untoward action,
manipulates certain normative terms by using them to describe an action which
does not meet the criteria for the conventional use of those terms.68 His inten-
tions are not only to bring about conceptual change, but to do it expressly for
the purpose of changing the constraints on action.
We have seen how the text in political theory is a locus of general conceptual
change.69 However, because the language of political theory is fundamentally a
normative language, the text is, first and foremost, a locus of normative concep-
tual change – it is a place where the author manipulates and redefines normative
terms. But although, as we have seen, the agency of the author becomes clear
when we consider what he is doing with these normative terms, the scope of
his agency is augmented when it is considered that this conceptual innovation
is intended to have, and will have, profound consequences for future politi-
cal action. Indeed, the direct link between conceptual change and social and
political behaviour emphasises the agency of the author because it illuminates
political theorising as a political action. When an author uses language in her text
with the intention of bringing about changes in social and political behaviour,
this use of language is, in itself, a political action. Thus, the distinction between
theory and practice is revealed to be one of great complexity and overlap, where
the author is a political actor, with her text as the locus of her actions.
I have tried to show how Skinner’s methodology in Foundations is not only
a methodology about ideological context, but also about agency within, and
against, that context. Agency is emphasised through Skinner’s assertion that
the meaning of a text must be found in the author’s intentions, thereby enabling
us to see the text as a political action. Context accompanies this emphasis as
an author’s intentions, and therefore actions, can only be understood through a
consideration of the wider linguistic conventions of the time, reminding us that
the text was aimed at a specific historical audience. Both concepts work together
in our quest to understand the meaning and significance of a text, leading us
through a humbling process of exegesis that enables us to see that the text was
not written for us, and therefore should not be asked to solve our contemporary
problems.70
It is true that recently Skinner has argued that in his methodology agency has
a secondary role in the study of normative vocabularies – describing his work as
leaving the author in ‘extremely poor health’.71 Yet, when this assertion is taken
in conjunction with a consideration of the way that Skinner himself practises his
methodology, one perceives an element of ambiguity.72 For Skinner’s practice
of his method demonstrates the high value which he places on agency, not only
because he tends to focus on theorists who intentionally act as catalysts for
70 Skinner’s memorable phrase comes to mind: ‘We must learn to do our thinking for ourselves’
in his ‘Meaning and Understanding’ p. 66.
71 Skinner, ‘Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts’, p. 118.
72 Indeed, this ambiguity is found not only in the way Skinner practises his method, but also in the
way he interprets it. For instance, in the same volume in which he describes the author in his
work as a patient in ‘extremely poor health’, Skinner also argues that a ‘moral’ to be drawn from
his work is that ‘agency deserves after all to be privileged over structure in social explanation.
Language, like other forms of social power, is of course a constraint, and it shapes us all . . .
however, language is also a resource, and we can use it to shape our world. There is thus a
sense in which the following chapters, far from reflecting a depoliticised stance, may be said to
culminate in a political plea. The plea is to recognise that the pen is the mighty sword. We are of
course embedded in practices and constrained by them. But those practices owe their dominance
in part to the power of our normative language to hold them in place, and it is always open to
us to employ the resources of our language to undermine as well as to underpin those practises.
We may be freer than we sometimes suppose.’ (Skinner, ‘Introduction’, in Visions, I, pp. 1–7,
at p. 7.) Despite this ambiguity, however, I argue below that the emphasis of Skinner’s work
must fall on agency, because his practice of his methodology is a striking revelation of his own
agency.
32 Holly Hamilton-Bleakley
the mutation of their ideologies, but also, and especially, because he himself
engages in this activity with his methodology.
Indeed, if we view Skinner’s work in the light of his own methodology, we
can ask ourselves what his intentions are in writing about alternative normative
vocabularies. For the effect of writing about these vocabularies is to encourage
the reader to scrutinise his own normative language and its limits in the light of
past alternatives. In other words, although the practice of studying past political
thought as a series of normative vocabularies ruthlessly requires us to keep it
fenced off from the present, the effect of this methodology, paradoxically, is
nothing less than an encouragement of conceptual change, here and now.
So, what is Skinner doing in recovering past ideologies? It seems that in his
recent work Skinner has posed this same question himself, asserting in Liberty
before Liberalism that historians must be prepared to ask themselves ‘what is
supposed to be the point’ of their studies.73 That Skinner equates the ‘point’
of an utterance with its speaker’s intention signals that when he speaks of the
‘point’ of his study of intellectual history, he is speaking of his own agency as
a historian. He answers that what he is doing in practising intellectual history
is ‘acting as a kind of archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back
to the surface, dusting it down and enabling us to reconsider what we think of
it’.74 This archaeology, however, is not without a purpose for the present world,
for the reconsideration that it encourages will enable us to ‘stand back from
and perhaps even to reappraise some of our current assumptions and beliefs’.75
Skinner’s assertion is thus that his intention in his work is to provide his readers
‘with information relevant to the making of judgements about their current
values . . .’76 He concludes strikingly by casting his project in a Nietzschean
light, declaring that the purpose of his archaeology is to leave his readers to
‘ruminate’.77
The use of the term ‘ruminate’ reveals the significance of what Skinner is
doing with his methodology, for it shows that he identifies in his practice of
intellectual history an element critical towards current values which is similar
to Nietzsche’s approach. In this way, it brings prominently into relief his agency
vis-à-vis his context. For instance, in Liberty before Liberalism, rather than ‘re-
iterating, underpinning and defending commonplace insights’, Skinner moves
away from the current liberal mindset to challenge the conventional political
language of liberty. In this work, Isaiah Berlin is the conventional thinker –
the theorist subsumed in the prevailing language who fails to step outside the
hegemonic definition of negative liberty.78 Skinner sees the prevailing conven-
tion and acts against it, using his practice of intellectual history to respond to
Berlin, intentionally intervening in the current debate on liberty.
73 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
p. 108.
74 Ibid., p. 112. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., p. 118. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., pp. 113–16.
Linguistic philosophy and The Foundations 33
J. G. A. Pocock
I
Context is king; but the present writer, to his embarrassment, cannot consider
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought apart from a context formed by
his own historical memory, in which he plays a large and autobiographical part.
I shall elaborate on these memories, in the hope of offering a commentary on
Quentin Skinner’s work shaped by that work’s relations with my own.
I can claim to have been present at the creation, not of Foundations alone
but of the enterprise of which Skinner has become the leader. I date its birth
about 1949, when Peter Laslett’s edition of Filmer’s Patriarcha1 pioneered
the enterprise of finding out exactly when, and for what, a work of political
theory was (a) written, (b) published, (c) answered. Laslett separated by nearly
half a century the moment when Patriarcha was written (the 1630s) from the
moment when it was published; he radically separated intention from effect,
and focused attention on what was intended, and what actually happened, when
Filmer’s works were republished, by agents we are still thinking about, in 1679–
80. What Laslett then did had two sets of consequences. In his own work it led to
the revolutionary discovery that Locke’s Treatises of Government were written
about 1680, with intentions and therefore meanings necessarily unlike those
he had when he published them in 1689.2 In mine – I must inject myself here
as an actor in the story – it led my researches into the work of Robert Brady
to the discovery that the republication of Filmer led to two concurrent debates
in different idioms (I began calling them ‘languages’) of political argument:
one concerned with the origins and rights of government – the classic field
and definition of ‘political thought’ – the other with the historic origins and
vicissitudes of government in England.3 The pursuit of contexts now became
the pursuit of languages as well as of moments. Locke, it emerged, had taken
1 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949).
2 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988 [1960]).
3 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical
Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).
37
38 J. G. A. Pocock
part in the first debate, but hardly in the second. His friend James Tyrrell had
endeavoured to act in both, and it is a comment on the discipline we practise,
rather than on his intellectual stature, that it has been fifty years since the time I
am recounting before a monograph on Tyrrell has at last appeared.4 For me, as
for Skinner, the point of importance has been that the study of the contexts in
which political speech acts have been performed can entail, and even become,
the study of the diverse languages, ways of thinking and views of the world in
which they have been conducted. It is a question whether ‘political thought’,
‘political theory’ and ‘political philosophy’ can be studied in ways which reduce
to a single narrative the history in which they have interacted.
The Laslettian moment, as I will call it, lasted through the later 1950s, when
Philosophy, Politics and Society – a series initiated and edited by Laslett, whose
contents were so rigorously analytical as to leave little room for historical
reconstruction – aroused in me the thought that if there were so many ways of
validating a statement, each of these ways might have a history of its own and
exist in history. I made a first attempt to elaborate a Laslettian methodology
for the history of political thought in 1962,5 when Laslett’s work on Locke
was mainly done and his interests were about to take a new turn. I published
further methodological essays between 1968 and 1987;6 these do not invite the
same intensity of analytical attention that has been paid to Skinner’s writings of
the like kind, though I dare say that comparison would reveal both similarities
and dissimilarities between the ways in which we attempt to reconstitute the
performance of speech acts constituting political discourse in history. I am
more interested in comparing the historical narratives we have constructed than
4 Julia Rudolph, Revolution by Degrees: James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late
Seventeenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
5 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The History of Political Thought: a Methodological Enquiry’, in Peter Laslett
and W. G. Runciman (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1962).
6 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action: an Essay on Traditions and their Understanding’,
in Preston King and B. C. Parekh (eds.), Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Michael
Oakeshott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 209–38; J. G. A. Pocock, Politics,
Language and Time: Essays in Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971,
now published by University of Chicago Press); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Verbalising a Political Act:
towards a Politics of Language’, Political Theory 1 (1973), pp. 3–17; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Political
Ideas as Historical Events: Political Philosophers as Historical Actors’, in Melvin Richter (ed.),
Political Theory and Political Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 139–
58; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Reconstruction of Discourse: towards the Historiography of Political
Thought’, Modern Language Notes 96 (1981), pp. 959–80; J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and
History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the
métier d’historien: Some Considerations on Practice’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages
of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
pp. 19–40; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought’, in
Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Politics of Discourse: the Literature and History of
Seventeenth-Century England (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 21–34.
Foundations and moments 39
II
A moment of secondary creation; readers of Tolkien will know that this is
the real danger point. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought appeared
in 1978, and the circumstance I cannot refrain from mentioning is that The
Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Repub-
lican Tradition had appeared from Princeton three years earlier. It is a further
contextualisation and complication that in 2003, the year in which the silver
jubilee of Foundations was celebrated at the conference that gave rise to the
present volume, The Machiavellian Moment was reissued with an afterword
dealing with its reception and afterlife;7 and in the same year I published The
First Decline and Fall,8 a survey through the centuries of the idea that the
Roman empire and its decline were alike consequences of the fall of the repub-
lic, which might well have been subtitled ‘Gibbon’s Machiavellian Moment’.
These volumes, in turn, appeared close on the heels of Skinner’s three-volume
Visions of Politics, and there is a complex if somewhat elephantine round-dance
that encourages me to comment on what Skinner has been doing in the light of
what I have been doing myself.
It was, of course, Skinner who suggested the first part of my 1975 title –
nobody but myself should bear responsibility for the second – but the meaning
of ‘the Machiavellian moment’ has developed beyond what he may have had
in mind. It does not mean only ‘the moment when Machiavelli performed his
speech acts and effected their consequences (including those he could not have
intended)’, or ‘the moment at which it is possible to say that Machiavelli’s inten-
tions assumed the shape they had’ (there are of course two moments implicit in
the latter formulation). These are Skinnerian moments and I certainly intended
to isolate and describe them; but there is a further level of meaning to ‘the
Machiavellian moment’ which it might be less plausible to say that Skinner
meant to intimate to me. The phrase came – in the course of writing the book
of which it is the title – to denote two moments of transitoriness which Machi-
avelli perceived, lived in and explored in his writings: the moment at which
some form of government – e.g. the regime set up by Cosimo de’ Medici in
the early fifteenth century – was seen to be fragile and a republic both possible
7 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition: with a New Afterword by the Author (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003).
8 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. III: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
40 J. G. A. Pocock
and necessary; and the moment at which the republic in its turn encountered
problems within or without its own nature with which it could not cope. Short
of some millennial future, I came to argue, the republic attempted so perfect an
equilibrium among the components of a necessarily imperfect human nature that
it must be thought of as deliberately incurring its own mortality; the Christian
Augustine knew this, and so did the pagan Machiavelli.
There is, then, an element of historicism about my volume of 1975 – scarcely
congenial though the word may be to one like myself whose thinking was
shaped in the era of Karl Popper; the republic, and by implication the society, is
perceived in its historicity. It is possible, though it should be attempted only with
caution, to link this with the proposition that the thrust of Skinner’s strategy of
contextualisation is to return the text, and the speech acts implied in writing it, to
the language context existing at a particular time, and to construct the author’s
intentions as they were shaped at that time; whereas The Machiavellian Moment
and the works growing out of it have directly addressed the question of what
happens when a language of discourse persists and is redeployed in a historical
situation, or context, other than that in which it was deployed previously. My
book attempts to narrate how Machiavelli’s texts, and the implication of his
language, were employed by some and attacked by others, first in seventeenth-
century England and then in eighteenth-century England and America. That is
not attempted in, and may be precluded by, the structure of The Foundations
of Modern Political Thought, though we come closer to it as we pass from the
second to the third volume of Visions of Politics almost a quarter-century later.
Foundations consists of two volumes, entitled The Renaissance and The Age
of Reformation. The first is focused on the politics of Italian humanism and
the Italian city-states; it deals with the principle that the life of a citizen in a
republic is natural and necessary to men (not to women), with Machiavelli’s
recension of this idea, and with the consequences of the downfall of the republics
in the cinquecento. The second is discontinuous with the first, being centrally
concerned with a problem the republics never faced: that of the circumstances,
if any, in which the subject is entitled to resist the ruler in the name of religious
truth. There is no need of a narrative showing how the problems of the first
volume came to be replaced by those of the second, since it is unlikely that
such a process can ever be located. Foundations concludes, however, with a
statement9 that seems to imply a future development and a narrative: that ‘the
foundations of modern political thought’ were laid when (a) the subject of
political thought came to be predominantly ‘the state’, (b) ‘the state’ came to
be the subject of a kind of thought to be termed ‘philosophy’. How far these
propositions have determined the course of Skinner’s work since 1978 may be
9 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), II, ‘Conclusion’, passim; especially p. 358, concluding the whole work.
Foundations and moments 41
debated; it is certain, however, that they are not addressed – and I see no reason
why they should have been – in The Machiavellian Moment or any of my work
since 1975.
This is not a disagreement between us. I was not offering a generalised history
of political thought, and shared what might be considered Skinner’s doubts as
to whether there could be such a thing. I was not much concerned with the
moment at which political thought became ‘modern’, or with the ‘foundations’
of whatever entitled it to be so regarded; and I do not suggest here that his work
should be treated as attempting to solve such questions. I have not engaged – nor,
I think, has he – with the pursuit of ‘modernity’, though I have noted several
historical moments at which the term ‘modern’ was employed in changing
senses. In Skinner’s work, however, I see the second and third volumes of
Visions of Politics as displaying a structure not unlike that of Foundations,
which may furnish both a narrated process and some points arguable between
him and me.
The second volume of Visions resembles the first of Foundations in that it
consists of essays on republican and civic thinking before and during the time
of Machiavelli. The third consists of essays about Thomas Hobbes, and may
be thought of as going beyond the themes of Foundations’ second volume to a
time when ‘the state’ was being called into existence to solve the devastating
problems of religious resistance and civil war. It is clear, moreover, that Hobbes
knew the language which depicted citizens as living in republics to assert their
civil, military and moral virtue, and that he altogether repudiated it; and it is
possible to suppose that he intended to counter the image and ideal of the citizen
with that of the subject, who had evoked the state to protect him and owed it
unqualified obedience. There might be found here a broadly conceived narrative,
in which one ideal confronted another and the confrontation had outcomes; but
it remains a question whether we are following a process of change or simply
moving to another part of the forest.
This question is entangled in others. In the first volume of Foundations
Skinner proposed an important modification of something Hans Baron had said,
and I had not abandoned, about the origin and originality of Italian republican
ideas of civic liberty. Baron – so challenging a proponent of ‘civic humanism’
that it is still thought worth while to devote an entire volume to criticism of him
and all associated with him10 – was in his own way a Laslettian contextualiser;
he had argued, in great bibliographic detail, that Florentine humanists turned
from medieval imperialism to ‘modern’ (as he thought of it) republicanism
under the stress of a single historical experience, the Viscontian war of 1400–2.
I had not adopted this thesis – I recall, though I cannot now document, receiving
10 James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
42 J. G. A. Pocock
a letter from Professor Baron in which he expressed regret that I had not seen
fit to endorse it – but I had accepted the argument that there were Florentines
who carried the idea of active citizenship to lengths that made it part of ‘the
Machiavellian moment’. I hold to this position, though it may be worth record-
ing that I do not see these assertions as constituting a birth of the ‘modern’ or its
‘foundations’. There are too many problems attached to a concept of the ‘mod-
ern’ as resting upon a rebirth of the ‘ancient’; and the notion of ‘modernity’
exercises a hold on the scholarly mind that I find shapeless and would like to
see de- and reconstructed.11
I had also argued strongly that the idea of active citizenship rested on
Aristotelian foundations. This has been much misunderstood, and I may have
misled readers through failure to foresee this. Clearly, a fully ‘Aristotelian’ or
‘scholastic’ training was not conducive to ‘civic humanism’ and might under-
write the king as readily as the republic; I might have made it clearer that when
I wrote ‘Aristotelian’ I did not have the whole body of his philosophy in mind.
But I had found in the Politics the most satisfying theory of the active citizen I
had, or have, encountered: that in which he (she had yet to be included) is an
equal, ruling over equals and so ruled by them, taking decisions which extend
to the shape and character of the polis or res publica, and finding in the exer-
cise and enjoyment of this equality a freedom and authority necessary to the
nature of the human being. I continue to employ this image of the citizen in
the criticism of my own world as well as in the reconstitution of worlds past,
and I am clearly at the danger point where the heuristic or the prescriptive may
become, or be confounded with, the historical; but having found this concept in
the Politics, a text as well known to Florentine humanists as any other, I thought
myself safe in employing it in the interpretation of their thinking and believed
I had some evidence of its presence in their texts.
What Skinner proposed in the first volume of Foundations was to move the
entire formulation – or as we should now say ‘invention’ – of active citizenship
back from the quattrocento where Baron had placed it, to the trecento or even
before, in the crisis of Hohenstaufen disintegration and Guelf predominance
which humanists and historians came to treat as cardinal. This entailed moving it
from Aristotelian terms to Ciceronian, from Greek to Latin, and from philosophy
to rhetoric, and uncovering a language of citizenship employed by dictatores at
large, by Brunetto Latini, Tolomeo da Lucca, possibly St Thomas himself, and
developed in pictorial form by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the frescoes of good and
bad government at Siena of which Skinner has written in such fullness. This
massive shift – is it a paradigm shift? – from a Greek to a Roman vocabulary
has been of enormous value, clarifying and enriching our understanding of the
history of the civic. Yet when we explore its intimations for what Baron or I
had been attempting to say, we find ourselves in terrain where Skinner is not
the only actor – as he never thought he was – and intentions additional to his
have to be taken into account.
III
Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty had been published in 1958; his The
Originality of Machiavelli by 1972.12 The former initiated the debate over
‘positive’ and ‘negative’ concepts of liberty which is still going on, and has
claimed Skinner’s attention, through his inaugural lecture on Liberty before
Liberalism to his Isaiah Berlin lecture of 2001. This has been a normative and
analytical debate – which concept makes better linguistic sense? which concept
is on the whole to be preferred? – and though Skinner and I have both been
attentive to it in our historical writings, and have probably given indications of
our respective normative preferences, it is certainly not the case that either of us
has been writing history as a contribution to the debate. Nevertheless, the two
concepts are of substantive as well as heuristic value in the writing of history,
since both have from time to time been articulated and set in opposition. It was
Charles I on the scaffold who declared that the liberty of the people consisted in
their freedom under law, not in their having a voice in their own government. In
the historical enquiry which Skinner and I have been pursuing, the ‘republican’
concept of active citizenship – particularly in the Aristotelian form in which I
have sought to express it – articulates at a high level the ‘positive’ concept of
liberty; it is the freedom to speak, to act, to associate, to enter upon relations
with one’s equals, to take decisions, to affirm what one’s city and one’s self
shall be; to be – in short – the political creature it is said one is, and ought to be,
by nature. It is less a freedom to do than to be; less an assertion of right than an
exercise of virtue. At another extreme, the individual presupposed by Hobbes,
who accepts the sovereign’s actions as his own that he may be free from the
fear of death, has carried negative liberty about as far as it is possible to go, and
may be intelligible to the philosopher when he can no longer be represented by
the rhetorician.
To pass from Machiavelli to Hobbes is to pass from Visions II to Visions III,
not from Foundations I to Foundations II; Skinner’s engagement with Hobbes
may belong chiefly to the period after 1978. Yet the presence of Berlin and the
two concepts has long been apparent to me – though I cannot now remember
when I first noticed it – when I consider the proposal in Foundations I to move
the origins of the ideal of citizenship from the quattrocento to the duecento and
12 For the latter, see Myron P. Gilmore (ed.), Studies on Machiavelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1972),
pp. 149–206.
44 J. G. A. Pocock
a return to monarchy necessary; the consequent loss of liberty, say Bruni and
Machiavelli, destroyed both virtue and empire. There takes shape a historiogra-
phy in which empire is seen as corrupting both the republic and the principate;
and the consequence for political theory and philosophy is that liberty is exer-
cised in history and is self-problematising. It is hard to be free and rule ourselves
without ruling others who are not free; a problematic by no means archaic in
the year 2003. In this way the Machiavellian moment becomes an enduring
constituent of Euro-American political thought, a theme still pursued in The
First Decline and Fall.
IV
If the ‘Machiavellian’ scenario survives and persists – as I contend it does far
into the eighteenth century – it is fair for me to ask how it will stand in relation
to any scenario that may appear in Skinner’s further work. I am writing at a
moment when his work is big with a future whose argument is not yet disclosed,
and it would be a waste of good trees to fill pages with speculations about that
future, or ask him to anticipate intentions he is in process of carrying out; one
does not really know one’s intentions until one sees them declared and put
in practice. Nevertheless, this volume stands at a moment of commemoration
which is also one of anticipation, and since he is certainly about to do something
other than what I have done, it may be suggestive to employ The Machiavellian
Moment in asking what that something is going to be.
I have suggested that neither the two volumes of Foundations nor the second
and third volumes of Visions supply us with a covering narrative or macro-
narrative. Let me say at once that there is no reason why they should have
done so, or why they should be any the worse if they do not. It is possible
that Skinner’s historical intelligence is focused on the synchronic, the detailed
reconstruction of language situations as they exist at a given time, whereas mine
leans to the diachronic, the study of what happens when languages change or
texts migrate from one historical situation to another. If this is so, there comes
a point when our intentions diverge and neither offers more than an incidental
criticism of the other. It is none the less true that to have, or not to have, a given
set of intentions has consequences, and that it is legitimate on these grounds to
enquire whether his work may in future entail a covering narrative, and whether
that will – as there is no reason why it must – resemble that of The Machiavellian
Moment.
I have contended that Foundations I and II do not supply a covering narra-
tive, for the reason that there is no process or series in which writers can be
seen moving from the language of Renaissance citizenship to the language of
Reformation resistance; these are simply two different stories, told in the order
of time. The situation is somewhat different when we turn to Visions II and III,
46 J. G. A. Pocock
since Hobbes knew about Machiavelli and found him problematic in his world.
That is to say, concepts and arguments from the thought-world of classical and
humanist literature – Ciceronian, Plutarchan, Machiavellian and Tacitist – had,
somewhat surprisingly, made their way into the thought-world and rhetorical
armoury of Stuart England; and Hobbes considered their presence there harmful
and set out to refute and expel them. It would therefore be possible to construct a
narrative in which humanist language about citizenship and its virtues collided
with a Hobbesian language about right, law and sovereign will, and the latter,
probably more deeply entrenched in England, won what looks like a series of
victories, which however did not (as we shall see) expel the former from the
English conceptual vocabulary.
To construct this narrative would have a further interesting effect. The Italian
citizen affirming his virtue and the English subject defending his rights may
without much distortion be made to stand for the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ poles
of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘two concepts of liberty’, and these concepts, or phenomena
not unlike them, may be found operative in the narrative of history as well as in
the schematisations of philosophy. It might be said that Skinner’s Reason and
Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes is a sophisticated and brilliant exploration
of the intimations of their presence in conflict there. Such a narrative, however,
would be multi-dimensional and have a tangled plot. The text of Leviathan is
extremely rich and many threads, with accompanying narratives, run through
it; Hobbes’s antipathy to the rhetoric of civic action and civic virtue is not
more than one, though an extremely interesting one, of them. There are other
narratives with other starting points. Skinner’s recent publication indicates one
such: his A Third Concept of Liberty, which carries on the enterprise, evident
even before Liberty before Liberalism, of seeking a way of defining liberty,
valid both as philosophical concept and as historical phenomenon, identical
with neither Berlin’s ‘positive’ nor his ‘negative’ liberty. This third concept
may be defined, very tersely, as the proposition that one is free only if one’s will
is not dependent on that of another. In his Isaiah Berlin lecture under this title,
Skinner both explores this concept in the spirit of the analytical philosopher,
which is one of the things he is, and gives evidence for the presence of language
suggesting it in the history of the English Civil War, arriving at a moment when
‘an apoplectic Hobbes picked up his pen’ to answer it.
I have certain reservations about the third concept of liberty. Philosophically,
the condition of having no master, to which it very often amounts, seems to me
oddly incomplete when set beside the Aristotelian definition of liberty as equal-
ity, mentioned earlier. Equality is more than the mere absence of inequality;
it may denote an actual and positive relationship, a friendship or fraternity
(gender-free equivalent wanted) between equals which is to be enjoyed for
its own sake and, when converted into decision, becomes a necessary way of
asserting one’s humanity. To have no master, and so to be neither slave nor
Foundations and moments 47
villein, is a means or prerequisite of equality, not the end for which one has it;
so that when put forward as an alternative to the positive freedom of the citizen,
it begins to look like a diminution of the latter. Historically, it seems that this
definition of freedom could be situated in a number of linguistic contexts hav-
ing meaning to the minds of the seventeenth century, so that one would need
to know in what particular context it was being situated before one knew what
particular speech act was being performed. In the historical material Skinner
puts before us, the condition of having no master seems to become the liberty
one has under law, which defines one’s properties and rights and makes one
the equal of others who are, like oneself, legales homines and neither serfs
nor villeins. Whether this concept of liberty is termed ‘neo-Roman’ seems to
depend on whether the civil or the common law is thought of as providing the
definition.
I am inclined, then, to suspect a certain indeterminacy in this definition of
liberty, especially when it is used to denote a form of argument continuously
involved in history. I do not doubt that the argument that to be deprived of
recourse to law is to be reduced to slavery is regularly to be found in history,
from the English Civil War to the War of the American Revolution, or that it
is one of several arguments (not all reducible to it) which Hobbes set out to
answer. But – while waiting for the text of Skinner’s Ford lectures to instruct
me, as they surely will – I suspect that there were other arguments going on –
some to be found answered in Leviathan and others not – and consequently a
number of narratives to be recounted, especially if, in Skinner’s company or
without it, we journey past Hobbes into the very different world after 1688.
V
Here I resume a narrative of my own which does undertake that journey. It
may be recalled that I selected for my pivotal figure of the English Revolution
not Thomas Hobbes but James Harrington.14 While we know what Harrington
thought of Hobbes we do not seem to know what Hobbes thought of Harrington;
but we do know that if the two differed radically as to the meaning of libertas
on the towers of Lucca, they were agreed, though for opposite purposes, that
the first bishops did not owe their office to supernatural grace conferred by
the hands of apostles. I proposed that Harrington constructed a ‘Machiavellian
meditation on feudalism’, in which the decay of feudal tenures restored, for the
first time in a millennium and a half, the prospect that free armed proprietors
might act as citizens and display that governing virtue which made them the
14 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 11; James Harrington, The Political Works of James
Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); J. G. A.
Pocock (ed.), Harrington: Oceana and a System of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).
48 J. G. A. Pocock
philosophers has been not Berlin but Hannah Arendt, arguing that in the eigh-
teenth century the political was overtaken by the social, and the study of action
superseded by that of behaviour.17
I am tempted to develop this narrative into a critique of postmodernism,
as completing the disintegration of the self in a commodified society whose
beginnings I see detected three centuries ago. The points of substance for the
present essay, however, are first, that its pursuit has supplied me with a narrative,
and even a narrative of the transformation of narrative itself; second, that in
pursuing it I have been able to relate the modification of political thought by
the operation, and perhaps the changing roles, of modes of discourse other than
the philosophy, theology and jurisprudence canonically supposed to constitute
it throughout its history. My perception fifty-five years ago that the Filmerian
controversy was conducted in the language of history as well as philosophy was
enlarged and enhanced by the discovery of civic humanism and then of political
economy; and in all this I owe enormous debts to two scholars, Peter Laslett
and Quentin Skinner. In speculating on Skinner’s further work, therefore, I ask
myself the following questions. Will he find a narrative – does he need one at
all? – in which the subject matter and governing procedures of political thought
are transformed by the injection of new languages? I have been led away – at
no time unwillingly – from the study of philosophy and the state towards that
of historiography and civil society (themselves new and innovative concepts).
Does he still pursue the dictum at the end of Foundations, that ‘modern’ political
thought consists in the former mode of study? If so, his definition of ‘modernity’
will probably differ from any I use, but I would rather be emancipated from
defining it at all. I much doubt if he will allow himself to be dominated or
constrained by his language of 1978, but I cannot predict with what governing
concepts he will study the history of political thought down to Hobbes and
possibly beyond. It will be worth waiting to find out.
17 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), ch. 6.
4 Skinner, pre-humanist rhetorical culture
and Machiavelli
Marco Geuna
I
According to Skinner, if we want to understand the foundations or the origins
of modern political thought we must return to the twelfth century. The opening
chapter of Foundations takes the reader back to the comuni, the Italian city-
republics and their experience of self-government: their practice of electing
magistrates (first the consoli and then the podestà) and consigli. Skinner is
convinced that in the rhetorical, juridical and philosophical reflections which
emerged from those experiences lay some of the roots of modern political
thought. In so doing, Skinner is making a precise historiographical choice. He
1 Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003),
p. 91.
50
Pre-humanist rhetorical culture 51
is strongly opposing the theses of Hans Baron, according to whom the origins
of humanism, and ultimately of modern political thought, were to be located at
the beginning of the quattrocento, in the period of the Florentine opposition to
the expansionistic designs of Giangaleazzo Visconti. In The Crisis of the Early
Italian Renaissance, Baron had argued that prior to that moment and prior to
the writings of ‘civic humanists’ like Salutati and Bruni, no republican ideol-
ogy defending the special virtues of republican civic life had been produced.
Furthermore, Baron claimed that prior to this cleavage the majority of political
thinkers adhered to the medieval idea of ‘imperial monarchy’ and that before the
early fifteenth century it was impossible to find a positive re-evaluation of the
moral and political ideas of Cicero and a developed ‘Republican interpretation
of Roman history’.2
In many passages of the first chapters of Foundations Skinner challenges the
chronology and the historiographical theses of Baron,3 later taken up by many
historians, ranging from Ronald Witt and George Holmes to John Pocock.
Against Baron, Skinner takes as a starting point the studies of Paul Oskar
Kristeller on Renaissance thought.4 Already in the 1950s and 1960s, Kristeller
had shown the importance of constructing a specific and precise concept of
humanism. He had argued, in fact, that within Renaissance thought it was
possible to distinguish a variety of strains: the classic, the scholastic and the
specifically humanist strain. He considered the humanists, the scholars who
pursued the studia humanitatis, as the heirs of those teachers of rhetoric of the
previous centuries, of the masters of the ars dictaminis. Skinner further develops
the hypotheses of Kristeller5 and, taking up some observations of Charles Davis
and Jerrold Seigel, outlines an interpretation which is a radical alternative to
the one originally put forward by Hans Baron.
Thus the first part of Foundations, devoted to ‘The origins of the Renaissance’,
opens onto a discussion of the ‘ideal of liberty’ that emerges from the experience
of the comuni, in their opposition to both the papacy and the empire. This
ideal centred on the vindication of the independence of the cities and in the
assertion of the value of republican self-government. Skinner reconstructs the
conceptual strands of this ideal of liberty and the languages through which it
was formulated. Two distinct traditions of thought make this defence of the
2 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1966), pp. 49, 58, 64, 160, 444–6.
3 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), I, pp. 27, 54, 70–1, 77, 79, 82, 102.
4 P. O. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Let-
teratura, 1956); P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: the Classic, Scholastic and Humanistic
Strains (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
5 Skinner refers to his debt in many passages: Foundations, I, pp. xxiii–xxiv, 71–2, 102–5. He will
also acknowledge it in subsequent writings. See e.g. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), II, p. 92n.
52 Marco Geuna
6 Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. x–xi and 77 on the need to examine also ‘diplomatic negotiations,
city chronicles and other forms of political propaganda dating back at least as far as the middle
of the thirteenth century’.
54 Marco Geuna
ideological structure of a given historical moment and that offer the context
which allows the classic texts themselves to be interpreted adequately.
Skinner’s thesis, as a matter of fact, is not simply that the pre-humanist
rhetorical culture developed prior to the recovery of Aristotelian moral and
political philosophy and on the basis of Roman sources, but also that this culture
survived the advent of Aristotelianism without major changes. The discovery of
a rhetorical culture, and of its persistence and continuity in time, allows Skinner
to put into question some consolidated historiographical theses. First of all, it
allows him to criticise the theses proposed by John Pocock and Walter Ullmann
that attribute a crucial role to the recovery and diffusion of Aristotle’s Politics
and Nicomachean Ethics in the ‘rebirth of the citizen’ and, more generally,
in the formation of a true republican ideology.7 Against those who see the
decisive turning point in the recovery of these Aristotelian texts and assert a
continuity between the culture of scholasticism and that of humanism, between
Marsilius and Machiavelli, Skinner underlines that in doing so one devalues the
role played by the rhetorical reflections on politics and history in the advent of
humanism.
His reconstruction of the rhetorical culture which developed in the city-
republics between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been received
with great attention by the scientific community and has led to further research
by a variety of historians from diverse cultural backgrounds, ranging from Cary
Nederman and Anthony Black in the English-speaking world, to Enrico Artifoni
in Italy.8
At this point it is clear that the recovery of pre-humanist rhetorical cul-
ture, and its roots in Roman historical and political thought, proves to be
of long-lasting importance to Skinner, granting him a different view of the
political culture of the Renaissance. While Eugenio Garin had emphasised
above all the Platonic roots of much political-philosophical thought in the
Renaissance, and Pocock and Ullmann had emphasised the role played by
the recovery of Aristotle, Skinner insists on the importance of the philosophical
thought of Cicero and Seneca, and the historical thought of Sallust and Livy, for
pre-humanists like Brunetto Latini and Albertino Mussato, for humanists of the
early quattrocento like Leonardo Bruni, and for late humanists like Machiavelli.
In his opinion, Rome, not Athens, Roman thought rather than Greek thought,
was more important and had a greater impact on the political thought of the
Renaissance.
Skinner argues, therefore, that there is a continuity between the rhetorical
elaborations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ‘civic humanist’
thought of a Leonardo Bruni and a Poggio Bracciolini, and the historical and
political reflections of late humanists such as Machiavelli and Guicciardini.
Such continuity is not only based on shared values and ideals, above all that of
the excellence of republican government, and on the analyses of the causes of the
crisis of republican orders and of the remedies for this crisis, but also on a shared
resort to the same literary genres. In fact, Skinner finds continuity between the
advice-books for the podestà, such as the De Regimine Civitatum of Giovanni
da Viterbo, the texts of the specula principum tradition of the quattrocento from
Patrizi to Pontano, and Machiavelli’s arguments in the central chapters of The
Prince. It is time, then, to consider Skinner’s interpretation of the Florentine
Secretary.
II
In his book on Machiavelli, published in 1981, Skinner presents the Florentine
Secretary as ‘an exponent of a distinctive humanist tradition of classical repub-
licanism’.9 But already in Foundations he reads Machiavelli’s thought, and
his republicanism, within the context of the longue durée of the humanist
tradition: from the pre-humanist writings of the dictatores, to the texts of the civil
humanists of the early quattrocento, to the works of the late humanists such as
Guicciardini and Giannotti. These are the three diverse but deeply interrelated
contexts to which Skinner constantly brings back Machiavelli’s theses in order
to establish which of them simply repropose shared assumptions and which
constitute radical innovations.
Machiavelli’s thought is dealt with in two separate chapters, ‘The Age of
Princes’ and ‘The Survival of Republican Values’. In the first chapter attention
is, of course, given to The Prince, while in the second it is given to the Discourses
on Livy. Not even in Machiavelli’s case, then, does Skinner think it worthwhile
to give a unitary treatment of an author. He prefers to keep faith with his initial
methodological assumptions and continue to illustrate ideologies and traditions
9 Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. v. On Skinner’s inter-
pretation of Machiavelli, among recent studies: M. Senellart, ‘Républicanisme, bien commun
et liberté individuelle. Le modèle machiavélien selon Quentin Skinner’, Revue d’éthique et de
théologie morale, ‘Le Supplément’, 193 (1995), pp. 27–64; R. Talamo, ‘Quentin Skinner inter-
prete di Machiavelli’, CroceVia 3 (1997), pp. 80–101.
56 Marco Geuna
of thought rather than analyse individual authors.10 Thus he offers two separate
treatments of the two great works of the Florentine Secretary, discussing each
one in relation to the cultural and ideological contexts that in his opinion are
most significant and revealing.
In this way Skinner can, to some extent, sidestep the delicate problem of the
relation between Machiavelli’s two central works. It can be pointed out that,
after all, Skinner basically accepts the chronological hypothesis and the overall
interpretation developed by Baron in his famous article of 1961 ‘Machiavelli:
the Republican Citizen and the Author of the Prince’11 . Baron, insisting on the
difference between the two works, argued that Machiavelli wrote The Prince
first, in the second half of 1513, and only later composed the Discourses, which
in Baron’s view required the acquisition of a culture profoundly different from
that possessed by Machiavelli up to that moment. In so doing, Baron was chal-
lenging the hypothesis, first formulated by Chabod and then taken up by many
other interpreters, including Gennaro Sasso, according to which at least the first
eighteen chapters of the Discourses had been written before The Prince. This
hypothesis implied that the philosophical presuppositions of the two works were
identical and that Machiavelli’s culture was unitary and had not substantially
changed from one work to the other.12 Although Skinner dutifully reminds the
readers that ‘the dating of the Discourses remains a subject of learned debate’ he
finds that ‘Baron’s general argument seems plausible’.13 The idea of an intellec-
tual development in Machiavelli between The Prince and the Discourses seems
acceptable to him and appears to underlie his choice of commenting on the two
works in two distinct chapters.
It is worth noting that already in his ‘Meaning and Understanding’ of 1969
Skinner criticised the ‘mythology’ of coherence that leads interpreters into the
fallacy of claiming to resolve antinomies and contradictions present in different
texts by the same author, or even in one and the same text. In that context, he gave
as one of the examples the differences between The Prince and the Discourses.
Against the attempt to build a general and unitary scheme that explains away all
differences, Skinner argued that the historian must not limit himself to ‘anything
10 Cf. Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. x–xi. On the limitations which Skinner’s method poses for any
extended treatment of individual authors, see Quentin Skinner, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, in James
Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1988), pp. 231–288, at pp. 276–7; Skinner, Visions, I, pp. 117–18.
11 Hans Baron, ‘Machiavelli: the Republican Citizen and the Author of the Prince’, The English
Historical Review 76 (1961), pp. 217–53. On Baron’s interpretation, see the recent article by
John M. Najemy, ‘Baron’s Machiavelli and the Renaissance Republicanism’, American Histor-
ical Review 113 (1996), pp. 119–29.
12 Gennaro Sasso has repeatedly contested Baron’s hypothesis that the writing of the Discourses
required a culture which radically differed from that needed for writing The Prince. Among
his later contributions see G. Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, 2 vols. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), I,
pp. 330 and 350–6.
13 Skinner, Foundations, I, p. 154.
Pre-humanist rhetorical culture 57
14 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8
(1969), pp. 3–53, at 20; later in Tully, Meaning and Context, pp. 29–67, at 42.
15 Skinner, Foundations, I, p. 118. 16 Ibid., p. 129.
58 Marco Geuna
the originality of Machiavelli proposed by Isaiah Berlin and writes that ‘the
essential contrast is rather between two different moralities – two rival and
incompatible accounts of what ought ultimately to be done’.22
With this claim, Skinner also takes a stand against the interpretation of Machi-
avelli offered by Leo Strauss in the 1950s. According to Strauss the doctrines
presented in The Prince and in the Discourses are ultimately ‘immoral and
irreligious’ and, more generally, the Florentine Secretary needs to be consid-
ered not only as a thinker who subverts classical political philosophy, but as a
veritable ‘teacher of evil’.23 Skinner sees in these assertions the last echo of the
stereotype of ‘the murderous Machiavelli’ found in Shakespeare’s plays and of
the condemnations of Machiavelli to be found in Christian political writings,
such as Innocent Gentillet’s Anti-Machiavel.
In his reading of the Discourses, Skinner employs a strategy of interpretation
analogous to that used in the reading of The Prince. He first lists the assump-
tions which Machiavelli shares with previous humanists, and then he points out
the theses in which Machiavelli was original, the aspects in which he distances
himself from shared beliefs. In order to understand the theses of the Discourses,
Skinner looks closely at two contexts: the republican thought of the civic human-
ists of Bruni’s generation and the ‘revival of Florentine Republicanism’ which
took place in the early sixteenth century, and whose main actors were Machi-
avelli’s contemporaries such as Francesco Guicciardini or Donato Giannotti.
The Discourses, as a free commentary on the work of Livy and simultaneously
as a theoretical work on politics, do not fit easily into any literary genre. The
attempts to compare them with the Rerum memorandarum libri of Petrarca
and to the Miscellaneorum centuria prima of Poliziano are not convincing.24
Therefore, in relating the Discourses to humanist culture, Skinner understand-
ably begins by showing the values and the ideals shared by both sides. The first
value that Machiavelli shares with the other Florentine humanists is political
liberty. Also for Machiavelli, liberty means, first and foremost, independence,
independence from external aggression, and republican self-government, that
form of self-government which guarantees against tyranny. Skinner stresses the
central role of political freedom in the Discourses and claims that ‘Machiavelli’s
preoccupation with political liberty provides him with his basic theme in all
three books of the Discourses’.25 Machiavelli shares with the other humanists
also the thesis that a mixed type of republican rule represents the best form of
government. But he prefers a governo largo, a government that gives adequate
voice to the popolo, and distances himself from the admiration granted to the
governo stretto of Venice, which was widespread among Florentines with aris-
tocratic sympathies, ranging from Bernardo Rucellai to Francesco Guicciardini.
These remarks on Machiavelli’s basic choices already reveal Skinner’s clear
historiographical standpoint. He openly rejects the reading of Machiavelli as a
‘value-free’ political scientist, purely interested in dispassionately classifying
various forms of government. The thesis had been put forward in the 1940s
by Ernst Cassirer in The Myth of the State, and subsequently also by French
scholars such as Augustin Renaudet and by Italian historians such as Luigi
Russo and Nicola Matteucci. Skinner rightly emphasises that Machiavelli is a
‘partisan’ writer: he reminds readers of Machiavelli’s basic choice in favour of
republican governments, his normative stance, one might say. For Skinner, ‘by
background and conviction Machiavelli was basically a Republican’.26
The Machiavelli of the Discourses is presented as a ‘philosopher of lib-
erty’.27 Liberty, in fact, is considered by Skinner as the ‘basic value’ of the
Discourses, while security is seen as the key value of The Prince.28 Skinner
wants to find a point of equilibrium and reconcile two requirements: that of
giving an account of the differences between the two works and that of indi-
cating their shared conceptual framework. In order to avoid slipping into the
‘mythology of coherence’ he insists, following Baron, on the differences. But
in order to remain faithful to the texts, he cannot avoid pointing out the common
conceptual threads. Skinner suggests that in order to account for the differences
one has to look at the values that inspire the works, more than to the different
forms of government, principality and republic, which each work apparently
praises. He points out, on various occasions, that Machiavelli’s discourse on
the respective merits of principality and republic is never abstract, but takes
into account the historical-political conditions in which these forms need to
be realised. Principality is a form of government which is recommended in
a precise historical situation: in The Prince as in the Discourses Machiavelli
suggests that in a condition of advanced political corruption it will always be
necessary to resort to a government of a single person in order to bring the city,
or the state, out of its corruption and restore civil life.29
With the humanists, as we have seen, Machiavelli shares the assumption that
political liberty is the basic value and, in general, shares the preference for
republican governments. Skinner points out other common assumptions: the
25 Skinner, Foundations, I, p. 158. 26 Ibid., p. 153.
27 ‘The philosopher of liberty’ is the title of the chapter devoted to the Discourses of his book on
Machiavelli; see Skinner, Machiavelli, p. 48.
28 Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. 156–7. 29 Ibid., pp. 124 and 159.
Pre-humanist rhetorical culture 61
condemnation of the resort to mercenary forces and the belief in the superiority
of militias; the preoccupation with corruption and the analysis of the different
ways in which it grows in a republic. On this last point, it is interesting to note
that Skinner emphasises Machiavelli’s concern with the growth of individual
wealth, with the striving for personal gain at the expense of the striving for the
common good. Skinner shows how this concern brings Machiavelli closer to
many writers of the pre-humanist rhetorical tradition, from Latini to Compagni
and Mussato, who took up the analyses of Sallust for whom the search for profit
could weaken public virtues, and the growth of personal wealth could lead to
factions in the city. Skinner also points out that this concern was not shared by
the humanists of the early quattrocento, for they believed that personal wealth
was compatible with the pursuit of virtue and could have positive consequences
on the overall life of the city-republic. On these, as on other themes, Skinner
elegantly shows the continuities and discontinuities of Machiavelli with respect
to the beliefs of earlier humanists.
On two basic issues, however, Machiavelli decisively parts company with
the theses of all generations of humanists. The first issue is the judgement
on the tumults and the civic discords that marked the history of the Roman
Republic; the second is the judgement on the compatibility of political virtù
with Christian virtues. According to Skinner, the positive view that Machiavelli
has of the dissensions which ‘made that republic free and powerful’, voiced in
ch. 4, book I of the Discourses, not only breaks with the Venetian paradigm, as
John Pocock has already pointed out, but also constitutes a radical break with
respect to ‘Florentine political thought’ as a whole, and more generally with
humanist thought in its entirety, which followed Cicero and Sallust in their
praise of concord. Asking implicitly ‘what was Machiavelli doing when he
defended that thesis in the Discourses?’, Skinner answers that Machiavelli was
questioning one of the most basic premises of the previous three hundred years
of political thinking, namely the premise that civil discord should be banned
because it leads to the most nefarious factions. This premise was not only shared
by the humanist rhetorical tradition but also by those thinkers who made use of
the scholastic framework, from Remigio de’ Girolami to Dante.
When we come to Skinner’s discussion of these aspects of Machiavelli’s
thought, we find, perhaps, a deliberate historiographical silence on his part.
Skinner never mentions Claude Lefort’s interpretation in Foundations. In Le
travail de l’oeuvre. Machiavel, Lefort stressed the importance of conflicts in the
thought of the Florentine Secretary, but he often resorted to a Marxist language,
talking of lutte de classes,30 rather than the clash between umori, as Machiavelli
30 C. Lefort, Le travail de l’œuvre. Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 474–531. On Lefort’s
interpretation, see P. Manent, ‘Vers l’œuvre et le monde. Le Machiavel de Claude Lefort’, in
C. Habib and C. Mouchard (eds.), La démocratie à l’œuvre. Autour de Claude Lefort (Paris:
Editions Esprit, 1993), pp. 169–90.
62 Marco Geuna
does. Skinner, for his part, insists on the fact that Machiavelli breaks with the
tradition that gave preference to the value of homonoia, of concordia, but he
does not go as far as offering an overall interpretation of the role of disunions,
of tumults, in Machiavelli’s thought. He tries to avoid, most of all, readings
that, in his opinion, are anachronistic, constructed as they are from categories
that belong to other conceptual frameworks.
The other radical point of departure in relation to the humanist tradition is
Machiavelli’s presentation of the character of virtù. The virtue which is singled
out in the Discourses is no longer the virtue of the individual, of the prince, but is
rather the virtue of the citizen body: ‘a more collective view of virtù’ emerges in
this work.31 Machiavelli presents virtù as the necessary quality for the survival
of a free republic and for its attainment of greatness. His emphasis is on the
constitutive relation between virtù and political freedom. But Machiavelli also
presents virtù in terms that are very different from the Christian virtues and the
cardinal virtues praised by the humanists. If ‘virtù is the key to political success’,
then it is virtù itself that requires citizens to place freedom and security of the
republic above all other considerations: the hierarchy of Christian values and
the hierarchy of humanist virtues are radically subverted. Skinner concludes
that ‘for all the many differences between The Prince and the Discourses,
the underlying political morality of the two books is thus the same’.32 In this
‘political morality’ the traditional requirements of justice, conveyed both by
classical Stoic ethics and Christian ethics, become secondary. What comes to
the foreground is the value of mantenere lo stato (preserving the state) to use
the expression of The Prince, or the value of guaranteeing la salute della patria
(‘the health of the commonwealth’), to use the expression of the Discourses.
Skinner can thus effectively discuss a veritable historiographical topos: the
different relation between politics and justice that Machiavelli and Erasmus
place at the centre of their political works, written at nearly the same time.
If these are the main lines of the interpretation proposed in Foundations, we
may wonder if this kind of presentation, which analyses Machiavelli’s individ-
ual works in different chapters, may understate the importance of some aspects
of Machiavelli’s thought. I would like to mention at least one of them: Machi-
avelli’s reflections on time and politics, on history and politics.33 Obviously
Skinner mentions the relation between virtù and fortuna, as well as Machi-
avelli’s attention to the dynamics of corruption, and he points out that it is
precisely in the treatment of corruption in the Discourses that Machiavelli
envisages a special role for the principality. But Skinner neglects other impor-
tant themes: the relevance of occasione (opportunity) in politics; the problem of
31 Skinner, Foundations, I, p. 176. 32 Ibid., p. 183.
33 This issue was instead crucial in Pocock’s reading in The Machiavellian Moment. For a recent
interpretation of these themes with a philosophical approach, see M. E. Vatter, Between Form
and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).
Pre-humanist rhetorical culture 63
riscontro con i tempi (matching the times) which change constantly; the ques-
tion of the ritorno ai principii (return to beginnings), for example. He cannot
therefore ask whether these concepts offer a precise and original vision of the
relation between time and politics, between history and politics. Skinner limits
himself to mentioning Machiavelli’s famous reformulation of Polybian cyclical
theory in the second chapter of the first book of the Discourses and presents
it as a sign of Machiavelli’s acceptance of an ‘ultimately fatalistic view’.34
But perhaps this observation is out of place. Perhaps it is inevitable that some
aspects of a thinker as rich and complicated as Machiavelli had to be left on
the sidelines, in the context of a history mainly devoted to the reconstruction of
wide ideological frameworks and traditions of political thought.
III
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought can be considered as the starting
point of much of Skinner’s historical and philosophical work of the subsequent
twenty-five years. With regard to the historical work, Skinner deepens and
widens his analysis of the pre-humanist rhetorical literature in a series of stim-
ulating essays written during the 1980s. Suffice to cite two of them: ‘Ambrogio
Lorenzetti: The artist as a Political Philosopher’ of 1986 and ‘Machiavelli’s
Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas’ of 1990. While in
Foundations the fresco of the buon governo was mentioned only in a footnote
and, following the well-known thesis of Nicolai Rubinstein, its interpretation
was referred back to an Aristotelian conceptual context, in the new study Skin-
ner proposes a completely different interpretation of the Sienese frescoes. He
claims that in order to understand the allegories of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and
in particular to identify the mysterious regal figure that dominates the mid-
dle section of the fresco, we do not have to look at the Aristotelian culture,
at scholastic political philosophy, but precisely to the pre-humanist rhetorical
culture so dear to him.35 Thus Skinner has the opportunity to further develop
the reconstruction of pre-humanist culture which he had put forward in 1978.
For example, he refers to more instances of the literary genre of advice books
for the podestà, such as the De regimine et sapientia potestatis of Orfino da
Lodi, and to the Florilegia and the moral treatises of Roman inspiration that
transmitted the doctrines of Seneca and Cicero. He then examines closely how
36 Quentin Skinner, ‘Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the Pre-Humanist Origins of Republican Ideas’,
in G. Bock, Quentin Skinner and M. Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 121–141, at pp. 135 and 141.
37 Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, in C. B. Schmitt (ed.), The Cambridge History of Renais-
sance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 389–452, at pp. 389–95.
38 Skinner, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, p. 56n.; Skinner, ‘Machiavelli’s Discorsi’, p. 121n. Cf. Skinner,
Visions, II, pp. 12–13, 91–2.
Pre-humanist rhetorical culture 65
39 See Quentin Skinner, ‘Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty’, Politics 18 (1983), pp. 3–15;
Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives’, in
Rorty et al., Philosophy in History, pp. 193–221; Quentin Skinner, ‘The Paradoxes of Political
Liberty’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 7 (1986), pp. 225–50; Quentin Skinner,
‘Il concetto inglese di libertà’, Filosofia politica 3 (1989), pp. 77–102; Quentin Skinner, ‘The
Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in Bock et al., Machiavelli and Republicanism, pp. 293–
309. See also Quentin Skinner, ‘On Justice, the Common Good and the Priority of Liberty’, in C.
Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 211–24; Quentin
Skinner, ‘Two Concepts of Citizenship’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 55 (1993), pp. 403–19. For a
contextualisation and interpretation of these essays, see Palonen, Quentin Skinner, pp. 95–132.
66 Marco Geuna
40 For an introduction to this debate, see S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians,
2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
41 For an introduction to the debate on republicanism in the 1970s and 1980s, one may still refer
usefully to D. T. Rodgers, ‘Republicanism: the Career of a Concept’, The Journal of American
History 79 (1992), pp. 11–38.
Pre-humanist rhetorical culture 67
in the polemic against Rawls and in general against liberalism. The theoretical
continuum between Aristotelianism, republicanism and communitarianism was
thus already established by the end of the 1970s.
But in fact Skinner was rejecting this theoretical continuity. From a histo-
riographical point of view, as we have seen, he stresses that the language of
the modern republican tradition was derived from Roman philosophical and
historical sources. In this way, he breaks, or reduces the importance of, the
continuity between Aristotelianism and republicanism emphasised by Pocock.
From a strictly interpretative point of view, opposing the claims by MacIntyre
and other communitarians according to which the philosophical choice today
is between liberal individualism and some version of Aristotelianism, Skinner
tries to define an autonomous identity for republicanism, avoiding the embraces
of old and new Aristotelians. In his opinion, republicanism is not a form of
Aristotelian politics. To demonstrate this point, he examines the Discourses
of Machiavelli to show that the Florentine Secretary, as well as his republican
followers, do not make use of many of the typically Aristotelian premises: the
human being is not considered to be an animal politicum et sociale, to employ
the Thomistic formula, but is rather a being exposed to ‘corruption’, tending
to disregard his duties towards the community. Furthermore, in the res publica
individuals pursue different ends; we cannot assume the necessary existence of
ends shared by all. The freedom theorised by republicans is not positive liberty,
but a specific form of negative liberty: the individual participates in the affairs of
his res publica not because this is his natural destination, but in order to prevent
the government from degenerating into a hateful tyranny, which endangers his
security and private property. Political participation is not an ultimate end, but
a means or an intermediate end.42
Skinner gives theoretical autonomy to republicanism by freeing it from the
metaphysical assumptions present in the teleology of Aristotelian politics, and
reconfigures republicanism as a third way43 between liberal individualism and
Aristotelian communitarianism. A reformulation of the republican theory of
42 Republicanism, as defined by Skinner in these essays, has been labelled by some of his inter-
preters as an ‘instrumental republicanism’. Cf. Alan Patten, ‘The Republican Critique of Liber-
alism’, British Journal of Political Science 26 (1996), pp. 25–44, at p. 26. See also the remarks
by Burtt and Spitz: S. Burtt, ‘The Politics of Virtue Today: a Critique and a Proposal’, American
Political Science Review 87 (1993), pp. 360–8 (in which Burtt distinguishes between an ‘Aris-
totelian politics of virtue’ and an ‘instrumental politics of virtue’) and J.-F. Spitz, La liberté poli-
tique. Essai de généalogie conceptuelle (Paris: PUF, 1995), p. 172 (with reference to Skinner’s
interpretation, Spitz talks of an ‘instrumentalisation de la vertu et de l’auto-gouvernement’).
43 See J.-F. Spitz, ‘Le républicanisme, une troisième voie entre libéralisme et communautarisme?’,
Le Banquet 2 (1995), pp. 215–38. Skinner’s essays are presented as a contribution to the debate
between liberals and communitarians in M. Edling and U. Mörkenstam, ‘Quentin Skinner: from
Historian of Ideas to Political Scientist’, Scandinavian Political Studies 18 (1995), pp. 119–32;
and in A. Berten, P. Da Silveira and H. Pourtois, ‘Introduction générale’, in A. Berten, P. Da
Silveira and H. Pourtois (eds.), Libéraux et communautariens (Paris: PUF, 1997), pp. 1–19.
68 Marco Geuna
liberty, in his opinion, would make possible an interesting and innovative theory
of citizenship. He is aware that ‘we have no realistic prospect of taking active
control of the political process in any modern democracy’, but he is convinced
that ‘there are many areas of public life . . . where increased public participation
might well serve to improve the accountability of our soi disant representa-
tives’.44
The interpretation of republicanism offered by Skinner has quickly become
influential.45 Historians and theorists were increasingly aware that in the schol-
arly community radically different interpretations of republicanism confronted
each other. If for many years the term coined by Hans Baron, ‘civic humanism’,
and the term ‘classical republicanism’ preferred by Felix Gilbert, were often
used as synonyms, from the 1990s onwards they have been more frequently used
to denote radically different conceptual frameworks. Among political philoso-
phers, John Rawls was the one who underlined the interpretative differences.
In Political Liberalism he used the term ‘classical republicanism’ to refer to an
interpretation of republicanism à la Skinner, and he used the term ‘civic human-
ism’ to denote a ‘form of Aristotelianism’ and an interpretation of republican
themes à la Pocock. Rawls added furthermore that there was no substantial
incompatibility between classical republicanism so understood and his politi-
cal liberalism, whereas there was a ‘fundamental opposition’ between his theory
and civic humanism.46
At this point, two observations of a general nature concerning these essays on
liberty are necessary. The first is that while in Foundations Skinner stressed that
two traditions of political thought had provided legitimacy to the institutions
of self-government in the city-republics, the scholastic tradition of Aristotelian
derivation and the humanist tradition developed from the teaching of rhetoric, in
the later essays on freedom his attention is exclusively devoted to the humanist
tradition and to its formulation of republican concepts and ideals. Skinner puts
at the centre of his attention, as we have seen, the ‘classical republican tradition’
and clarifies the theory of political freedom that lies at the heart of this tradition.
From this point onwards, one of his objectives has been to clarify the conceptual
structure of modern republicanism, starting from the key value of freedom, but
also taking into consideration other concepts and values linked to it.47
The second point is that in his historical as well as in his philosophical essays
of the 1980s, Skinner presents Hobbes as the thinker who radically opposes the
assumptions central to the republican tradition. Hobbes not only elaborates a
concept of freedom as absence of ‘externall impediments of motion’ which is
opposed to the concept of freedom at the heart of republicanism, but, more
generally, he proposes a political theory that represents a radical alternative, at
all levels, to republican political theorising since it is based on concepts such as
individual rights and contract, representation and artificial person. At the end of
his contribution to the Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy Skinner
writes:
The humanist ideal of virtuous public service was increasingly challenged and eventually
supplanted by a more individualistic and contractarian style of political reasoning, the
style perfected by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan . . . Hobbes decisively repudiated the
distinctive ideals of Renaissance political theory, burying them and writing their epitaph
in the same breath.48
This opposition between Hobbes, and political theories based on individual
rights, on the one hand, and Machiavelli and republican theories centred on
virtù and public service, on the other, will recur constantly in his subsequent
writings.
IV
Liberty before Liberalism registers some interesting terminological changes
and significant conceptual elucidations. Whereas in the essays of the 1980s
Skinner strove to reconstruct the conceptual profile of the republican tradition,
placing at the centre of his attention the thought of Machiavelli, in Liberty
before Liberalism the historiographical focus shifts to the English theories of the
seventeenth century. In order to find out how republican thinkers conceptualised
freedom, Skinner analyses the thought of well-known figures such as John
Milton, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and examines less-known authors
such as Marchamont Nedham, John Hall and Francis Osborne. His starting point
is the fact that these thinkers held widely differing opinions on the institutional
framework for their ideal commonwealth. While some of them argue for a mixed
47 This interest led him to edit, and contribute to, collective works such as Bock et al., Machiavelli
and Republicanism; D. Armitage, A. Himy and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republi-
canism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); M. van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner
(eds.), Republicanism: a Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
48 Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, p. 452.
70 Marco Geuna
in Hobbes, gives centre stage to the concept of the state. Skinner recognises
that one way to speak about politics, the one centred on the state, has become
hegemonic starting from the seventeenth century, but he also emphasises how it
was constantly challenged by other ways of thinking about politics and common
life.
From Foundations, through Liberty before Liberalism, to Visions of Politics
Skinner may be considered the historian of rival political theories, of opposing
traditions of political thought. He is a historian who has repeatedly stressed
the need to recover the ‘lost treasures’ of our past, the political conceptions
and the languages that have been defeated and sidelined, the interpretations of
common values that have been covered over by the ‘hegemonical accounts’
of the ‘mainstream of our intellectual traditions’. We may refer here to the
concluding pages of Liberty before Liberalism.54 We may also refer to the
final lines of the preface to Visions of Politics, in which Skinner, referring to
the Renaissance republican theories analysed in the second volume and to the
political philosophy of Hobbes examined in the third, claims to have studied
and compared ‘two contrasting views we have inherited in the modern West
about the nature of our common life’. To which he pointedly adds: ‘One speaks
of sovereignty as a property of the people, the other sees it as the possession of
the state. One gives centrality to the figure of the virtuous citizen, the other to
the sovereign as a representative of the state. One assigns priority to the duties
of citizens, the other to their rights.’55 These are not only historical oppositions
but also theoretical alternatives for the present.
But it is not surprising that radical alternatives and profound oppositions
characterise the heavens of political philosophy. For Skinner, at bottom, the
space of politics is a terrain of conflicts, and political theories participate in
these conflicts. Political theories and political ideologies take part in these
conflicts by constantly legitimating and delegitimating the political actors on
the ground. Wittgenstein teaches us that ‘words are deeds’. Skinner has never
ceased applying this lesson to political theory.
54 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 116–20. 55 Skinner, Visions, II, p. xi.
5 Unoriginal authors: how to do things with texts
in the Renaissance
Warren Boutcher
The first volume of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought offered a new
account of the relationship between rhetorical resources and political moments.
Quentin Skinner balanced attention to the normative traditions of political lan-
guage with attention to the new force they acquire at critical times. The first
part of this chapter argues that the balance had a specific controversial origin.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hans Baron’s thesis that the political crisis
of the early Florentine quattrocento had been the catalyst for a new humanism
came into conflict with Paul Oskar Kristeller’s restatement of the continuities
between medieval and Renaissance, ecclesiastical and lay traditions of rhetoric
and thought.1 Skinner took the academic community beyond these encamped
positions with his historical account of the instrumentality of political rhetoric.
One always had to ask what a given ‘author’ was doing in his particular moment,
how he was exploiting handed-on rhetorical resources to build a position on a
current issue or crisis.
The second half of this chapter aims to reconsider Skinner’s model in the light
of subsequent advances in textual studies. It uses works from the second half of
the sixteenth century (Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and A Letter to Queen Elizabeth,
Etienne de la Boétie’s De la servitude volontaire and Montaigne’s Essais), a
period when the circulation and publication of manuscript and printed texts
coexisted in a hazardous and censorious environment. For Skinner shares one
important methodological assumption with more traditional scholars of political
thought like Baron. Historical interpretations of what an author thought or said
must rest, yes, on a sound textual basis. It is important to know exactly what the
author intended to say and when he or she intended to say it. But, it is assumed,
this does not mean that the culture of textual production and circulation need
be a principal or ever-present concern of the intellectual historian.
1 The controversy centred on an exchange between Baron and Jerrold Seigel, who used Kristeller’s
work to counter Baron’s thesis about ‘civic humanism’. See J. E. Seigel, ‘“Civic Humanism or
Ciceronian Rhetoric?” The Culture of Petrarch and Bruni’, Past and Present 34 (1966), pp. 3–48;
Hans Baron, ‘Leonardo Bruni: “Professional Rhetorician” or “Civic Humanist”?’, Past and
Present 36 (1967), pp. 21–37.
73
74 Warren Boutcher
I believe it should be, and that limiting the role of textual criticism to the
search for a ‘sound textual basis’ and an authoritative date sidelines some
of the core issues in early modern intellectual history. It may be that the
‘media’ in the modern sense did not yet exist to monopolise the communi-
cation of political discourse, but there are still questions to ask about the role
of textual media in the shaping of political experience. How did the physical
forms and cultural modes of circulation of the textual instruments of political
discussion – and of knowledge about their origins and uses – condition the
agency of actors?
If anything, the assumption to which I referred in the paragraph before last
is more obvious in Skinner’s than in Baron’s work. For good reasons, Skinner
wants to get away from the image of the moral or political thinker handling
perennial themes in contemplative isolation. So he re-imagines the agent of
discourse (the ‘author’) as one who acts by speaking in a given context or
conversation. The author is equivalent to the live speaker of a crafted oration in
a forum or parliament – hence the successful application of Skinner’s methods
to actual political speech-making.
But when we talk about political rhetoric in the Renaissance – especially the
northern Renaissance – we are not normally referring to live speech acts, to
oratory. We are referring to rhetoric which circulates in the form of manuscript
and printed texts and engages in debate and controversy with and by means of
other such circulating texts. Furthermore, knowledge about the background and
uses of these texts circulates alongside them in written or oral form. It is subject
to uncertainty and manipulation. I shall clarify these points in relation to La
Boétie’s De la servitude volontaire and an example of an oration that becomes
a circulating manuscript letter between two versions of Sidney’s Arcadia.
If the field of action is textual rather than oral or (as in the fictional example
taken below from Sidney’s New Arcadia) a mixture of both, then our approach
needs to take that consistently into account. The expectation that the evidence
should normally lead back to an original and transparent situation in which a
single author-speaker acts upon a particular audience for clear purposes may be
inappropriate. Even where there is such transparency, might it not be artificially
contrived, something that has to be actively put in place? Might it not be in
producers’ interests to leave clues leading us back to this ‘original’ context so
that we will not – from their point of view – misinterpret or misuse the work?
If we follow those clues too innocently are we not in danger of missing the
struggle about ‘context’ that occurs at the time of a work’s first composition,
publication and circulation? And finally, does the agent of discourse, the author
whose circumstances and objectives determine meanings, always have to be
identified with the ‘original’ writer of a published work? The answer I offer on
this last point is that the agents whose doings interest us can also be unoriginal
authors: the readers, the copiers, the recommenders of texts.
How to do things with texts 75
Take a text on moral or political themes composed between 1300 and 1600,
even one Skinner does not address. The Foundations of Modern Political
Thought will give you a very good idea what questions you need to ask about
its context. This is the true measure of a book which, more than any other,
heralded a much needed paradigm shift in the history of ideas. There were
past precedents and contemporary parallels for what was being done, but they
were confined to particular fields. In 1965 Felix Gilbert had related the works
of Machiavelli and Guicciardini to the topical arguments accompanying the
vicissitudes of Florentine political history after 1494. Donald Kelley, Skinner’s
colleague at the Institute of Advanced Study, published a book three years after
Foundations placing the Huguenot classics in the context of the development of
reformed ideologies.2 But Foundations did more than both books put together.
It provided an account of the ‘social and intellectual matrix’ of three centuries
of political thought.3 It carefully balanced internal against external explanations
of the history of political thought.4
In volume I’s discussion of ‘liberty, rhetoric and Renaissance humanism’ the
balance in question had a specific origin. Skinner brought intellectual temper-
ance to the controversy that had broken out in the previous decade between
disciples of Hans Baron’s and of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s divergent approaches
to these topics. The roots of the controversy lay in the interwar crisis of the
German and Italian humanities, and in the intellectual migration to the United
States before and during the Second World War.5 Baron used textual criticism to
date crucial early works of Leonardo Bruni to the period immediately after the
Florentine crisis of 1402 (when Milan seemed about to attack). He argued that
these works revealed the effects of a revolution in moral and political thought
caused by the crisis. From Kristeller’s perspective, on the other hand, they were
continuous with a whole tradition of manuscript rhetorical works going back
two centuries.6
What might Foundations be said to be doing in the context of this controversy?
The book has recently been credited by James Hankins – a one-time research
assistant to Kristeller – with subjecting Hans Baron’s thesis to ‘a searching
critique’. Skinner, according to Hankins, showed that ‘many of the ideas Baron
2 Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Donald R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology:
Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981).
3 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), I, p. x.
4 See especially ibid., I, pp. 102–3.
5 Warren Boutcher, ‘The Making of the Humane Philosopher: Paul Oskar Kristeller and Twentieth-
Century Intellectual History’, in John Monfasani (ed.), Kristeller Reconsidered: Essays on his
Life and Scholarship (New York: Italica Press, 2006), pp. 39–70.
6 Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. 70–3.
76 Warren Boutcher
(and, of course, of glossing newly recovered classical texts) had one unfortunate
consequence for intellectual historiography.11 It directed too many scholars to
focus exclusively on the pedagogical history of Latinate literary style, on the
history of the manuals’ treatments of elocutio and the tropes from Antiquity to
the Renaissance.12 Skinner’s point was that right through from the pre-humanist
dictatores, those who started choosing more topical examples, to the fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century humanists who drew on classical models, one had to look
not only at the rules, the programme but at the force and the incidental political
content of the examples chosen.
Scholars of translation – to use an example of my own – who study Cicero’s
De optimo genere oratorum in the context of Renaissance rhetorical litera-
ture invariably forget its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century publishing context.13
It often appeared in extract or in full alongside a Latin translation (usually
Leonardo Bruni’s) of the two Greek orations it had originally been designed by
Cicero to accompany: Demosthenes’ On the Crown and Aeschines’ Against
Ctesiphon.14 Demosthenes had won an argument on a particular occasion
against a noted opponent whose reputation was destroyed by the encounter.
The debating issue had been a technical one but it had had broad ramifications
for the public understanding of the Athenian struggle for political liberty. So,
pace Kristeller, rhetoric could be a matter of ceremonial elegance or literary
exercise, yes, and no, its practitioners did not share a common philosophy of
man or politics. But its most important paradigms, its key instances, were inter-
ventions at crucial junctures of a particular type. They were junctures at which
princes’ and people’s powers and liberties were pragmatically or deliberatively
at stake, as in the case of the speech in The Siege of Ancona.
This crucial advance in the understanding of the history of rhetoric lay at
the heart of Foundations’ account of early modern intellectual history. The
paradigms of Renaissance discourse were shown to be fundamentally pragmatic
and instrumentalist. They were also oral, deriving as they did from classical
oratory. They were geared to doing things with verbal instruments on particular
occasions to specific ends. Later, I want to ask how the intellectual historian
should re-introduce the fact that the instruments actually used in practice were
of course predominantly textual not oral.
11 See especially Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renais-
sance’, Byzantion: International Journal of Byzantine Studies, American Series III, 17 (1944–5),
pp. 346–74, reprinted in his Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome: Edizioni di
Storia e Letteratura, 1956) and in Renaissance Thought: the Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic
Strains (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
12 As in, for example, Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
13 This is true of the major study in the field: Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of
Translation in Renaissance France and their Humanist Antecedents (Geneva: Droz, 1984).
14 See, for example, the editions of Cicero’s works published in 4 vols. at Milan in 1498 (British
Library IC.26894) and in Basel in 1534 (British Library 11396.l.1).
78 Warren Boutcher
For now, let us return to Foundations I, ch. 4, ‘The Italian Renaissance’, where
Skinner begins by acknowledging Kristeller and by delivering the critique of
Baron that follows on from the exposition of the preceding chapters.15 On
the one hand, Baron had failed to appreciate the origins of the civic humanists’
themes in the literature of the city-republics of medieval Italy. On the other hand,
he had not understood the ‘nature of the links between the Florentine writers of
the early quattrocento and the wider movement of Petrarchan humanism’ as it
followed on from the culture of the medieval dictatores.16 Skinner’s exposition
of the latter allows him to bring out the centrality of the concept of virtus and
its struggles with fortuna, and to explain the fact that Renaissance political
treatises devote so much space to instituting the ‘right process of education’ for
leaders and citizens.17
But towards the end of the chapter we find an equally searching critique of
Kristeller’s ‘influential account of the evolution of Renaissance culture’.18 For
Skinner insists that whatever the merits of his philological and chronological
arguments about Bruni’s early works and his thesis about the year 1402 as the
threshold between medieval and Renaissance eras, Baron still has a point that
Kristeller does not tackle. It is true that the civic humanists’ arguments derived
from earlier scholastic and pre-humanist writings. But ‘we still need to ask
why it happened that these particular arguments were revived in one particular
generation – and with such particular intensity – at the beginning of the fifteenth
century’.19 This is not, of course, the way Baron had phrased the question. He
had asked about the circumstances of the moral and intellectual conversion of
an individual humanist (Leonardo Bruni) to modern political allegiances and
modern ways of thinking.
After Foundations, Skinner’s new way of phrasing the question became rou-
tine in early modern historiography. As applied specifically to the study of
quattrocento humanism it is still being asked and answered twenty years later
by one of the most important contemporary critics of the whole debate between
Baron’s and Kristeller’s disciples, John M. Najemy. Najemy’s approach itself
descends directly from the history of normative vocabularies and their use
offered in Foundations. He writes a history of ideologies as ‘powerful stories
that organize experiences, aspirations, fears, and memories into more or less
coherent accounts of how the world is perceived to be and how it ought to
be – but usually not how it actually is’.20 So the early quattrocento language of
civic humanism was a ‘normative discourse’ regenerated, Najemy argues, not
so much by the threat from Milan, as by the transformation of domestic poli-
tics from the 1380s on. Civic humanism’s real antagonist was less the duke of
15 Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. 69–71, 71n. 16 Ibid., p. 71.
17 Ibid., p. 88. 18 Ibid., p. 102. 19 Ibid., p. 103.
20 John M. Najemy, ‘Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics’, in Hankins, Renaissance Civic
Humanism, pp. 75–104, at p. 80.
How to do things with texts 79
Milan than the ‘popular, guild republicanism’ that had periodically surfaced to
challenge the hegemony of the élite in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.21
The answer may have changed, then, but the question is still the one first posed
in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.
I claimed earlier that Foundations would give you a good idea what questions
had to be asked about the context of any text on moral or political themes com-
posed between 1300 and 1600. I registered one qualification right at the outset:
the missing question of how knowledge – both at the time and now – about
the circumstances of transmission of texts can affect their possible meanings
in ways that are open to manipulation. Let me both back up my earlier state-
ment and introduce the question of manuscript and print circulation by taking a
text Skinner does not address but that another scholar indebted to his approach
does. On the one hand, I argue below, an approach such as Blair Worden’s to the
political contextualisation of Sidney’s Arcadia relies on the groundwork and
the questions established by Foundations.22 On the other hand, questions about
textual transmission continue to be preliminary or marginal in Worden’s work.
Worden is of course aware of the differences between the various versions of
the Arcadia and of the difficulties presented by its textual bibliography. But the
transmission of texts and of knowledge about texts is not an integral part of the
story he has to tell. Whereas it is an integral part of the story that Sidney has to
tell when he revises his prose fiction.
At the beginning of the earliest extant draft of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, the
Old Arcadia completed c.1581, the counsellor Philanax addresses an oration to
his prince, Basilius. The omniscient narrator of the story tells us that Basilius,
inspired by vanity and curiosity, has consulted the Delphic oracle about his and
his family’s future. The oracle’s cryptic reply seems to tell him that all in one
year his eldest daughter shall be stolen by a prince and his younger by a rustic,
that he shall commit adultery with his own wife, and that a foreign state shall sit
in his throne. In understandable panic, he discloses his predicament only to his
faithful friend and counsellor Philanax. He does this not – the narrator tells us –
because he is open to advice, but because he wants his own fancies confirmed.
For he has already decided to avoid confronting the cruel menaces of fortune
head on; he will take refuge in a ‘solitary place’ with his family, handing his
eldest daughter over to what he thinks is an honest herdsman, and keeping his
youngest daughter under his own close supervision. As to the government of
his country and the manning of the frontiers against foreign invasion, he will
leave that to deputies headed by Philanax himself.23
For ‘fashion’s sake’, then, Basilius asks Philanax for his counsel. Philanax
starts by saying that he ‘should in better season and to better purpose have
spoken’ had he been asked before Basilius went to Delphos. He nevertheless
goes on to deliver what Foundations tell us is an entirely conventional set
of humanist counsels. As for Basilius’ desire for knowledge from the oracle,
wisdom and virtue are the only destinies appointed to man to follow. They
make a man see so direct a way of proceeding ‘as prosperity must necessarily
ensue’. Besides, standing or falling with virtue, a man is never in evil case.
And in heavenly matters, prayer and reverence must oust vain curiosity. As
for Basilius’ plan to retire from government, what justification could there
be for this? For thirty years, out of the good constitution of the state and a
wise providence, obedient subjects have not lacked justice, while neighbours
have found the prince ‘so hurtlessly strong that they thought it better to rest in
your friendship than make new trial of your enmity’. Why, then, should he seek
new courses, deprive himself of governing his dukedom out of fear? He should
instead arm himself with courage against the oracle, be in his subjects’ eyes,
let them see the benefits of his justice daily more and more, live and die like a
prince.24
Philanax then applies the same arguments to the question of the government
of the princesses’ education. Hitherto, this has been fitly to restrain them from
evil, while giving their minds virtuous delights, and ‘not grieving them for want
of well ruled liberty’. But now, in has come suspicion, ‘the most venemous gall
to virtue’. After elaborating this theme and lamenting the elevation of a clown
to the post of royal guardian, Philanax concludes by beseeching Basilius to
face the assays of fortune, ‘to stand wholly upon your own virtue’ as the surest
way of maintaining ‘you in that you are’, i.e. in his state. But Basilius, already
wedded to his opinion, is not listening. It seems that the virtuous constitution
of the state, established by former prince-lawgivers and the ‘well bringing up
of the people’, is to fall because this prince is to abnegate the struggle between
virtù and fortuna.25
Sidney’s Arcadia sits squarely within the humanist rhetorical tradition
described by Skinner. It is studded with set-piece eclogues and oratorical
speeches like that of Philanax. As a humanist romance, it bears the hall-
marks of rhetorical pedagogy and was quickly incorporated into the teaching
repertoire of Elizabethan vernacular humanists.26 But Foundations also enables
us to trace the tradition of Philanax’s conventional arguments very precisely.
Italian Renaissance authors of princely advice-books and theorists of republi-
can liberty had both used the concept of virtù to denote ‘those qualities which
guarantee success in political life’, whatever the assaults of fortuna.27 Virtue
24 Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), pp. 6–8.
25 Ibid., p. 9. 26 Ibid., pp. xxx–xxxiii. 27 Skinner, Foundations, I, p. 177.
How to do things with texts 81
was conventionally broken down into its constituent cardinal virtues, including
wisdom and justice.28 Philanax’s oration is, though, more specifically redolent
of these themes as received by the northern humanists of the first half of the
sixteenth century and ‘assimilated into their own very different range of expe-
riences’. The Italian obsession with libertas has gone, replaced by the problem
of counselling princes moved by tyrannical passions.29 Northern humanist dis-
cussions of these topics, Skinner tells us, as well as placing greater emphasis
on piety, conventionally culminated ‘in a denunciation of what Milton was to
call a “fugitive and cloistered virtue”’.30 This is exactly how Philanax’s oration
indeed culminates.
So what was Sidney doing? He was reviving the traditional arguments of
the humanist counsellors and tutors to his father’s generation. But again, the
further question Foundations has bequeathed to us – and to Blair Worden in
his book The Sound of Virtue in particular – is why Sidney is reviving these
arguments in this fictional form at a specific political moment around 1580? If
we look, as Foundations’ introduction suggests, at some of the ‘more ephemeral
contemporary contributions to social and political thought’ we quickly find
Sidney’s A Letter to Queen Elizabeth about the Alençon courtship. In the letter
Sidney describes the proposed marriage to the French king’s brother as a ‘refuge’
procured by ‘fears’. Why would the Queen even contemplate such a hazardous
change in her calm ‘estate’?31
Questions still remain. It does not follow from this – as Blair Worden seems
on occasions to argue – that the author of the Old Arcadia is just elaborating
the letter on Protestant virtue to the queen in a different form.32 The evidence
suggests that copies of A Letter circulated widely in manuscript, like the Old
Arcadia, but to a different audience. By design, the Old Arcadia circulated
among Sidney and his sisters’ family friends, not among his seniors and betters.
The work, it might be argued, was written for this kind of distinct and controlled
circulation and not for ‘common’ consumption – even though Fulke Greville
claimed it had met this fate by 1586. Whereas A Letter was in a sense authored
by Sidney’s seniors and betters in order that it be freely and widely copied for
propagandistic purposes. It formed part of a campaign by the earl of Leicester
and his supporters against the French marriage. It did for a noble and court
audience what John Stubbs’s printed 1579 tract The discoverie of a gaping gulf
did for a more popular audience.33
28 Ibid., p. 126. 29 Ibid., pp. 200, 217. 30 Ibid., p. 218.
31 Philip Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 46–7.
32 Worden, The Sound of Virtue, pp. 127–41, 195–96.
33 H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 100, 151–2, 301, 421. See Alan Stewart’s shrewd commentary on A
Letter and its circumstances in Philip Sidney: a Double Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000),
pp. 218–21.
82 Warren Boutcher
Having seen, in the gallery of Kalender’s summer house, a royal family portrait
that rather curiously lacks the elder princess, Musidorus is puzzled. Kalender
promises to discover unto him not only that knowledge he has in common with
others, but knowledge which ‘by extraordinary means is delivered unto me’.
It is then Kalender who begins to tell Musidorus the story that is told by the
omniscient narrator directly to the reader at the beginning of the Old Arcadia.36
It turns out that the uncommon knowledge he possesses about the reasons
for Basilius’ mysterious retirement is derived from the copy of a letter that
has fallen into his hands. His son Clitophon had been a gentleman of the privy
chamber and had taken a copy of a letter that the prince had laid in a window after
reading, ‘presuming nobody durst look in his writings’. Clitophon had plenty
of time not only to read but also to copy the letter. Kalender tells Musidorus
that he blamed his son for the curiosity that made him break his duty ‘in such
a kind whereby kings’ secrets are subject to be revealed’. Since it was done,
though, Kalender was ‘content to take so much profit, as to know it’.37
Before Kalender reads the letter – which for his good liking he has carried
about him ever since – he tells Musidorus the background. The background
amounts to the virtuous character of the author, Philanax himself, and whatever
Kalender can deduce about the circumstances from the text. He gathers that the
Prince has ‘written unto him his determination . . . upon some oracle’ he has
received at Delphos. He then reads the text, which is very close to the text of
the oration in the Old Arcadia. He says afterwards that he does not know what
the oracle said, and gathers from the text that Philanax did not know either. He
deduces from what he calls ‘this experience’, i.e. the text of the letter and the
ongoing uncertainty of the political situation, that Basilius ‘hath rather heard
then followed the wise . . . counsel of Philanax’. The prince has lost the stern of
his government, ‘strange bruits are received for current’ among the people, ‘the
prince himself hath hidden his head’. Kalender apologises to Musidorus for his
long discourse. Perhaps old men, he admits, are particularly keen to eternise
themselves not only by children but ‘by speeches and writings recommended
to the memory of hearers and readers’. He assures Musidorus, however, that
he has not revealed these matters so freely to any but him, in whom he already
sees so much to love and trust.38
Here, then, is a fictionalised account of the circumstances in which speeches
and writings might be recommended to the memories of hearers and readers
in English Renaissance culture. Do Kalender’s act of recommendation and its
context have a place, though, in Skinner’s historiography of moral and political
thought? Or is there only a place for the act of the original letter-writer? The
letter is addressed to a prince who does not hear its contents, and reaches its
readership by means of copies taken ‘accidentally’ at court. Kalender is an
think this makes Skinner’s approach inapplicable – quite the contrary – but I
do think his question needs modifying. It is not always about what the author
is doing, at least in the conventional sense of that term.
More important still than the fact that we do not have a stable authorial text or
genealogy of copies is the fact that we do have more than one Kalender figure
recommending the text to us with contextualising stories about its circumstances
of composition. And the stories conflict. De Thou tells us that it was composed
as an immediate response to the Guyenne revolt of 1548 against la gabelle,
the hated royal salt tax imposed under Henri II.45 Montaigne tells us that ‘this
subject was treated by him in his childhood purely as an exercise’ though he
does not doubt that La Boétie believed what he wrote, for ‘if he had had the
choice he would rather have been born in Venice than in Sarlat’.46 Both of
these stories are taken seriously by editors and inform some of the divergent
interpretations offered by critics.
By contrast, modern editors are positively embarrassed about the story told by
Agrippa d’Aubigné. According to him the discourse was written in a fit of irri-
tation after a royal guard, pestered by La Boétie to grant access to the Louvre’s
ballroom, dropped his halberd deliberately on the author’s foot. D’Aubigné
claims La Boétie went running through the Louvre crying for justice but was
laughed at by the grandees that heard him.47 Modern scholars add further stories.
One has recently insisted that we pay more attention to La Boétie’s embedded
dedications to Guillaume de Lur-Longa. He has tied the text to the moment
when La Boétie succeeded Lur-Longa as conseiller at the Bordeaux parlement.
He has read it in this local political gift context as an encouragement to members
of the parlement of Paris at a moment when it was in conflict with the crown.48
But it should be noted that at least one of the manuscript copies lacks one of
the addresses to Lur-Longa.49
Few could deny that the power of De la servitude volontaire’s argument and
the force of its language ought to have made it a political classic. I cannot
summarise the discourse in any detail here. With declamatory brilliance, La
Boétie denounces the exercise of absolute power by a single man, without
control or moderation, at the expense of a whole community. But it is not – I
should specify in current circumstances – about a tyrant’s oppression of a non-
consenting people by terror. La Boétie argues that monarchical tyranny can
only come about with the tacit accord of the people, who subject themselves
45 La Boétie, De la servitude volontaire, ed. Smith, p. 8.
46 Montaigne, Essays, pp. 218–19.
47 La Boétie, De la servitude volontaire, ed. Smith, p. 11.
48 See G. Demerson, ‘Les exempla dans le Discours de la Servitude Volontaire: une rhétorique
datée?’, in M. Tétel (ed.), Etienne de La Boétie. Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin,
Actes du Colloque International, Duke University, 26–28 mars 1999, Colloques, Congrès et
Conférences sur la Renaissance Européenne 30 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), pp. 195–224.
49 Girot, ‘Une version inconnue’, p. 563.
How to do things with texts 87
voluntarily to a single man. The situation is intolerable, and goes against nature,
which makes each individual man free. It can only pertain in a degenerate
society, for since the whole of society is a pyramid culminating in the tyrant
and his entourage at its summit, social relationships at all levels down to the
bottom are corrupted. La Boétie’s work is a classically powerful discourse.
And so it appeared to its first readers. When the exiled Florentine humanist
Jacopo Corbinelli encountered a copy of the text in an unidentified Parisian
library, possibly Henri de Mesme’s or Claude Dupuy’s, he wrote to his friend
Vincenzo Pinelli in Padua in November 1570 as follows:
I would like to have a copy of a writing that I have seen in the most elegant French
de voluntaria servitute that Brutus himself could not have said better. I read it and it is
learned and deep but dangerous for these times.50
A copy did find its way to Pinelli though it is not certain whether it was provided
in the event by Corbinelli or not.51 Paolo Carta has recently excavated the cir-
cumstances behind Corbinelli’s remarks and his desire for a copy of a discourse
whose author and origins appear to have been unknown to him. In the context
of Florentine politics, Corbinelli was an anti-Medicean republican. His projects
in exile included a plan for a French edition of Giannotti’s Republica fiorentina,
a text that heralded the coming of a ‘new Brutus [nuovo Bruto]’ to Florence.
Writing to Pinelli at Padua in the Venetian republic, Corbinelli inserts his read-
ing of La Boétie into the construction of a cultural platform for the hoped-for
return of republicanism to Florence. At the same time, Corbinelli is a supporter
and servant of Catherine de Medici. In the entirely different context of French
politics, he reads the text as one that at that particular moment, in the hands of
the wrong readers, the hands of the growing Huguenot ‘resistance’, could be
very dangerous for the Valois monarchy.52
In an address to the reader, dated August 1570, but published in the slim 1571
edition of some of La Boétie’s works, Montaigne says something very similar in
the course of explaining why he cannot print De la servitude volontaire. In this
address and in other dedicatory letters he describes what difficulties he has had
collecting enough texts of enough weight to represent his friend’s genius. La
Boétie had spread his works around in manuscript copies without any care for
their fortunes. But even though Montaigne had found a copy of this and another
50 ‘Vorrei poter haver copia d’una scritt[ura] che io ho visto in franzese elegantiss[mo], De volun-
taria servitute, che Bruto stesso non harebbe detto meglio. Io l’ho letta et è cosa dotta et recondita
ma per questi tempi pericolosa’ (J. Corbinelli to V. Pinelli, 4 November 1570, Pinelli collec-
tion, B. 9, fol. 131, Biblioteca Ambrosiana Milan). I use the transcription given by N. Panichi,
Plutarchus Redivivus? La Boétie e i suoi interpreti (Naples: Vivarium, 1999), p. 21.
51 Girot, ‘Une version inconnue’, 565.
52 P. Carta, ‘Les exilés italiens et l’anti-machiavélisme français au XVIe siècle’, in P. Carta and L.
De Los Santos (eds.) La République en exile (XVe–XVIe siècles) (Lyons: ENS-Editions, 2002),
pp. 93–117. I am grateful to Professor Carta for sending me a copy of his chapter.
88 Warren Boutcher
discourse he could not publish them as their manner was ‘too delicate and
dainty’ for them to be abandoned to the gross and heavy air of such an unpleasant
season.53 But De la servitude volontaire did of course reach the gross and heavy
air. In 1574 a large section of La Boétie’s discourse was pirated and inserted
without acknowledgement into the mouth of a pro-revolutionary politique in
one of the printed dialogues of the famous Reveille-Matin, or ‘alarm-call’ to
revolutionary Protestants. The work was published again in Simon Goulart’s
cleverly propagandistic, pro-‘resistance’ collection of Mémoires of the reign
of Charles IX in 1578, and in another, separate Huguenot edition published at
Rheims (1577).54
Meanwhile, Montaigne had been planning to embed this delicate discourse at
the heart of book I of the Essais, to surround it with a prophylactic commentary
that would allow it to be released into the common air. But ‘having discovered’,
as he says, ‘that this work of his has since been published to an evil end by
those who seek to disturb and change the state of our national polity without
worrying if they will make it better, and that they have set it among works of
their own kidney’, he decided not to publish it in the Essais after all.55
I am arguing that La Boétie’s is a text which does have a precise historical
‘moment’ to illumine its meanings. But if we continue to ask what the author is
doing with his arguments at that moment then we must understand the author
to be a group of readers, copiers and editors, including Montaigne himself. For
a decade between 1570 and 1580 De la servitude volontaire (or whichever title
we ascribe to it) provided seasonal arguments for liberty and against tyranny. It
could serve to express the liberty-loving sentiments of anti-Huguenot supporters
of the French monarchy, including those who backed republicanism in Florence
and Venice, while also being self-evidently applicable, and therefore – from
one perspective – dangerous in the context of the growing body of anti-Valois,
revolutionary Huguenot propaganda. The problem that Montaigne faced and
failed to solve was how La Boétie’s discourse could be circulated in print in such
a way as to fix its definitive context as the former, rather than the latter. He was
meant to be Kalender to La Boétie’s Philanax. But controlled, ‘contextualised’
circulation of texts in the sixteenth century was a much messier, more uncertain
and more hazardous enterprise than either Sidney’s fiction or much modern
scholarship suggests.
By the mid-sixteenth century the textual fortunes of virtuous and free speech
and the potentially vicious curiosity of readers and copiers were as much a mat-
ter of active concern to producers of discourse as the intellectual definition of the
53 Étienne de la Boétie, CEuvres complètes, ed. Louis Desgraves, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: William Blake,
1991), I, p. 149.
54 Panichi, Plutarchus Redivivus?, pp. 21–9; La Boétie, De la servitude volontaire, ed. Gontarbert,
pp. 245–7.
55 Montaigne, Essays, p. 218.
How to do things with texts 89
vices and virtues and their relationship to political liberty and the chances of for-
tune. I think this applies to Montaigne, and that his concern derives specifically
from his bitter experience with the fortunes of his great friend La Boétie’s texts.
For when we describe what Montaigne is doing in the Essais we should take into
account that the author figures in the first edition as a ‘recommender’ of others’
texts. We have seen that the first volume was centrally to have included an
edition of La Boétie’s praise of liberty. The largest essay in the second volume,
likewise, apologises for a fifteenth-century text that had been recommended to
Pierre Eyquem (Montaigne’s father) by a humanist, Pierre Bunel. Montaigne
translated the text, Raymond Sebond’s Natural Theology, as a filial duty and
published it eleven years before the first edition of the Essais.
The point here, again, is that Sebond’s intention is less important than Bunel’s.
Bunel’s intention – an intention co-opted by Montaigne’s father – had been to
provide a textual prophylactic against the spread of licentiously critical reason-
ing occasioned by the Lutheran protest against the established church. Sebond’s
text was indeed held by Montaigne’s betters and patrons to be a useful instru-
ment in preserving true Catholic piety at this time. This despite the fact that
the Roman church – the protagonist most interested in this case in the original
author’s intentions – was highly suspicious of Sebond’s prologue (which was
eventually placed on the Index of Prohibited Books). The problem was that the
Natural Theology was in many ways a ‘weak’ book designed for readers with
relatively little formal learning, readers such as Pierre Eyquem and the ladies
at court.56 It looked flimsy and inadequate when put up alongside other works
being produced by court theologians and philosophers. It needed protection and
support from its patron (Pierre) were it to serve the purpose intended by Pierre’s
learned guest, and vicariously by Pierre himself. In his father’s name, Michel
brings in some heavy-duty argumentative resources from Sextus Empiricus to
provide this protection and meet this purpose. The new wrapping changes the
nature of the gift – it now undermines rather than rebuilds the foundations
of man’s rational knowledge – but it serves the same purpose. More important
than Sebond’s original intention is what Pierre – co-opting his humanist client’s
idea – intended to do with the text, and Montaigne, I would argue, is faithful
to this intention. We can understand Pierre as the author here, if we want,
but only if the agency of both his intellectual servant and his son is somehow
comprehended.
Behind the Essais, then, are two highly complex stories about the transmis-
sion of others’ texts. Montaigne’s attempts in his first edition to recommend
56 Ibid., pp. 490–91 (from II.12, ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’); E. Limbrick, ‘Métamorphose
d’un philosophe en théologien’, in Claude Blum (ed.), Montaigne, ‘Apologie de Raimond
Sebond’. De la ‘Theologia’ à la ‘Théologie’ (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1990), pp. 229–46,
at pp. 234–8; F. Rigolot, ‘D’une Théologie “pour les dames” à une Apologie “per le donne”’,
in ibid., pp. 261–90.
90 Warren Boutcher
these texts dovetail with his increasingly elaborate attempts in the same and
subsequent editions to recommend his own. In describing what Montaigne is
doing in the Essais it is certainly helpful to refer in the spirit of Skinner to an
act of free speech before an audience of friends and familiars. But one must
also refer to a carefully deliberated and manipulated act of publication. The
traditional story of a book composed in isolation in a library-tower without
a thought for printers, publishers and readers outside the family should not
be taken too much at face value. For Montaigne sets out to shape a clear story
about the contextual origins of his works so as to shape the ethos of their recep-
tion. The context in and for which he was writing is a crucial part of his subject
matter, subject matter that he shapes with a definite purpose.
For the story Montaigne tells about his own book is a solution to a problem
in specific social and cultural circumstances. The problem is how safely to
communicate freely formed critical opinions as one’s own in an age of print
piracy and violent controversy, an age in which criticism of authorities is used
to perpetuate civil and religious war. The fate of La Boétie’s manuscript De
la servitude volontaire dramatised the problem only too clearly for him as he
prepared the first edition of the work that was to have accompanied it into print.
The standard instrument for solving this problem was the familiar or dedicatory
letter. Works could be accompanied by a carefully confected set of dedicatory
letters – as in the case of Montaigne’s editions of La Boétie. Or the works could
consist of a collected volume of familiar letters to friends.
Since the Reformation, the theory had been that one could publish free judge-
ments on ticklish matters in the safe and controlled environment of a letter to a
friend. Even in Erasmus’s case the theory had not worked out that well in prac-
tice. However much he tried to control the circulation of his familiar letters, to
circumscribe their political force, the letters ‘turned out all-too-easily to escape
his authorial control’. Erasmus’s own semi-fictionalised efforts were overtaken
by devastatingly effective and polemical publications of entirely counterfeit
correspondence.57
From one perspective, Montaigne’s particular solution to the problem is to
tell the story of a wise man’s live ethical experiment in frankness and open-
ness, the fortunate success of which he observes and comments upon in later
editions of the text.58 As the work, after first publication, finds far-flung and
trusting readers, and as Montaigne, who is consubstantial with his book, travels
and networks, encountering people who – despite his candour – receive him
57 Lisa Jardine, ‘Before Clarissa: Erasmus, “Letters of Obscure Men”, and Epistolary Fictions’,
in T. Van Houdt, J. Papy, G. Tournoy and C. Matheeussen (eds.), Self-Presentation and Social
Identification: the Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times. Pro-
ceedings of the International Colloquium Leuven-Brussels, 24–28 May 2000, Supplementa
Humanistica Lovaniensia 18 (Leuven: Brill, 2002), pp. 385–403, at pp. 400–3.
58 See especially Montaigne, Essays, pp. 1201–5.
How to do things with texts 91
well, both are emboldened to be more openly themselves, to speak more freely
and experimentally on a variety of potentially controversial topics. In other
words, the ethical self-experimentation has demonstratively positive outcomes.
Montaigne on his estate and on his travels, the book both locally and interna-
tionally, does manage to survive unscathed in such a dangerous season and to
make friends. He has brought his true and natural self in all (or almost all) its
nakedness out into private social life and it has been welcomed, not censored,
requisitioned or killed.
As this already makes clear, the solution to which I refer is also a strategy
for the publication of a uniquely free but unrevolutionary and uncontrover-
sial book. The strategy has intellectual, literary and commercial aspects. For
a start, Montaigne does not, like La Boétie, disperse himself in miscellaneous
manuscript works given to friends and family on various occasions, works
which are then recopied by others for potentially illegitimate uses. Nor does
he, like Sidney, remain a manuscript author but seek to exercise more control
over his works by various means. He collects himself in a printed book. And
it is himself. For he does not choose a subject that controls him, that limits
his freedom of intellectual movement. He does not choose a subject, such as
contemporary events, that, given his natural liberté, would lead him to publish
unlawful and punishable judgements. He finds a core subject of which he is the
undisputed master but about which he is free to talk (i.e. himself).59
He abandons the standard generic choice. He does not confect letters to
friends with whom he is no more than acquainted but to whom he would become
publicly obliged for the maintenance of his reputation. He does not, in other
words, use the tired fiction of a printed collection of familiar letters to friends.
He collects himself in a new genre of essais.60 He tries to control the distribution
and use of the Essais by means of their format and content, as though the work
were a single manuscript circulated only to friends who know the author and
accept his good faith. Instead of writing new works he takes advantage of the
privilège system to keep control of his one work by periodically preparing
expanded editions.61 By various rhetorical means he directs the work to the
private spaces of his readers’ households, where it will have no role in bitter
public controversies. At the same time, again, the text becomes bolder and freer
59 Ibid., p. 120.
60 See ibid., pp. 279, 282–3. It is not just that Montaigne’s letters failed to survive the ravages
of time. Contemporaries noted that Montaigne did not play the epistolary game. Catherine
Magnien quotes a near contemporary of Montaigne’s, Ogier, speculating that the conspicuous
lack of letters to friends left by Montaigne could have been due to his distance from worthy
correspondents, or to his choosiness in friendship. See Catherine Magnien, ‘Etienne Pasquier
“familier” de Montaigne?’, Montaigne Studies 13 (2001), pp. 277–313, at p. 300.
61 See George Hoffmann’s classic article, ‘The Montaigne Monopoly: Revising Montaigne’s Essais
under France’s Privilege System’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 108 (2)
(1993), pp. 308–19.
92 Warren Boutcher
as it goes, from one edition to another, the more confident the author becomes
about his reception. This, at any rate, is the story Montaigne tells about himself
and his book. The intellectual historian, of course, should not take it at face
value. But that is another story.
Since the publication of Foundations we have become more aware of the
cultural and physical conditions informing textual production and consumption
in the early-modern period. This means that we now have some supplementary
questions to ask of early-modern texts of moral and political thought. We must
question traditional stories about the circumstances of composition of texts,
interrogate producers’ strategies for controlling and circumscribing their inter-
pretation, and consider whether the ‘author’ whose doings interest us is not
sometimes the reader, the copier, the ‘recommender’ of others’ works. These
are, though, only supplementary questions. The foundational questions are still
firmly in place.
6 ‘The Best State of the Commonwealth’: Thomas
More and Quentin Skinner
Cathy Curtis
I am indebted to David Colclough and the participants of the conference ‘Rethinking the Founda-
tions’ for their comments and criticisms. Conal Condren, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Jean Pretorius
responded to earlier drafts. The editors, Annabel Brett and James Tully, helped me sharpen and
clarify my arguments. My greatest thanks are due to Quentin Skinner for his generosity as a
scholar and teacher, which extended to discussions concerning this paper.
1 James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988); Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), I: Regarding Method.
2 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978) I, p. ix.
3 Ibid., p. 244.
93
94 Cathy Curtis
‘that the noblest way of life is one of virtuous public service’.4 The essay con-
cluded that, as the contrasts between scholastic and humanist principles were
considered more deeply in the course of the sixteenth century, ‘the humanist
ideal of virtuous public service was increasingly challenged and eventually sup-
planted by a more individual and contractarian style of political reasoning, the
style perfected by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan’. Political liberty was now cali-
brated according to the extent of individual rights, and ‘this new tradition found
the humanist attempt to connect liberty with virtue and public service at best
paradoxical and at worst a sinister misunderstanding of the concepts involved’.5
And more than a decade later, Visions of Politics now compares these ‘two
contrasting views we have inherited in the modern West about the nature of
our common life’; the neo-Roman theory of freedom and self-government on
one side, and ‘the modern theory of the state as the bearer of uncontrollable
sovereignty’ on the other.6 The reconciliation of ‘these divergent perspectives’,
it is said, ‘remains a central problem in contemporary political life’; Skinner’s
hope is that his ‘excavation’ of the history of these ‘rival theories’ will ‘contri-
bute something of more than purely historical interest to these current debates’.7
And certainly it is the values of the neo-Roman vision of politics that Skinner
believes have been neglected and misconstrued by its scholastic critics and
their modern Gothic counterparts, such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick.
It was in his Liberty before Liberalism of 1998, developed from his Inaugural
Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge,
that Skinner adopted the terminology of neo-Roman rather than republican
theory of liberty for the first time, arguing that it allowed the inclusion of
those writers who did not strictly oppose the institution of monarchy, but rather
may even have preferred that an element of monarchy be part of a mixed
constitution.8 In a trenchant review of Liberty before Liberalism, Blair Worden
considered that certainly
in the English-speaking world there existed, at least from the early seventeenth century,
a loose but enduring vocabulary which connected liberty not, or not only, with individual
rights but with particular forms of government (sometimes republican, sometimes mixed-
monarchical).
But the challenge facing Skinner, he argued, was ‘to establish more fully
the relationship of seventeenth century English thought of the Civil War
and Interregnum to classical and Italian thinking about the free state, and
9 Blair Worden, ‘Factory of the Revolution’, London Review of Books, 5 February 1998, pp. 13–
15, at 15. On Skinner’s refiguration of the concept of negative liberty, see Quentin Skinner,
‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives’, Visions, II, ch. 7;
Quentin Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner
and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), pp. 293–309; Quentin Skinner, ‘Machiavelli on Virtù and the Maintenance of
Liberty’, Visions, II, pp. 160–85; Paul Rahe, ‘Situating Machiavelli’, in James Hankins (ed.),
Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), pp. 270–308. Like Worden, Rahe also questions the usefulness of the terminology
of neo-Roman theory. Other challenges and comments come from Graham Maddox, ‘The Limits
of Neo-roman Liberty’, History of Political Thought 23 (2002), pp. 418–31; William Walker,
‘Paradise Lost and the Forms of Government’, History of Political Thought 22 (2001), pp. 270–
91; Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Conal
Condren, ‘Liberty of Office and its Defence in Seventeenth-Century Political Argument’, History
of Political Thought 17 (1997), pp. 460–82; J. C. Davis, ‘Political Thought during the English
Revolution’, in B. Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), pp. 374–96; and Antony Black, ‘Christianity and Republicanism: from St Cyprian
to Rousseau’, American Political Science Review 9 (1997), pp. 647–56.
10 Worden, ‘Factory of the Revolution’, pp. 13–15; compare Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism,
p. 118 to Michael P. Zuckert, ‘Appropriation and Understanding in the History of Political
Philosophy: on Quentin Skinner’s Method’, Interpretation 13 (1985), pp. 403–24 on the Cam-
bridge school’s insistence on severing the history of political thought from one’s own political
life or action.
11 For a brief preview of that history, see Quentin Skinner, ‘States and the Freedom of Citizens’,
in Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth (eds.) States and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), pp. 11–27.
12 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, p. 112f. for the metaphor of archaeology; Peter Kjellstrom,
‘The Narrator and the Archaeologist: Modes of Meaning and Discourse in Quentin Skinner and
Michel Foucault’, Statsventenskaplig Tidskrift 98 (1995), pp. 21–41.
96 Cathy Curtis
I
Most schematically described, the neo-Roman tradition is said by Skinner to
have emerged from a synthesis of Roman law concepts glossed by Azo and his
pupils in the thirteenth century and the classical writings of Cicero (in partic-
ular), Sallust, Livy and Tacitus; this underpinned the civic ideology, the ideal
of republicanism, developed in the Italian city-states, especially Florence and
Venice. Machiavelli makes the fullest and most influential, if unorthodox, state-
ment and reappraisal of the neo-Roman theory in the Discorsi on Livy’s History
of Rome. Some of the elements of Italian republicanism – which remained
in contestation with the theory of princely government – were imported into
northern Europe in the first years of the sixteenth century, and found a partic-
ularly receptive audience in early-modern (and monarchical) England.13 In the
Visions, Skinner moves directly from considerations of the writings of the ‘neo-
Roman’ Machiavelli on liberty and virtù to Thomas More’s contemporaneous
Utopia of 1516, which he there describes as the ‘one of the earliest and most
original attempts to introduce a classical (particularly Roman) understanding of
civic virtue and self-government into English political thought’.14 Skinner never
explicitly labels More a neo-Roman theorist, or even a republican theorist; how-
ever, from 1998 More is implicitly assimilated into the ‘neo-Roman’ narrative.
The More essay is a lightly revised version of ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the
Language of Renaissance Humanism’ of 1988, now entitled ‘Thomas More’s
13 Recent research on the transmission of Italian humanism into early Tudor England lays emphasis
on the education and/or diplomatic service in Italy of humanists such as Linacre, Tunstall, Pace,
Starkey, Pole and Lupset. See J. Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy,
1485–1603 (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 1998); C. Curtis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy,
Counsel and Satire’ (Cambridge: unpublished PhD thesis, 1996); J. Woolfson (ed.), Reassessing
Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
14 Skinner’s essays on More are ‘More’s Utopia’, Past and Present 38 (1967), pp. 153–68; Foun-
dations, I, ch. 9; the discussion at the end of ‘Political Philosophy’ in Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 389–452; ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renais-
sance Humanism’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 123–57; and the recent revision of
the last-mentioned in Visions, II, as ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility’,
pp. 213–44. See George Logan, ‘Interpreting Utopia’, Moreana 31 (1994), pp. 203–58 for a dis-
cussion of Skinner’s treatment of Utopia. Skinner has incorporated some of Logan’s criticisms
about, for example, his blurring of the distinction between More as author and character and
his equation of Utopia with the best state of the commonwealth, into the revised Visions essay.
I cite the revised essay in order to avoid confusion, while acknowledging that it represents a
more recent and altered reading, especially in its placement immediately following the essays:
Skinner, ‘Machiavelli on Virtù and the Maintenance of Liberty’, Visions, II; and Skinner, ‘The
Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavelli and Modern Perspectives’, Visions, II.
Thomas More and Quentin Skinner 97
Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility’ so as to refer more specifically, it seems,
to the larger concern with the Renaissance virtues and neo-Roman liberty.
In Liberty before Liberalism More appears as an early advocate of self-
government, in terms of individual citizens exercising a right of participation in
the making of laws – Utopia suggests the ideal of the free city as realised in a fed-
erated republic. There is then a large gap in the explication of reception of neo-
Roman liberty, or at least some of its constituent elements, in England, beyond
the comment that it had ‘already struck some deep and ramifying roots’.15 The
research of Patrick Collinson is cited as showing how ‘quasi-republican modes
of political reflection and action’ were present in later Elizabethan society, and
that of Markku Peltonen on the reception of Machiavellian ideas by humanists
from the 1570s.16 It is unclear to me whether it is implied that the elements of
neo-Roman theory which Skinner identifies in the text of Utopia disappear from
the horizon between More and the later Elizabethans; or whether, as is more
likely, the ideal of the mixed constitution as developed by later Tudor human-
ists, such as Thomas Starkey (Dialogue c.1535), John Ponet (Shorte Treatise
of Politike Power 1556) and Sir Thomas Smith (De republica Anglorum 1583)
represents some sort of continuity.17 More supporting scholarship is yet to be
done by Tudor intellectual historians. Jonathan Woolfson’s recent essay on
the use made of Aristotle’s Politics and the contemporary Venetian model by
Tudor writers is an important contribution in this direction; Mark Goldie’s study
of office holding in early-modern England is another.18 The Visions similarly
15 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, p. 11.
16 Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum Or, History with the Politics Put Back: Inaugural
Lecture delivered 9 November 1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); ‘The
Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in J. Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London: St
Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 110–34; David Norbrook, ‘Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a
Republican Literary Culture’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early
Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1993), pp. 45–66. Other relevant discussions
include B. Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of
Political Thought, with the assistance of Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), pp. 443–75; M. Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987); D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance
(London: Routledge, 1984); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and
Republic: the English Experience’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Repub-
licanism: a Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
I, pp. 307–27.
17 Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, pp. 445–7; J. Woolfson, ‘Between Bruni and Hobbes: Aristotle’s
Politics in Tudor Intellectual Culture’, in his Reassessing Tudor Humanism, pp. 197–222.
18 Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim
Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 153–94.
Worden sounds a cautionary note, warning historians not to confuse participatory features in
pre-Civil War English public and communal life, which are being increasingly recovered, with
constitutional republicanism: Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic’, p. 313. My
thanks to Conal Condren for allowing me to read the manuscript of his book, Argument and
Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices, which further
develops this line of stimulating research and questions whether negative concepts of liberty
have any place at all in this period.
98 Cathy Curtis
moves from More directly to the British civil wars. In any case, a native version
of fully fledged neo-Roman theory is said to appear in the seventeenth century,
with Machiavelli’s Discourses serving as an obvious source of inspiration and
culminating in James Harrington’s Oceana of 1656 (Harrington was, it should
be said, an admirer of More, and Utopia informs the Oceana).19 The ‘rise and
temporary triumph’ of neo-Roman theory is traced into the early decades of the
eighteenth century in the Visions; it helped to destabilise the Stuart monarchy
and aided the legitimation of the short-lived ‘free state’ established after the
regicide in 1649.
And what are the most distinctive characteristics of neo-Roman theory as
Skinner reconstructs it from classical and humanist sources? Drawing explana-
tory power from the metaphor of the body politic, neo-Roman thought had as
its fundamental premise the idea that sovereignty in a free state must remain
in the possession of the citizen-body as a whole.20 It is the will of its citizens
that is recognised as the basis of law and government. The standing of the civis
or citizen is in contrast to that of the subditus or subject; and libertas, the free-
dom of individual citizens as well as of communities, is defined in terms of
the absence of arbitrary domination, or even the potential for arbitrary domi-
nation, by others and in contrast with the condition of slavery. The nurturing
of a virtuous and educated citizenry is necessary to guarantee and maintain
the liberty of states and individuals alike. The humanist contention that virtus
vera nobilitas est is identified as an important element of neo-Roman theory:
virtue alone, rather than hereditary wealth and lineage, enables us to play our
part as citizens of true nobility and worth. Citizenship is also linked with the
value of the life of negotium, of active political service, in preference to that of
otium, contemplative withdrawal in pursuit of religious or philosophical truth.
Tyranny, on the other hand, renders the body politic unfree ‘if it is forcibly
or coercively deprived of its ability to act at will in the pursuit of its chosen
ends’.21
This constitutes Skinner’s third concept of liberty, the fruit of his continuing
engagement with theorists of liberty, especially Isaiah Berlin, Phillip Pettit and
Gerald MacCallum, and his reading of authors such as Henry Parker, Francis
Osborne, Henry Neville, Edward Littleton, Marchamont Nedham, Henry Vane
and John Milton in the seventeenth century.22 In addition to Berlin’s two
concepts of liberty, positive and negative in the sense of freedom from con-
straint, Skinner sets forth an alternative theory of liberty – negative liberty
in the sense of freedom from the potential for the exercise of discretionary
powers held by those on whom those who are ruled depend. In the context
of the clash between crown and Parliament in the seventeenth century, Skin-
ner argues that the critics of the royal prerogative (particularly with respect to
extra-parliamentary taxation and the negative voice or power of veto) develop
arguments that insist that if a king retains any discretionary powers whatsoever
the realm cannot be a free state, but rather a state of dependent servitude. If many
of Skinner’s seventeenth-century ‘neo-Romans’ allow for the possibility for a
monarch to be a ruler of a free state, safeguards must be imposed to ensure that
the body of the commonwealth can never be reduced to a condition of depen-
dence on his/her personal will or on the prerogative powers of the crown.23
Some, like Francis Osborne, deny that any community living under a monarch
can be considered a free state – any king inclines to the arbitrary exercise of
power. In the English context, Skinner concedes that the ‘immediate inspira-
tion for this way of thinking appears to have come from a number of medieval
common-law texts’, such as those of Henry de Bracton and Sir Thomas Lit-
tleton.24 But Skinner continues on to argue that the definitions found in these
authorities derive from the Digest, and so from Roman law.
The fiction of Utopia, as is well recognised, bears the mark of More’s close
reading of Greek philosophy as much as Roman. More was a translator of
Lucian and, along with Richard Pace, supported the causes of Erasmus’s Greek
New Testament and education in the Greek language as the basis for study in the
liberal sciences.25 Skinner’s previously mentioned essay (revised for Visions),
‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility’, does not concern itself
with the details of the structure of the mixed constitution of the newly discovered
island of Nowhere, formed with reference to Sparta, Greece, Rome and the
primitive Christian church, as internal evidence and the parerga of the text
suggest.26 Nor does it consider Utopia from a rhetorical or literary perspective,
or in detailed historical context. Skinner chooses instead to concentrate on two
idioms or contested vocabularies in the so-called dialogue of counsel in book I
23 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 53–5.
24 Skinner, ‘States and the Freedom of Citizens’, pp. 12–13.
25 C. Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’s De fructu and Early Tudor Pedagogy’, in Reassessing Tudor Human-
ism, pp. 43–77; Eric Nelson, ‘Greek Nonsense in More’s Utopia’, The Historical Journal 44
(2001), pp. 889–917.
26 For example the prefatory letter of Jerome Busleyden to More, and Beatus Rhenanus to Wilibald
Pirckheimer. Thomas More, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St Thomas More, ed.
Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press 1965), IV, Utopia, p. 317;
R. J. Schoek, ‘More, Plutarch and King Agis’, Philological Quarterly 35 (1956), pp. 366–75;
M. N. Raitere, ‘More’s Utopia and The City of God’, Studies in the Renaissance 20 (1973),
pp. 144–68; Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); George
Logan, The Meaning of More’s Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
100 Cathy Curtis
of Utopia which are familiar from neo-Roman theory: of otium versus negotium,
and vera nobilitas, and to show how these relate directly to the issue of what
constitutes the optimus status reipublicae, the best state of the commonwealth.
While acknowledging the insights of recent scholarship which stresses the
equivocations and ambiguities of the text of Utopia, Skinner rejects the ‘new
orthodoxy’ which he characterises as over-emphasising these, and argues that
More’s principal aim ‘was to challenge his readers at least to consider seri-
ously whether Utopia may not represent the best state of the commonwealth’.27
Classical, humanist and scholastic debates over these issues contextualise
Skinner’s discussion of ‘what orthodoxy More is questioning, what response
he is offering, what exact position he is occupying on the spectrum of political
debate’.28
There are several related conclusions, and these are important to Skinner’s
typology of early-modern English political thought; they underlie the ideal
of the vir civilis which Skinner brilliantly discusses in Reason and Rhetoric
in the Philosophy of Hobbes and inform the influential characterisation of
English civic humanism which Peltonen presents from the mid-sixteenth
century onwards.29 The authorial More in book I sets ‘civic’ or Ciceronian
humanism, as articulated by the figure of More, against a Platonic notion of
contemplative withdrawal, argued by Hythloday. The figure of More is said
to be restating the case for the ‘ideal of civic self-government, based on an
active and politically educated citizenship’ to which the courts of northern
Europe were becoming increasingly inhospitable. Skinner implies that this is
closest to the understanding of the historical More, poised to enter the ser-
vice of Henry VIII, of the proper relationship between philosophy and life.30
And against the Aristotelian and scholastic view that distinguished birth and
inherited wealth – and their attendant ethic of display, splendour and magnifi-
cence – are the foundations of nobility, and therefore necessary qualifications
for public office, Hythloday counters with, in Skinner’s words, ‘a claim that
soon became almost a slogan of humanist political thought: the claim that
virtus vera nobilitas est, that the possession of virtue constitutes the only pos-
sible grounds for regarding someone as a person of true nobility’.31 And this
in turn relates to the question of what qualities in a citizen best serve the
commonwealth: ‘The Utopians believe that what is alone noble and deserving
of honour is a willingness to labour for the common good. The qualities they
think of as truly noble are accordingly the qualities of virtue that are indispens-
able for performing such civic tasks.’32 Consequently, the laws and customs of
Utopia prohibit otium and require negotium from all citizens. Civic virtue in
all its manifestations is encouraged. ‘The Utopians, we learn, are all trained in
virtue.’33
The true radicalism of the text, however, lies in the conclusion of Hythloday
and the Utopians that the only means of achieving this is through the aboli-
tion of private property and money, so that all pride and inequity are pulled
out by the roots. The figure of More reflects on Hythloday’s description of
Utopia in one of the concluding passages of book II that such a system ‘utterly
overthrows all the nobility, magnificence, splendour and majesty which are, in
the estimation of the common people, the true glories and ornaments of the
commonwealth’.34
Skinner considers that the authorial More is raising a doubt about the coher-
ence of humanist political thought. If inherited wealth is prevented from being
treated as criterion of true nobility, can humanists continue ‘to insist on the
indispensability of private property, of hereditability and in general of “degree,
priority and place” as preconditions of any well-ordered society’?35 Is it then
enough to educate the nobility in virtue, or must a more radical restructuring of
political life be effected? Here then is a point of conceptual change for Skinner,
where More’s ‘humanist critique of humanism’ has sought to alter the view
of his countrymen about how political and ethical life may be reappraised by
challenging and inverting inherited normative vocabularies.36
In the final essay in Visions of Politics, ‘The State of Princes to the Person
of the State’, Skinner links Utopia with the series of linguistic moves that give
rise to the modern understanding of the state. The Erasmian humanists transmit-
ted the vocabulary and values of the quattrocento ‘vision’ of the optimus status
reipublicae into northern Europe. Erasmus, Starkey and More are concerned
with the status that allows the happiest and most justly ordered political life.37
And furthermore, in its depiction of the arrival of the Anemolian ambassadors
on the island, Utopia contains an ‘early and devastating portrayal of public
magnificence as nothing more than a form of infantile vanity’.38 If Machiavelli
still assumed that a ruler’s capacity to maintain his state was connected with ‘his
condition of stateliness’, More is said to begin the process by which that con-
nection is severed. This is held to be part of the growing perception in the course
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that heads of state are simply holders
of office, and the ascription of majesty to them as such was inappropriate.39
33 Ibid. Nelson has recently argued that Utopia dramatises a ‘confrontation between the values of
the Roman republican tradition, as understood in More’s time, and those of a rival commonwealth
theory based on Greek ethics’. Contra Skinner, the ideology standing behind virtus vera nobilitas,
Nelson argues, is essentially Platonic and Aristotelian, rather than Roman in the first place:
‘Greek Nonsense in More’s Utopia’, pp. 889, 914–15.
34 More, Utopia, pp. 224–5. 35 Skinner, Visions, II, p. 242.
36 Skinner, Visions, I, p. 178. 37 Skinner, Visions, II, p. 373.
38 Ibid., p. 412. 39 Ibid., p. 412.
102 Cathy Curtis
II
It is worthwhile to ‘excavate’ more from Utopia and other Morean and humanist
writings in the first decades of the sixteenth century with respect to the vocabu-
laries and themes which relate to Skinner’s representation of neo-Roman theory
for two reasons. First, I wish to extend Skinner’s study of early-modern English
liberty and slavery. Second, I wish to challenge Skinner’s adoption of More
as a ‘neo-Roman’. I leave the question of the value of ‘neo-Romanism’ as an
explanatory category more generally in the period open at this time, although
my discussion does suggest potential difficulties.
In October 1516 More wrote to Erasmus that he should like to win approval
for Utopia from gifted humanists who held high office in their own countries and
so were particularly suitable critics, as well as beneficiaries, of the wisdom of
his fiction. They should favour such an invented polity with men like themselves
in positions of leadership and influence; in their own countries, however, they
must suffer inferior men as their equals, if not superiors. More is confident that
men of their kind are not motivated by the desire to have ‘many people under
them, many subjects, as kings now call their peoples (something, that is, worse
than slaves); for it is so much more honourable to bear rule among free men’.43
This subject/slave antithesis appears in one of fifteen Latin epigrams which
are composed on the topos of responsible versus tyrannical rule, and clearly
articulates More’s preference for consultative government – this is important,
for the reader of the ironic, undogmatic and contradictory Utopia is often denied
40 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, p. 10. 41 More, Utopia, p. 54.
42 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 87–9.
43 Erasmus, The Complete Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), IV, Ep.
481, p. 116.
Thomas More and Quentin Skinner 103
clear access to authorial intention. These highly political epigrams were com-
posed around the same time as Utopia, and Erasmus had hoped to publish an
enormous volume containing Utopia, his own Querela Pacis and the Lucianic
translations and Latin poems of both writers. In the end, More’s Latin poems
were printed with the third edition of the Utopia. More contrasts the tyrant
and the king as follows, punning on the meaning of liberi as either freemen or
children: ‘A King who respects the law differs from cruel tyrants thus: a tyrant
rules his subjects as slaves; a king thinks of his as his own children.’44 This
patriarchal understanding of government, and indeed the pun, is repeated in
another epigram: ‘A devoted king will never lack children; he is father to the
whole kingdom. And so it is that a true king is abundantly blessed in having as
many children as he has subjects.’45 More appears to invite the translation of
civis as citizen as much as subject.
The force of the other epigrams on good and bad rulers is similar, drawing on
centuries-old discursive traditions of the corpus reipublicae mysticum and the
king’s two bodies based on Christological imagery and the Aristotelian ideal
of kingship as paternal government.46 They also cast the duties of ruler and
subject in terms of office, as the Yale editors suggest. A good king acts as a
shepherd or watchdog, protecting the interests of his subjects and so ensuring
his own survival and peace of mind. In a well-governed kingdom there is a
relationship of mutual protection, affection and obligation, in which the people
risk their lives to save the king, and they each individually consider him as
the head of their own body. It is not only a question of what is best for the
subjects, but also what renders the ruler less vulnerable to either foreign attack
or internal rebellion. Rulers should not feel free to abuse their position merely
because they are surrounded with the trappings of majesty; in sleep they are
no more elevated than beggars, and unless guarded by either virtue or force,
their life may be disposed of by any man. On the other hand, tyrants who treat
subjects as slaves have no right to hold authority and should retain command
only as long as the populus allows, judging that there is no other who can
promote its interests better.47
More’s highly ambivalent encomiastic coronation odes for the young Henry
VIII – who has just taken his oath – set out criteria against which his discharge
44 Thomas More, Epigram 109, in Clarence Miller et al. (eds.), The Latin Poems, in The Complete
Works of St. Thomas More, vol. III, part II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 163,
164. Quid inter Tyrannum et Principem: ‘Legitimus immanissimis/ Rex hoc tyrannis interest./
Seruos tyrannus quos regit,/Rex liberos putat suos’.
45 More, Epigram 111, Yale Complete Works, III, part II, pp. 163, 164: Bonum principem esse
patrem non dominum: ‘Princeps pius nunquam carebit liberis./ Totius est regni pater./ Princeps
abundat ergo felicissimus,/ Tot liberis, quot ciuibus.’
46 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1966) pp. 207–32. More, Yale Complete Works, III, part II, pp. 364–5;
Yale Complete Works, IV, p. 367. Cf. John 10:12; Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 2.1.15 (1219b).
47 More, Epigrams 112, 114, 115, 120, 121, 201, in Yale Complete Works, III, part II.
104 Cathy Curtis
of office might later be judged, and articulate his reservations concerning hered-
itary rule. One of the five odes is particularly pertinent given More’s outspoken
opposition in Parliament to Henry VII in 1504.
This day is the limit of our slavery, the beginning of our freedom, the end of sadness,
the source of joy, for this day consecrates a young man who is the everlasting glory of
our time and makes him your king – a king who is worthy not merely to govern a single
people but singly to rule the whole world – such a king as will wipe the tears from every
eye and put joy in the place of our long distress . . .48
It appears here at least that More believes that it is possible to live in freedom
under monarchical rule. But it is also clear that More looked to Henry VIII
to undo the damage his father had inflicted upon the commonwealth through
his abuse of royal prerogative and exploitation of attainder, as well as bonds
and recognisances, in order to cow the nobility. He extols the son to restore
the ancient laws and ranks of the realm, award honours and public offices
appropriately rather than sell them to the undeserving, and even rescind the
unjust laws enacted in the previous reign.49 Henry VIII is warned that it is vital
to attract the affection of his people by ensuring that they do not fear that their
property is not secure from the royal prerogative. The anger of the people brings
tumults.
How much faith More placed in the reforming power of the panegyric is
unclear. More worked on the English and Latin versions of The History of
Richard III between 1513 and 1518. Indebted to Sallust, Tacitus and Suetonius,
it was another scarcely veiled exhortation to virtuous rule for Henry VIII, and
certainly reveals More’s pessimism about the likelihood of monarchical rule
degenerating into arbitrariness. In the hypothetical council scene of book I of
Utopia, Hythloday argues in terms very close to those of More’s Latin poems
and through him the authorial More alludes to specific sharp fiscal practices in
48 More, Epigram 19, in Yale Complete Works, III, part II, 100–10, 101–10. ‘Meta haec seruitij est,
haec libertatis origo,/ Tristitiae finis, laetitiaeque caput./ Nam iuuenem secli decus O memorabile
nostri/ Ungit, et in regem praeficit ista tuum./ Regem qui populi non unius usque, sed orbis/
Imperio dignus totius unus erat./ Regem qui cunctis lachrymas detergat ocellis,/ Gaudia pro
longo substituat gemitu’. As described by Nicholas Harpsfield, More, using ‘the ancient liberty
of the Parliament House for freely speaking touching the public affairs’, persuaded the Lower
House to resist the king’s request, based on custom, for moneys to provide for the marriage of
Princess Margaret to James IV of Scotland. E. V. Hitchcock (ed.), The Life and Death of Sir
Thomas More (London: Early English Text Society, 1932), pp. 60–1. More returned to the theme
of tyranny in his translation of Lucian’s exercise in forensic rhetoric, Tyrannicide. A man who
has killed the son of a tyrant and so prompted the father’s suicide claims that he is entitled to
receive the reward due for freeing the state of its oppressor. More, Translations of Lucian, ed.
C. R. Thompson, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. III, part I (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1974).
49 The Yale editors note that Henry VII exploited a thirteenth-century declaration of common
law, the Statuta de praerogativa regis, in order to increase royal revenues. An obsolete text, it
was revived and glossed to cover economic possibilities not previously envisioned. More, Yale
Complete Works, III, part II, p. 328. Henry VIII did, in fact, cancel many bonds and recognisances
in the early years of his reign.
Thomas More and Quentin Skinner 105
the reigns of Edward IV, Henry VII and Henry VIII.50 Again we find excoriating
criticism of kings who regard their subjects’ lives and properties as their own,
of dishonourable counsellors who claim that poverty and lack of liberty blunts
the spirit and grinds out of the oppressed the lofty spirit of rebellion,51 and of
judges who massage the law so that decisions are always made in favour of
the king’s treasury. Hythloday argues that a ruler can always fall back on the
royal prerogative if other means of satisfying his will fail. But such a ruler is
a jailer rather than a keeper of his kingdom. A ruler who does not know how
to reform the lives of his citizens, except by depriving them of all of life’s
rewards, should admit that he is not competent to rule free men and abdicate.
Hythloday cites the case of the Macarians, the ‘happy people’, who have had
a succession of excellent rulers who take an oath on assuming office to have
no more in the treasury than an amount of £1000, sufficient to safeguard the
realm.
I want to underline a crucial element that arises from my discussion thus
far, which is at variance with Skinner’s account of neo-Roman theory. Where
Skinner’s neo-Romans decry the dependence of subjects on any monarch who
wields discretionary power, More emphasises a mutual, and potentially benefi-
cial, relationship between ruler and subject. Even a self-interested ruler might
theoretically be made to see that a willing and loving people best advances
the ruler’s desire for internal and external security and prosperity. And More
deploys an eclectic range of sources – Greek, Roman, Christian and scholastic –
to persuade us of this.
How likely is it that a people may live in freedom under a ruler or monarch
(precisely the question which Skinner argues was considered in the next century
by his ‘neo-Romans’)? Another epigram echoes the title of Utopia, ‘What is
the Best State of the Commonwealth’ (Quis optimus reipublicae status):
You ask which governs better, a king or a Senate. Neither, if (as is frequently the case)
both are bad. But if both are good, then I think that the Senate, because of its numbers,
is the better and that the greater good lies in numerous good men. Perhaps it is difficult
to find a group of good men; even more frequently it is easy for a monarch to be bad. A
senate would occupy a position between good and bad; but hardly ever will you have a
king who is not either good or bad. An evil senator is influenced from better men than
he; but a king is himself the ruler of his advisers. A senator is elected by the people
to rule; a king attains this end by being born. In the one case blind chance is supreme;
in the other, a reasonable agreement. The one feels that he was made a senator by the
people; the other feels that the people were created for him so that, of course, he may
have subjects to rule. A king in his first year is always very mild indeed, and so every
year the consul will be like a new king. Over a long period a greedy king will gnaw away
at his people. If a consul is evil, there is hope of improvement. But, you say, a serious
50 Utopia, 92f. J. H. Lupton’s commentary to his edition of The Utopia of Sir Thomas More (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1895) supplies the details. See Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia, pp. 121–3.
51 Utopia, p. 94.
106 Cathy Curtis
disagreement impedes a senate’s decisions, while no one disagrees with a king. But that
is the worse evil of the two, for when there is a difference of opinion about important
matters – but say, what started you on the inquiry anyway? Is there anywhere a people
upon whom you yourself, by your own decision, can impose either a king or a senate?
If this does lie in your power, you are a king. Stop considering to whom you may give
power. The more basic question is whether it would do any good if you could.52
52 More, Epigram 198, Yale Complete Works, III, part II, pp. 228–31. I depart from the Yale
translation of the title.
53 Complete Works of Erasmus, IV, Ep. 499, pp. 163–4.
54 Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia, has a good discussion of the Utopian constitution, pp. 151–200.
There is a general council of the whole island, with an assembly of syphogrants and a senate
of tranibors (one-tenth the size of the assembly). The syphogrants or phylarchs, who represent
thirty households each, elect the chief magistrate or prince by secret ballot from among four
men nominated by the people of the four sections of the city, and he holds the office for life. The
tranibors are re-elected annually, and at each meeting of the senate, two syphogrants as well as
the governor attend to guard against conspiracy and factionalism. No matter of public interest
may be settled by the senate unless it has been aired at a previous meeting. The discussion of
public matters outside the senate or assembly is a capital offence. There is, however, scope for
wide public discussion within the institutional framework – the comitia publica in all likelihood
refers to the forum of each syphogrant together with the thirty families he represents in the senate.
It would appear, then, that every member of every family (the basic unit of the commonwealth)
participates in decision-making regarding the administration of their city. These checks on the
power of the prince and senate thus, says Hythloday, prevent the enslavement of the people.
Thomas More and Quentin Skinner 107
laws are needed) and the practice of virtue. Utopus is the extraordinary and
exceptional ruler in the line of Lycurgus, who is able to reconstitute a state fallen
into corruption because of internal religious conflict and then deprives his office
of the discretionary power of coercion.55 The office of ruler is replaced by a
system of multiple princes or governors, one for each city, who can be deposed
for tyranny. The Utopians are the happiest of people, we are told, subject to
no anxieties since they cannot be arbitrarily dispossessed of their property or
deprived of their liberty or lives; the governors, one feels, sleep easily in their
beds, while everyone values virtue as its own reward. If Plato’s Laws and the
Spartan constitution suggest features of the Utopian constitution, there would
appear to be a parallel with the Venetian constitution with its doge, senate and
grand council. One neglected parallel, I believe, is with the constitution of the
church; the silver age of conciliarism is flourishing in precisely those years in
which Hythloday lived in Utopia, 1510 to 1515.56
If More had no direct experience of the Venetian constitutional arrangement
or of the debates surrounding the Pisan–Milan schism and the Fifth Lateran
Council, his close friend, the diplomat and cleric Richard Pace, did. Pace’s
writings offer a fruitful context to those of More on conciliar and republican
themes. Part of the Erasmus circle and patron to Starkey, Lupset and Pole in
the Veneto, Pace considered that if he were not Venetian by birth, he was by
inclination; the Venetians for their part claimed him as one of their own.57
Unlike More, he was educated in the Italian universities. He studied at Padua,
Bologna and Ferrara under the supervision of famous humanist scholars and
translators in the areas of Latin, Greek, rhetoric, Roman law, and Platonic
and Aristotelian philosophy. One of them was Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, a Pad-
uan scholar and republican with links to Donato Giannotti, and by the 1520s
at least Pace was well acquainted with Gasparo Contarini, as well as many
other leading Italian humanists.58 Pace entered the service of Christopher Bain-
bridge in Rome in 1509 as his Latin and Italian secretary. Bainbridge was made
a cardinal in 1511, and Pace attended the conclave which elected Leo X in
1513 and sessions of the Fifth Lateran Council. He became First Secretary to
55 Walker argues contra Skinner that there are two circumstances in which Livy and Machiavelli
allow the rule of a single person – in the foundation of a commonwealth or in the reform of a
corrupt one. ‘Paradise Lost’, pp. 271–82.
56 Black has argued in opposition to Skinner and Pocock that ‘republican ideas could, like monar-
chical ones, be put about in a variety of languages, in terms of corporation theory and neo-
Christian ecclesiology as well as neo-Roman or Machiavellian terms’. With Black I must agree
that Skinner has implied that Christian thought has little to do with republicanism, neglecting
the shared themes of public welfare and corporate decision-making: Black, ‘Christianity and
Republicanism’, p. 654.
57 Cathy Curtis, Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.
58 T. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989); M. L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986); Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’, ch. 1, esp. pp. 24–6.
108 Cathy Curtis
Henry VIII in 1516, and had much experience of the princely courts of the
empire and the operation of imperial legal codes.
Pace’s De fructu of 1518, published by John Froben and sharing the same
editors as Utopia, advances conciliarist theory and a plea for a counsellor’s
exercise of freedom of speech against the background of European war and
peace, and the failures of the Pisa–Milan and the Fifth Lateran Councils to
effect reform in the years 1511–17.59 Like More, Pace connects vera nobilitas
with civic virtue, and exhorts others to the life of negotium. With a note of
extreme weariness, however, he makes the paradoxical complaint that if he is
free by nature, he is not by choice, having bound himself to the service of
Henry VIII as the servant of Wolsey. And to serve one’s country exceeds all
liberty.60
But Pace is not easily classified as a neo-Roman, despite his seal being
the head of Cicero. Like his younger contemporary and friend Starkey, he
was as deeply immersed in Aristotelian political thought as Roman and, like
More, tended to a synthesis of these with an Erasmian Christian civic human-
ism. In De fructu Cicero is said to have been created by Demosthenes and
Isocrates in oratory, and by Plato and Aristotle in philosophy. The satire itself is
Menippean and encyclopaedic, a praise of classical and Renaissance learning
in all its spheres. The conciliarism it obliquely expresses favours a strong oli-
garchical and mixed church structure, perhaps the analogue of his preference
for oligarchic Venetian republicanism. Pace argues for wide participation by
learned and lay members of the church, and the adherence by popes and car-
dinals to the rule of canon and civil law. The acts of previous popes cannot be
rescinded at will in order to exact taxation which is justified as being necessary
to defend ecclesiastical liberty. In De fructu, Pace contrasts Giles of Viterbo’s
Lateran address calling for reform of the church at the highest level with the
debased classicising Ciceronian oratory of the papal court which asserted the
church’s ancient libertas in terms of a triumphant Roman imperium. Pace shared
Erasmus’s extreme distaste for appeals made by self-serving papal orators, such
as Thomas Inghirami, to necessitas and utilitas publica to justify Julius II’s
prosecution of war on the papacy’s Christian subjects. The classical Roman lan-
guage of liberty and slavery could be put to specious uses by skilled and corrupt
rhetoricians.61
Whether or not one of the most widely read and frequently published and
translated satires of the sixteenth century – the Julius exclusus (composed and
revised 1513–17, first edition 1518) – should be attributed to Pace rather than
Erasmus, as I have argued, it should hold an important place in English political
59 Richard Pace, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. and trans. F. Manley and R. S. Sylvester
(New York: The Renaissance Society of America, 1967).
60 Pace, De fructu, pp. 12–13. 61 Curtis, ‘Pace’, pp. 150–63.
Thomas More and Quentin Skinner 109
More, St Peter insists on the exercise of freedom of speech by learned and vir-
tuous men in frequently convened public assemblies, be they church councils
or senates, as an antidote to tyranny. Julius is censured for breaking his election
capitulation to hold a general council within two years of his election. He is also
taken to task for endangering the respublica Christiana through his policy of
territorial expansion funded through illegal and punitive taxation and the sale
of offices and indulgences, and by encouraging faction and dissent between
European princes. Pope Julius, incredulous at his exclusion from heaven and
threatening St Peter with excommunication, insists on those concepts in Roman
law, carried into canon law and articulated by Cardinal Cajetan, which support
absolutist rule of government: quod principi placvit, what pleases the prince
has force of law, and legibus solutus, the ruler is the source of all law. According
to the character Julius, a pope cannot be censured, even by a general council,
or deposed even if publicly convicted of heresy, since he has the power to abro-
gate, limit, interpret and stretch the law itself if he should find it unsatisfactory.
In any case who would dare challenge the pope, who is so well armed and
protected? St Peter counters that it is Christ who is the true head and law-giver
of the church; the welfare of the Christian commonwealth is more important
than the maiestas of any individual pope.
It is well to recall here that More argued that tyrants who treat subjects as
slaves have no right to hold authority and should not retain power if the people
judge that there is another who can better promote their interests – abdication
is one solution. More warns that a tyrant – a ruler who does not put the welfare
of the commonwealth before his personal will – may meet death at the hand of
an assassin. In the 1530s More would make the analogy between ecclesiastical
and secular government – ‘counsayles do represent the whole chyrch . . . as
a parliament representeth ye hole realm’.66 More wrote to Cromwell that he
never thought the pope above the general council, or greatly advanced the pope’s
authority in any of his writings.
III
I wish to conclude with some further observations on Utopia, its interpretation
and Skinner’s methodological approach. I have argued that More and his best
state of the commonwealth do not rest easily under the term ‘neo-Roman’, or
republican, although More is clearly preoccupied with issues of freedom and
servitude, tyranny and representative government, civic participation and true
nobility. That More was deeply pessimistic about the corruptibility of early-
modern European rulers is undeniable. Hythloday’s discussion of the dangers
66 More, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in Yale Complete Works, VIII, part I, eds. L. A.
Schuster, R. C. Marius and J. P. Lusardi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 146;
E. Rogers, The Correspondence of Thomas More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947),
p. 499, ll.252–64.
Thomas More and Quentin Skinner 111
author making a direct comparison between Charles I and ship money and the
questionable Tudor taxations alluded to in Utopia, despite the striking similari-
ties in theme. It is only Harrington who gives as much constitutional specificity
to his Oceana as More does in Utopia. In the case of Harrington and Robert
Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, interpretation of Utopia is in turn embed-
ded in their utopias which continue the transformational process. This is further
compounded by More’s ambivalent reputation acquired in the sixteenth century
as both a witty corrector of folly and a deceitful mocker who prostituted his
learning to the Catholic cause. The Utopians are allowed religious toleration,
but not English Protestants. Protestant writers did not necessarily wish to claim
this ancestry.
The final issue raised in my opening remarks concerns Worden’s appre-
hensions about Skinner’s historical-mindedness and present-mindedness in his
writings on freedom and citizenship. Skinner has returned to this in a recent
interview, reiterating his view that intellectual history, especially in the study of
discontinuities, opens our eyes to the richness of our intellectual inheritance and
our relationship to it. It does not contain lessons for the present. But again the
passion of Skinner’s language argues not only for his claim that the bringing to
the surface of the neo-Roman vision helps give a new perspective on the hege-
monic rival classical liberal view of politics, of the relations between ‘freedom
of citizens and the powers of the state’, but that he in some way endorses a
contemporary society which reconceptualises itself in the light of a neo-Roman
theory of liberty.69 He writes for an audience ‘obsessed with notions of rights
and interests’ so that they can be awakened to the knowledge that there exists
‘a completely different model, in which duty was prioritised and citizens were
not encouraged to see themselves simply as consumers of government’.70 It is
difficult to draw the line in the sand.
69 Maria Lucia Pallares-Burke, ‘Quentin Skinner’ in The New History: Confessions and Conver-
sations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 212–40. cf. Skinner’s peroration, ‘States and the
Freedom of Citizens’, pp. 24–5.
70 Pallares-Burke, ‘Quentin Skinner’, p. 229.
7 Scholasticism in Quentin Skinner’s Foundations
H. M. Höpfl
1 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), I, pp. 22ff., 65ff., II, esp. pp. 323ff.
2 In Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
he has suggested ‘the neo-Roman concept of liberty’.
113
114 Harro Höpfl
before the sixteenth century.3 At the time when he wrote Foundations Skinner
was sometimes curiously insouciant about the vocabulary that people actually
used and their self-identifications. What he calls ‘scholastics’ and ‘scholasti-
cism’ was identified in two ways before the sixteenth century. One was by
neutral designations of institutions (the ‘schools’) and their custom and prac-
tice, faculties (e.g. ‘the theologians’), and adherents of some doctrine, teacher
or method (methodus, mos). The other was by means of terms of abuse. But
even in the sixteenth century, the normal designation was doctores, magistri,
theologi, dialectici, which could be used either neutrally or sarcastically. Luther,
for example, seems always to have used expressions like die Doctores in den
hohen Schulen,4 die Juristen, etc., never ‘scholastics’. Foundations examines
how ‘renaissance’, and cognate ideas like ‘middle’ and/or ‘dark’ ages, spread-
ing light, humaniores litterae or studia humanitatis and so forth5 identified
scholasticism by opposition and denigration, as it were. But this terminology
is transparently self-glorificatory and implies an absurdly schematic periodi-
sation. The only thing we can learn from it is that there was an established
and powerful academic enterprise which, according to its opponents, fostered
ignorance, arrogance and incomprehension of the classics (apparently the one
thing necessary for the cultivated mind), and which was devoted to impractical,
useless, frivolous, obscure, disputatious, point-scoring questions and topics,
‘quillets and quiddities’, argutiae, etc. All in a barbarous, dreadful kitchen-
Latin which used words not to be found in Cicero, or even Augustine, such as
circumstantiae and entitas and so forth.6 No historical interpretation of scholas-
ticism could treat such a caricature as more than symptomatic, and of course
Skinner’s bears no resemblance to it.
It seems most prudent, therefore, to begin with an identification of scholasti-
cism which is impossibly restrictive, but historically unproblematic at least. It
3 I owe this and other corrections to Annabel Brett. The Constitutiones of the Society of Jesus,
adopted in 1558, but written by Ignatius himself and finished in 1551, pt 4, ch. 5, s. 1, and ch. 6,
s. 4, have theologia scholastica, without explanation, whereas the first text qualifies ‘[theologia]
positiva, ut dicant’, presumably recognised as a neologism. The English term for ‘scholasticism’
was ‘the schools’, and ‘school’ philosophy, logic, divinity, etc. See for example Robert Persons
SJ, A Treatise tending to Mitigation towardes Catholicke Subjectes in England (London, 1607),
especially ch. 9: ‘Schoole-Devines, Doctors and Lawyers’, for an astonishingly well-informed
account of the history of the schools.
4 E.g. Vermahnung an die geistlichen, versammlet auff dem Reichstag zu Augsburg, Anno 1530, in
Martin Luther, Martin Luther’s sämmtliche Werke, ed. E. L. Enders, XXIV (Frankfurt: Evange-
lischer Verein, 1883), p. 375.
5 Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. 105–12.
6 For the entire vocabulary of abuse, self-praise and mutual recrimination from the fourteenth
century onward see Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and
Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). Regrettably she rarely cites
the original terminology; I have been unable to check her sources for her citations in translation
of ‘scholastic’ and in once place ‘scholasticism’ (p. 85), translating the Dominican theologian
Melchior Cano, who by then (1563) may well have used the former term, but certainly not the
latter.
Scholasticism in The Foundations 115
7 I am unsure of the force of the term scholastica in the standard biblical history textbook of the
schools, the Historia scholastica of Petrus Comestor, mid-twelfth century.
8 See A. Kenny and J. Pinborg, ‘Medieval philosophical literature’, in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny
and J. Pinborg (eds.), Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 11–42, at pp. 14–17.
9 Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. 197ff. Universitas was merely one of several medieval words for a
corporation; the lower faculties of what we call medieval universities taught what would subse-
quently be taught in grammar schools plus logic to boys of (say) fifteen, and many ‘universities’
did not have some or all of the higher faculties; only universitates studii generalis taught every-
thing, if they had the staff. Some of the convents of the religious orders had their own teaching
even at theology level.
10 Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), ch. 5, p. 30: ‘the
signs of Science are some certain and infallible; some uncertain. Certain, when he that pretendeth
116 Harro Höpfl
the Science of any thing, can teach the same; that is to say, demonstrate the truth thereof
perspicuously to another’; Aquinas, Sententia libri Metaphysicae, ed. E. Alarcón, bk I, lectio
1, no. 29 (81595): ‘Signum scientiae est posse docere . . . Artifices autem docere possint, quia
causas cognoscant, ex eis possunt demonstrare: demonstratio autem est syllogismus faciens
scire’. All references to Aquinas’s works are to the astonishing Corpus Thomisticum website
edited by Enrique Alarcón.
11 A bon mot of the time was ‘Qui scit Sotum, scit totum’, the person who knows Soto knows what
there is to know.
Scholasticism in The Foundations 117
termed ‘the revival of Thomism’ means only that Thomism attained a new vital-
ity and prestige under particularly able exponents like Mair, Almain, Vitoria and
their Dominican and Jesuit successors in Spain and elsewhere. But there is also
a different understanding of ‘revival’ in his account. The Thomists, he argued,
reconfigured their authorities and doctrine in such a way as to direct them
single-mindedly to the refutation and exclusion of the ‘heretics of our age’.12
But what is arguably striking is just how little these preoccupations intruded on
the Second Scholastic: Suárez’s De legibus and his Opus sex dierum, for exam-
ple, hardly mention anything specifically related to the Reformation. Treatises
On justice and law, such as those of Soto, Molina, Lessius and Valentia, con-
fined their comments about the heretics to add-ons, and even then tried as much
as possible to assimilate contemporary heresy to its ancient and medieval pre-
decessors already dealt with in extenso in the schools, and thus requiring no
conceptual re-tooling.
This deliberately narrow understanding of scholasticism highlights the fact
that until the fifteenth century virtually all the scholastic ‘contributions’ to what
is now and was never then called ‘political theory’ were in fact extracurricular
productions, or polemical writings, Publizistik. But then the same could be said
of almost the entire ‘canon’ of political theory subsequent to the Greeks. And
it would be mere pedantry to deny the title ‘scholastic’ to writings by authors
whose day-job was as academics, whose every paragraph paraded its scholastic
provenance, and whose authority as polemicists was predicated on their aca-
demic status but almost never vice versa. The most striking exception here is
Marsiglio of Padua, who had no independent academic standing but could trade
quotations with the best of them. As I have said, the curriculum was not forever
fixed, and the content of polemical treatises could subsequently be interpolated
into the curriculum, partly by the later practice of relectiones, and before that
by the quaestiones quodlibeticae and quaestiones disputatae, which were part
of the ordinary conduct of academic business.13 In sixteenth-century scholasti-
cism the traditional limits of the curriculum were in any case being comprehen-
sively eroded, not least by the introduction of Controversies-theology towards
the end of the century. Its first and most conspicuous exponents were the Jesuits
Gregorio de Valentia at Ingolstadt and Robert Bellarmine at the Roman College,
subsequently the Gregorian University of Rome; the formal curricular incorpo-
ration of ecclesiology and casuistry had taken place much earlier.
But although this more relaxed identification of scholasticism to include
extracurricular as well as curricular activities is eminently reasonable, there
is a price to be paid for it. Stripped of any strictly academic location and
of the methodological dimension, scholasticism rapidly loses its identity as a
distinctive discursive genre in terms of tenets, authorities, vocabulary or any-
thing else. It would be extravagant to say, as I formerly did, that there are no
propositions, beliefs, attitudes or doctrines peculiar to ‘scholasticism’: some
utterances are indelibly stamped with the mark of the schools. All the same,
virtually all the authorities acknowledged by humanists were also authorities
for scholastics, though obviously not vice versa. Scholastics believed just as
emphatically as humanists did that the classics, pagan as well as patristic, were
a treasury of wisdom and virtue. What is more, the premium that scholas-
ticism placed on authorities and hence on short quotes summarising them,
as well as on principles, axioms, maxims, free-standing and snappy one-line
propositions of every sort demanded by the syllogistic and dialectical method,
meant that a fund of such memorable one-liners was available for general
public consumption, transportable from location to location, including from
scholastic to humanist or polemical or even vernacular locations. ‘Man is born
free’ (or as the case may be, equal), ‘man is a political [or social] animal’,
‘peoples were not created for kings, but kings for peoples’, ‘it is permissi-
ble to repel force with force’, ‘what concerns all should be approved by all’,
‘no one may be a judge in his own cause’, ‘no one can give what they do
not have’: who held the copyright on such dicta? Their original source was
often impeccably classical in any case. And humanists, Protestants, politiques,
etc. could appropriate a ‘scholastic’ authority by the still familiar rhetori-
cal ploy: ‘even our enemies admit that’, etc. The less ignorant or dogma-
tic among them had never denied the intelligence of at least some scholastics;
misapplied intelligence no doubt, but intelligence for all that.
Consider an illustration: the two vernacular pieces of English political writing
in the 1590s that created the greatest stir were Persons’s Conference concern-
ing the Next Succession (1594/5) and Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
(preface and books I–IV, 1593, book V, 1597). The Anglican cleric Richard
Hooker cited the ‘Schoole-Divines’ at every turn, writing, however, in melliflu-
ous English (so there were no identifying stylistic barbarisms), and without
the quaestio format. The Jesuit Robert Persons, the ‘diabolical Machiavellian’
hate-figure of English Protestants, wrote his scathing Conference in vigorous
polemical English. As to its theoretical part it was very similar to Hooker’s.
But he did not cite a single scholastic authority, or indeed anything whatever
that was not equally authoritative for a predominantly Protestant English lay
public, or for humanists; he even adopted the latter’s favourite dialogue form
for his book. But then, as has already been said, grammar, rhetoric, philology,
patristics and humaniores litterae were part of the scholastic curriculum and
in 1599 they were methodically integrated into a systematic course of studies
in the exemplary curriculum of the Jesuits, the Ratio studiorum. Hooker’s and
Persons’s contemporary, the Jesuit Juan de Mariana, wrote much the same as
Scholasticism in The Foundations 119
they did in his notorious mirror for princes De rege et regis institutione (1599),
which was in best humanist (indeed Tacitean) Latin, mentioned no scholastics,
and incorporated a good deal of reason of state, as Persons had done. Are we
to say that Mariana’s and Persons’s works were scholasticism in drag, so to
speak? Surely a more sensible verdict would be that we are here witnessing the
evaporation of anything specifically scholastic into the mainstream of European
political thinking.
I alluded earlier to the opacity of the reasons why the scholastic curricu-
lum in- or excluded substances of various kinds. The extracurricular character
of scholastic writings on politics, however, is certainly not due to scholastics
regarding politics as a dirty business which an academic ought not to allow to
soil his hands, or because they considered it to be one of the ‘practical arts’, for
so was medicine, which was one of the higher faculties. And scholastics, like
academics throughout the ages, were not in the habit of underselling themselves
or their products in point of usefulness. Nor was it because of any personal or
professional dangers incident to political utterances. Scholasticism covers hun-
dreds of years, and what was outright heresy or treason in one time or place
was often precisely what secular and/or ecclesiastical authorities wanted to hear
in another time or place. The reason for the disjuncture between academy and
politics is rather that politics was the kind of discourse for which it was difficult
to find a place in the academic curriculum, and for which there was no corps
of academic experts. Who is authoritative (peritus, expertus, sollers) in respect
of what matter was and remained a persistent preoccupation of scholasticism.
As the maxim had it, cuilibet experto in sua scientia credendum est. It was
clear enough who had authority to pronounce on canon or civil law, doctrine or
morality or cases of conscience, or health, geometry or sound argument, or for
that matter on plumbing. But who had any particular authority or locus standi
in respect of politics? Ockham at one point seemed to be saying there were no
such experts for politics at all: ‘It is not necessary to believe everyone who is
thought an expert [peritus in scientia sua], because in many arts and science no
one can be perfect, but everyone can err.’ But on closer inspection this turns out
to be merely a highly polemical claim aimed at those who in Ockham’s view
simply had long memories but no speculative aptitude. Another similar remark
about periti was equally polemical, being directed at those theologians who
were in his view giving the wrong advice about the authority of the papacy.14
Elsewhere his views on the authority of theologi aut canonistae aut in legibus
imperialibus eruditi were assertive enough.15
Here are some generalisations, perilous as all such things are, but someone
has to put their head above the parapet occasionally. In the first place, there was
not only no academic discipline or faculty, but not even an identifiable academic
field constituted by the term ‘politics’, or any of the variant grammatical forms
derived from polis. I am happy to follow Maurizio Viroli’s account of the use of
the language of politics to distinguish a republican regime and the civile vivere
from the stato of princes in quattrocento Italy.16 But in Northern Europe politica,
politici, politique, politicks, policy (distinguished only in English from ‘politics’
by a separate word, and then only uncertainly until the seventeenth century),17
polity, politisch became a fashionable and vernacular vocabulary only in the
course of the sixteenth century: one can positively see people rolling such words
around on their tongues.18 Even then the Latin substantive politica was still so
unfamiliar that there was no agreement on whether it was a feminine singular
(which it remains in the Romance languages and German) or a neuter plural
(which it sometimes is in English). The same was true in the middle ages.
Aquinas for example refers to the title of Aristotle’s Politics in the plural,19
as was usual, since this was how the Moerbeke translation rendered it. But
he normally used the term in the singular, either as a short form for scientia
politica (presumably after the precedent of ethica, also a singular except in the
translation of the Ethics), or to designate the activity of ruling. On occasion, but
very rarely, he and others used politicus as a substantive to mean a statesman
or ruler.20
The whole family of words normally did no conceptual work at all that I can
see. It was of course familiar from the Latin translations of Aristotle, and also
from Cicero who had used politia for the title of Plato’s Republic. But whether
a writer used any term from this family seems to have depended largely on
how closely he was tracking Aristotle’s Politics or his Ethics. Aquinas used the
adjective politicus freely in his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, but hardly
at all in the Summa theologiae. But even in his commentary on the Ethics,
he often preferred the adjective civilis, referring for example to civilis scien-
tia or civilis multitudo.21 He rendered Aristotle’s description of man as zoon
politikon as either animal politicum, or sociale, or both, indifferently. Again,
Marsiglio and Ockham rarely used the adjective, let alone politica as a sub-
stantive, even though both referred regularly to politia (or policia, a spelling
16 M. Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
17 Thomas Fitzherbert’s two-part Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (London, 1606, 1610)
used ‘policy’ indifferently to mean both politics and policy.
18 For some supporting evidence, see my ‘Orthodoxy and Reason of State’, History of Political
Thought 23 (2002), pp. 211–37, at pp. 215–18.
19 Aquinas, Sententia libri Metaphysicae, proem, para. 81566: ‘Sicut docet philosophus in politicis
suis’.
20 Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, bk I, lectio 2, no. 5 (para. 72731).
21 Ibid, e.g. bk I, lectio 2, no. 7 (72729), and lectio 3, no. 1 (72736); bk I, lectio 1, no. 5 (para.
72709). See also the quotation from Aegidius Romanus, cited in n. 29 below.
Scholasticism in The Foundations 121
which presumably explains the German word Polizeyen, sometimes used for
‘polities’, for which German had no current word, and for ‘state’, for which it
had no word at all until the end of the sixteenth century). That term too, how-
ever, seems to have had no settled meaning, and was used equally for regime,
form of government or as a variant for civitas. In the scholastic curriculum,
Aristotle’s Ethics, his Metaphysics and his writings on natural philosophy, even
minor and falsely ascribed works, were vastly more significant than the Politics.
Cicero’s De officiis was a much more widely known text in any event, not least
because it also figured in the arts curriculum. Even when the adjective ‘political’
was used (and Gerson, for one, writing three-quarters of a century later than
Ockham, used it quite freely and also the peculiar politizans: reflecting about
the polity), it was normally accompanied by an explanatory term: e.g. politica
vel civilis (or saecularis), qualifying law, government, authority, societas or
dominium. Civilis or saecularis were far more usual terms. The only author
who made politicus do any conceptual work that I can find is Ptolemy of Lucca.
In his mirror of princes De regimine principum he distinguished after a fash-
ion between political and despotic rule, seemingly on the basis of Aristotle’s
mixed form. Aristotle had confusingly categorised the latter as the politeia, a
term he otherwise used generically for the institutional order of any polis. If
they knew of Ptolemy’s work, neither Marsiglio, Ockham nor Gerson followed
his usage, even though all of them were as deeply concerned with distinguish-
ing tyrannical from legitimate rule, and were as respectful of Aristotle as he
was.22
In short, politica did not demarcate a substance, such as (according to the
opinion of the time) was presupposed by any science, art or discipline. And there
was no other equivalent term either. So far as the topics dealt with in Foundations
were given any general label before the sixteenth century, it was as matters
concerned with regimen, gubernatio, imperium, potestas, the civitas, respub-
lica, the societas perfecta and even less promisingly and more personalising,
dominium or principatus or most commonly regnum or imperium. Knowledge
of such matters was referred to by Aquinas in his unfinished23 commentary on
Aristotle’s Politics and his commentary on the Ethics as politica scientia or
doctrina politica, id est civilis. In deference to Aristotle’s authority, he even
22 Ockham in one place (De Principatu Tyrannico in Ockham: Opera Politica, IV, p. 184), referring
to Aristotle’s Politics, does however say: ‘vir principatur uxori politice, et pater principatur
liberis regaliter’. Similarly Aquinas, Sententia libri Politicorum, bk I, lectio 3.9 (para. 79129),
distinguishes despotic principatus over servi from ‘politicum [principatum] quo rector civitatis
principatur liberis’, but then explained his meaning as ‘principatu politico et regali qui est ad
liberos’ (my italics). Compare however ibid., bk. 1, lectio 10.3 (para. 79218), where following
Aristotle he distinguishes principatus politici from the regal in virtue of the fact that subjects
and princes change positions from one year to the next.
23 It was finished by Peter of Auvergne. Aquinas found time to complete commentaries on the
Ethics, the Metaphysics, the Posterior Analytics, the De Anima, but did not write a commentary
on Aristotle’s other most eminently ‘political’ work, the Rhetoric, either.
122 Harro Höpfl
described this scientia as the noblest and most architectonic of sciences in virtue
of the eximious dignity of its subject matter, namely the common good.24 But
although the purpose of scholastic commentaries was expository and explana-
tory, Aquinas was extremely careful to limit the importance and also the scope
of this scientia. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which began by
citing ‘the Philosopher in his Politics’, he made it clear that metaphysics was
the highest of the sciences, as being maxime intellectualis, and dealing with
those things that are maxime intelligibilia, namely first causes. It is its (and not
political science’s) place to regulate and order (regulatrix, ordinare) all the other
sciences. He explained that metaphysics, unlike politics, deals with the high-
est things under three titles, according to the subject matter: scientia divina (or
theology), metaphysics and prima philosophia.25 And in his Ethics commentary
he made the point even more explicitly, attributing it to Aristotle: ‘He does not
say that politica (sing.) is the foremost science unconditionally (simpliciter),
but foremost among the sciences dealing with action (scientiarum activarum)’,
for ‘the foremost science with regard to all sciences is divine science’. Then,
shifting from scientia to mean a discipline, to scientia meaning any body of
knowledge, he explained that its ordering capacity extended only to the scientiae
concerned with ends subordinate to the highest end of the polity, the common
good, namely rhetoric, the military and ‘operative artes’, or practicae scien-
tiae, dictating to them not only whether they shall or shall not be employed, but
also what they shall be employed in doing. With respect to the higher-ranking
speculative (i.e. theoretical)26 sciences, politica (here meaning government and
the kind of practical and ethical scientia it involves) determines only whether
they shall be taught and which shall be taught (for example that geometry will
be taught), but does not tell the practitioners of these sciences what they are to
think (e.g. about the properties of triangles). He then repeated Aristotle’s con-
tention that the wise man demands no more certitude than the subject matter
allows, and that in political and moral matters there was inevitably more uncer-
tainty than in the speculative sciences. All of which amounted to saying that
theology, not politics, was queen of the sciences, and that scientia politica was
24 Sententia libri Ethicorum, bk 1, lectio 2, nos.7–8 (paras. 72729–30): ‘Optimus finis pertinet ad
principalissimam scientiam, et maximam architectonicam . . . Sed civilis scientia videtur esse
talis . . . Duo autem pertinent ad scientiam architectonicam, quorum unum est, quod ipsa praecipit
scientiae vel arti quae est sub ipsa quid debeat operari . . . Aliud autem est, quod utitur ea ad
suum finem. Primum autem horum convenit politicae, vel civili, tam respectu speculativarum
scientiarum, quam respectu practicarum’.
25 Proemium (para. 81566).
26 I do not know whether theoria or its adjective were ever used in medieval Latin; theoria
was very rare in classical Latin and does not appear in its English form until the later six-
teenth century. ‘Speculative’ and ‘theoretical’ have the same metaphor as their root: a spec-
tacle, something to be contemplated. They certainly had no role in any curricular sphere, and
‘political speculation’ would hardly have the same meaning as ‘political theory’ or ‘political
science’.
Scholasticism in The Foundations 123
essentially a practical art conversant with things about which certain knowledge
(and knowledge and certitude are the same thing) was hard to come by, and
therefore it could not pretend to any academic status, for all its salience and
nobility among the practical arts. He then went on to endorse Aristotle’s verdict
that since it presupposed so much experience, it was not a scientia for which
young persons (i.e. students) were suitable auditors.
But just because this was the verdict of Aquinas, it does not follow that it
was therefore the verdict of scholastics as a body. But it was. Political science
could pass the first hurdle for inclusion in the scholastic curriculum, because
from 1265 there was a relevant text (in translation), Aristotle’s Politics, and
also his Ethics. Apart from Albert the Great’s and Aquinas’s commentaries,
there is also evidence of commentaries produced by various arts faculties, but
they are uncommon and not nearly as numerous as commentaries on Aristo-
tle’s other works, and attendance at lectures on the Politica was not compul-
sory for matriculation.27 In any event commentaries were extremely sparing
of discussions: they were intended to explain the ‘mind’ of the author, which
given the character of Moerbeke’s translation was labour enough. What is alto-
gether missing is any paradigm in the quaestio/responsio format, until we get
the relectiones (a way of pulling together topics that previously had only been
dealt with separately and in a diffuse manner) of the sixteenth century, in par-
ticular those of Francisco de Vitoria. Even then, it is notable that there is not
a single attempt to produce a coherent and sustained discussion of the fore-
most political concept of scholasticism, namely the common good.28 In so
far as politica had any academic locus standi at all, it was as a sub-branch
of scientia moralis or ethics, where certain knowledge of at any rate moral
principles was possible. And this explains an attractive but misleading com-
ment of the extreme hierocrat Aegidius Romanus (Giles of Rome), which is
in my view misinterpreted by Flüeler. In an occasional piece De differentia
rhetoricae, politicae et ethicae of the late thirteenth century, Aegidius put the
lawyers in their place, and Flüeler interprets this as an instance of political sci-
ence having to defend its autonomy not only against theology but also against
jurisprudence (p. 7):
Politica is divided into two parts: setting down laws and upholding laws (legum
conservativam); deliberating about laws therefore concerns those whom we call legistas
and also to [political science], but not in the same way. For politica delivers laws in the
manner of an art [i.e. a science!]; but the legistae deliver laws without art. For they do
not consider them in a scientific manner, but merely report (per modum narrativum).
So legistae have the same relation to politici as the vulgar and lay-persons to dialec-
tics . . . Legistae are political rustics (ydiote politici), because they use politics without
art.29
33 This was another Aristotelian cliché, piously reported by scholastics, but without any curricular
valence or substantive exploration.
126 Harro Höpfl
Lombard’s Sententiae. All the same, it was one thing to consider, say, the prin-
ciples of just taxation, and quite another to decide on the appropriate method
and requisite level of taxation to meet some particular contigency. But for the
most part the universities did not explore political concepts or issues in the way
that issues in metaphysics, logic or theology were explored, unless some topos
was already clearly established. I think I can confidently say, for example, that
when contracts were discussed in the law faculties, this was never treated as an
invitation to consider the possibility of any contractus, foedus, conventio, pactio
or pactum between a ruler and the people or the commonwealth, or any other
topic of that sort. For the most part lawyers confined themselves narrowly to the
minutiae of their trade. But higher-level commentary on Roman and canon law
as well as theology did allow all manner of speculative excursions: both had in
particular to deal at some point with the authority of emperors and popes respec-
tively, and by extension with the authority of all those who had some claim to
exercise a legislative or coercive power. The topic here was normally imperium,
and by extension regnum (rex est imperator in regno suo), or generically princi-
patus or dominium. But it also on occasion included free cities, which could be
elided with respublicae because the ambiguous term civitas was both a general
term for the polity but also meant a city; there was not before the sixteenth cen-
tury a going rate, or upper and lower threshold about size of territory, for what
could count as a regnum or principatus. However, absolutely no curricular or
other significance seems to have attached to the public law/private law distinc-
tion, which in Roman law at most vaguely approximated to modern distinctions
between constitutional law and other forms of law. In any event, there was not,
I think, any area marked out in any faculty as ‘public law’, which might give us
an analogue for a constitution, and hence for constitutionalism by implication.
In passing, I have not found any evidence that what Skinner terms the ‘private
law’ argument for political resistance was designated or thought of in that way,
and there is no reason to expect to find any evidence: in principle, any argument
about individual rights or powers, such as the ‘right of self-defence’, could
equally well attach to ‘mystical bodies’, that is to say bodies corporate of any
kind, including the body politic.
One significant implication of this approach to discussions of principatus
and potestas is that it brought into operation with a vengeance what C. S. Lewis
somewhere describes as the ‘insulating power of context’. The fact that some
issue or some concept featured in one standard quaestio in one part of the
curriculum of one faculty did not in the least imply that it would be treated
in the same way even in another quaestio in the same faculty, let alone in
other faculties or in connection with related matters in other faculties. The
analytical and topic-based approach characteristic of the scholastic method did
not encourage synoptic overviews of anything as a whole. Instead, in the best
tradition of universities through the ages, subject matters were defined by the
Scholasticism in The Foundations 127
set of quaestiones of some master, and usually by his answers as well. The more
routinised topics became, the less likely it was that their insulation would be
broken through. So it was for example perfectly possible, and indeed usual, to
assert the principle that ‘man is naturally free (and/or equal)’ in the context of
discussions of whether slavery was legitimate or not, or whether a human being
might be subject to dominium proprietatis, or might licitly sell him- or herself
into slavery, or whether a free man might marry a servus or vice versa. The
principle might however be ignored altogether in the context of the potestas
coactiva of princes or commonwealths, where the justification was in terms of
the naturalness and necessity of relationships of super- and subordination, of
bodies needing heads, of the common good needing to be the special business
of someone, lest it be attended to by no one. Again, the ‘natural liberty’ of
individuals was not brought together with the idea of a pre-civil, and pre-
political ‘natural state’, or ‘state of nature’, despite the fact that the legitimation
of authority was standardly by reference to what Locke was still calling the
‘original’ of civil government, or the ‘end’ of civil government. These two were
as often as not the same thing, namely some permanent requirement of human
beings, considered as the origin if they did not as yet have it, or the end which
it ought to continue to aim at, once it was established. Skinner is quite right to
say that the terms and concepts of a status purae naturae, or status naturalis,
or man in puris naturalibus were or became part of the standard repertory of
Thomist concepts. But what they were used to address was the question of
the operations and effect of grace and of divinely vouchsafed knowledge and
laws: the ‘natural condition’ was a conjecture about what man would be like,
were he not provided with saving grace and saving knowledge vouchsafed by
revelation. So the ‘natural condition’, the condition when man knew only the
natural law, was for example contrasted with the status of man under Mosaic
law, and subsequently man’s condition under the law of Christ. The insulating
power of context ensured that there was absolutely no compulsion to bring this
concept together either with any account of the origin or end of civil authority
and the respublica perfecta, or with the concept of ‘natural liberty’ or ‘natural
right’, which involved a different sense of the concept of ‘nature’. In the same
way, the context sometimes dictated that ownership of something in virtue of
having worked for it, and thus merited it, counted as being by natural right.
But in other contexts scholastics maintained with equal confidence and lack
of qualification that only common property was by natural right and that all
regimes of particular or private property and possession were creatures of the
positive law or some regime of property created by rulers.
Skinner is therefore not in my view right to say, as he does, that according to
Thomists, man’s natural condition was pre-civil but not pre-social: until Suárez
such an idea never entered their heads. Moreover the fact that one standard
argument for the necessity of civil authority was in terms of what things would
128 Harro Höpfl
be like in the absence of civil authority does not entail that with or without
the word, scholastics had the concept of the state of nature. You might as well
say that Luther and Calvin had the concept of the state of nature, because they
too both said that unless civil authority were there to restrain them, men (or
at least the wicked) would tear each other apart. It was the genius of Hobbes,
and to some extent of Suárez, that they invented the concept of a condition of
nature as a methodical way of considering the bases and necessity of authority.
Obviously they did not invent it out of nothing. They may even have got it from
scholastic writings on grace and re-tooled it, seeing that grace was one of the
most contested issues in Western Christendom both as between reformers and
Catholics and within each denomination from the 1520s onwards. But that in
no way detracts from it being an invention, and theirs.
Was there then no politically relevant substance at all which was peculiar to
scholasticism? There was, at an extremely abstract level. Scholasticism offered
the only methodical way of asking and answering the most abstract questions.
Indeed it lends itself to misinterpretation precisely because it alone achieved
that level of abstraction. Thus it is sometimes asked, for example, whether
or to what extent Aquinas or Ockham advanced a positivistic theory of law
and/or a subjective theory of rights, or whether the ethic of scholasticism was
‘individualistic’ or ‘collectivistic’. Such questions are anachronistic, but the
point is that the work of scholastics was abstract enough to tolerate them. For a
methodical and theoretical account of concepts like law, or justice, or right, or
contract, or for a general theory of political authority or the respublica, or the
church, or order, or the relationship between the law-giver and the law, or law
and command, or reason and law, or law and morality, or the commonwealth and
the ruler, the only place to go was to go to the schools. Just as you had to go to
the schools for anything resembling a discussion of epistemological questions.
People, including scholastics, increasingly went to humanists for instruction
in philology, for classical and patristic erudition, for historiae, for elegance
of expression and copiousness of language, for practical political prudence,
or moral edification, the philosophia Christi or humanitas. But for scientia it
was the scholastics that provided both the materials and the method, even for
vituperative critics like Hobbes.
The scholastics’ way of dealing with such matters was in many respects far
from ideal, given their passion for syllogisms, for knock-down arguments and
for one-liners. It is also beyond contention that some of the topics on which
scholastics thought certitude and demonstrative argument was possible seem to
us the purest cases of metaphysical speculation, or ‘dominant ideology’, if that
sort of language is preferred. Although it was questioned by some, for example
inconclusively and on pragmatic grounds by Marsiglio of Padua, in an ambiva-
lent way (with the arguments pro et contra being stated without resolution) by
William of Ockham, and in a deeply confused way by Ptolemy of Lucca, it
Scholasticism in The Foundations 129
was almost universally regarded as a certain inference from first principles that
monarchy was the best form of government in that it corresponds most closely
to the first principles of order. It is also striking just how much did not figure
among the standard quaestiones of the schools. A remarkable example is that
everyone agreed that rulers, especially those in positions of highest authority,
were in some sense ‘absolute’, legibus soluti, and in other respects not. But
we have to wait until the later sixteenth century for attempts to distinguish the
laws that bound them as ‘fundamental laws’, and until the seventeenth century
for the idea that what binds them is an order of laws and institutions which
are themselves changeable and human artefacts, and which together compose
a ‘constitution’, a word which like ‘institution’ was in scholastic terminology
merely one of the many variants for a law. Again, the whole topic of ecclesiology
(until the fifteenth century), specifically the rights of the papacy with respect
to secular rulers, and much of the discussion of the authority of the emperor
versus that of the papacy, and then the authority of kings with respect to the
emperor, and even more opaquely that of ‘free cities’ with regard to the emperor
or the pope, was conducted in polemical treatises and not inside the academies.
The position of Aquinas, who confined himself strictly to academic writing and
teaching, in many of these questions remains almost indecipherable.
What would complete Foundations, then, would be an investigation of how
scholasticism came to be assimilated and attenuated into the formats and
approaches to methodical study (with method itself a philosophical or dog-
matic issue of acute significance) which came to be common to the universities
and academies of all Europe. And while the same account might be given of
theology and philosophy, and (for all I know) of law, the particular focus of our
story would be the absorption of scholasticism into a common manner of treating
methodice what was increasingly clearly identified as the special academic field
of doctrina civilis (or politica), or ‘civil philosophy’. That in turn was distin-
guished in curricular terms from the more clearly humanist and rhetoric-derived
but equally academic areas of prudentia civilis and ‘reason of state’, which in
turn furnished the resources for the discussion of ‘institutional architecture’
(Rahe), on which (pace Skinner) I think scholastics had virtually nothing to
say, and for which they had virtually no vocabulary. And it is perhaps in these
terms that we might for instance be able to explain why the echo of the schools
is clearly audible in a thinker like Hobbes, for all his jibes at the schoolmen. It
is hardly surprising that a philosopher should resemble schoolmen rather than
rhetoricians.
8 Scholastic political thought and the modern
concept of the state
Annabel Brett
130
Scholastic political thought 131
3 The phrase is David Wootton’s in his essay on the Levellers in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge
History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 442;
but true to Skinner’s intentions, I think.
4 Skinner, Foundations, II, pp. 347–8.
5 Ibid., p. 347. Their works clearly constitute, therefore, part of the ‘foundations of modern political
thought’. But their relevance to the ‘acquisition of the modern concept of the State’ is unclear.
Summing up on the subject of the state in the conclusion, Skinner does not mention these authors
again: it is rather Bodin and the politiques who are said to be the key players in the establishment
of the fourth precondition (that ‘political society is held to exist solely for political purposes’).
Skinner tackled this issue directly in his later article, ‘The state’, in T. Ball, J. Farr and R. L.
Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), pp. 90–131, at 114–15: in the monarchomachs and their successors, principally
Locke, ‘no effective contrast is drawn between the power of the people and the powers of the
state’, and hence they cannot be seen as direct sources for the modern concept of the state.
6 The phrase occurs for example in I, p. 144, discussing the role of scholastic thinking in quattro-
cento republicanism.
7 See the preface in Skinner, Foundations, I, pp. x–xi.
132 Annabel Brett
The Reformation remained the Reformation, but had its roots in fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century critiques of the papacy. In the case of constitutionalism,
Skinner relocated the origin of the most popular forms of constitutionalism in
Catholic rather than Calvinist circles.
In some sense, then, Skinner’s allegiance to the traditional nomenclature
of the history of ideas was actually part of his attempt decisively to shift
the relations between the players. What strikes one forcibly in retrospect is
the dialectical character of the book, as it moves forward in a series of steps and
counter-steps in relation to existing paradigms within the history of ideas. But
it also depicts the same kind of progression among the normative vocabularies
that Skinner takes as the proper subject of that history. The result is a kind of
split-level intellectual waltz concealed by its elegant narrative prose and indeed
by its own success in making its dialectical moves part of the common currency
of the history of political thought. Although my focus here is on ‘scholasticism’,
therefore, it will be clear from what I have said that this thread cannot be isolated
from the others without losing the sense of the book.
8 I have suggested in my introduction part of the motivation for the use of the term ‘scholasticism’
in Skinner’s account. As a general point, I agree with Harro Höpfl (above, p. 113) that it can
represent an artificial and anachronistic reification. But I do not think that the term ‘scholasticism’
is necessarily vicious as such, provided we understand it not as an ‘ism’ but as referring to
the dynamic intellectual practice of the medieval universities or schools. An alternative is to
follow continental usage and refer instead to ‘the scholastic’. See the remarks in G. Wieland,
Ethica – scientia practica. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Ethik im 13. Jahrhundert (Münster:
Aschendorff, 1981), pp. 13–16 (‘Bemerkungen zur Scholastik’).
9 Skinner, Foundations, I, ch. 2 passim; pp. 144–52. 10 Ibid., I, p. 51.
Scholastic political thought 133
masters of arts, the newly translated texts of the Aristotelian corpus fulfilled
this function.
As Harro Höpfl argues in his chapter in this book, the key issue vis-à-vis pol-
itics was the scholastic understanding of the Aristotelian corpus as scientia or
‘science’. Here the influence of the Arab commentators on Aristotle was critical.
It was the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in particular who
had stressed the scientific character of Aristotle’s works: ‘[t]he Philosopher’s
conclusions are true and certain because they are the result of syllogistic demon-
stration based on causes’.17 However, again under Arab influence, the texts that
were translated in the first wave of the Aristotelian reception were, apart from
the first four books of the Nicomachean Ethics, exclusively works of physics
and metaphysics: that is, they were works of ‘speculative’ rather than ‘practical’
science. Medieval scholastics had inherited this Aristotelian distinction prior to
the reception of the Aristotelian texts themselves, and had confidently put down
ethics, economics and politics under the heading of practical science. But when
the full texts of the Nicomachean Ethics, the (ps.-Aristotelian) Economics and
the Politics came to be available in the second half of the thirteenth century, their
interpreters had to face the problematic question of how a discipline could be
both practical, concerned with the contingent particulars of action, and scien-
tific, which to them meant conclusions demonstrated from universal principles
and causes. In his commentary on Ethics book I, Albert the Great (Aquinas’s
teacher) solved the problem with a division of ethics into ‘teaching’ (doctrina,
‘doctrine’) and ‘use’. Ethics as ‘use’ is the same as virtue, but ‘with regard to
the doctrine that considers virtue, it is a science of [virtue] and it is knowable
[scibilis]’.18 Aquinas in his commentary on Ethics book VI also argued that
political science is not identical with the virtue of prudence:
prudence does not exist purely in reason, but has something of itself in the appetite; all
the things mentioned here are species of prudence insofar as they do not consist solely
in reason, but have something of themselves in the appetite; for insofar as they exist
purely in reason, they are called practical sciences, i.e. ethics, economics and politics.19
These defences of the scientific character of practical science come from com-
mentary on the Ethics, a text that was officially part of the arts curriculum
17 C. Lohr, ‘The New Aristotle and “Science” in the Paris Arts Faculty (1255)’, in Weijers and
Holtz, L’enseignement des disciplines, 251–70, at 260–1; cf. pp. 262–3 for the Latin reception
of the Averroist model.
18 Albertus Magnus, Ethicorum libri X, in Opera omnia (Lyons, 1651), t. IV, tract. I, ch. 2 (‘Can
there be a science of virtue?’). Cf. the discussion in Wieland, Ethica, pp. 116–17.
19 Thomas Aquinas Sententia libri ethicorum, in Opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P.M. edita, t. 47.2
(Rome, 1969), p. 357. Aquinas had earlier (p. 347) specified that prudence is a virtue of the
‘opinionative’ faculty, since both opinion and prudence concern ‘things that can be otherwise’,
i.e. non-universals. Thus, although prudence is an intellectual virtue, it does not exist purely as
a matter of reason, like an art or a science, but requires in addition ‘rectitude of the appetite’.
Scholastic political thought 135
at Paris. Aristotle’s Politics never achieved this status. None the less it was
intensively studied and commented on there, as recent work has shown.20 In a
move that would be crucial for the future course of scholastic political thought,
Aquinas incorporated extensive material from both the Ethics and the Politics
into the second part of his Summa theologiae, which considers human action.
For Aquinas, as for most of his thirteenth-century contemporaries, theology
was a science: in so far as it concerns God, a speculative science; in so far as
it considers human actions, a practical science.21 Aristotle’s work on politics,
then, gave Aquinas the possibility of a scientific understanding of human com-
munities and human law deriving from the nature of their constituent human
beings. In his political treatise the De regno, this enabled him to develop a ratio-
nally demonstrable, causal analysis of the power of the prince and the nature of
his government, in place of the reflective and moral practice-orientated ‘mirror
for princes’ that had hitherto been the norm.22 In the Summa it profoundly
shaped his understanding of natural law and its relationship to human law and
the virtues of justice and political prudence. The legacy of this for sixteenth-
century scholastics was to allow them to raise explicitly political questions
within the theology curriculum as part of the study of theology, the master-
science of human actions.
The second key aspect of scholastic political thought identified by Skinner
was its close relationship with the discipline of law, both in method and in
content. Like the masters of arts, Roman lawyers (or at least some of them) used
the model of science as a knowledge based on causes, understood law as a prac-
tical science, and incorporated some of the substantive principles of Aristotelian
politics, for example that man is by nature a political animal, into their work.23
We should not think of this as a one-way process, however: scholastic philoso-
phers and theologians were heavily influenced in their turn by the concepts
and vocabulary of legal discourse. In the Italian context, Skinner’s focus was
on Roman law; but there was also considerable exchange between scholastic
theologians and canon lawyers, particularly as they wrestled with questions of
the nature of the church and its government. It was principally from canon law,
for example, that scholastic theologians gained the idea of the universitas or
corporate body, which crucially extended the range of legal and political agents
beyond the natural individuals of Aristotelian political science to include the
20 The key work is Christoph Flüeler, Rezeption und Interpretation der Aristotelischen Politica im
späten Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: B. R. Grüner, 1992).
21 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, in Opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P. M. edita, t. 4 (Rome,
1888), pars prima, q. 1, a. 2 and a. 4.
22 J. Miethke, De potestate papae. Die päpstliche Amstcompetenz im Widerstreit der politischen
Theorie von Thomas von Aquin bis Wilhelm von Ockham (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000),
pp. 31–45.
23 A good discussion can be found in J. Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 159–84.
136 Annabel Brett
church and the political community.24 One vitally important dimension of this
legal or juridical cast was, however, entirely left aside in Foundations, although
it was at the centre of the life both of the university of Paris and of the northern
Italian cities in the period in question. This was the impact upon the scholastic
vocabulary of politics of the so-called ‘poverty controversy’, the extended and
destructive wrangle over the possibility – both legal and moral – of living the
life of supreme poverty, which the Franciscans claimed to do in imitation of
Christ. Thus, simultaneously with the reception of the Aristotelian understand-
ing of human nature and its relation to political structures came the question of
the relation of Christ and his life to the legal structures of the Roman empire:
property and jurisdiction. The debate was, at one level, intricately legalistic in
its exhaustive analysis of the different legal relations that human beings can
be in with regard to other human beings and to goods. But it was forced to
transcend the lawyers’ perspective in so far as what was being argued over was
the possibility of living outside such legal relations. The end result was, again,
a recourse to human nature and its natural potentials, but this time cast in the
juridical terms of dominium and rights – ‘licit powers’, potestates licitae, as
William of Ockham famously described them.25 This dual heritage would be
critical to the political thought of the second scholastic that Skinner discussed
in volume II of Foundations.
Returning now to the question of scholasticism and liberty, Skinner’s more
recent lines of inquiry into republican liberty have bypassed the medieval
scholastics almost entirely. He has seen the Aristotelian tradition as a tradi-
tion of positive liberty, stemming from one of its key premises (‘taken up in
particular by scholastic political philosophy’, with the example of Aquinas),
that ‘the human animal is naturale sociale et politicum’.26 Instead Skinner has
stressed the Roman inheritance of republican thought: Cicero, Sallust and clas-
sical Roman law. But the sharp distinction this suggests between Roman law
and scholasticism has left him open to the charge of ignoring the influence of
legal thought on scholastic political Aristotelianism, which is not always or
necessarily so ‘eudaimonistic’ as his brief characterisation suggests – even in
Aquinas (not to mention Marsilius).27 While Skinner has examined in detail
24 The canon-law understanding and application of corporation theory to the church is classi-
cally discussed in Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1955).
25 See The work of ninety days, ch. 2, tr. in A. S. McGrade and J. Kilcullen (eds.), William of
Ockham: A letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), p. 24.
26 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in G. Bock, Quentin Skinner
and M. Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), pp. 293–309, at 296.
27 See K. Übl, Engelbert von Admont. Ein Gelehrter im Spannungsfeld zwischen Aristotelismus
und christliche Überlieferung (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 2000), pp. 119–21. However, the question
of what constitutes ‘political Aristotelianism’, at least for the medieval period, is heavily debated.
The account offered by Cary Nederman, ‘The meaning of “Aristotelianism” in medieval moral
Scholastic political thought 137
the classical texts of Roman law on liberty and servitude, he has not returned to
any extensive consideration of how medieval and Renaissance Roman lawyers
may themselves have understood and used those texts, nor to the medieval
scholastics. To that extent the possibilities offered by the second chapter of
Foundations for a rapprochement between republicanism and Aristotelianism
remain open.28
29 Cf. Constantin Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy: the Political Thought of William Durant the
Younger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 318: ‘no such thing as the conciliar
theory was ever a historical reality’.
30 Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 123; Skinner insisted, however, on the Roman law element as well
as the conciliarist.
31 F. Oakley, ‘Nederman, Gerson, Conciliar Theory and Constitutionalism: Sed contra’, History of
Political Thought 16 (1995), pp. 1–19, at 3; F. Oakley, ‘“Anxieties of Influence”: Skinner, Figgis,
Conciliarism and Early Modern Constitutionalism’, Past and Present 151 (1996), pp. 60–110,
at 77.
32 Questionably so: see below, p. 147.
33 C. Nederman, ‘Conciliarism and Constitutionalism: Jean Gerson and Medieval Political
Thought’, History of European Ideas 12 (1990), pp. 189–209, at 193, gives a list of require-
ments for ‘modern’ constitutionalism; C. Nederman, ‘Constitutionalism – Medieval and Modern:
Scholastic political thought 139
it undoubtedly calls into question any uncritical usage of the term ‘constitu-
tionalism’ vis-à-vis these authors. Oakley suggests that we can take it broadly
as any political arrangement involving the governed as well as the governors,
while Nederman draws to his side Constantin Fasolt’s conclusions concern-
ing the fourteenth-century (and so ‘medieval’) conciliarist William Durant the
Younger: the so-called ‘conciliarist’ and ‘papalist’ position are not two opposed
theories of the church, but two parts of an understanding of the community which
both involves and transcends the two aspects, council and hierarchy.34 Fasolt’s
historically engaged and subtle analysis offers, however, another perspective:
that for all the scholastic writers with whom we are concerned, we might do
better to abandon these dualisms altogether. In the authors we are considering,
the dynamics of legitimate potestas run both up and down, from the individ-
ual and/or the community to the head and back again, in different contexts and
depending on what needs to be done or what aspect is in question. It is a distinc-
tive way of thinking about the interlocking and conflicting powers and agency
of the different bodies and individuals that make up human life in common, be
this the life of the political community or the life of the church.
Returning to the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scholastics who
are the subject of Skinner’s analysis (and whose position between ‘medieval’
and ‘modern’ is an issue to which I shall return in conclusion), I suggest that
their political theory both resists and is obscured by the antithesis between
‘constitutionalism’ and ‘absolutism’ – which moreover renders the debate inter-
minable. Take, for example, the treatment of Suárez in The Cambridge History
of Political Thought 1450–1700: was he ultimately an absolutist, even if he
‘accommodated significant aspects of the constitutionalist tradition’ (Howell
Lloyd), or did he on the contrary tend to endorse ‘contractarian doctrines of
resistance’ (John Salmon)?35 The answer is, both; or, better, neither. Most of
the Spanish scholastics have a strong conception both of the extent of royal
power and of the rights of individuals and communities: they are two sides of
the same coin. And in fact Skinner himself was quite well aware that scholastic
political thought strains at his categories of analysis. His final chapter in the
central section is called ‘The limits of constitutionalism’, and shows how their
thinking contains elements of both ‘radicalism’ (especially in the concept of
individual rights) and ‘absolutism’; its heirs are both Mariana and Buchanan
(the radical side) and ‘the modern natural-law theory of the state’ in Grotius,
Hobbes and Pufendorf (which tends to absolutism). The chapter might perhaps
against Neo-Figgisite Orthodoxy’, History of Political Thought 17 (1996), pp. 179–94, develops
these themes.
34 See Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy, introduction (pp. 1–25); cited by Nederman, ‘Constitution-
alism – Medieval and Modern’, pp. 185–6.
35 H. A. Lloyd, ‘Constitutionalism’, and J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory’, both in
Burns, Cambridge History, pp. 254–97, at 296–7; and pp. 219–53, at 238–9.
140 Annabel Brett
36 For a recent restatement of Skinner’s case, see M. Walther, ‘Potestas multitudinis bei Suárez
und potentia multitudinis bei Spinoza’, in F. Grünert and K. Seelmann (eds.), Die Ordnung der
Praxis. Neue Studien zur spanische Spätscholastik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), pp. 281–97, at
281–2.
37 Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 140; Francisco de Vitoria, On Civil Power, transl. in Vitoria: Political
Writings, ed. A. Pagden and J. Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 16.
38 This exchange has now been translated into English in J. Burns and T. M. Izbicki (eds.), Con-
ciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
39 As is apparent from Vitoria’s commentary on the Summa theologiae, 1a2ae q. 90 a. 3, in Francisco
de Vitoria. Comentario al tratado de la ley, ed. V. Beltrán de Heredia (Madrid: CSIC, 1952).
40 Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 138: ‘remarkably homogeneous outlook’.
Scholastic political thought 141
Here again he is clearly aware of the strain that this imposes in some respects,
but he none the less he sees the members of the school as broadly putting for-
ward the same pattern of political argument. This is certainly justified up to a
point. Skinner called his book The Foundations of Modern Political Thought:
his enterprise was not to give an exhaustive account of the second scholastic,
but to identify its predominant features, the unarguably characteristic linguis-
tic formulations, motifs and argumentative strategies that it bequeathed to the
seventeenth century and beyond. Compare the summary of scholastic political
thought given by Filmer in his Patriarcha, and we see that contemporaries too
felt that they could identify with confidence the broad outlines of the scholastic
‘tenet’.41 Furthermore, Skinner’s approach has the merit of taking seriously
the entirety of the second scholastic from Vitoria to Suárez and integrating it
fully within a Europe-wide history of political thought, contrary to the ten-
dency within Anglo-American historiography to discuss only those aspects
and figures (principally the later Jesuits, and especially Suárez because of his
role in the controversy with James VI and I) that impinge upon a basically
northern European and indeed Atlantic perspective on the political thought
of the early-modern period. The Cambridge History mentioned above aptly
demonstrates the impoverishment of thinking on the second scholastic within
anglophone circles in the years following Foundations: the Iberian peninsula
receives hardly any attention at all, as Burns acknowledges in his introduction
with little apparent regret.42
None the less, this unification of the school in terms of its fundamental polit-
ical motifs and their motivation has its drawbacks. There are major differences
between the authors and in particular between the Dominican and the Jesuit
members of the school: the context (both political and institutional), the aims
and the theology had important differences. As I have indicated, Skinner does
take some account of this. But those distinctions that he draws do not affect
the substance of his discussion. Specifically – and this will be the focus of the
rest of this paper – to take Suárez as in some sense a spokesperson43 elides
what I am tempted, in view of this volume, to call ‘the Dominican moment’,
roughly coinciding with the reign of Charles V: the period in which princi-
pally Dominican theologians engaged simultaneously with questions of church
reform and counter-reform, extra-European and intra-European empire. Their
41 ‘Mankind is naturally endowed with and born with freedom from all subjection, and at liberty to
choose what form of government it please, and that the power which any one man hath over others
was at the first by human right bestowed according to the discretion of the multitude’: Sir Robert
Filmer, Patriarcha and other writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 2.
42 Burns, Cambridge History, p. 5. It is a merit of his introduction, however, that he squarely and
honestly confronts the issue of anglocentrism.
43 Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 138.
142 Annabel Brett
understanding of the political commonwealth was forged with all these dif-
ferent dimensions in view, not simply the necessity of combating an heretical
understanding of political power or of the church. Precisely by – quite rightly –
giving the second scholastic such a central place in European political thought,
and precisely by insisting that we include Vitoria and Soto in this perspective
as well as the Jesuits Molina and Suárez, Skinner sidelined the extra-European
dimension of their thought and did not directly address the question of empire
at all. Equally, by subordinating or even reducing the issue of the church to a
question of constitutionalism versus absolutism in church government44 (par-
allel with the question over secular government), he gave little consideration to
the supranational dimension of this element of their thinking as well.
Globally speaking, then, Skinner’s approach has the effect of marginalising
the universalist elements of second scholastic political thought, by which I mean
precisely those aspects that surpass the limits of the modern state, which is –
according to the second and third criteria mentioned at the outset of this paper –
by definition particularist and territorial. This is not to say that he ignores them
completely. His scrupulous discussion covers both their attitude towards the
American Indians and their understanding of the ius gentium (‘international
law’). But Vitoria’s discussion of the American Indians is seen only as a part
of the more general Counter-Reformation inflection of his theology and its
rebuttal of the heretical thesis of dominium founded upon grace. Equally, the
ius gentium is introduced in the course of discussing the revival of Thomist
natural law theory, not overseas expansion, and while Skinner recognises that
Vitoria held a less positivist view of international law than the later Jesuits,
he does not examine its context or implications, concentrating instead on the
development towards Suárez and the modern theory of international law as
a positive law between sovereign states. The universalist elements, then, are
there as addenda, a function of a Counter-Reformation constitutionalism that is
essentially a theory of government within a single commonwealth, rather than
partly constitutive of that theory.
Now one could argue that here again the governing metaphor of ‘foundations’
allowed Skinner to follow just this procedure. Under its protection, he was free
to pick and choose which bits of what authors or movements constitute ‘foun-
dations’ of modern political thought, seen as the theory of the modern state, and
leave behind those bits that do not seem to go in that direction or just mention
them as additional aspects. But what I am concerned to argue here is that this
misrepresents the thought of the second scholastic. It was born out of a period
in which the boundaries of the modern state were not yet fixed. The Habsburg
empire was being fought over both inside and outside Europe. The relationship
44 For example, Skinner’s discussion of Ockham’s analysis of the papacy is cast throughout in
terms of a ‘constitutional’ as opposed to an ‘absolute’ monarchy, rather than addressing the
different kind of community that Ockham thought the church to be: Skinner, Foundations, II,
p. 38.
Scholastic political thought 143
between national monarchies and church was in question. The rights of individ-
uals within and outside these communities were in question too. The important
thing about the theorists of the second scholastic, especially its Dominican
members, is that they did not think about these questions independently of each
other.
Let me fill that out. One of the surprising things about the handling of
scholastics in volume II as opposed to volume I is that whereas in the latter
the local Italian identity and political allegiances of the authors in question
are central to the story, in the former Skinner gives very little attention to the
peculiarly Spanish circumstances surrounding and involving the first members
of the school of Salamanca. He highlights, rightly, the Parisian training of both
Vitoria and Soto and the extent to which they took the lessons of Almain back
to Spain with them. And yet Vitoria returned to Spain in 1524 and spent two
years at the Dominican convent in Valladolid, one of the towns at the centre of
the revolt of the comuneros against the new government of Charles V, a revolt
generated partly by concerns over Spain’s place within the new dimensions of
the Habsburg empire and the refusal to be governed by foreigners.45 Empire
within Europe was therefore a central issue from the start, especially given the
emphasis within Spanish humanist circles around Charles V on celebrating an
idea of renewed world empire, a new Rome.46 In respect of empire outside
Europe, the Dominicans Vitoria, Soto, Melchor Cano, Bartolomé Carranza and
others inherited the critique of Spanish conquistador activity begun by the
Dominican missionary Antonio de Montesinos in Hispaniola in 1512 and con-
tinued – though without explicit reference to the Indies – by Cardinal Cajetan
in his commentary on question 66 of the Secunda secundae, a key text for the
Spanish school.47 On the question of relations between empire and church,
Vitoria had hardly taken up his chair at the University of Salamanca when
Charles V’s troops sacked Rome in 1527; and it was Charles again who was
the prime mover in calling for a general council to address the problems of the
Reformation.48
45 The context of the comuneros revolt is brought out by J. A. Fernández-Santamarı́a, The State, War
and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance, 1516–1559 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), in his discussion of Vitoria at pp. 54–87. It is this – the fear of popular
uprising – that offers at least part of the explanation for Vitoria’s more divine-right monarchism
in the lecture On Civil Power. However, Fernández-Santamarı́a’s book came too late for Skinner
fully to make use of it, which he regrets: Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 138n.
46 See A. R. D. Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France
c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 40–3.
47 Las Casas reported that Cajetan’s commentary on this locus, with its famous insistence that
taking the possessions of infidels who had never been subject to Christian rule was nothing
more that magna latrocinia (‘great robberies’, from Augustine) and liable to restitution, was
written as a direct response to news of the Indies: see J. Höffner, Kolonialismus und Evangelium.
Spanische Kolonialethik im goldenen Zeitalter (Trier: Paulinus Verlag, 1969), p. 251.
48 Skinner acknowledges the more conciliarist dimensions of Vitoria’s thought (as opposed to the
Jesuits’), though he does not set this in the Spanish context: Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 145.
144 Annabel Brett
These conclusions, which contain the essence of Soto’s theory of the genesis
of the commonwealth and the origin of political power, are formulated in two
questions entitled ‘Is any man lord of all the world?’ and ‘Is the emperor lord
of the world?’ That is, what we might call Soto’s ‘political theory’ is formed
not just as a deduction from Thomist natural law principles, or in response to an
heretical understanding of government – though it certainly involves that – but
as part of a meditation on structures and activities that transcend the boundaries
of the individual commonwealth. And this brings me on to the second major
strategy of Dominican political reflection, intimately connected with the first:
the Dominican habit of ‘cross-referencing’ the phenomena with which they
were presented, understanding the juridical status of one with reference to that
of another, and so involving all the dimensions of their political meditation
in a kind of mutual implication. A critical grasp of extra-European juridical
structures and the relations between them involves a similarly critical grasp
of their European counterparts. So, to continue with Vitoria’s lecture on the
American Indians: having established on natural-law principles that they are
human, he then faces the classic objection that they do not look very human to
us. His reply is to insist that this is an accident of upbringing, not an essential
difference, and to confirm this he refers to his own Spain: ‘Even among us we see
many peasants who are little different from brute animals.’53 He also concludes
that the Europeans have no just cause to invade American commonwealths
purely on the grounds that they are offending against natural law: for otherwise
‘the king of France has a perfect right to conquer Italy’.54 On the issue of
relations between temporal commonwealths and the church, Vitoria argues for
the difference between them on grounds taken from Aristotle and Aquinas, but
supplements his explanation with the remark that therefore ‘it is not correct to
think of civil and spiritual powers as two disparate and distinct commonwealths,
like England and France’.55
One of the most telling examples of this practice of cross-reference was
the controversy generated within the school by Vitoria’s invocation of the ius
communicandi or ‘right of communication’ in support of European travel to and
through the New World. As we have seen, he formally recognises American
Indian political structures as equivalent in nature and juridical status to those
of Europe. But he uses the ius communicandi to argue that these structures
cannot exclude travellers from other countries, who must (if they come in
peace) be allowed passage and also given the right of citizenship if they decide
53 Vitoria, On the American Indians, 1.5, in Vitoria, ed. Pagden and Lawrance, p. 250.
54 Vitoria, On Dietary Laws, or Self-Restraint, 1.5, in Vitoria, ed. Pagden and Lawrance, p. 225. As
the note there explains, this involves a joke in questionable taste about the sexual predilections
of the Italians and an indirect reference to the Sack of Rome.
55 Vitoria, Relection I On the Power of the Church, 5.6, in Vitoria, ed. Pagden and Lawrance,
p. 90.
146 Annabel Brett
to stay.56 Vitoria’s pupil Melchor Cano made a classic Vitorian move in relating
Vitoria’s argument to the European context: the Spanish come to the Indies not as
travellers but as invaders, ‘and the Spanish would not tolerate this at the hands of
the French’.57 But Vitoria’s closest associate Soto turned the argument back in a
different way. In his Deliberation in the cause of the poor, Soto’s principal thesis
concerned internal migration and the right of cities within Spain to exclude
travelling mendicants. His first argument against this right was the natural right
of travel: ‘by natural law and the law of nations highways and cities lie open
to all indifferently’.58 His third was that the kingdom constitutes one body, in
which there are wealthier and poorer regions, and that (as members of the same
body) the wealthier cannot bar the poor from elsewhere.59 But he developed this
point about the unity of the body of the realm to argue not just for the unity of
all Christians in one body – a conclusion from St Paul, and therefore of divine
law – but (‘if we refer the matter higher, to natural law’) for the conjunction of
all humanity in the same nature: ‘so that, unless they were our enemies, or we
feared some detriment to our faith from them, it would not be rightful [ fas] to
eject even infidel mendicants from our commonwealth’.60
As we have seen, Vitoria’s (and, to some extent, Soto’s) position was chal-
lenged even within their own Dominican circle. Beyond it, the Jesuit Luis de
Molina definitively rejected the position that a breach of the ius communicandi
constitutes grounds for a just war: any commonwealth may licitly forbid access,
commerce and the use of its assets (e.g. harbours, rivers, mines) to strangers
– all the more so if these strangers appear to be more powerful than it is and
might be a threat in future (although this is not a necessary condition).61 But
it would be wrong to see the later generations of the school of Salamanca
in terms of a generalised shift in their theory towards positivism in the field
of the ius gentium and (in parallel) towards legal voluntarism and absolutism
within political commonwealths. Although some of these traits are present in
Suárez – and not unambiguously, as I have hinted – the position of his De legibus
56 Vitoria, On the American Indians, 3.1, in Pagden and Lawrance, Vitoria, pp. 278–84.
57 Melchor Cano, De dominio indorum: Apéndice II in L. Pereña et al. (eds.), Juan de la Peña. De
bello contra insulanos (Madrid: CSIC, 1982), p. 579; discussed in comparison with Vitoria by
M. Delgado, ‘Die Zustimmung des Volkes in der politischen Theorie von Francisco de Vitoria,
Bartolomé de las Casas und Francisco Suárez’, in Grünert and Seelmann, Die Ordnung der
Praxis, pp. 157–81, at 175.
58 Domingo de Soto, In causa pauperum deliberatio (ed. together with his Relectio de ratione
tegendi et detegendi secretum (Salamanca, 1566)), fo. 102.
59 Ibid., fo. 103.
60 Ibid. Interestingly, this precise point does not appear in Soto’s vernacular version of this treatise,
perhaps indicating its controversial nature: see his Deliberación en la causa de los pobres, ed.
Felix Santolaria Sierra, El gran debate sobre los pobres en el siglo XVI. Domingo de Soto y Juan
de Robles 1545 (Barcelona: Ariel, 2003), p. 65.
61 Luis De Molina, De iustitia et iure, q. 40 ‘De bello’ (bilingual Latin-Spanish edn. in M. Fraga
Iribarne, Luis de Molina y el derecho de la guerra (Madrid: CSIC, 1947), Apéndice I), disp. 105,
pp. 335–9. See the discussion in D. Janssen, ‘Die Theorie des gerechten Krieges im Denken des
Francisco de Vitoria’ in Grünert and Seelmann, Die Ordnung der Praxis, pp. 205–43, at 231.
Scholastic political thought 147
62 J.-F. Courtine, Nature et empire de la loi. Études suaréziennes (Paris: Vrin, 1999), esp. ch. 2,
offers an analysis of Suárez’s political thought in terms of the Jesuit shift away from the authen-
tically Thomist anthropology of Vitoria and Soto, underpinning a more voluntarist and posi-
tivist understanding of law. Similar lines of thought, developing the Augustinian theme, can be
found in D. Ferraro, Itinerari del volontarismo. Teologia e politica al tempo di Luis de León
(Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1995). For a detailed new study with a completely different approach, see
H. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: the Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
63 See J. N. Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625, 2nd edn.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), lecture VI (‘The Jesuits’) passim and lecture
VII (‘The Netherlands revolt’), esp. p. 186 (Grotius and the Jesuits against, in the first place,
‘the radical separateness of states’). See also his lecture ‘On some political theories of the early
Jesuits’, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society NS 11 (1897), pp. 89–112.
64 See for example R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); cf. the thoughtful discussion in R. Specht,
‘Spanisches Naturrecht: Klassik und Gegenwart’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 41
(1987), pp. 169–82.
148 Annabel Brett
It is time, my lords, to conclude, for I have talked for much longer than I
believed I would. And now you clearly see, that the Sovereign Magistrate,
whichever title he has been given, has not been sent from Heaven, but is
established by the common consent of the Citizens; that, if he wants to act in
a way that is worthy of a Prince or Magistrate, he should recognise himself to
stand under all Laws; that he cannot wield his Power at will, but as required
by the Public Good; and that if he does otherwise, he does not act as a Prince
or Magistrate, but as a Tyrant; and that he then may be bridled by his Subjects,
in virtue of all Divine and Human Law.1
With this powerful summary Gerard Noodt concluded his farewell lecture as
Rector of the University of Leiden. It was February 1699 and Noodt had cho-
sen ‘The Power of Sovereigns’ as the title of a lecture that was a synthesis
of seventeenth-century debates on natural liberty, the formation of the com-
monwealth, the nature of sovereignty and the legitimacy of resistance against
tyranny. Noodt presented his conclusions as mere common sense, underpinned
by references to the leading authorities on the subject, to George Buchanan, the
Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf.
One of the most important legacies of Quentin Skinner’s Foundations is
its systematic study of theories of resistance in early-modern Europe – from
Luther to Locke. It is a journey that takes the reader right across Europe, from
the Lutheran heart of Saxony to the centres of constitutionalist thought in Paris,
moving on to the revival of Thomism in Salamanca and to Calvin’s rise in
Geneva, ending with the elaboration of full-fledged theories of resistance by
Calvinists in France, Scotland and England – the authors and works Gerard
Noodt knew so well. Along thematic lines it is a journey from Luther’s ini-
tial insistence on obedience to the theory of revolution of Calvinists such as
François Hotman, Theodore Beza, Hubert Languet, Philippe du Plessis Mornay,
Christopher Goodman and George Buchanan, whose theories culminate in ‘the
1 Gerard Noodt, Du pouvoir des souverains et de la liberté de conscience, ed. Jean Barbeyrac
(Amsterdam, 1714), p. 302.
149
150 Martin van Gelderen
the Lutherans had already developed’.7 English Calvinists such as Ponet and
Goodman endorsed the private law justification of armed resistance. In Geneva
and France Calvinists elaborated the constitutionalist defence of the duty of
inferior magistrates to resist a godless higher magistrate. Calvin and his follow-
ers presented these inferior magistrates as ‘ephoral’ authorities. The reference
to the Ephors of Sparta emphasised that these magistrates were elected; they
were popular magistrates. Calvinists embedded their reflections on the author-
ity and duty of inferior and popular magistrates in a contractual theory, where
princes, faithful subjects and God were bound together by covenant.
The idea of the covenant was central to the political thought of the French
Huguenots, culminating in the contractual analysis of the Vindiciae contra
Tyrannos, published in 1579 and now available in English in George Garnett’s
fine edition.8 The argument of the Vindiciae is centred around two covenants.
The first is a contract between God, king and inferior magistrates. On the basis
of this covenant the Vindiciae argues that as both king and inferior magistrates
are ‘ordained by God to govern justly and rule on his behalf’, inferior magis-
trates have the religious duty to resist a king ‘who overturns the law and Church
of God’.
The second covenant is only between king and people. The Vindiciae argues
that, in a position of natural liberty, the people had decided to create a king, to
pursue their welfare and to uphold their rights. Kings should always remember,
the Vindiciae writes, ‘that it is from God, but by the people and for the people’s
sake that they do reign’. Since it was impossible for all inhabitants to get together
and conclude a contract with the king, the people had, the Vindiciae asserts,
vested its authority in a body of inferior magistrates. If the king ‘fails in his
promise’ to uphold the covenant, ‘the people are exempt from obedience, the
contract is made void’ and on behalf of the people the inferior magistrates are
entitled and obliged to resist the tyrant. In the words of the Vindiciae, ‘every
magistrate is bound to relieve, and as much as it in him lies, to redress the
miseries of the commonwealth’.
The Vindiciae’s emphasis on the contract between king and people exem-
plifies what in Foundations is called ‘the epoch-making move’ the Huguenot
monarchomachs make
from a purely religious theory of resistance, depending on the idea of a covenant to
uphold the laws of God, to a genuinely political theory of revolution, based on the idea
of a contract which gives rise to a moral right (and not merely a religious duty) to resist
any ruler who fails in his corresponding obligation to pursue the welfare of the people
in all his public acts.9
The most radical affirmation of such a political right of resistance was artic-
ulated by George Buchanan in his dialogues on The Right of the Kingdom in
Scotland, published, like the Vindiciae, in 1579.10
Both Calvin and Buchanan had been pupils of John Mair. In one of its most
innovative moments Foundations argues that Lutheran and Calvinist theories of
resistance are deeply indebted to the late medieval discussions of commentators
and conciliarists. The legacy of conciliarism and Roman law was brought to
the Calvinists by their own teachers, and Foundations highlights the importance
of Mair and Almain, who revived the conciliarist tradition at the Sorbonne, and
of jurists such as Mario Salomonio, whose De Principatu argues that the prince
was not legibus solutus, but a ‘minister of the commonwealth’ bound by contract
to the people, who, to quote Salomonio, ‘as the creator of the prince must be
greater than the prince whom they create’.11
The conclusion, stated at the end of Foundations, is that, to quote,
as will by now be clear, the concepts in terms of which Locke and his successors
developed their views on popular sovereignty and the right of revolution had already
been largely articulated and refined over a century earlier in legal writings of such radical
jurists as Salomonio, in the theological treatises of such Ockhamists as Almain and Mair,
as well as in the more famous but derivative writings of the Calvinist revolutionaries.12
The main theorists of resistance may have been self-proclaimed Calvinists,
but their theories were legal and political, rooted in the legacy of late medieval
conciliarism and constitutionalism. Moreover, the shift to radical politics was
never the preserve of Calvinists alone. Buchanan’s move to what is called ‘a
highly individualist and even anarchic view of the right of political resistance’13
is paralleled by the account of popular sovereignty given by the Spanish Jesuit
Juan de Mariana in the first book of De Rege et Regis Institutione, published in
Toledo in 1599. 14
Lutheranism
While the arguments in Foundations are mainly directed against Michael
Walzer’s work, they entail the fundamental rejection of a long historiographic
tradition, going back to the work of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, that pre-
sented Calvinists as studious contributors to the rise of capitalism and democ-
racy, the hallmarks of modernity, while poor Lutherans remained stuck in their
unqualified reverence for absolutist princes.15 In the past decades German
historians have contributed strongly to the revision of the theories of Weber
10 George Buchanan, De Iure Regni apud Scotos, Dialogus (Edinburgh, 1579).
11 Mario Salomonio, De Principatu (Rome, 1544), fol. 12, also 17 and 21.
12 Skinner, Foundations, II, pp. 347–8. 13 Ibid., p. 343.
14 Juan de Mariana, De Rege et Regis Institutione (Toledo, 1599).
15 Key works include Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other
Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2002) and, perhaps even more importantly, Ernst Troeltsch,
Theories of resistance 153
and Troeltsch, which form such an important part of their intellectual heritage.
Research on Lutheran theories of authority, obedience and resistance has played
an important role in this revision.
Scholars such as Diethelm Böttcher, Gabriele Haug-Moritz and Robert von
Friedeburg have delved deeper into the connections between Lutheran political
thought and late medieval legal traditions.16 Their research shows how the jurists
and princes who sympathised with Luther almost self-evidently appealed to
Roman law commentators such as Bartolus and Baldus and to the long-standing
constitutional practices of the Empire, including the 1519 Wahlkapitulation of
the emperor Charles V. To their notable astonishment Luther refused to accept
their refined interpretations of imperial and Roman law, superseding them – and
this was the real novelty of the debate – with a much more straightforward hier-
archical and centralistic image of the political order as a divine ordination with
the emperor as its sole apex and all others, including proud princes and imperial
cities, reduced to the status of subjects whose duty was to obey. Luther’s verdict
in 1529 was simple: ‘a Christian should bear violence and injustice, especially
from his own secular authority’.17 Grudgingly, as only Luther could grudge, the
Wittenberg theologians recognised the legal – but not the theological – validity
of the arguments of the jurists in October 1530.
John, elector of Saxony, and Philip, landgrave of Hessen, did not see them-
selves as subjects of the emperor. They recognised Charles V as their overlord,
to whom they owed dutiful obedience. But they also insisted on the highness
and authority of their own office, as set out by divine and natural law, by the
rules of Roman and canon law and by the charters of the Empire. Legal and
classical conceptions of office smoothly merged with the feudal concepts of
tutelage, of lord and vassal, who were tied to each other in a pact of mutual
rights and obligations, not in the one-way street of king and subject. Admittedly,
as Obrigkeit the position of the elector of Saxony and the landgrave of Hessen
within the constitutional patchwork of the empire was inferior in status to that
of the emperor, but if Charles V, the higher magistrate, stepped outside the
bounden duty of his office, then it was the officium of the princes of Hessen
and Saxony to defend themselves and those under their authority and protection
against the deliberate use of unjust force.
The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (London: Macmillan, 1931). For recent assess-
ments see Hartmut Lehmann and Günther Roth (eds.), Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’: Origins,
Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
16 See Diethelm Böttcher, Ungehorsam oder Widerstand? Zum Fortleben des mittelalterlichen
Widerstandsrechtes in der Reformationszeit (1529–1530) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991);
Robert von Friedeburg, Self-defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England
and Germany, 1530–1680 (London: Ashgate, 2002) and Gabriele Haug-Moritz, ‘Widerstand
als “Gegenwehr”. Die schmalkaldische Konzeption der “Gegenwehr” und der “gegenwehrliche
Krieg” des Jahres 1542’, in Robert von Friedeburg (ed.), Widerstandsrecht in der frühen Neuzeit.
Erträge und Perspektiven der Forschung im deutsch-britischen Vergleich (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 2001), pp. 141–61.
17 Luther, WA Briefwechsel 5, 258.
154 Martin van Gelderen
In discussing the natural and legal entitlement to defence against unjust vio-
lence Lutheran jurists were keen to use the concepts of Gegenwehr and Notwehr.
The Magdeburg Confession is built on the principle ‘that an inferior magistrate
may use self-defence against a higher one, if the latter wants to root out the
Christian religion with force’.18 As the equivalents of the Latin concept of
defensio, Notwehr and Gegenwehr refer to the immediate and proportional
defensive response to the use of unjust force. The element of proportionality is
vital. Matthias Flacius, the leader of defiant Magdeburg, declares emphatically
in 1551 that it is as plain ‘as clear, lightning sunshine, that this war and this
persecution are there because of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and that we have
not overreacted in our self-defence’.19
To appreciate this particular emphasis on self-defence it is vital to recog-
nise, as Luise Schorn-Schütte has highlighted in a number of studies, that
Lutheran reflections on issues of obedience and resistance are embedded in
a more comprehensive theory of the social order. By divine ordination soci-
ety is composed of three orders. As Luther puts it in 1528: ‘These are the
three holy orders and right establishments [stiffte], ordained by God: the office
of the minister, the state of marriage, the secular authority’.20 From the dis-
tinction between status ecclesiasticus, status politicus and status oeconomicus
Lutherans started to derive more specific conceptions of the three offices. As
the Magdeburg Confession explains, God ‘has separated the three regiments
in such a way, that he has given each his specific office and duty and his
own specific way of punishment’. But the three orders are also interdependent
and, to quote the Confession, as God wants it, ‘each of them should serve the
other’.21
18 Bekentnis Unterricht und vermanung, der Pfarrhern und Prediger, der Christlichen Kirchen zu
Magdeburg, fol. H4 (r).
19 Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Ein Geistlicher Trost dieser betrübten Magdeburgischen Kirchen
Christi: daß sie die Verfolgung umb Gottes Worts, und keinen andern Ursachen halben, leidet,
in Friedrich Hortleder, Der Römischen Keyser und königlichen Maiestete, auch des heiligen
Rö(mischen) Reichs, geistlicher und weltlicher Stände . . . Handlungen und Ausschreiben . . . Von
Rechtmässigkeit, Anfang, Fort- und endlichen Außgang deß Teutschen Kriegs, Keijser Carls deß
Fünfften, wider die Schmalkaldischen Bundsoberste, Chur und Fürsten, Sachsen und Hessen . . .
Vom Jahr 1546 bis auff das Jahr 1558, 2nd edn (Gota, 1645), IV:13, s. 1152. For Flacius see Oliver
K. Olsen, Matthias Flacius and the survival of Luther’s reform, Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen
zur Renaissanceforschung (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002).
20 Luise Schorn-Schütte, ‘Die Drei-Stände-Lehre im reformatorischen Umbruch’, in Bernd
Moeller, Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Ver-
lagshaus, 1998), p. 439. See also Luise Schorn-Schütte, Evangelische Geistlichkeit in der
Frühneuzeit. Deren Anteil an der Entfaltung frühmoderner Staatlichkeit und Gesellschaft
(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), pp. 390–452 and Luise Schorn-Schütte, ‘Obrigkeit-
skritik und Widerstandsrecht. Die politica christiana als Legitimitätsgrundlage’, in Luise
Schorn-Schütte (ed.), Aspekte der politischen Kommunikation im Europa des 16. und 17.
Jahrhunderts, Historische Zeitschrift, Beiheft 39 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004),
pp. 195–232.
21 Bekentnis Unterricht und vermanung, der Pfarrhern und Prediger, der Christlichen Kirchen zu
Magdeburg, fol. Giij.
Theories of resistance 155
As Leyser insists, in doing so, the Lutheran minister ‘is neither intruding
into another office, nor is he falling into worldliness’. On the contrary ‘it is
appropriate to his office . . . to warn his beloved ruler [Oberkeit] and his beloved
neighbour’.24
Thanks to the research of the past twenty-five years a more nuanced picture
of Lutheran political thought starts to emerge. Firmly rooted in late medieval
legal and feudal traditions, Lutherans – and Lutheran jurists in particular – give
particular twists to such crucial concepts as defensio, officium and to the theory
of estates. Within the Lutheran conception of society as a divine ordination
Revolt, Marnix van St Aldegonde, decisively rejected the proposal to limit the
entitlement to resistance to the ‘high magistrate and the States of the country’
with the exclusion of ‘the lowest magistrates and private persons’. Marnix’s
reply that the legitimacy of resistance depends in particular on whether civil
government has been established ‘with certain contracts and mutual obligations’
indicates the move away from the Lutheran emphasis on self-defence.
In legitimating their resistance against the government of Philip II Dutch
authors represent the charters in terms of contracts as essential parts of the
‘ancient constitution’ which has been created by wise ancestors to safeguard
Dutch liberty. Within the ‘ancient constitution’ the charters function as consti-
tutional guarantees of liberty. They are the fundamental laws of the country,
which no prince is allowed to violate or change; they are the bridles of the prince
and they contain the conditions on which the prince has been accepted by the
States on behalf of the people. While the charters are the constitutional and
legal guarantees of liberty, the parliamentary assemblies and the citizens of the
Netherlands are presented as its virtuous guardians. In the course of the 1570s
the Dutch rebels develop an interpretation of the Dutch political order as based
on liberty, constitutional charters, representative assemblies and civic virtue. In
1581 the Frisian humanist Aggaeus van Albada is the first Dutch author to give a
full account of popular sovereignty as the foundation of the constitution. Being
educated in Paris, Orléans, Bourges and Italy29 he underpins his arguments with
references to Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, to Bartolus and Baldus, to Salomonio
and the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos and, perhaps most surprisingly and cleverly,
to the work of Domingo de Soto and Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca, coun-
sellors to Charles V and Philip II, whose vital contributions to early modern
theories of civil power and resistance are highlighted in Annabel Brett’s study
Liberty, Right and Nature.30
Vázquez develops his radical theory of civil power in his main work, the
Controversies, published in 1564 and dedicated to Philip II. The foundation of
Vázquez’s account of civil power is the presumption that before the establish-
ment of the first acts of human law all res are in a state of natural liberty. In
the case of some res, most famously the sea, this natural liberty can never be
relinquished. In the case of human beings ‘the natural appetite for society, the
naturalis appetitus socialis, and the necessity of human beings to protect them-
selves against wrongdoers leads to the formation of society and civil power.31
29 For Albada see Wiebe Bergsma, Aggaeus van Albada (c. 1525–1587), schwenckfeldiaan, staats-
man en strijder voor verdraagzaamheid (Groningen: Meppel, 1985).
30 Annabel S. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) especially ch. 5, pp. 165–204.
31 Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca, Controversiarum Illustrium aliarumque usu frequentium libri
tres (Venice, 1564), preface, nos. 121–2. I have used the edition of Fidel Rodriguez Alcalde,
which also has a Spanish translation (Valverde: Valladolid, 1931).
158 Martin van Gelderen
In strong contrast with Soto, Vázquez draws a sharp line between the natural
movement to society and the artificial establishment of civil power.32 Natural
sociability leads to the congregation of free citizens in society. But men do not
naturally live at peace with each other, and so society will suffer from discord
and dissent. For their own protection free citizens will then decide to establish
civil power. As Vázquez puts it, all kings ‘are understood as created, elected or
given not for their own sake or that of their own utility, but for the sake of the
citizens and the utility of the citizens’.33 In Vázquez’s theory civilis potestas is
power conceded by free citizens to the king, who should govern them to their
own good.
Vázquez’s theory raises the question of the legitimacy of resistance in situa-
tions where the king abuses his imperium et potestas and turns into a tyrant. In
the case of Vázquez the radical answer is that if the jurisdiction of the king is
based on the consent of the citizens, ‘then that consent is of its nature revocable,
since they are seen to have subjected themselves for their own utility, not that
of their prince’.34
Albada refers to Vázquez at almost all stages of his legitimation of the Dutch
revolt and of the civil power of the Dutch parliamentary assemblies, the provin-
cial States and the States General. The basic premise of Albada’s argument,
‘that all forms of government, kingdoms, empires and legitimate authorities
are founded for the common utility of the citizens, and not of the rulers’ is
directly taken from the Controversies;35 it is followed by a long reflection on
Salomonio’s De Principatu which leads to Albada’s endorsement of popu-
lar sovereignty. The argument that all princes are bound by the laws and that
Philip II in particular is tied to the charters of the Low Countries is supported
with references to both Soto and Vázquez.36 The defence of the active policy
of intervention by the States is based on Vázquez’s theory of jurisdiction and
‘natural protection’. The legitimacy of Dutch resistance against Philip II is sup-
ported with the argument ‘that if a community is oppressed by its Prince or
Stadholder, it shall take recourse to its overlord; but if there is no overlord, the
community is entitled to take up arms’. According to Albada this argument was
first formulated by Soto and then endorsed by Vázquez.37
The Dutch reception of Vázquez’s theory of the origins of civil power finds
its climax in the work of Hugo Grotius.38 The turn to Vázquez, ‘the pride of
32 See for this point in particular Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, p. 173.
33 Vázquez, Controversiarum, preface, no. 119. 34 Ibid., book II, ch. lxxxii, no. 6.
35 Aggaeus van Albada, Acten, 166 referring to Vázquez, Controversiarum, book I, ch. 1, no. 40.
36 Albada, Acten, 16, 106 and 121.
37 Ibid., 122 referring to Soto, De justitia et iure, book V, question 1, art. 3 and Vázquez, Contro-
versiarum, book I, ch. 8, no. 33.
38 Hugo Grotius, De Iure Praedae Commentarius, ed. H. G. Hamaker (The Hague, 1868). Ref-
erences are also to the English translation: Hugo Grotius, De Iure Praedae Commentarius:
Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, vol. I, ed. Gwladys L. Williams and Walther
H. Zeydel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950).
Theories of resistance 159
This argument lies at the heart of Grotius’s justification of the Dutch revolt.
First, in line with the revolt’s traditions, Grotius defends the authority of the
parliamentary assemblies with reference to the old charters. He characterises
the assembly of the States as the ‘supreme magistrate which maintains the law
of the commonwealth and the citizenry’. Faced with the ‘foreign arms’ of the
Spaniards it was their duty to uphold ‘the pacts which had been sanctified by the
oath of the prince, and which gave continuity to the form of government’ (forma
imperii); it was their duty to ‘liberate the commonwealth and the individual
citizens from exactions, which directly contravened not only the law but also
the common liberty of mankind because, as the Spanish Doctor argues, these
exactions lead to immediate pillage and to future servitude’.45
When Grotius moves on to justify the abjuration of Philip II, he appeals to
Vázquez not only as the ‘Spanish Doctor’ but also as one of Philip’s own
‘senators’. Grotius endorses Vázquez’s view that when ‘superiors’ such as
Philip ‘refuse justice to the subjects, they are not only deprived ipso jure of
supreme jurisdiction, but also become forever incapacitated from recovering
that jurisdiction’.46 Grotius places full weight on the basic principles that the
commonwealth is the source of civil power and that government is based on
contractual consent. He upholds the ‘doctrine which has maximum support
among the Spaniards themselves that the power which has been given to the
prince can be revoked, particularly when the prince exceeds his bounds, because
then ipso facto he ceases to be regarded as a prince’. With a final blow Grotius
reiterates – with a further reference to Vázquez – that ‘he who abuses supreme
power renders himself unworthy of it, and ceases to be a prince in consequence
of what he does to make himself a tyrant’.47
Like Salomonio and Albada, Grotius and Vázquez are key figures in an intel-
lectual tradition of humanists who blend the languages of jurisprudence and neo-
scholasticism, of Roman law and the school of Salamanca, with the Renaissance
vocabulary of civic humanism and republicanism to discuss the issues of civil
power and resistance. The contrasts with the Lutheran theory of self-defence
are striking. In terms of vocabulary there is an important shift from the lan-
guage of divine ordination, of divine orders, of defence and self-defence by
inferior magistrates to the language of popular sovereignty, civil power, civic
rights and, especially in Grotius’s Dutch writings, active citizenship. The polit-
ical order is not the outcome of divine ordination but of civic creation; social
order is not a divinely ordained hierarchy but a civil society of citizens whose
position, at least in the face of the law, is characterised by the principles of civil
liberty and equality. Resistance is not the ultimate resort of inferior magistrates
acting in self-defence but the active right of the sovereign people and their
representatives, who have been given this right by the collective consent of the
citizens.
Like Grotius, some of the monarchomachs, most notably, as John Salmon
has highlighted, Buchanan and Rossaeus, had grounded their radical theories of
resistance on the ‘acceptance of a presocial state of nature’ and ‘the belief that
the people really did exercise authority’.48 As in Grotius’s case, these reflections
on the origins of civil society were deeply informed by Cicero’s analysis in
De inventione and De officiis. Unlike Grotius, Buchanan and Rossaeus are less
willing to see civil society purely as the artificial outcome of private calculations
on the basis of self-preservation and utility; Buchanan still sees ‘a certain force
of nature’ and ‘a light divinely shed upon our souls’ moving men to the formation
of society.49
works to defend Grotius against the attacks of the puritan John Bidle.52 Another
Puritan, Richard Baxter, borrowed – as William Lamont has pointed out – ‘the
bits of Grotius he liked – particularly, the recognition of self-preservation as
the ultimate criterion – and turned them against the bits of Grotius he didn’t
like’, most notably Grotius’s irenicism, which Baxter interpreted as a disas-
trous programme for the reunion of the churches.53 Meanwhile during the
1660s John Locke, whose inclinations were rather different from Baxter’s,
started to recommend the irenicist works of Grotius – in particular De Veritate
Religionis Christianae – to his students at Christ Church in Oxford, while taking
notes himself from Henry Hammond’s Pacifick Discourse of God’s Grace and
Decrees.54
Grotius’s theory of resistance became, as Jonathan Scott has pointed out, ‘one
of the most quoted political sources in England’.55 For most, if not all English
readers, the principal source of Grotius’s theory was not De Iure Praedae, but
Grotius’s much more cautious account of civil power and resistance in the fourth
chapter of the first book of De iure belli ac pacis. Making a remarkable move
Grotius now explicitly rejected the opinion of those ‘who will have the Supreme
Power to be always, and without exception, in the people’.56 The key argument
against the absolute primacy of popular sovereignty is the absolute liberty of
the people. Grotius argues that people are perfectly free to transfer their natural
right of self-government to one – or more – persons, relinquishing it, if they
want to, forever. Just as it is ‘lawful for any man to engage himself as a slave to
whom he pleases’, so it is ‘lawful for a people that are at their own disposal, to
deliver up themselves to any or more persons, and transfer the right of governing
them upon him or them, without reserving any share of that right to themselves’.
Just as individual persons are entitled to choose their own ‘way of living’, so
the people ‘may choose what form of government they please’. Being on the
‘Brink of Ruin’ or ‘in great Want’, the people may well ‘find no other Means
to save themselves’ but to ‘yield all Sovereignty to another’.57
52 See Henry Hammond, A Second Defence of the Learned Hugo Grotius (London, 1655); A
Continuation of the Defence of Hugo Grotius in an Answer to the Review of his Annotations
(London, 1657). For Hammond see John W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–
1660, with Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester: Manchester University Press
1969); Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, pp. 215–27 and Neil Lettinga, ‘Covenant Theology
turned upside down: Henry Hammond and Caroline Anglican Moralism, 1643–1660’, Sixteenth
Century Journal 24 (1993), pp. 653–69.
53 William Lamont, ‘Arminianism: the Controversy that Never Was’, in Phillipson and Skinner,
Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, pp. 45–66, at p. 59.
54 See John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), pp. 25–6.
55 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 149.
56 Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis, book I, ch. IV, para. VIII. The translation is based on Hugo
Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. and trans. Jean Barbeyrac (London, 1738).
57 Ibid.
Theories of resistance 163
In the judgement of Grotius’s strongest English critic, Sir Robert Filmer, this
is still dangerous radicalism. Filmer recognises the doctrines ‘that civil power
depends on the will of the people’ and ‘that private men or petty multitudes
may take up arms against their princes’.58 As Filmer sees it, these doctrines
are ‘the desperate inconveniences which attend upon the doctrine of the natural
freedom and community of all things’.59 From Filmer’s perspective Grotius is
affiliated with a group of ‘Jesuits and some over zealous favourers of the Geneva
discipline’– for an Anglican such as Filmer an unholy alliance if ever there
was one. Membership of the unholy alliance included Cardinal Bellarmine,
Francisco Suárez and Buchanan.
To begin with, Filmer abhorred Grotius’s argument that the political order
is not the outcome of divine ordination but of civic creation; that social order
is not a divinely ordained hierarchy but a civil society of citizens whose posi-
tion, at least in the face of the law, was characterised by the principles of, as
Filmer writes with great disdain, ‘the Natural Liberty and Equality of Mankind’.
Grotius ‘teacheth’, Filmer writes with strong disapproval, ‘that the people may
choose what form of government they please, and their will is the rule of right’.60
And as Filmer notes, even when the people choose monarchy as their form of
government, ‘lawful kings have no property in their kingdoms, but a usufruc-
tuary right only as if the people were the lords and the kings but their tenants’.
Worse is to follow. The theory of resistance that Grotius goes on to derive in De
iure belli ac pacis alarms Filmer even more. While Grotius underpins his theory
of resistance with frequent references to the work of William Barclay, the arch
anti-monarchomach, Filmer argues that the great peril of Grotius’s theory of
resistance is that, given the foundational principles of Grotian political thought,
on the issue of whether a king has become a tyrant, an ‘enemy of the whole
people’, as Grotius now puts it,61 ‘every private man may be judge’.62
For Henry Parker, ‘the most aggressive, thoughtful, and provocative par-
liamentarian writer in the early years of the Long parliament and civil war
era’,63 whose own writings were also heavily attacked by Filmer, Grotius did
not go far enough. As Michael Mendle has shown, Parker’s staunch defence of
parliamentary sovereignty was grounded on the assumption that all power, as
58 Sir Robert Filmer, Observations Concerning the Originall of Government upon Mr Hobs
Leviathan, Mr Milton against Salmasius, H. Grotius De Jure Belli (1652) in Sir Robert Filmer,
Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), p. 222.
59 Ibid., p. 225. 60 Ibid., p. 221.
61 Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, book I, ch. IV, para. XI.
62 Filmer, The Originall of Government, p. 220.
63 Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: the Political Thought of the Public’s
‘privado’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. xi; for a similar judgement see
Quentin Skinner, ‘John Milton and the politics of slavery’, in Skinner, Visions, II, pp. 286–307,
at p. 293.
164 Martin van Gelderen
Parker put it in the pamphlet from 1642 that gave him the name and fame of the
Observator, ‘is originally inherent in the people, and is nothing else but that
might and vigour which such or such a societie of men containes in itselfe’.64
Parker insisted on the identity of people and Parliament; popular sovereignty
implied parliamentary sovereignty. Parliament, wrote the Observator, was ‘the
State it self’.65
Like Grotius Parker saw government as a civic creation. In Jus Populi,
Parker’s most systematic and ‘frontal assault upon the organic and patriarchal
assumptions about the naturalness of government’,66 the Observator explicitly
praised Grotius’s ‘qualification of political rule, that he accounts so meerly
humane’, and fully endorsed Grotius’s argument, ‘that if the King seek to
alter it, he may be . . . opposed by the people’.67 But Parker strongly rejected
Grotius’s new permissiveness towards absolute monarchy. The key issue was
whether the people can, as Grotius argued, choose to relinquish their natural
liberty and put themselves under the subjection of a monarch. While accepting
the legitimacy of absolute monarchy, Grotius had later on in De iure belli ac
pacis drawn parallels between slavery and monarchy, asserting that ‘as then per-
sonal liberty excludes the Dominion of a Master, so does civil Liberty exclude
royalty, and all manner of Sovereignty properly so called’.68 Right at this point
Grotius quotes Livy, who, in Grotius’s poignant summary of the crux of the
republican argument, ‘oppose those Peoples that were free, to them that lived
under Kings’. Livy is joined by Cicero and of course Tacitus. To top it all,
Grotius reminds his readers that ‘even the Stoicks acknowledge there is a kind
of servitude in subjection and in the Holy Scriptures the Subjects of Kings
are called their servants’.69 Parker drew the conclusion. ‘By favour of Grotius’
Parker argued ‘there is stronger reason, that no Nation yet ever did voluntar-
ily or compulsorily embrace servitude, or intend submission to it’.70 With this
conclusion Parker made Filmer’s nightmare come true. While Grotius had, as
Filmer saw it, ‘in words’ acknowledged the legitimacy of monarchy, his ‘circu-
lar suppositions’ were brought to their radical conclusion by Parker. True lovers
of liberty, cherished deeply by both Parker and Grotius, would never opt for
monarchy.
Along these lines the abolition of monarchy should be seen as an act of self-
liberation by the free and sovereign people. As Martin Dzelzainis and Skinner
have argued, this argument lay at the heart of John Milton’s defence of the
64 Henry Parker, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (London,
1642), p. 1.
65 Parker, Observations, p. 34. 66 Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War, p. 127.
67 Henry Parker, Jus Populi. Or, a Discourse wherein Clear Satisfaction is given, as well Concerning
the Right of Subiects, as the Right of Princes (London, 1644), p. 7; see Mendle, Henry Parker
and the English Civil War, pp. xiv, 131–2.
68 Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, book I, ch. III, para. XII.
69 Ibid. 70 Parker, Jus Populi, p. 66.
Theories of resistance 165
1649 regicide.71 Milton asserted that no man ‘can be so stupid to deny that
all men naturally were borne free . . . born to command and not to obey’.
After the Fall men had formed ‘Citties, Towns and Common-wealths’. They
had done so ‘by common league to bind each other from mutual injury, and
joyntly to defend themselves against any that gave disturbance or opposition to
such agreement’. For reasons of ‘ease’ and ‘order, and least each man should be
his own partial Judge’, men had ‘communicated’ their natural ‘authoritie and
power of self-defence and preservation’ to those called kings and magistrates,
‘not to be thir lords and Maisters’, Milton insisted, but to be their ‘Deputies and
Commissioners’, their trustees.72 The ‘power of kings and magistrates’ is ‘only
derivative’, ‘committed to them in trust from the People to the Common good
of them all’.73 ‘Kingdom and magistracy’ are, as Milton puts it with reference
to the first letter of the apostle Peter, ‘a human ordinance’.74 ‘Fundamentally’,
Milton argued, the power of self-government remained with the people; to take
it away from them was ‘a violation of thir natural birthright’.75 In defending
the regicide, Milton combined the ‘classical – and more specifically a Roman
law – conception of freedom and slavery’ with elaborate appeals to the argu-
ments of the monarchomachs, referring at length to Buchanan, Goodman, and
to Luther and Calvin themselves.76 But given the endurance and inalienabil-
ity of popular sovereignty the language of resistance was no longer needed
to justify the people intervening with the ‘tenure of kings and magistrates’.
‘As oft as they shall judge it for the best’, the people may either ‘choose’ or
‘reject’ a ruling king or magistrate, ‘retaine him or depose him, though no
tyrant, merely by the liberty and right of free born Men to be govern’d as seems
to them best’.77 From this perspective the regicide, seen as ‘justice don upon a
Tyrant’ was, Milton writes, ‘no more but the necessary self-defence of a whole
Common-wealth’.78
There was no doubt in the minds of England’s revolutionaries that Charles
I was a tyrant; indeed for many he was directly associated with popery and
the Antichrist. As Volker Leppin has shown, Luther had turned the Antichrist
into a central concept of Reformation theology, identifying not just individual
popes, but the institution of the papacy itself as the Antichrist, the figure who,
as announced in II Thes. 2:4, puts himself above everything, including, most
71 See Martin Dzelzainis, Introduction in John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. ix–xxv; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s pol-
itics’ in Dennis Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd edn. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 70–83 and Skinner, ‘John Milton and the politics of
slavery’.
72 John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Milton, Political Writings, pp. 8–9.
73 Ibid., p. 10. 74 Ibid., p. 15. The reference is to 1 Pet. 2.13. 75 Ibid., p. 10.
76 Skinner, ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’, p. 302 and Dzelzainis, Milton’s Politics.
77 Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 33. 78 Ibid., p. 45.
166 Martin van Gelderen
In one of his boldest moves, when asking ‘what the people may lawfully doe’
against tyranny, ‘a common pest, and destroyer of mankinde’, Milton declared
that ‘no man of cleare judgement need goe further to be guided then by the very
principles of nature in him’.83 Milton, to be sure, was one of Filmer’s other
nightmares.
83 Ibid., p. 17.
84 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), II. 240 (pp. 426–7).
85 Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986); James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in
Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jonathan Scott, ‘The Law of War:
Grotius, Sidney, Locke and the Political Theory of Rebellion’, History of Political Thought
13 (1992), pp. 565–85; John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
86 As emphasised in Scott, ‘The Law of War’. 87 Locke, Two Treatises, II. 87 (p. 323).
88 Ibid., II. 95 (p. 331).
168 Martin van Gelderen
government dissolves the legitimating bond of trust between itself and the
incorporated people by, as John Marshall puts it, ‘acting beyond its trust or
unjustly – that is, by arbitrarily taking property, or by removing or corrupting
the legal processes by which such arbitrary action could be prevented and
thus directly threatening the people’.89 If government goes as far as actually
declaring and perpetrating war on the people, it dissolves civil society itself,
bringing back a state of nature. In breaching the trust of the people and governing
arbitrarily, a king steps out of the bounds of his authority and, as Locke argues
in a dramatic passage, declares war against the people, for whom it is perfectly
legitimate to repel unjust force with force: ‘When a King has Dethron’d himself,
and put himself in a state of War with his People, what shall hinder them from
prosecuting him who is no King, as they would any other Man, who has put
himself into a state of War with them’.90 As Jonathan Scott has highlighted, in
his defence of rebellion Algernon Sidney makes a very similar move.91 Sidney
argues that it is perfectly legitimate to act
against a legal magistrate, who takes upon him (tho within the time prescribed by the
law) to exercise a power which the law does not give; for in that respect he is a private
man, Quia, as Grotius says, eatenus non habet imperium; and may be restrain’d as well
as any other, because he is not set up to do what he lists, but what the law appoints for
the good of the people.92
89 Marshall, John Locke, p. 270. 90 Locke, Two Treatises, II. 239 (pp. 424–5).
91 For Sidney’s political thought see Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis,
1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Blair Worden, ‘The Common-
wealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney’, The Journal of British Studies 24 (1985), pp. 1–40;
Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) and Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism and the
Restoration, 1660–1683’, in David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial
Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 139–93, esp. 153–74.
92 Sidney, Discourses concerning Government, ch. II, section 24, para. 3, p. 222.
93 See Scott, ‘The Law of War’, p. 569.
94 Anon, The Proceedings of the Present Parliament Justified by the Opinion of the most Judicious
and Learned Hugo Grotius (London, 1689), title page.
Theories of resistance 169
The presence of Grotius in the debates of 1689 and in the work of authors
such as Locke and Sidney indicates the common ground but also the variety of
the political ideas employed to defend the turnover of the English monarchy,
the abdication of James II, the invasion of William III and the establishment of
William and Mary as king and queen. Grotius, Locke and Sidney share some of
the crucial arguments that are at the heart of the debate; they advocate natural
liberty, see political society and government as the outcomes of civic creation,
and justify resistance against kings who have fallen into tyranny and make
war on the people. These were the foundational elements of Gerard Noodt’s
synthesis from 1699, which underlined that all of this was, in Parker’s words,
‘so meerly humane’. As Noodt put it, ‘it is certain that the names of Sovereign
and of Subject, of Master and of Slave are unknown to Nature: they were simply
given to us by men’.95
There are, of course, also substantial differences between Grotius, Locke
and Sidney. Much more than Locke, both Grotius and Sidney indulge in his-
torical argumentation, buttressing their arguments with lengthy studies of past
and present societies and governments, of Rome, Israel, Sparta, Venice, Aragon,
France, England.96 Locke and Grotius try to be as precise as possible in identify-
ing and limiting the cases when rebellion is justified. Sidney, however, learning
from Machiavelli and Tacitus, starts to recognise the positive value of ‘civil
wars and tumults’, arguing that while
it is ill, that men should kill one another in seditions, tumults and wars . . . it is worse,
to bring nations to such misery, weakness and baseness, as to have neither strength nor
courage to contend for anything; to have nothing left worth defending, and to give the
name of peace to desolation.97
Richard Tuck
I think that what Quentin Skinner’s pupils learned first from him, before they
absorbed any particular ideas, and even before they understood his method-
ological advice, was how to live an intellectually adventurous and courageous
life. I remember as an undergraduate the excitement of his lectures in 1967 and
1968, which were the basis (as it later emerged) for The Foundations of Modern
Political Thought; we watched in awe as this rather slight figure on the podium
showed that one need be beholden to no one in developing one’s own ideas, and
that what mattered was how elegantly and powerfully one could defend them.
Almost forty years of thinking about this same material has not dimmed my
admiration for the lectures, for the subsequent book and for its author; every-
thing I have thought has begun (and sometimes – surprisingly often, actually –
ended) with his ideas. This paper is an example of the process.
What I want to raise in it is a question which has increasingly seemed to me
to be worth putting directly to the account of modern politics implicit in the
book, and in much of Skinner’s subsequent work. It is about the role in this
account not of republicanism but of democracy. As we all know, many of the
republican theorists whom he has studied, and from whom he increasingly wants
to bring lessons home to modern politics, were not democrats in anything like
our sense of the word; most of them were principally (in so far as they had clear
constitutional ideas) supporters of a kind of mixed government. On the other
hand, if we want to find a sophisticated and deep theorist of democracy, as it has
been understood since the French Revolution, then the most plausible candidate
I believe is the writer whom Skinner has always posed as the great opponent of
this politics, Thomas Hobbes. This may seem an extraordinary claim, such is the
strength and pervasiveness of the conventional view that Hobbes was a theorist
of ‘despotism’ or (in Skinner’s own words) ‘counter-revolution’. But this view,
as I hope to show, rests on a mistaken history of the idea of democracy; read
against a different history, Hobbes’s contribution to democratic theory becomes
clear, and perhaps one of his most important legacies. I should say to start with
that there are two aspects to this claim. The first is that Hobbes had a specific
and interesting theory of democracy, even though it may (to some extent) have
been a by-product of his desire to defend an idealised monarchy; the second
171
172 Richard Tuck
is that his political theory in general was more influenced by his reflections on
the character of democratic government than we often realise. Though he was
indeed a theorist of despotism, it was the despotic democracy which was the
clearest example of what he had in mind, and he was well aware of that fact.
In this paper I shall be concentrating on Hobbes’s earlier works, and not on
Leviathan. There are two reasons for this. The first and most important is that
if one is interested in Hobbes’s influence on eighteenth- and even nineteenth-
century European ideas of democracy, then De Cive is by far the most significant
work. It was frequently reprinted by major publishers in its original Latin, and
copies seem to have been readily available of the authorised translation into
French by Hobbes’s friend Samuel Sorbière,1 whereas the Latin Leviathan
was not reprinted after 1678, and was essentially available only as part of the
1668 Opera Omnia; Leviathan was, extraordinarily, not fully translated into
French until 1971! Rousseau, for example, who was a most attentive reader of
Hobbes, was primarily interested in De Cive. The second reason is that Hobbes
presented his political theory in somewhat different terms in Leviathan from
those which he had used in the early works; in particular, he allowed the notion
of representation to do much of the expository work. This may have made a
difference in the underlying theory, and a full discussion of that difficult question
would require a separate paper; though I myself think that in the end the new
terminology did not fundamentally alter his ideas – after all, he reprinted De
Cive in his Opera Omnia alongside the Latin translation of Leviathan, and so
presumably believed at that point that they were broadly compatible. At all
events, what I present here is an account of Hobbes as he would have been
understood if he had died (as he nearly did) in 1647. If it is a plausible account,
then the question of what happened in Leviathan has to be answered in the light
of it.
By the end of October 1641 Hobbes had put together a distinctive and (he
claimed) original theory of political association, embedded in three connected
works – a sketch (at the very least) of the second section of his great and ongoing
project, the Elementa Philosophiae; a full version of the third section; and an
English summary of both sections, in the form of a treatise on law. At the heart
of this theory was a distinction between what he called in English ‘concord’
and ‘union’ (in Latin consensio or concordia2 and unio). He proclaimed the
novelty of this theory in ch. 8 of part II of The Elements of Law, in which
he was dealing with those opinions which ‘are maintained in the books of the
dogmatics, and divers of them taught in public chairs, and nevertheless are most
1 Latin texts: Paris 1642, Amsterdam 1647 (bis), Amsterdam 1657, Amsterdam 1668 (part of
the Opera Omnia), Amsterdam 1669 (bis), Amsterdam 1696, Halle 1704, Amsterdam 1742,
Lausanne 1760. The Sorbière translation was published in 1649.
2 Rather oddly, the term consensio is used in the body of De Cive’s text, and concordia in the
marginal notes and chapter summaries.
Hobbes and democracy 173
3 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies, 2nd edn
(London: Frank Cass, 1969), II 8.5.
4 Ibid., II.8.7.
5 See the passage from De Cive, V.4 quoted below – ‘the last section’ refers (as sectio always did
in Hobbes’s Latin works) to a sectio of the Elementa Philosophiae. For additional references to
the other sections, see De Cive, preface 18 and ch. IX.8.
6 Hobbes, The Elements, I.12.7,8.
174 Richard Tuck
[societas] formed only for mutual aid, does not afford to the parties to the accord or
association the security which we are looking for, to practise, in their relations with
each other, the laws of nature given above. (An accord of several persons, as defined
in the last section, consists only in their all directing their actions to the same end and
to a common good.). But something more needs to be done, so that an accord on peace
and mutual assistance for a common good may be prevented by fear from collapsing in
discord when a private good subsequently comes into conflict with the common good.7
This ‘something more’ was that, because ‘a combination of several wills in the
same end is not adequate to the preservation of peace and stable defence’,
it is required that there be a single will [una voluntas] among all of them in matters
essential to peace and defence. This can only happen if each man subjects his will to the
will of a single other, to the will, that is, of one Man or of one Assembly, in such a way
that whatever that one wills on matters essential to the common peace may be taken as
the will of all and each [omnes et singuli].8
General submission or subjection ‘is called UNION’, and
A Union so made is called a commonwealth [civitas] or civil society [societas civilis]
and also a civil person [persona civilis]; for since there is one will of all of them, it is to
be taken as one person; and is to be distinguished and differentiated by a unique name
from all particular men, having its own rights and its own property [res sibi proprias].
Consequently, no single citizen nor all together (except him whose will stands for the
will of all) are to be regarded as the commonwealth. A COMMONWEALTH, then, (to
define it) is one person, whose will, by the agreement of several men, is to be taken
as the will of them all; so that he may make use of their strength and resources for the
common peace and defence.9
Everyone ‘directing their actions to the same end and to a common good’
sounds on the face of it like a desirable state of affairs, but Hobbes’s central
idea was that it is not politics – as he said in De Cive V.5, social animals
such as bees or ants ‘should not be called political; for their government is
only an accord, or many wills with one object, not (as a commonwealth needs)
one will’. Politics requires precisely the renunciation of one’s own desires and
projects in the interests of a united course of action, and this should not be seen
(Hobbes always argued) merely as the alignment of the citizens’ wills towards
a generally defined end such as (say) a well-ordered common life.10 The union
of the citizens was total, in the sense that they did not preserve (even internally, I
would argue) a separateness of purpose: each citizen genuinely took the will of
the person or group of people who were the civitas to be his will, and this public
7 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, V.4. I have slightly altered the translation of this sentence from that
found in the Cambridge edition. The original reads ‘sed oportere amplius quiddam fieri, ut qui
semel ad pacem, & mutuum auxilium, causa communis boni consenserint, ne postea, cum bonum
suum aliquod privatum a communi discrepaverit, iterum dissentiant, metu prohibeantur’.
8 Ibid., V.7 (slightly corrected from Cambridge translation). 9 Ibid., 5.9.
10 Contrast Grotius’s remarks in the Prolegomena to De iure belli ac pacis, libri tres §6.
Hobbes and democracy 175
will became in the process his own conscience – ‘the conscience being nothing
else but a man’s settled judgment and opinion, when he hath once transferred
his right of judging to another, that which shall be commanded, is no less his
judgment, than the judgment of that other; so that in obedience to laws, a man
doth still according to his conscience’.11 This was indeed a startling idea, and it
remains so; but the puzzle Hobbes wished to solve was the pre-eminent modern
puzzle. Given the absence of any agreement among the citizens about matters
of substance (either because as a matter of fact such agreement is not to be
extracted from a culturally disparate population, or because, as Hobbes himself
believed, there can be no reasonable consensus about anything), how can there
be politics? His answer (as I have argued in a number of places) was that, at
least for political purposes, citizens have to be ready to accept the irrelevancy
of their own views, and genuinely transfer their own judgements about all con-
tentious issues to a single agent who will make a conclusive judgement on their
behalf.12
As I have said, total union of this kind sounds extraordinary, and there were
no contemporary European states which claimed to be examples of such a thing.
Indeed, Hobbes himself may have supposed that there never had been such a
state – see his distinctly utopian remarks in the Epistle Dedicatory to De Cive,
and the rather similar remarks in part IV of Leviathan.13 The governing ideology
of most states, whether monarchies or republics, was that they were mixed
constitutions of some sort, and of course the essence of a mixed constitution
11 Hobbes, The Elements, II.6.12. Some people are misled by the fact that this passage continues,
‘but not his private conscience’ into supposing that Hobbes imagined that one could have a
‘public’ and a ‘private’ conscience with respect to the same thing. But it is clear from what
comes later in paragraph 12 that he meant that one would have a ‘private’ conscience only if
the issue with which the conscience was concerned had not yet come under the consideration
of the sovereign. Obeying law is as much a matter of internal assent as is acting on one’s own
judgement.
12 The one exception to this – and it is a subtle and complex issue – is that citizens of a special
kingdom of God are exempt in religious matters from this requirement internally to assent to the
judgements of the (pagan) sovereign, though not necessarily from externally assenting. Fully to
discuss this question would again require another paper.
13 If the patterns of human action were known with the same certainty as the relations of mag-
nitude in figures, ambition and greed, whose power rests on the false opinions of the common
people about right and wrong, would be disarmed, and the human race would enjoy such secure
peace that (apart from conflicts over space as the population grew) it seems unlikely that it
would ever have to fight again. But as things are, the war of the sword and the war of the pens
is perpetual (De Cive). ‘Whence comes it, that in Christendome there has been, almost from the
time of the Apostles, such justling of one another out of their places, both by forraign, and Civill
war? such stumbling at every little asperity of their own fortune, and every little eminence of
that of other men? and such diversity of ways of running to the same mark, Felicity, if it be not
Night amongst us, or at least a Mist? [W]ee are therefore yet in the Dark’ (Leviathan, ch. 44,
p. 334 of the original). For Hobbes’s utopianism, see now Richard Tuck, ‘The Utopianism of
Leviathan’, in Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (eds.), Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004) pp. 125–38.
176 Richard Tuck
was that the different elements were (to use Hobbes’s terminology) in accord
rather than united.
Even if the parts of the state were not articulated in the classic mixed fashion,
into a single person, an aristocratic or oligarchic council, and a more democratic
assembly, the conventional idea of the ‘body politic’ (as Hobbes spotted) still
rested on the notion of accord between the individual citizens, as in the story
in Livy from which the imagery was so often drawn (that is, the speech of
Menenius Agrippa at the Secession of the Plebs, II.32).
But this traditional view had itself come into being in opposition to a vision of
politics much closer to that which Hobbes wanted to introduce (or re-introduce)
into the modern world, and the striking thing about this alternative vision was
that it was explicitly and systematically a theory of democracy. The story begins,
as one might have supposed, with Aristotle, and in particular with the distinction
in the Politics between two kinds of democracy, which were (on the Aristotelian
account) fundamentally at odds with one another. The discussion which was
to be most relevant to Hobbes’s theory came in book IV, in the section of
the Politics which is probably a separate and free-standing work on constitu-
tional forms from Aristotle’s later years, and which is almost certainly closely
related to the Constitution of Athens. In this book, Aristotle, after distinguishing
between four types of democracy according to their differing levels of citizen
participation, turned to a more fundamental distinction. In all the four types
which he had so far dealt with, ‘the law [, nomoi] is supreme’. But there
is a fifth,
in which not the law, but the multitude, have the supreme power, and supersede the
law by their decrees [
, psephismata or plebiscites]. This is a state of affairs
brought about by the demagogues. For in democracies which are subject to the law the
best citizens hold the first place, and there are no demagogues; but where the laws are not
supreme, there demagogues spring up. For the people becomes a monarch, and is many
in one; and the many have the power in their hand, not as individuals, but collectively . . .
This sort of democracy, which is now a monarchy, and no longer under the control of
law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the flatterer is held in
honour; this sort of democracy is to other democracies what tyranny is to other forms
of monarchy . . . (1292a5–20)
(psēphismata) were no longer allowed (as they had been under the Periclean
democracy) to decide legislative issues on the basis of general discussion and
majority vote. Hansen has observed, intriguingly, that the very word
(dēmos), while it is often used as a synonym for the Assembly, is never used as
a synonym for the jury.14 The Athens of Aristotle’s time, in other words, had
tried to erect a system of constitutional law which was to a degree immune to
ordinary democratic activity, and which called for judicial reflection rather than
political discussion, in a very modern way; Aristotle like many of his contempo-
raries appears to have thought that this was a restoration of the original Solonic
democracy, which had gradually been corrupted from the time of Aristides
onwards, and which was turned into an extreme democracy by Cleon. Medieval
readers lacked this precise knowledge, but they were aware of the general point
of Aristotle’s remarks, and usually associated them (reasonably enough) with
the defence in the Politics of the
(politeia) or ‘mixed democracy’, in
which a variety of institutions reined in the power of the (dēmos), and
in which the balance of the institutions was preserved by a relatively inviolable
underlying structure of law.
Extreme democracy, according to Aristotle, was thus a constitution which
had too high a degree of unity among its citizens. In book I he had attacked
the Socrates of the Republic for arguing that the city should be united, arguing
instead that ‘freemen and equals . . . cannot all rule together’ and that rotation
of magistracies among them preserved equality without sacrificing diversity
(1261a30); in book II he repeated that ‘there is a point at which a state may
attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, or at which, without
actually ceasing to exist, it will become an inferior state . . . The state is a
plurality [ , plēthos], which should be united and made into a community
by education’ (1263b30–40). It is clear throughout Aristotle’s discussion of
constitutions that he envisaged a well-founded democracy to be a mode of
government in which there was a certain amount of agreement on common
ends among the citizens, but not total agreement, and in which there was no
one sovereign source of authority over their lives. And through the rediscovered
Politics this system of distributed powers became the standard constitutional
model for medieval Europe, and beyond.
A similar system had already come to be regarded as the model for Rome,
though with some straining of the facts. On the face of it, the Roman Republic
from the third century bce onwards was a clear example of an Aristotelian
extreme democracy. There was no distinction between (nomoi) and
14 Mogens Herman Hansen, ‘The Sovereignty of the People’s Court in Athens in the Fourth Century
bc and the Public Action Against Unconstitutional Proposals’, in Odense University Classical
Studies 4 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1974), pp. 19–21. Hansen argues persuasively that
Aristotle did not count Athens as a ‘radical democracy’ (p. 14), but as a ‘mixed democracy’
(p. 60).
178 Richard Tuck
(psēphismata) at Rome; every piece of legislation, even the ancient
Twelve Tables themselves, could be changed by a plebiscitum passed by a
simple majority vote in the concilium plebis presided over by the tribunes.15
Moreover, the Republic was not a deliberative democracy: the various assem-
blies were the means by which a mass voting population (910,000 registered
citizens in the census of 70/69, compared with a good estimate of 30,000 in
fourth-century Athens) could express their wishes, while discussion and delib-
eration were expressly confined to the Senate, which consisted (in the classical
period of the Republic) of magistrates and ex-magistrates who had previously
been elected to their offices in the assemblies. One might say that the classi-
cal Roman republican constitution was the reverse of the post-403 Athenian
constitution: at Athens, policy matters were discussed in the democratic assem-
bly, but important legislation took place in an elected body, while at Rome the
Senate discussed policy, and the assemblies voted on the plebiscites.
The fact that Rome was an extreme or tyrannical democracy according to
the Aristotelian classification was obscured by a division among the Romans
themselves over how to characterise their republic. The most influential tradition
for later readers stemmed from the circle of Scipio Africanus the Younger, who
befriended Polybius and appears as an interlocutor in Cicero’s De republica; the
view of this tradition, expressed by both Polybius and Cicero, was that Rome
was a mixed constitution and was therefore close in form to a politeia. Cicero
in particular insisted repeatedly that pure democracy was dangerous – ‘the
principle which ought always to be adhered to in the commonwealth [is] that
the greatest number should not have the greatest power’16 – and that democratic
equality (aequabilitas) was undesirable.17 Clearly, this was partly an attempt to
rescue Rome from the opprobrium of democratic tyranny with which it might
be invested in the Greek world; indeed, many Greeks did see Rome in this light,
as is shown by the accounts of its constitution in Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
and in the constitutional theory put by Cassius Dio into the mouth of Agrippa in
the fascinating debate at the court of Augustus about whether truly to restore the
republic.18 But it was also presumably an attempt to force the constitution into
15 See the excellent discussion in Andrew Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford:
Oxford University Press 1999), e.g. p. 63. Other popular assemblies could also change any
existing legislation by majority vote – the differing methods for legislating under the Republic
are notoriously complicated.
16 Cicero, De Republica, II.39.
17 See in particular De Republica, I.43 and I.53, in which aequabilitas is contrasted unfavourably
with aequitas, the recognition of merited distinction. Lactantius (Divine Institutes, V.14) pow-
erfully denounced these passages of Cicero, concluding that ‘neither the Romans nor the Greeks
could hold justice, because they had men distinguished by many grades, from the poor to the
rich, from the lowly to the powerful, from private citizens even to the most sublime heights of
kings’. The contrast of aequabilitas with aequitas was preserved for medieval and Renaissance
writers in this section of Lactantius, as the relevant parts of the De Republica were not known
until 1820.
18 Cicero, De Republica, LII.9.
Hobbes and democracy 179
a form which was congenial to the optimates towards the end of the Republic.
More radical and popularis Latin writers such as Sallust seem to have thought
of Rome straightforwardly as an unmixed democracy, though the passage in
which Sallust says this most clearly is a fragment from a lost work.19 In the
absence of the Greek texts, this view was more or less unknown in the middle
ages, and even when they came to be known, their discovery was balanced by
the discovery of Polybius which (then as now) was the most systematic and
authoritative statement of the ‘mixed’ interpretation.
A plural state of the Aristotelian or Polybian kind is of course in some sense
a single agent. At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle uses the comparison
between a state and a body: ‘the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to
the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the
whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except homonymously,
as we might speak of a stone hand’ (1253a20). This image became extremely
popular among Roman writers; thus Cicero talked of the corpus reipublicae,20
and I have already mentioned Livy’s famous use of the image. The lawyers used
the term (Digest 41.3.30, 6.1.23.5), and Seneca expounded it approximately in
terms of Stoic philosophy:
there are certain continuous bodies, such as a man; there are certain composite bodies, –
as ships, houses, and everything which is the result of joining separate parts into one sum
total: there are certain others made up of things that are distinct, each member remaining
separate – like an army, a populace [populus], or a senate. For the persons who go to
make up such bodies are united by virtue of law or function [iure aut officio]; but by
their nature they are distinct and individual.21
As Seneca’s remarks illustrate, the notion of the corpus rei publicae did not
in any way preclude the kind of plurality which both Aristotle and Cicero
advocated. The different parts of the body politic remained distinct but collab-
orating, as in the fable told by Menenius Agrippa, and the unity of the whole
was given by this agreement – it was a prime example of the kind of consensus
and concordia which Cicero extolled.
The language of the corpus rei publicae or (in less good Latin) the corpus
politicum persisted all through the middle ages and the Renaissance. At some
point it came to be joined by the language of the persona publica; although
Gierke declared that the notion of the ‘person’ was not applied to the state
(as distinct from the private corporation) by medieval writers,22 subsequent
scholarship has uncovered many such instances, notably in the writings of the
19 The speech of Macer the tribune (from the lost Historiae) 15–17, 24.
20 See De Officiis, I.85; In Pisonem, 25; Pro Murena, 51.
21 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard Gummere, Loeb Classical Library LXXVII
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), pp. 170–1.
22 Otto von Gierke was already arguing this in his 1880 essay on Althusius: Otto von Gierke, The
Development of Political Theory, trans. Bernard Freyd (New York: H. Fertig, 1939) – see e.g.
p. 150.
180 Richard Tuck
23 Antony Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy
1430–1450 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 25, 143.
24 Ibid., pp. 27, 143.
25 See the text in Aquinas, Octo Libros Politicorum Aristotelis Expositio, ed. Raymund M. Spiazzi
(Turin: Marietti, 1966), p. 201 (liber IV, lectio iv).
26 Ibid., p. 203. The text is corrupt, among other things reading decreta for sententiae. This was
the result of the Renaissance reworking of the Thomist texts to bring them in line with Bruni’s
translation of Aristotle: see Aquinas, Sententia libri Politicorum, in Opera Omnia iussu Leonis
XIII P. M. edita, t. 48 (Rome, 1971), A17–18. There is no accurate edition of books IV–VIII of
this commentary, unlike I–III, which are by Aquinas.
Hobbes and democracy 181
Bruni had called the ductores populi who led the radical democracy were peo-
ple like the tribunes at Rome.27 This hint was picked up in the mid-sixteenth
century, largely by French Aristotelians, who began to translate
27 Donato Acciaiuoli, In Aristotelis Libros Octo Politicorum Commentarii (Venice, 1566), p. 131.
28 See Joachim Périon (trans.), De Republica, qui Politicorum dicitur, libri VIII (Basle, 1549),
p. 128.
29 Pietro Vettori, Politicorum libri octo ex Dion. Lambini & P. Victorii interpretationibus (Basle,
1582), pp. 352–3, 357. (Vettori’s translation is the left column, Lambin’s the right – see p. 2.
Lambin was more circumspect – in place of plebiscita he said decreta, quae psephismata Graeci
dicunt).
182 Richard Tuck
authority over all the magistrates, and the Senate, that it is not unjustified to say that
all the sovereignty of the Republic [omne imperium, omnem maiestatem illius Reip.]
was with the people . . . Passing laws, making peace and war, contracting or dissolving
associations with others, and making treaties, were all in the power of the people. So
great was the reward of virtue in the Republic, that no one could seek the offices and
honours which everyone wanted except via the people . . .30
the merits of paternal authority were obscured. Although Bodin’s attack on the
mixed constitution was followed by a number of early seventeenth-century writ-
ers, notably Grotius, they also tended not to construe the Republic as a model
democracy – for Grotius it was a model, but its constitution was aristocratic, not
democratic.35
So the idea that Rome had been an admirable radical democracy (as distinct,
of course, from an admirable mixed constitution – a sentiment widely shared)
remained the preserve of those historians who agreed with Grouchy, and did
not form the basis of a more general political theory, until – it can be claimed
– the work of Hobbes. Particularly in De Cive, Hobbes granted democracy a
very special status, in a way which was quite unprecedented. It is true that he
was (from the point of view of his liberal readers) an advocate of despotism
or tyranny, but the clearest example of tyranny, as far as he was concerned,
was the tyrannical democracy which Aristotle had attacked in book IV, and his
whole theory of the body politic was designed to show how the union which
Aristotle had criticised in that passage was in fact the only legitimate form
of political association. The Aristotelians were therefore wrong in supposing
that it was possible to think of a political association in which the different
elements worked together but kept their individuality. As he had spotted, the
traditional idea of the ‘body politic’ presupposed that the ruler was separate
from the ruled, and that it was the agreement between ruler and ruled which
kept the body functioning. In place of this, he insisted that the commonwealth
was genuinely (as Vettori had said) unus homo, which was itself the ‘monarch’
or ‘prince’. Hobbes clearly referred to Aristotle’s observation that (in Vettori’s
translation) the tyrannical democracy was where the princeps populus fit, when
he said in De Cive that
men do not make a clear enough distinction between a people and a crowd. A people
is a single entity, with a single will; you can attribute an act to it. None of this can be
said of a crowd. In every commonwealth the People reigns; for even in Monarchies the
People exercises power [imperat]; for the people wills through the will of one man. But
the citizens, i.e. the subjects, are a crowd. In a Democracy and in an Aristocracy the
citizens are a crowd, but the council is the people; in a Monarchy the subjects are the
crowd, and (paradoxically) the King is the people.36
35 By the time of De iure belli ac pacis in 1625, Bodin was saying things which to some extent
anticipate Hobbes – see his remarks at I.3.19 about Polybius: ‘At the Time in which he wrote,
the Government [of Rome] was merely popular, if we consider the Right and not the Manner of
acting; since not only the Authority of the Senate, which he refers to Aristocracy, but also that
of the Consuls, which he compares to Monarchy, were both dependent on the People. What I
have said of Polybius, I say likewise of other Authors, who, in writing on Politicks, may think
it more agreeable to their Purpose, to regard the external Form of Government, and the Manner
in which Affairs are commonly administered, than the Nature itself of Sovereignty.’
36 Hobbes, De Cive, XII.8.
184 Richard Tuck
Or, as he said at VII.7, ‘after a commonwealth has been formed, any agreement
by a citizen with the People is without effect, because the People absorbs into
its own will the will of the citizen . . . [populus voluntate sua voluntatem
civis . . . complectitur]’.42 Pufendorf himself recognised the force of this when
he conceded that his own account of the two contracts might not convince his
reader in the case of a democracy, ‘yet he cannot fairly take Occasion thence
to exclude it from other Forms, where those who command, and those who
obey, are really and naturally different Persons’.43 In a sense, one could say
that whereas earlier writers (including Aristotle himself) had taken something
like a mixed state to be paradigmatic, and had interpreted democracy as ideally
a kind of mixed government, Hobbes took democracy to be paradigmatic, and
ruthlessly interpreted all other forms (even monarchy) as like democracy.
It goes without saying, and it is on the face of it the great difference between
him and later democratic theorists such as Rousseau, that Hobbes supposed that
implicit in the power of an actual democracy was the power to dissolve itself and
transfer its sovereignty to a single person; this is, after all, why he has normally
been seen as an apologist for monarchy and as profoundly unrepublican. But
two things should be said about this. The first and most important is that there are
many ways of being dominated by other men, and socially approved arguments
can oppress us as surely as laws. The power of Hobbes’s extreme democracy
was total precisely because (on his general account of politics) no room should
be left for any contentious principles to govern and restrain the people’s actions.
The logic of this, or so he not implausibly believed, was that the democracy had
inter alia the right to decide that another agent could exercise its power, since
otherwise a constitutional principle would be constraining the popular will; and
if that principle, why not others? This is potentially a bleak view of democratic
politics, and it is possible that Rousseau thought of a way out of it, but it is a real
dilemma for anyone as bitterly opposed as Hobbes to the informal structures of
coercion which proliferate in modern liberal democratic societies.
The second thing to say is that the outlook might not have been as bleak as it
appears at first glance. There were actually two separate concerns in the parts of
De Cive devoted to constitutional matters (and, though to a lesser extent, in the
equivalent parts of The Elements of Law). One, with which we are very familiar,
was a desire to show that the king of England was an absolute monarch in the
sense that he did not owe his authority to Parliament;44 but the other and much
42 Intriguingly, one of the meanings of complector is ‘represent’ – this may count as the first use
of the notion of ‘representation’ in this context in Hobbes, and illustrates how the elaborate
discussion of the concept in Leviathan may simply spell out in detail an idea which was already
effectively present in the earlier work.
43 Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, VII.2.12.
44 The specifics of the English constitution are not dealt with explicitly in De Cive, but the anti-
Parliamentary thrust of the argument is abundantly clear.
186 Richard Tuck
of affairs. The superiority of one type of sovereign constitutional order over its
rivals then rested purely on the kind of administration to which it was likely
to give rise, and it was quite possible to have a democratic sovereign whose
administration met Hobbes’s standards of effectiveness. Such an administra-
tion could not be a deliberative assembly: he made abundantly clear in all his
discussions of commonwealths that such assemblies are the antithesis of a well-
founded democracy. In popular states, for example, he remarked, ‘there may
be as many Neros as there are Orators who fawn on the people’.47 And in a
most powerful passage from the same chapter, a passage which in many ways
lies at the emotional heart of Hobbes’s whole enterprise, he mocked those who
defended democracy as a forum for deliberation:
Perhaps someone will say that the popular state is immensely preferable to Monarchy,
because in that state, in which of course everyone manages public business, everyone
has been given leave to publicly display his prudence knowledge and eloquence in
deliberations about matters of the greatest difficulty and importance; and because the
love of praise is innate in human nature, this is the most attractive of all things to
all those who surpass others in such talents or seem to themselves to do so; but in
Monarchy that road to winning praise and rank is blocked for most of the citizens. What
is a disadvantage, if this is not? I will tell you. To see the proposal of a man whom we
despise preferred to our own; to see our wisdom ignored before our eyes; to incur certain
enmity in an uncertain struggle for empty glory (for this cannot be avoided, whether
we win or lose); to hate and be hated because of differences of opinion; to reveal our
plans and wishes when there is no need to and to get nothing by it; to neglect our private
affairs. These, I say, are disadvantages. But to lose the opportunity to pit your wits against
another man, however enjoyable such contests may be to clever debaters, is not such a
disadvantage for them, unless we shall say that it is a disadvantage for brave men to be
forbidden to fight, for the simple reason that they enjoy it.48
And it was of course true for Hobbes that democratic sovereignty might read-
ily imply deliberative government, and that the great merit of monarchical
sovereignty was that it was less likely to (though the – from his perspective –
depressing history of English Parliaments showed that this was far from being
necessarily true). But a democracy without a deliberative assembly was not at
all inferior to a monarchy:
These disadvantages found in the deliberations of large assemblies prove that Monarchy
is better than Democracy insofar as in Democracy questions of great importance are
more often passed to such assemblies for discussion than in a Monarchy; it cannot
easily be otherwise. There is no reason why anyone would not prefer to spend his time
on his private business rather than on public affairs, except that he sees scope for his
eloquence, to acquire a reputation for intelligence and good sense, and to return home
and enjoy his triumph with his friends, parents and family for his great achievements.
The whole pleasure which Marcus Coriolanus drew from his deeds in war was seeing
that the praises of him pleased his mother. But if in a Democracy the people chose
to concentrate deliberations about war and peace and legislation in the hands of just
one man or a very small number of men, content themselves with the appointment of
magistrates and public ministers, content, that is, to have authority without executive
function, then it must be admitted that Democracy and Monarchy would be equal in this
matter.49
As the analogy with the God who is First Mover illustrates, Hobbes was also
quite prepared to envisage a situation where the democratic sovereign (unlike
at Rome or Venice) had virtually no power to intervene in the daily running of
the state. Sovereignty anyway, he argued, was general in scope – ‘the sovereign
as such provides for the citizens’ safety only by means of laws, which are
universal’51 – and there would normally be no occasion for genuinely arbitrary
children and servants[,] yet he commands the people in general never but by a precedent law,
and as a politic, not a natural person’ (Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth; or, the Long Parliament, ed.
Ferdinand Tönnies, intr. Stephen Holmes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 51).
52 The Cambridge trans. simply has ‘people’, not ‘a people’. 53 Hobbes, De Cive, VII.16.
190 Richard Tuck
Hobbes who first posed this problem and provided the modern solution to it.
His interest in this possibility, and in the general implications for democracies
of his distinction between government and its administration, testifies to the fact
that he did not think of his ideas as fundamentally anti-democratic, but rather
as providing, alongside a new constitutional theory of monarchy, an equally
plausible new theory of democracy.
Furthermore, we may have to face the fact that the modern image of the
extreme democracy – the type of society in which for good or ill its citizens
are arbiters of both law and morality, and in which the liberal constraints on
political power are absent – is transmitted to us from republican Rome not
so much by the ‘republican’ theorists of the seventeenth century but by their
principal opponent. Even to put the thought in this way, however, though in
some respects it poses a question to Skinner’s interpretation of these matters,
acknowledges a debt to him; the terms in which we might think of politics have
been permanently changed by his work, and as we play with re-arranging the
ideas, we should recognise that it was Skinner who handed us all the ideas in
the first place – and that in the end he will probably have the last word.
11 A lion in the house: Hobbes and democracy
Kinch Hoekstra
Popular Hobbes
In contrasting Hobbes with some of his contemporaries, Skinner has made much
of Hobbes’s sardonic characterisation of them as ‘democratical gentlemen’.2
A number of scholars have none the less claimed that Hobbes’s own writings
form the foundation of the modern theory of political democracy.3 The label
191
192 Kinch Hoekstra
4 Roberto Farneti develops this thesis at length in Il canone moderno. Filosofia politica e genealogia
(Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002). A recent variant of the canonical view is in Vickie B. Sullivan,
Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004): see esp. pp. 83, 105, 110.
5 Ingrid Creppell, ‘The Democratic Element in Hobbes’s Behemoth’, Filozofski vestnik 24 (2003),
pp. 7–35, at pp. 29–30n. citing works by Richard Tuck, Deborah Baumgold and Murray Forsyth.
6 George Mace, Locke, Hobbes, and the Federalist Papers: an Essay on the Genesis of the American
Political Heritage (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), p. x.
Cf. Frank M. Coleman, Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 3: ‘Hobbes is the true ancestor of constitutional liberal
democracy.’
7 That Tuck believes the democratic freight of Hobbes’s theory is intentional can be seen, for
example, in his argument that ‘he did not think of his ideas as fundamentally anti-democratic,
but rather as providing . . . [a] plausible new theory of democracy’ (Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and
democracy’, p. 190; all subsequent references to this piece will be to ‘Tuck’).
A lion in the house 193
12 Tuck, pp. 186–9; this expands the suggestion in his introduction to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan,
ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. p. xxxvii.
13 Tuck, p. 187.
14 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10.15: ‘then it must be admitted that Democracy and Monar-
chy would be equal in this matter’ (my concluding emphasis; references to De Cive will be to
this edition). Specific disadvantages of deliberating in assemblies are laid out in sections 9–14
of De Cive, ch. 10. In section 6, arguing that the disadvantages of favourites are more serious
in a democracy, Hobbes shows that his most frequent complaint about democracy, the effect of
orators or demagogues, is not just a function of a democracy that deliberates, but of any democ-
racy (for such demagogues will try to sway whatever decisions the people make, in whatever
way they can). He would presumably find fault even with the proposed assembly in James Har-
rington’s Oceana, in which all debate is banned and the people simply vote yes or no in silence.
In ch. 19 of Leviathan, Hobbes makes clear that the drawbacks he discusses are of democracy
per se rather than of deliberative democracy only, and points out the difficulties that attend
any democratic assembly’s attempts to procure counsel (including the influence of rhetoric, the
tendency to division, and the impossibility of secrecy).
15 I.e. ‘if in a Democracy the people chose to concentrate deliberations about war and peace and
legislation in the hands of just one man or a very small number, and content themselves . . . to
have authority without executive function (Hobbes, De Cive, 10.15).
16 Hobbes, De Cive, 10.16.
A lion in the house 195
of the people, however, it seems that the tyrant has succeeded in preserving
himself in power only by destroying his tyranny per se.17 Similarly, Hobbes
argues that a democracy will crumble unless the people forswear deliberation
‘about war and peace and legislation’ and hand over their executive power to
one or a few. Democracy is self-defeating unless it is self-effacing – that is,
unless it effectively becomes a monarchy or aristocracy.
The democracy without deliberation that Hobbes treats with such respect,
Tuck maintains, is a close description of the Roman republic.18 Two sections
after the passage that Tuck offers as evidence, however, Hobbes makes his point
about the Romans explicit:
The most evident sign that the most absolute Monarchy is the best of all conditions for
a commonwealth, is that not only kings but also commonwealths which are subject to
the people and the optimates invariably confer full power to conduct a war on one man
alone; and that power is the most absolute power possible . . . A Monarchy therefore is
the best government of all in an army camp. And what else are countries but so many
camps fortified against each other . . .?19
That is, Hobbes praises the Romans for abandoning such democracy as they
had, and censures them for not realising that they should have abandoned it
for good, rather than just in cases of emergency.20 The idea that Rome was
an admirable radical democracy because policy was not decided there in a
deliberative assembly, far from forming the basis of Hobbes’s political theory,
is rejected by him.21 In fact, in The Elements of Law Hobbes goes so far as to
say that Rome was an aristocracy with a large deliberative assembly.22
17 That said, it may be that Aristotle would keep these two distinct in principle, because the
motivational state of the tyrant is different from that of the king: the tyrant mirrors the king, but
has a different end for the same actions and thus is vicious.
18 Tuck, pp. 187–8, on Hobbes, De Cive, 10.15.
19 Hobbes, De Cive, 10.17. Hobbes here apparently draws on Jean Bodin, who builds his case
primarily on Livy: see The Six Bookes of a Common-weale, trans. Richard Knolles (London,
1606), 6.4, pp. 715–17. Cf. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert
Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), ch. 16, pp. 86–7.
20 Cf. William Petty, The Petty Papers, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne, II (London: Constable, 1927),
p. 35. Hobbes also argues that although the Romans governed themselves by an assembly (each
wanting ‘to participate of government’), they implicitly admitted the superiority of monarchy
by governing their provinces ‘alwaies by Presidents, and Praetors’ (Leviathan, 22.16 (p. 118);
cf. 19.10 (p. 98), 19.13 (p. 99), and 23.3 (p. 124)).
21 Pace Tuck, p. 183.
22 Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 2.5.8, re. ‘aristocracies . . . where the affairs of state are debated
in great and numerous assemblies, as they were anciently in Athens, and in Rome’. In Leviathan
he treats the Roman republic as riven by faction and sedition: cf. 22.32 (p. 122) and esp. 29.4
(p. 168). (Citations of The Elements of Law are to part, chapter and section number of the
edition of Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Frank Cass, 1969); citations of Leviathan are to page
number of the ‘Head’ edition of 1651, preceded by chapter and paragraph number.) In the
Latin edition, he again brings in the possibility that the Roman Republic was an aristocracy:
see how he alters 19.13 (p. 99) and 22.32 (p. 122). In The Elements of Law, 2.1.17, he says
that Rome was ‘sometimes’ a democracy, but immediately makes clear that this democracy
196 Kinch Hoekstra
In the next section we will see why Hobbes denied that Rome was a democ-
racy (along with Athens, the usual early modern exemplar of an extreme democ-
racy). Before doing so, it is worth making two preliminary points about the dis-
tinction between sovereignty and the administration of government (on which
Hobbes’s ‘new theory of democracy’ is purportedly based). First, the idea that
Hobbes advocates such a division does not sit well with the idea that he re-
introduces the Aristotelian conception of radical democracy into the modern
world.23 Tuck argues that for Hobbes the sovereign rules only by universal
laws and ‘there would normally be no occasion for genuinely arbitrary acts of
sovereignty by a monarch or a democracy’.24 This would mean, however, that
a Hobbesian democracy would rule by established general nomoi rather than
occurrent particular psēphismata – the opposite of Aristotle’s primary consti-
tutional claim about radical democracy.25 Hobbes says that a democracy may
was not radical, for sovereignty could be exercised or administered by a dictator, by the gen-
erals, or by the senate. Nor is it clear that Hobbes would have accepted the assimilation of
plebiscita with the psēphismata of radical democracy, for he identifies the demos not with the
plebs but with the populus (cf. De Cive, 7.1, 7.5). Bodin excoriates Polybius inter alia for
confusing plebs and populus, and thus for regarding plebiscita as the pronouncements of the
people rather than of a faction (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beat-
rice Reynolds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 181–4, 236–8; cf. John Case, Sphaera
Civitatis (Oxford, 1588), 4.4.8). Hobbes identifies the plebeians not with the people, but with
an unlawful faction (Leviathan, 22.32, p. 122), so he seems to follow this line (which can be
traced back to Sallust’s lost Histories via the first decade of Livy and Augustine’s City of God).
If Hobbes had a specific state in mind when he considered the possibility of a democracy
in which ‘the people should choose to concentrate deliberations about war and peace and leg-
islation in the hands of just one man or of a very small number of men, and were happy to
appoint magistrates and public ministers, i.e. to have authority without executive power’ (De
Cive, 10.15), it was probably not Rome but Venice. In The Elements of Law, Hobbes reduces all
democracies to aristocracies, and so judges that Athens, Rome, and Venice are all aristocracies.
But whereas the former, ancient regimes are condemned for debating affairs of state in large
assemblies, and thus for their ‘aptitude to dissolve into civil war’, Hobbes is careful to explain
that this aptitude is not to be found ‘in such as do nothing else in great assemblies, but choose
magistrates and counsellors, and commit the handling of state affairs to a few; such as is the
aristocracy of Venice at this day’ (The Elements of Law, 2.5.8). This may be Hobbes’s way of
squaring his theory with ‘the myth of Venice’, according to which that republic was a paragon
of stability and longevity; if he also has it in mind in De Cive, he may classify it as a democ-
racy because, as Contarini and others explained, all of the citizens participated in the sovereign
assembly and authority resided in the popolo – though only aristocrats were citizens and only the
citizen body constituted the popolo. (Cf. Harrington, The Prerogative of Popular Government
(1658), p. 482 of The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977); for a more complicated view, see James S. Grubb, ‘Elite
Citizens’, in John Martin and Dennis Romano (eds.), Venice Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2000).)
23 Tuck defends both ideas: see pp. 189–90 and 176. 24 Tuck, pp. 188–9.
25 See the passage Tuck treats as central, Politics 1292a5–37 (references to this work are to the
edition of Franz Susemihl (Leipzig, 1872)). Even if we emphasise Tuck’s qualification that rule
in the Hobbesian commonwealth would ‘normally’ be by precedent law rather than arbitrary
act, this marks a sharp difference from Aristotle’s picture of radical democracy, in which the
assembly of the citizens rules by arbitrary decrees rather than precedent universal law. Note too
that Aristotle says that extreme democracy is undertaken for the interests of these rulers rather
than for the common interest, whereas Hobbes rejects this distinction.
A lion in the house 197
so in order to maintain that the people retain authority and only ever dele-
gate administration.35 We can even be fairly confident about Hobbes’s imme-
diate modern source for the idea, for Hobbes first articulates the distinction
between sovereignty and its administration in a stretch of argument that is heav-
ily indebted to Jean Bodin.36 The distinction between the state (or sovereignty)
and government (or the administration of sovereignty) is common in Bodin,
but the clearest cases, including instances where a democracy is administered
non-democratically, come in book II, ch. 7. One salient case is that of Rome.
Bodin judged that during most of the time of the republic, sovereignty in Rome
was popular while its administration was not (‘the gouernment was in the mag-
istrats, the authoritie and councell in the Senate, but the soueraigne power and
maiestie of the Commonweale was in the people’).37 From these cases, Bodin
concludes: ‘let vs firmely set downe and resolue that there are but three formes of
Commonweales, and no more, and those simple also, and without any confused
mixture one of them with an other; albeit that the gouernment be sometimes
contrarie to the state.’38
found the greatest encomium of a direct democracy, in the funeral oration deliv-
ered by Pericles. It might be no great surprise, therefore, that we find Anthony
Hammond writing that Hobbes ‘translated this booke to teach Popular Oratory
& in favour of a Democratical Governmt ’.40
This view is surprising, however, because it is so wrong-headed. Writing
a few years earlier, Pierre Bayle captures Hobbes’s professed intention more
accurately: ‘to arouse in the English a disgust for the Republican spirit, he
produced a translation of Thucydides’.41 In his prefatory essay ‘Of the Life
and History of Thucydides’, Hobbes commends Thucydides warmly, observing
that ‘it is manifest that he least of all liked the Democracy’,42 and providing a
summary of what he takes to be Thucydides’ indictment of it. At the other end
of his literary career, Hobbes singles out Thucydides’ work for praise in both
his prose and verse autobiographies. In the former, he writes that he translated
the history to reveal to his fellow citizens the folly of the Athenian democracy;
in the latter, he says that Thucydides ‘showed me how foolish Democracy is,
and how much wiser one man is than an assembly’.43 Hammond managed to
get it completely backward.
very first time since antiquity given political theorists a well-documented example of a func-
tioning radical democracy’ (p. 182). If Tuck is right that Aristotle thought that Athens from
the time of Cleon was an extreme or radical democracy (pp. 176–7), then they already had
available to them a vivid account of radical democracy in the text of Thucydides, which was
by then in Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and English. And it would then be hard to
avoid the conclusion that the model for Aristotle’s view of radical democracy served Hobbes
not as a pattern for his well-founded commonwealth, but as a paradigm of political disaster.
It is not clear, however, that Aristotle had Athens in mind when describing extreme democ-
racy. Commentators disagree not only with one another on this issue, but even with themselves:
compare W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887–
1902), 1:504 and n. 2 with 4:xli; and Peter L. Phillips Simpson, A Philosophical Commentary
on the Politics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 307
n. 39 with 381 n. 36. Robin Osborne points out that whereas it ‘is generally accused of being
Aristotle’s model of the worst form of democracy’, Athens had elements of his best democ-
racy, especially in so far as it was agrarian and without frequent participation in assemblies
(Demos: the Discovery of Classical Attica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
pp. 71–2). Bodin observes that Xenophon’s characterisation of the Athenians as holding the
will of the people to supplant the law fits Aristotle’s characterisation of extreme democracy
(Method, p. 241). Contrast Pericles (in Thucydides, 2.37.3, Hobbes edn, p. 102), who com-
mends the Athenian people for obeying the magistrates and the laws. Also, note that Aristotle
(e.g. at Politics 1298a31) repeatedly considers extreme democracy as it is ‘now’, whereas the
Athenian democracy of Aristotle’s day was not extreme (though cf. the Aristotelian Constitution
of Athens, 41.2).
40 Bodleian MS Rawl. D 174, fol. 8r , dated 4 September 1699.
41 Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire Historique et Critique (Rotterdam, 1697), vol. II, part 2, sub Pericles
(p. 806 n. O): ‘Thomas Hobbes voulant inspirer aux Anglois quelque degoût pour l’esprit
Republicain, fit une version de Thucydide.’
42 Thucydides, Hobbes edn, sig. a1v .
43 Thomae Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera Philosophica Quae Latine Scripsit Omnia, ed. William
Molesworth, vol. I (London, 1839), pp. xiv, 1xxxviii (‘Democratia ostendit mihi quam sit
inepta, / Et quantum coetu plus sapit unus homo’).
200 Kinch Hoekstra
44 Thucydides, Hobbes edn, p. 117 (2.65.9). Cf. Herodotus 3.82.4 (democracy idolises the cham-
pion of the people and becomes tyranny: cf. also Solon fr. 9); Plato, Republic 562a–569c,
esp. 565d–566a (tyranny necessarily arises from democracy, via a leader of the people who gets
a taste for blood and turns into a wolf against his fellow citizens); Plato, Menexenus 238cd (it
is called democracy, but is in truth aristocracy with popular consent); Plutarch, Moralia 802c
and Pericles 9, 11, 15, 16, and 39 (Pericles was thought to be monarchical and tyrannical, using
rhetoric to control the people in a way incompatible with democracy).
45 Thucydides deploys this distinction in various ways. For a subtle study, see Adam Milman
Parry’s 1959 dissertation, Logos and Ergon in Thucydides (New York: Arno Press, 1981).
46 This is not to say that he necessarily adopted it from Thucydides, or from Thucydides alone; the
thought pattern is also to be found in other traditions that influenced Hobbes, such as that of the
Machiavellians. Hobbes may have been the author of the earlier ‘Discourse upon the beginning
of Tacitus’, who writes about the popular forms Augustus was careful to retain in order to pre-
empt republican demands: ‘Few remained that had seene the ancient Republique. . . . whereas
they might haue heard of the names of Consuls, Tribunes, Censors, and the like, the same they
found also in the present State; though the authoritie of them all, remained onely in Augustus’
(Horae Subsecivae. Observations and Discovrses (London, 1620), pp. 304–5).
47 Thucydides, Hobbes edn, sig. a2r . 48 Ibid., p. 116 (2.65.4). 49 Ibid., sig. a2r .
50 Hobbes, Elements of Law, 2.2.5, emphases added.
A lion in the house 201
‘One or few must of necessity sway the whole; insomuch, that a democracy,
in effect, is no more than an aristocracy of orators, interrupted sometimes with
the temporary monarchy of one orator.’51 This judgement is not restricted to
deliberative democracies. When he comes to compare the three forms of gov-
ernment in general, ‘namely, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy,’ it turns
out that ‘the two former are in effect but one’. This is, again, because ‘democ-
racy is but the government of a few orators’.52 Because all democracies end
up effectively controlled by one or a few, there is in fact no such thing as a
democracy.53
Others take up and displace the point that a sovereign who delegates admin-
istration may effectively shift sovereignty to that administrator. So Harrington
argues that an aristocracy either rules via a king in order to protect its power
from the people, or via the people in order to protect it from a king; and that all
popular governments must rely on a senate or aristocratic element. ‘Whence,
though for discourse sake politicians speak of pure aristocracy and pure democ-
racy, there is no such thing as either in nature, art or example.’54 Hobbes cannot
accept these mixed forms, so if he decides that something is not a pure or
absolute democracy he must declare it another form of government or no form
51 Ibid., 2.2.5.
52 Ibid., 2.5.3; cf. Hobbes’s note on Thucydides 8.48.5–6 (Hobbes edn, p. 497). Satan follows
Hobbes (Paradise Regained, book IV, 267–70):
Thence to the famous Orators repair,
Those antient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce Democratie,
Shook the Arsenal and fulmin’d over Greece.
In saying that the orators controlled the supposed democracy ‘at will’, Milton specifically
refers to Pericles: the final line is from Aristophanes, Acharnians, 532 (‘[Perikleēs houlumpios]
ēstrapten, ebronta, sunekuka tēn Hellada’; reported in Diodorus Siculus, 12.40.6), which is
quoted by Hobbes in his De Cive, 5.5. (It also makes its way into ch. 17 of the first translation
of Leviathan, the 1667 Dutch edition (p. 173).)
53 Cf. Filmer, writing shortly after the appearance of Leviathan about that work and De Cive: ‘in
conclusion the poore people are deprived of their government, if there can be no democracy by
his principles’ (preface to the Observations upon Hobbes, in Patriarcha, p. 239). A few months
later, Filmer builds on this view in his Observations upon Aristotles Politiques. He says that
‘those governments that seem to be popular are kinds of petty monarchies’, and concludes that
‘there is no form of government, but monarchy only’, drawing the corollary that ‘there is no such
thing as an aristocracy or democracy’ (Filmer, Patriarcha, pp. 227, 229). Filmer here draws on
Bodin, De Republica, 6.4, where Bodin writes: ‘And although we imagin a bodie of many lords,
or of a whole people to hold the soueraigntie; yet hath it no true ground, nor support, if there
bee not a head with absolute and soueraigne power, to vnite them together: the which a simple
magistrat without soueraigne authoritie cannot do’: thus, ‘the chiefe point of a commonweale,
which is the right of soueraigntie, cannot be, nor subsist (to speake properly) but in a Monarchie:
for none can be soueraigne in a commonweale but one alone: if they be two, or three, or more,
no one is soueraigne, for that no one of them can giue or take a law from his companion’ (Bodin,
Six Bookes, 6.4, p. 715).
54 James Harrington, The Art of Lawgiving (London, 1659), p. 611 of The Political Works. Cf.
Filmer, Patriarcha, pp. 226–7.
202 Kinch Hoekstra
55 This point is touched upon by Bodin: cf. Six Bookes, 1.8, p. 99, which contains the gist of
Hobbes’s annotation of De Cive, 6.13, discussed by Tuck on pp. 184–5.
56 Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, 6.5: ‘qui credunt posse fieri, ut unus solus summum Civitatis Jus
obtineat, longè errant . . . imperium, quod absolutè Monarchicum esse creditur, sit reverâ in praxi
Aristocraticum.’ Hobbes does recognise the necessity of ‘public ministers of sovereign power,’
to use the title of ch. 23 of Leviathan, and would presumably argue that in those instances the
ministers are doing the sovereign’s bidding (whereas in the case of Pericles as understood by
Thucydides and Hobbes, the people are doing the magistrate’s bidding, and so sovereignty does
not truly inhere in the people).
57 Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 75. I do not have space here to explore the complexity of Hobbes’s
treatment of democracy in this and other works of the Restoration; for a stimulating analy-
sis, see Tomaž Mastnak, ‘Behemoth: Democraticals and Religious Fanatics’, Filozofski vestnik
24 (2003), pp. 139–68. James I anticipated many of the themes of Behemoth, pointing out in
Basilicon Doron that Puritans appealed to Athens and Rome as models for how to gain power
for themselves by trumpeting democracy. ‘Some fierie spirited men in the ministerie, got such
a guiding of the people at that time of confusion, as finding the gust of gouernment sweete,
they begouth to fantasie to themselues a Democraticke forme of gouernment: and . . . set-
tled themselues so fast vpon that imagined Democracie [margin: ‘Such were the Demagogi at
Athens’], as they fed themselues with the hope to become Tribuni plebes: and so in a popular
gouernment by leading the people by the nose, to beare the sway of all the rule . . . ’ (James I,
Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 26).
58 Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. 155, 193. Hobbes draws on the simile of the man who raised a lion
in his house from Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 717–36. This was picked up by the character of
Aeschylus in the Frogs of Aristophanes, in reply to the question of whether the people of
Athens should recall Alcibiades in order to save the city. (Alcibiades was in exile in 405 bc,
when this play was produced; a year later the Athenian democracy was defeated in the Pelo-
ponnesian war.) Aeschylus’ judgement – ‘It is best not to raise a lion in the city’ (Frogs,
1431) – is in turn put to use by Plutarch, in his life of Alcibiades (16). The Thucydidean
matrix for this passage is considered in Francis Macdonald Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus
(London: Edward Arnold, 1907), chs. 11 and 12. Cf. also Herodotus, 5.92.3 and 6.131.2; Aristo-
phanes, Knights, 1037–40; Valerius Maximus, 7.2; and Erasmus, Adagia, 2.3.77, 2.1.86, and
1.1.2.
A lion in the house 203
executive activities, they may find they have unwittingly enthroned their erst-
while administrators.59
Hobbes’s Thucydidean penchant for the underlying fact of the matter brings
him to insist upon effective rather than nominal sovereignty. This is in tension,
however, with a more formal and juridical strand of his thought, in which he
develops what he learned from Bodin, and reckons from the consequences of
established names – so, for example, limiting the forms of sovereignty to three,
with no mixture or limitation.60 The former is the tradition of thought that has
been neglected in this context, yet it may well be the dominant one. For Hobbes
argues that de jure sovereignty follows from de facto sovereignty, and not the
other way around.61 None the less, he attempts to interweave these ways of
thinking, simultaneously deploying prudence and reason and addressing both
humanist and scientific concerns.62
By paying attention to the Thucydidean Hobbes, we can see a central problem
with the suggestion that a democracy should delegate its deliberative and exec-
utive powers. For the question is not just a formal one of the ultimate source of
sovereignty, but also a pragmatic one of who really holds the reins of power.63
Delegation may shade over silently into abdication.
59 In the annotation of De Cive, 6.13, Hobbes indicates why it may be prudent to forgo the exercise
of some rights of sovereignty; in De Cive, 6.8, he argues that the executive power carries with it
the sovereign right of judgement. Note that the democratic sovereign is required by the law of
nature to preserve the absoluteness of sovereignty, and would be forbidden to delegate power
or authority if that would compromise the safety of the people or the absoluteness of their
sovereignty. There is a further potential problem with delegating the exercise of sovereignty,
for it can happen ‘that when the exercise of the Power layd by, is for the publique safety to be
resumed, it hath the resemblance of an unjust act; which disposeth great numbers of men (when
occasion is presented) to rebellion’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, 29.3, p. 167).
60 It should be noted, however, that both strands are already prominent in Bodin’s own work.
61 For defence of this point see Hoekstra, ‘The De Facto Turn’.
62 Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996) can be supplemented by further facets of both Hobbes’s humanism
(which draws on a tradition that is not just rhetorical, but also includes reason of state, political
prudence, etc.) and his scientific procedure (which is modeled not just on Euclid, but on Bodin
et al.); and it can be questioned in so far as it suggests that e.g. Hobbes’s Thucydides is humanist
but not scientific, whereas his Elements of Law is scientific but not humanist. See my review in
Filosofia Politica 11 (1997), pp. 139–43.
63 It may be that Hobbes employs both kinds of argument in the service of the aim of his philosophy.
On the one hand, formal arguments that appeal to the absoluteness of sovereignty are designed
to forestall dissension by those who would encroach with demands for limitation or mixture. On
the other, arguments that appeal to effective power may promote peace, for example by allowing
one’s former obligation to lapse and a new one to arise when one falls under another’s control.
Peace and security may be best served by drawing on both formal and effective strategies, even
if there are cases in which they could contradict one another.
204 Kinch Hoekstra
Tuck concludes from this that Aristotle’s ‘tyrannical democracy was in some
way the paradigm for [Hobbes’s] well-founded commonwealth’.67
On the one hand, it is not clear that the source for the idea that a people is
one man, or that the king is the people, must be Aristotle’s analysis of extreme
democracy as a monarch or tyrant, transmitted to Hobbes by Vettori.68 If a
source is required, it could, for example, be from Aeschylus, transmitted (if an
intermediary is needed) via Grotius: ‘For in the Argive Tragedy of the Suppliants
by Aeschylus, the people address the King thus: “You are the commonwealth,
you the people; a ruler subject to no judge, you govern the altar of the country’s
hearth by your single vote, by your nod.”’69 In Aristophanes (one of the seven
poets Hobbes specifies having read in his verse autobiography), Demos, or
People, is represented as a tyrant surrounded by flatterers, and is elsewhere
64 Tuck makes the suggestion on pp. 183–4, 190; the quotations from Hobbes, De Cive, 12.8 are
in Tuck, p. 183.
65 Tuck, pp. 171.
66 Tuck, pp. 183–4, quoting Hobbes, De Cive 12.8 (translating multitudo as ‘crowd’).
67 Tuck, p. 184.
68 Tuck holds (p. 181) that Vettori’s comment that a people is formed out of many by all coming
together and making one man ‘must have been a source of Hobbes’s thinking on the subject’.
69 Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres (Paris, 1625), 1.3.8, pp. 70–1 (quoting Suppliants,
370–3): ‘nam in Argiua Tragoedia Supplicibus, sic populus Regem affatur apud Aeschylum:
Su toi polis, su de to dēmion,
Prutanis akritos ōn,
Kratuneis bōmon hestian chthonos,
Monopsēphoisi neumasi[n] sethen.’
It is striking that Grotius extracts this quotation, given that before and after it the king insists
that he must consult the people to obtain their consent, and cannot act without persuading them:
he acts only after the people have authorised him to do so by unanimous vote (see 942–3: ‘mia
psēphos’, as one man – cf. line 373, above). On this Argive king as a constitutional monarch in
a democracy, see A. F. Garvie, Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and Trilogy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), pp. 143–54.
A lion in the house 205
arguing that in a monarchy the king is the people and the subjects a powerless and disunited
multitude – and that to maintain that the multitude is the people (or, therefore, to maintain
that the multitude is the king) is to be guilty of treason, as undermining the majesty of the
king.
75 For discussion of this point I am grateful to Victoria Kamsler.
76 Rousseau, Du Contrat social, 1.5, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel
Raymond, vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 359.
77 Hobbes, Elements of Law, l.19.8. Although the upshot of his argument is quite different, cf.
Althusius: ‘Monarchy is represented in Aristocracy and Democracy by the concord and consen-
sus of the rulers, whose many voices are considered as one voice and will; without such a will
Democracy and Aristocracy cannot endure, but perish immediately’ (translated from Politica
methodice digesta, ed. Carl Joachim Friedrich (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1932 (3rd edn 1614)), p. 405 (39.14)). See also the distinction drawn by Francisco Suárez
between an apolitical multitude and a political unity in which all are tied by consent to obey a
common power, in De legibus ac Deo legislatore (Coimbra, 1612), 3.2.4.
78 Cf. n. 53, above.
A lion in the house 207
But is it original?
Democratical Hobbesians appeal, none the less, to the idea that each and every
individual who submits to government must consent, and in so consenting they
form an initial democracy. All political obligation in Hobbes thus derives from
the consent of the governed, they argue, and from consensual alterations to the
democratic foundations. In the chapter of The Elements of Law entitled ‘Of
the three sorts of commonwealth’, Hobbes writes: ‘The first in order of time
of these three sorts is democracy.’79 In De Cive, he says much the same thing,
arguing that a democracy essentially exists when those who wish to form a
government meet.80 Harrington is just one contemporary who understandably
thought the meaning of this was obvious: ‘Mr Hobbes holdeth democracy to
be of all governments the first in order of time.’81 Later experts agree that
Hobbes held that any kind of government begins by democratic election, and
that democracy is the fundamental political order.82 Tuck insists that ‘democ-
racy was foundational and special’ for Hobbes, and that extreme democracy
was ‘the paradigm for his well-founded commonwealth’.83 In Philosophy and
Government, he made the same sort of case:
in the Elements [Hobbes] assumed that a sovereign must be elected by the people. In a
democracy, acts of sovereignty were necessarily decided by votes; and democracy was
prior both chronologically and logically to other forms of government . . . He clearly
envisaged that civil society was formed by a general agreement to form a democratic
republic, and that any other form of government must be voted in on a majoritarian
basis – an even more explicitly republican idea than Selden’s . . . or Grotius’.84
And Tuck says that Hobbes continued to emphasise the democratic nature of
sovereignty in De Cive and Leviathan.85
Hobbes does say that democracy is ‘first in order of time’ of the sorts of
commonwealth. This is not a claim of logical priority; but even the claim of
temporal priority is puzzling. For Hobbes repeatedly asserts that monarchy
79 Hobbes, Elements of Law, 2.2.1. 80 Hobbes, De Cive, 7.5. Cf. n. 108, below.
81 James Harrington, Politicaster (1659), p. 712 of The Political Works.
82 Among the many who clearly subscribe to this position (sometimes restricting the claim to
Elements of Law and De Cive) are George Croom Robertson, Ferdinand Tönnies, Leo Strauss,
Manfred Riedel, Tito Magri, Glenn Burgess, Lucien Jaume and Karlfriedrich Herb.
83 Tuck, p. 184.
84 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), pp. 310–11.
85 See below, n. 99, and Tuck’s introduction to his 1998 edition of De Cive, p. xxxii. Cf. also his
introduction to his 1996 edition of Leviathan: ‘in the Elements of Law and De Cive, Hobbes had
gone to some lengths to depict the original sovereign created by the inhabitants of the state of
nature as necessarily a democratic assembly, which could only transfer the rights of sovereignty
to a single person or small group by a majority vote of its members. . . . [In Leviathan,] Hobbes
still presupposed that something like a majority vote among the inhabitants of the state of nature
would be necessary to create any sovereign other than a democratic assembly’ (p. xxxv).
208 Kinch Hoekstra
92 In most of his works, Hobbes keeps to the usage found in Leviathan, which scholars have
accordingly followed. In his earliest works, however, his meaning is different. Cf. Thucydides
4.78, and Hobbes’s remarks thereon (Thucydides, Hobbes edn, p. 255).
93 Hobbes, Elements of Law, 1.19.11. 94 Ibid., 2.1.1.
95 Deborah Baumgold notices that on the assumption that Hobbes endorses the democratic origin
of all kinds of government in Elements of Law 2.2.1, his argument is ‘anomalous’, ‘aberrant’
and ‘redundant’ (‘The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law’, History of Political Thought,
25 (2004), pp. 16–43, at pp. 27–8). Rather than seeing this as reason to reject the assumption,
she regards it as evidence that the argument was ‘cobbled together to bring an ongoing project
to a hasty conclusion’ (p. 17; cf. pp. 29–30, 35).
96 Cf. Elementorum philosophiae sectio prima de corpore, 2.8.20 (ed. William Molesworth, Opera
Philosophica, I (London, 1839), p. 103).
97 He does make an attempt to find instances of instituted bodies politic, but it may be worth noting
that they are scriptural (see De Cive, 11.1).
98 Contrast the usual view that ‘civil philosophy is a study of the commonwealth by institution’
(F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes: an Interpretation of Leviathan (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 127).
99 Tuck argues that in De Cive ‘Hobbes once again emphasised the elective, republican character of
the sovereign’ (Philosophy and Government, p. 316); but Hobbes makes clear that he is talking
here only of instituted sovereigns (cf. De Cive, 7.1 and 8.1). Only the instituted sovereign can
be said to be elective, and Hobbes goes on at the outset of ch. 8 to emphasise the unelected and
monarchical origin of sovereignty in what he calls ‘the natural commonwealth, which may also
be called the commonwealth by Acquisition since it is acquired by natural power and strength’.
Similarly, Tuck maintains (ibid., p. 328) that in Leviathan ‘Hobbes retained some features of an
elective sovereign; as he said at the beginning of Chapter 18: “A Common-wealth is said to be
Instituted, when a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one. . . .”’
What should by now be clear is that this ‘elective’ sovereign is specifically a feature of (what
in this work Hobbes calls) a commonwealth by institution, whereas ‘A Common-wealth by
Acquisition, is that, where the Soveraign Power is acquired by Force’ (Leviathan, 20.1, p. 101).
210 Kinch Hoekstra
One school explained this as a definitive and irrevocable alienation of power, the other
as a mere concession of its use and exercise. The dispute was generalized and led to
the most widely different theories of the relation between ruler and people. On the one
hand from the people’s abdication the most absolute sovereignty of the prince might be
deduced. . . . On the other hand the assumption of a mere ‘concessio imperii’ led to the
doctrine of popular sovereignty.102
100 The main discussions are chs. 2.3 and 2.4 of Elements of Law, chs. 8 and 9 of De Cive, and
ch. 20 of Leviathan.
101 Institutes, 1.2.6; cf. Digest, 1.4.1.
102 Otto von Gierke, The Development of Political Theory, trans. Bernard Freyd (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1939), pp. 93–4. Yves Simon is emphatic: ‘Among the obnoxious simplifications which
fill the treatises of political science, let us single out the proposition that the divine-right theory is
theocratic and the sovereignty-of-the-people theory democratic. . . . Historians often described
the views of Bellarmine and Suarez as expressions of the democratic theory of sovereignty;
yet neither of these thinkers meant to recommend democracy. . . . This should be stressed: the
transmission theory [i.e., that the people alienate sovereign right rather than revocably delegate
it] is not understood by its proponents to be distinctly democratic.’ (Yves Simon, Philosophy
of Democratic Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 176–7.)
A lion in the house 211
103 As the moderate royalist Clarendon observes, the indisputable dependence of government on
the consent of the people is quite different from the doubtful idea that all government was
originally democratically instituted. ‘There is no doubt there are in all Governments many
things don by, and with the consent of the People; nay all Government so much depends upon
the consent of the People, that without their consent and submission it must be dissolved, since
where no body will obey, there can be no command, nor can one man compel a million to do
what they have no mind to do’ (Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey
of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes’s Book, Entitled
Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), p. 45). Cf. below, pp. 216–17.
104 In De Cive, 8.2–9, for example, Hobbes argues that those who are kept in chains remain slaves
rather than subjects: this presumably would hold even for slaves who are shackled but do not
wish to be unshackled.
105 Argument for this interpretation is in Hoekstra, ‘The De Facto Turn’.
106 Leviathan, ‘A Review, and Conclusion’, para. 8, p. 391.
107 Leviathan, 26.8, p. 138: ‘every subject in a Common-wealth, hath covenanted to obey the Civill
Law, (either one with another, as when they assemble to make a common Representative, or with
the Representative it selfe one by one, when subdued by the Sword they promise obedience, that
they may receive life).’ In Leviathan, 20.1, pp. 101–2, Hobbes does say that a commonwealth
by acquisition may itself come about either way, i.e. ‘when men singly, or many together by
212 Kinch Hoekstra
plurality of voyces . . . do authorise all the actions of that Man, or Assembly, that hath their
lives and liberty in his Power’.
108 Baumgold goes further: ‘Hobbes, in fact . . . jettison[s] “democracy first” from the revised
theory presented in De Cive and Leviathan, presumably due to the argument’s unfortunate
implication that England had once upon a time had a popular government’ (‘The Composition
of Hobbes’s Elements of Law’, p. 17, citing A. P. Martinich). She says that in De Cive Hobbes
inserts ‘the crucial modifier . . .“almost”’ (p. 27). Hobbes says: ‘When men have met to erect
a commonwealth, they are, almost by the very fact that they have met, a Democracy. From
the fact that they have gathered voluntarily, they are understood to be bound by the decisions
made by agreement of the majority. And that is a Democracy . . .’ (De Cive, 7.5). That is, there
is a kind of initial democracy in all commonwealths by institution. Those who assemble to
institute a commonwealth are a democracy, almost by the act of assembly itself (‘Qui coı̈erunt
ad ciuitatem erigendam, pene eo ipso coı̈erunt, Democratia est’). ‘Almost’, because there is
only necessary the understanding of what this voluntary meeting commits them to; but this is an
understanding that is taken to follow from such voluntary assembly itself, so commonwealths
by institution do begin as democracies. Elsewhere in De Cive (cf. 7.8 and 7.11), Hobbes makes
clear that both monarchies and aristocracies by institution have their origin in the transfer of
right from the precedent democracy.
109 Alexandre Matheron, ‘The theoretical function of democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes’,
pp. 210–12.
110 See Hobbes, Leviathan 18.1, (p. 88) and 18.5 (p. 90); cf. nn. 99 and 108 above.
A lion in the house 213
argumentative strategies can make sense, however, in light of his overall aim of
security and peace. To pre-empt the frustration of that aim by an active and divi-
sive democracy, Hobbes would have the democracy be like a sleeping monarch,
delegating all administration to a non-democratic body. To lull the democracy
to sleep is to tranquillise the threat – it does not matter so much whether the
body politic still counts as a democracy when it is asleep. The important thing
is that it is at peace, and asleep.
Hobbes does share some starting points with many democratic theories,
including the emphasis on individual rights, the formal importance of the con-
sent of the people, the denial of a privileged epistemological standpoint, and a
doctrine of natural equality. Moreover, at a time when many who were branded
as democrats in fact endorsed mixed sovereignty in order to check democracy,
Hobbes’s absolutism brings him to reject mixture and, strikingly, to accept the
legitimacy of thoroughgoing democracy. These positions, however, are consis-
tent with a broadly undemocratic argument. Hobbes’s view that democracy must
be as absolute and legitimate as any other form of government is not ultimately
a call for or a defence of democracy in particular; rather, it is an argument
for absolute government and the legitimacy of present power regardless of
form.
If any democratic stirrings remain in Hobbes’s thought, perhaps they are
to be detected in three areas that have not been explored by the democratical
Hobbesians. I will sketch these three very briefly and conclude that they are
suggestive but do not suffice to give Hobbes a place in the democratic fold.
First, there are passages in The Elements of Law that appear democratic. The
most striking is this:
Now seeing freedom cannot stand together with subjection, liberty in a commonwealth
is nothing but government and rule, which because it cannot be divided, men must
expect in common; and that can be no where but in the popular state, or democracy. And
Aristotle saith well (lib. 6, cap 2 of his Politics), The ground or intention of a democracy,
is liberty; which he confirmeth in these words: For men ordinarily say this: that no
man can partake of liberty, but only in a popular commonwealth. Whosoever therefore
in a monarchical estate, where the sovereign power is absolutely in one man, claimeth
liberty, claimeth (if the hardest construction should be made thereof) either to have the
sovereignty in his turn, or to be colleague with him that hath it, or to have the monarchy
changed into a democracy.
Moreover, Hobbes says, ‘a few only’ can receive honour from the sovereign,
‘unless it be in a democracy; the rest therefore must be discontent. And so much
the acting governor’s authority (cf. Tuck, p. 189 on ‘the only condition’), then the body of
the people could never transfer or surrender their sovereignty – a proposition that Hobbes
vigorously denies.
A lion in the house 215
of the first thing that disposeth to rebellion, namely, discontent, consisting in fear
and ambition.’114 Although this shares with Hobbes’s later deflationary analyses
the idea that the usual demands for liberty under a monarch are outrageous, this
way of making the point suggests that there is greater liberty in a democracy
than in a monarchy or aristocracy, and that there may be less discontent, and
thus less rebellion, therein.
One reason this argument appears only in The Elements of Law may be that
this work was written for an audience different from those for whom De Cive and
Leviathan were intended. Hobbes circulated manuscript copies of The Elements
of Law only within a restricted circle, and may have addressed this argument to
those who would identify themselves as (or who would be concerned to persuade
those who identified themselves as) members of an élite.115 And there is special
reason to think that this particular argument is geared to the élite. The argument
quoted above does not appear in the general discussions of forms of government.
Rather, it occurs in a chapter on ‘the things that dispose to rebellion’, of which
‘the first is discontent’.116 In one section, Hobbes considers the discontent of ‘a
great multitude, or heap of people’, and of those who are in ‘fear of want’.117
In the next section, he analyses ‘the other sort of discontent which troubleth the
mind of them who otherwise live at ease, without fear of want’; and it is here
that Hobbes puts forth his argument about democracy. This discontent arises
because these gentlemen are not honoured as they think they should be, and
are ‘grieved with the state’ that has not preferred them, thinking themselves
‘regarded but as slaves’.118 Hobbes then gives the above reply. In this context,
we can see that the reply urges the ambitious gentlemen to be content with
their lot.119 The alternatives are either to claim rule instead of or along with the
monarch, or to change the monarchy into democracy. The first is treason, the
second rebellion. Attempting either will alienate the affection of the one from
whom they seek preferment. And even if the latter succeeds, it is likely to leave
the gentlemen with less than they had initially, for the honour and liberty will
then be shared by all.120 On this reading, the liberty promised by democracy is
to be seen by the addressees of this argument, who think ‘they excel in virtue
114 Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 2.8.3.
115 Together with an increasing awareness that the rebellious gentlemen furthered their ambitions
with a democratic appeal, the difference in intended audience may explain why in The Elements
of Law, 2.5 the advantages and disadvantages of forms of government are compared between
monarchy and aristocracy, and in De Cive, 10 between monarchy and democracy.
116 Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 2.8.1 and section heading thereof. 117 Ibid., 2.8.2.
118 Ibid., 2.8.3.
119 Moreover, Hobbes insinuates that the rhetoric of liberty and anti-slavery is in the service of the
wounded pride of the ambitious, thus encouraging suspicion of that rhetoric.
120 And Hobbes makes clear that in a democracy ‘the whole number . . . assembled together, are
the sovereign, and every particular man a subject’ (The Elements of Law, 2.1.3). Thus, even
within a democracy, any individual’s claim to general liberty is illegitimate and rebellious.
216 Kinch Hoekstra
121 Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 2.8.3. Cf. the argument in 1.14.12 that ‘he therefore that desireth
to live in such an estate, as is the estate of liberty and right of all to all, contradicteth himself’.
122 See Hobbes, Elements of Law, 2.5.2.
123 Hobbes, De Cive, ‘Preface to the readers’, p. 14.
124 Against this characterisation, see Richard Tuck, ‘The Utopianism of Leviathan’ in Leviathan
After 350 Years; for it, see Hoekstra, ‘The De Facto Turn’.
125 Hobbes, Leviathan, 42.82, p. 301. Cf. Alcibiades in Thucydides, Hobbes edn, pp. 361–2
(6.18.7): ‘they of all men are most surely planted, that with most vnity obserue the present
Lawes and customes, though not alwaies of the best’.
126 Hobbes, De Homine, 14.8: ‘scilicet postulante multitudine singulis multò potentiore’.
127 Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 115.
A lion in the house 217
128 This translation from ch. 30 of the Latin Leviathan is by Curley, who notes that Claren-
don compared even the more subdued English version (Leviathan, 30.16, p. 180) to the out-
look of the Levellers (Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994),
pp. 227–8n.).
129 Hobbes, Leviathan, 18.7, p. 90.
130 Ibid., 31.40, p. 193. Cf. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 2.8.2.
131 I have argued that in The Elements of Law Hobbes maintains that there is no greater liberty for
subjects (considered as such) in a democracy; in his later works, Hobbes’s repudiation of this
democratic commonplace is unambiguous (cf. e.g. De Cive, 10.8).
132 Also, as is made clear in Clarendon’s case (n. 103 above), a view of the superior power of the
multitude may provoke a demand for the management and restraint of that power rather than
an endorsement of, or a belief in the ineluctability of, democracy.
133 That is, Hobbes emphasises the latter arguments and puts them at the centre of his general
theory. The clearest statement of the argument against the view that ‘Soveraign Kings, though
they be singulis majores, of greater Power than every one of their Subjects, yet they be Universis
minores, of lesse power than them all together’, is in Leviathan, 18.18, p. 93.
218 Kinch Hoekstra
his claims to fulfil them. The government must be for the people, and Hobbes
agrees that the proper end of government is salus populi. The government must
be by the people, and he argues that in all commonwealths the people rule.
And the government must be of the people, a condition Hobbes contends is met
by the consent of the governed. Entrusting the sovereign with the salus populi
does not make a democracy, however, and there is no democratic purchase in
Hobbes’s claims that the people always rule or that the people have consented
to government, for they are made for all governments, however tyrannical and
whatever their form. Sheep’s clothing does not mean that the lion is one of the
sheep after all, but that he plans to devour them.
12 Hobbes and the foundations of modern
international thought
David Armitage
Profecto utrumque verè dictum est, Homo homini Deus,& Homo homini Lupus.
Illud si concives inter se; Hoc, si civitates comparemus. (Hobbes, De Cive)1
Quentin Skinner concluded The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
(1978) with the claim that ‘[b]y the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
concept of the State – its nature, its powers, its right to command obedience –
had come to be regarded as the most important object of analysis in European
political thought’. For confirmation of this, he quoted Thomas Hobbes who,
in the preface to De Cive (1642), declared that ‘the aim of “civil science” is
“to make a more curious search into the rights of states and duties of sub-
jects”’.2 Foundations was dedicated to the historical examination of just how
the state became the central analytical object of political thought and how the
groundwork for a recognisably modern concept of the state had been laid. Fun-
damental to this concept was the state’s independence from ‘any external or
superior power’.3 Yet, save for a brief but suggestive account of neo-scholastic
conceptions of the law of nations, Foundations included no treatment of the
state in its nature, its powers or its rights as an international actor.4 The concept
of the state traced by Skinner defined it almost entirely in terms of its internal,
I am especially grateful to Annabel Brett, Michael Doyle, Tim Hochstrasser, Quentin Skinner,
James Tully and Lars Vinx for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: the Latin Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1983), p. 73; ‘There are two maxims which are surely both true: Man is a God to
man, and Man is a wolf to Man. The former is true of the relations of citizens with each other,
the latter of relations between commonwealths’: Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard
Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3. (Sub-
sequent references to these works will be to these editions, unless otherwise indicated.) On
this passage see François Tricaud, ‘“Homo homini Deus”, “Homo homini Lupus”: Recherche
des Sources des deux Formules de Hobbes’, in Reinhart Koselleck and Roman Schnur (eds.),
Hobbes-Forschungen (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1969), pp. 61–70.
2 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), II, 349; ‘in jure civitatis, civiumque officiis investigandis opus est’:
Hobbes, De Cive, p. 78. Compare Skinner, ‘From the State of Princes to the Person of the State’,
in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
II: Renaissance Virtues, pp. 368–413; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the
State’, in Skinner, Visions, III: Hobbes and Civil Science, pp. 177–208.
3 Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 351. 4 Ibid., pp. 151–4.
219
220 David Armitage
nuanced set of reflections on the state in its international capacity than could
be inferred from most treatments of the subject. No previous attempt has been
made to trace the afterlife of Hobbes’s reflections, in large part because there
has been little study of the reception of his works more generally in the period
since the mid-eighteenth century.12 The second part of the essay will then sur-
vey the afterlife of Hobbes’s international thought from the seventeenth century
to the twentieth in order to show just how recent is the adoption of Hobbes as
a – if not the – theorist of international anarchy.
The earliest statement on the subject of international relations attributable to
Hobbes comes from the ‘Discourse of Laws’ contained in the Horae Subsecivae
(1620), a volume of essays credited to Hobbes’s pupil, William Cavendish, later
the second earl of Devonshire. There the author (who, stylometric analysis has
suggested, may have been Hobbes)13 provided the following entirely conven-
tional definition of the ‘three branches that mens Lawes do spread themselves
into, every one stricter then other’:
The Law of Nature, which we enjoy in common with al other living creatures. The Law
of Nations, which is common to all men in generall: and the Municipall Law of every
Nation, which is peculiar and proper to this or that Country, and ours to us as Englishmen.
That of Nature, which is the ground or foundation of the rest, produceth such actions
amongst us, as are common to every living creature, and not only incident to men: as
for example, the commixture of severall sexes, which we call Marriage, generation,
education, and the like; these actions belong to all living creatures as well as to us. The
Lawes of Nations bee those rules which reason hath prescribed to all men in generall,
and such as all Nations one with another doe allow and observe for just.14
This definition was conventional because drawn almost word for word from
the opening pages of the Digest of Roman law, a text whose fundamental impor-
tance for early-modern political thought Skinner has repeatedly stressed.15 The
first paragraph of the Digest distinguished public law (which concerned reli-
gious affairs, the priesthood and offices of state) from private law. It then divided
private law into three parts: the ius naturale, the ius gentium and the ius civile
[collectum etenim est ex naturalibus praeceptis aut gentium aut civilibus]. In
words that would be followed exactly by the author of the ‘Discourse of Laws’,
it stated that the ius naturale is common to all animals and out of it comes mar-
riage, procreation and child-rearing, while the ius gentium ‘the law of nations,
is that which all human peoples observe’. The source of the ius naturale was
instinct; that of the ius gentium, human agreement. They therefore obliged
human beings in different ways. It could thus be concluded of the ius gentium:
‘That it is not co-extensive with natural law can be grasped easily, since this
latter is common to all animals whereas ius gentium is common only to human
beings among themselves.’16 Though both could be distinguished from the ius
civile, the internal law of particular communities, the ius gentium could not be
assimilated to the ius naturale. The medieval and early-modern theory of natu-
ral law would thereafter rest on this trichotomy with its fundamental distinction
between the law of nature and the law of nations.17
The definitions of the laws of nature and of nations in the Horae Subsecivae
stand in marked contrast to what would become Hobbes’s standard account in
the successive versions of his civil science from the Elements of Law (1640)
through De Cive (1642) to Leviathan (1651; 1668). If the passage from the
‘Discourse of Laws’ can be attributed to Hobbes, then his later treatments of
the law of nature and of nations represented a clear break with that early triadic
definition.18 Hobbes’s mature conception of the law of nations differed in three
basic ways from the account offered in the ‘Discourse of Laws’: first, it derived
the law of nature from reason alone; second, it distinguished firmly between
the law of nature and the right of nature (a distinction that later writers, such as
Samuel Pufendorf, would not observe as scrupulously as Hobbes); and, third,
it collapsed the law of nations into the law of nature.
Hobbes’s later statements were much closer to the jurist Gaius’s defini-
tion, also found in the first chapter of the Digest, which distinguished the ius
civile proper to each particular society from ‘the law which natural reason has
16 The Digest of Justinian, ed. Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger, trans. Alan Watson, 4 vols.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), I.1. pp. 1, 2–4: ‘Ius gentium est quo,
gentes humanae utuntur. quod a naturali recedere facile intellegere licet, quia illud omnibus
animalibus, hoc solis hominibus inter se commune sit’; Max Kaser, Ius gentium (Cologne:
Böhlau, 1993), pp. 64–70. This passage is usually attributed to Ulpian.
17 Merio Scattola, ‘Before and After Natural Law: Models of Natural Law in Ancient and Modern
Times’, in T. J. Hochstrasser and Peter Schröder (eds.), Early Modern Natural Law Theories:
Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), pp. 10–11.
18 The fact that the passage is such a literal paraphrase of the Digest makes it inapt for the kind of
analysis applied in Reynolds and Hilton, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Authorship of the Horae
Subsecivae’; likewise, Thomas Hobbes, Three Discourses: a Critical Modern Edition of a
Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes, ed. Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxon-
house (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), supplies little information on the sources
of the discourses and, hence, no indication of whether other passages might also be paraphrases.
For further evidence of such borrowing in the text see Andrew Huxley, ‘The Aphorismi and A
Discourse of Laws: Bacon, Cavendish, and Hobbes 1615–1620’, Historical Journal 47 (2004),
pp. 399–412.
224 David Armitage
established among all human beings . . . among all observed in equal mea-
sure . . . called ius gentium, as being the law which all nations observe’.19 This
produced a dichotomous taxonomy of law in which the law of nature applied
both to individuals and to commonwealths and the civil law was distinguished
from it as the positive commands of sovereigns. Hobbes’s use of the distinction
between the law of nations and the civil law would help to create two com-
peting afterlives for him as a foundational figure both for the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century discipline of the law of nature and nations and for
nineteenth-century legal positivism. His later reputation as a denier of inter-
national law and as a theorist of international anarchy would spring from these
competing conceptions of him as at once a naturalist and a positivist, depend-
ing on whether he was considered as an international theorist or as a political
theorist.
In his first mature account of the law of nations, Hobbes noted in the Elements
of Law that previous writers on the law of nature could not agree whether it
represents ‘the consent of all nations, or the wisest and most civil nations’ or
‘the consent of all mankind’ because ‘it is not agreed upon, who shall judge
which nations are the wisest’. He concluded instead that ‘[t]here can be . . . no
other law of nature than reason, nor no other precepts of NATURAL LAW, than
those which declare unto us the ways of peace’. Later in the work, he asserted
that ‘right [ius] is that liberty which law leaveth us; and laws [leges] those
restraints by which we agree mutually to abridge one another’s liberty’ before
applying that distinction to a tripartite division of law crucially different from
that found in the Digest and in the Horae Subsecivae: ‘whatsoever a man does
that liveth in a commonwealth, jure, he doth it jure civili, jure naturae, and jure
divino’. This division omitted the law of nations as strictly impertinent to the
internal affairs of a commonwealth and irrelevant to its citizens as individuals
and substituted instead the ius divinum as the third source of obligation in civil
society. Individuals are not the subjects of the ius gentium; commonwealths in
their capacity as artificial persons are. The ius gentium therefore only appeared
as an afterthought in the very last sentence of the Elements of Law:
And thus much concerning the elements and general grounds of law natural and politic.
As for the law of nations, it is the same with the law of nature. For that which is the law
of nature between man and man, before the constitution of commonwealth, is the law
of nations between sovereign and sovereign after.20
Hobbes elaborated this rather cursory statement in De Cive, a work whose
central themes – ‘men’s duties, first as men, then as citizens and lastly as
19 Gaius, Institutiones, I.3: ‘quod vero naturalis ratio inter omnes homines constituit, id apud omnes
populos peraeque custoditur vocaturque ius gentium, quasi quo iure omnes gentes utuntur’ (also
in Digest, I.1.9); Kaser, Ius gentium, pp. 20–2.
20 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies, intr. M. M.
Goldsmith, 2nd edn, (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 75, 186, 190.
Foundations of modern international thought 225
This was the clearest statement Hobbes would ever give of his rationale for iden-
tifying the law of nations with the law of nature. In the Leviathan, he would say
only, ‘Concerning the Offices of one Soveraign to another, which are compre-
hended in that Law, which is commonly called the Law of Nations, I need not
say any thing in this place; because the Law of Nations, and the Law of Nature,
is the same thing’ in so far as ‘every Soveraign hath the same Right, in procuring
the safety of his People, that any particular man can have, in procuring his own
safety.’23 This left implicit what Hobbes had made explicit in De Cive: that the
commonwealth once constituted as an artificial person took on the characteris-
tics and the capacities of the fearful, self-defensive individuals who fabricated
it. However, he did not necessarily imply that individuals in the state of nature
could be understood reciprocally as possessing ‘the characteristics of sovereign
states’.24 The analogy between pre-civil individuals and commonwealths was
imperfect and only made sense for Hobbes once states had been constituted
as persons; to describe individuals as possessing the characteristics of states
would beg the question of just what characteristics a state in fact possessed.
When Hobbes came to offer the final version of his account of the relation
between the law of nature and the law of nations in the Latin Leviathan (1668),
he repeated that they are the same [idem sunt] and expanded his definition in the
English Leviathan by asserting that ‘whatever a particular man could do before
commonwealths were constituted, a commonwealth can do according to the ius
every man’s being and well-being is the rule of his actions’. Beyond that, his
treatment of commonwealths as international actors was descriptive rather than
normative and concerned only ‘the means of levying soldiers, and of having
money, arms, ships, and fortified places in readiness for defence; and partly, in
the avoiding of unnecessary wars’.30
In De Cive, Hobbes offered for the first time the full range of descriptive
and normative characteristics of commonwealths as international actors that
would also be found, with some modification and elaboration, in Leviathan.
Answering the criticism that he had overestimated the primacy of fear as the
fundamental motive for human action in the state of nature, Hobbes adduced the
evidence of the relations between commonwealths, which ‘guard their frontiers
with fortresses, their cities with walls, through fear of neighbouring countries’;
‘[a]ll commonwealths and individuals behave in this way, and thus admit their
fear and distrust of each other’. That fearful defensiveness defined the very
nature of commonwealths when seen from the outside: ‘And what else are
countries but so many camps fortified against each other with garrisons and
arms [totidem castra praesidiis et armis contra se invicem munita], and their
state . . . is to be regarded as a natural state, i. e. a state of war?’ Thus, Hobbes
concluded,
hostility is adequately shown by distrust, and by the fact that the borders of their common-
wealths, Kingdoms and empires, armed and garrisoned, with the posture and appearance
of gladiators [statu vultuque gladiatorio], look across at each other like enemies, even
when they are not striking each other.31
In the Leviathan, this image would become even more decisive evidence for
the existence of the state of nature:
though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of
warre one against another; yet in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority,
because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture
of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is,
their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall
Spyes upon their neighbours, which is a posture of War.32
punish their Injustice: mutual fear may keep them quiet for a time, but upon
every visible advantage they will invade one another.’33 However, Hobbes did
not infer from this posture of hostility that mutual fear would give rise to
an international Leviathan, to liberate commonwealths from the dangers of
the state of nature as the institution of the sovereign freed individuals from
those perils. The two cases were incomparable ‘because [sovereigns] uphold
thereby, the Industry of their Subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery,
which accompanies the Liberty of particular men’.34 The international state of
nature was not equivalent to the interpersonal state of nature and was therefore
insusceptible to parallel remedies for its inconveniencies.35
Hobbes’s scattered reflections on the law of nations, on the behaviour of states
and on the relations between them, gave rise to two major but distinguishable
conceptions with which his name would become associated in later international
thought. The first, and most fundamental, was that the law of nations was simply
the law of nature applied to commonwealths. The second, and currently the
one identified as most characteristically Hobbesian, was that the international
realm is a state of nature populated by fearful and competitive actors. These
two conceptions were not be found in tandem in Hobbes’s works before the
composition of De Cive in 1641 nor did he elaborate or elucidate them after their
appearance in Leviathan in 1651, save for their later translation into Latin in
1668. His failure to expound them systematically had three lasting consequences
for his reputation and for the reception of his political philosophy. The first,
arising initially in the seventeenth century, was to sharpen the division between
naturalism and positivism in international law. The second, which emerged in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was to distinguish his conception of
the law of nations from his conception of the international state of nature. The
third, arising from the previous two in the twentieth century, was to identify
Hobbes as the classic theorist of international anarchy. This last is the most
recent and the most contingent but remains the basis of Hobbes’s reputation as
a theorist of international relations.
The positivist response to Hobbes’s naturalism originated even before the
appearance of Leviathan with the publication in 1650 of the Iuris et Iudicii
Faecialis, sive, Iuris Inter Gentes by the Royalist professor of civil law at
Oxford, Richard Zouche. Zouche’s later reputation as ‘the first real positivist’
in the history of international law rests on the distinction he made in that work
between the ius gentium and the ius inter gentes.36 The ius gentium comprised
33 Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of
England (1666), ed. Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 57.
34 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 90.
35 Heller, ‘The Use and Abuse of Hobbes’; S. J. Hoekstra, The Savage, the Citizen, and the Foole:
the Compulsion for Civil Society in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (unpublished D.Phil.,
University of Oxford, 1998), pp. 69–84.
36 Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations (New York: Macmillan, 1947),
p. 122.
Foundations of modern international thought 229
all those elements common to the laws of various nations, such as the distinc-
tions between freedom and slavery or private property and public property. This
law of nations had to be distinguished from the law between nations, the ius inter
gentes, which comprised the laws different peoples or nations observed in their
dealings with one another, such as the laws of war and commerce.37 According
to this definition, the ius inter gentes was the product of convention and agree-
ment and did not derive from any other source of law, natural or divine. Yet in
an earlier manuscript version of his treatise, Zouche had originally defined the
ius inter gentes as that which is common among diverse sovereigns or peoples
and which is derived from the precepts of God, nature or nations, a definition
derived from Gaius’s in the Digest.38 Zouche had clearly changed his mind
about the definition of the ius inter gentes before 1650 and found it necessary
to distinguish it from both the ius gentium and the ius naturae. The impulse for
this shift seems to have been his reading of Hobbes on the law of nature and
nations. There is no sign that Zouche had read any of Hobbes’s works by the
time he composed the manuscript version of the Iuris Faecialis, but De Cive
did appear in the footnotes to the first chapter of the printed version.39 Zouche
may therefore have been the first legal theorist to resist Hobbes’s conflation of
the law of nations with the law of nature.
Within the later tradition of natural jurisprudence, from Pufendorf to Vattel
and beyond, Hobbes would be acclaimed as a fundamental innovator on the basis
of that conflation. By the late eighteenth century the relationship between the
two forms of law appeared to be the primary question in determining the basis of
obligation itself. As the first anglophone historian of the law of nations, Robert
Ward, put it in 1795: ‘Upon the whole the great points of difference concerning
the mode of its structure, seem to turn upon this; Whether the Law of Nations
is merely the Law of nature as it concerns man, and nothing more; or whether
it is not composed of certain positive Institutions founded upon consent’. Ward
took Hobbes, Pufendorf and Burlamaqui to be the key proponents of the first
position; Suárez, Grotius, Huber, Bynkershoek, ‘and in general the more recent
authors, declare for the last’.40 Pufendorf asked, ‘Whether or no there be any
such thing as a particular and positive Law of Nations, contradistinct to the Law
of Nature?’ and immediately answered his own question by quoting De Cive,
XIV.4:
37 Richard Zouche, Iuris et Iudicii Faecialis, sive, Iuris Inter Gentes (Oxford, 1650), p. 3.
38 ‘Ius inter Gentes est quod in Communione inter diversos Principis vel populos obtinet, et deduci-
tur ab Institutis divinis, Naturae et Gentium’: [Richard Zouche,] Iuris Faecialis. Sive Juris et
Judicii inter Gentes Explicatio, BL, Add. MS 48190, fol. 14r.
39 Zouche, Iuris et Iudicii Faecialis, p. 3.
40 Robert Ward, An Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe,
From the Time of the Greeks and Romans, to the Age of Grotius, 2 vols. (London, 1795), I,
p. 4.
230 David Armitage
Thus Mr. Hobbes divides natural Law, into the natural Law of Men, and the natural
Law of States, commonly called the Law of Nations. He observes, That the precepts of
both are the same . . . This opinion we, for our Part, readily subscribe to.41
Burlamaqui concurred, after quoting the same passage from De Cive: ‘There is
no room to question the reality and certainty of such a law of nations obligatory
of its own nature, and to which nations, or the sovereigns that rule them, ought
to submit.’42 By the time Emer de Vattel published his Droit des gens in 1758,
Hobbes’s contribution had become foundational but not incontrovertible:
Hobbes . . . was the first, to my knowledge, to give us a distinct though imperfect idea of
the Law of Nations . . . His statement that the Law of Nations is the natural law applied
to States or Nations is sound. But . . . he was mistaken in thinking that the natural law
did not necessarily undergo any change in being thus applied.43
41 Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672), trans. Basil Kennett, 4th edn. (Lon-
don, 1729), pp. 149–50 (De Jure Naturae et Gentium, II.3.23); cf. Robert Sharrock, Hypothesis
Ethike, De Officiis Secundum Naturae Ius (Oxford, 1660), p. 229; Samuel Rachel, De Jure Natu-
rae et Gentium Dissertationes (Kiel, 1676), p. 306; James Wilson, ‘Lectures on Law’ (1790–91),
in The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1967), I, p. 151 (quoting Pufendorf).
42 Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural Law (1748), trans. Thomas Nugent (London,
1748), pp. 195–6 (Les Principes du droit naturel, VI.5).
43 Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law Applied to the Conduct
and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns (1758), trans. Charles G. Fenwick (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Institution, 1916), 5a–6a (Le Droit des gens, ‘Preface’); Emmanuelle Jouannet,
Emer de Vattel et l’Emergence doctrinale du droit international classique (Paris: Pedone, 1998),
pp. 39–52.
44 A distinguished early exception was Leibniz, who commented favourably on Hobbes’s image
of interstate relations as gladiatorial: G. W. Leibniz, Codex Iuris Gentium, Praefatio (1693),
in Leibniz: Political Writings, ed. Patrick Riley, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), p. 166.
45 ‘Putat inter homines omnes a nature esse bellum et alia quaedam habet nostris non congruentia’:
Hugo Grotius to Willem de Groot, 11 April 1643, in Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, ed. P. C.
Molhuysen, B. L. Meulenbroek and H. J. M. Nellen, 17 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1928–2001),
XIV, p. 199; ‘Hobbes demande pourquoi, si les hommes ne sont pas naturellement en état de
guerre, ils vont toujours armés? et pourquoi ils ont des clefs pours fermer leurs maisons? Mais
on ne sent pas que l’on attribue aux hommes avant cet établissement des sociétés, ce qui ne peut
leur arriver qu’aprés cet établissement, qui leur fait trouver des motifs pour s’attaquer et pour
se défendre . . .’: Charles Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, L’Esprit des Lois (1748), ed. R.
Derathé, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1973), I, p. 10.
Foundations of modern international thought 231
same reasons that his account of the relations between atomised individuals
was incorrect. In fact, the very exiguousness of Hobbes’s empirical account of
international relations helped to ensure almost two centuries of silence on the
subject. Throughout the nineteenth century neither the first textbooks on inter-
national relations nor the first studies of Hobbes’s thought found it necessary to
treat him as an international theorist. For example, he did not appear alongside
Grotius and Pufendorf in the most widely used American text on international
relations of the nineteenth century, Theodore Woolsey’s Introduction to the
Study of International Law (1860), a work that would also be foundational for
the emergent discipline of political science in the United States.46 Similarly,
none of Hobbes’s nineteenth-century British students so much as mentioned
his reflections on international relations or the law of nations,47 while glancing
allusions to his views on Völkerrecht appeared only in the second edition of
Ferdinand Tönnies’s study of Hobbes in 1912.48
Hobbes was only identified as a theorist of international anarchy once a
consensus had emerged that the international realm was indeed anarchic. That
consensus was the product of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century devel-
opments internal to the emerging modern disciplines of political science and
international law.49 It rested on a series of propositions, each of which had to
be established before the ‘discourse of anarchy’ could be seen as plausible and
coherent. First, it had to be accepted that the domestic and the international
realms were analytically distinct. Then, the norms relevant to each realm had
to be identified and distinguished. On that basis, it could be argued that states
in their international capacity were unconstrained by any norms equivalent for-
mally or obligatorily to those that applied to their own subjects. States were
accordingly independent not just of one another but of any superior. Because
they were atomistic they were agonistic: in the absence of any external authority,
their relations were governed only by force. They therefore stood in relation
to one another as competitive actors within an international state of nature.
Hobbes’s conflation of the law of nature with the law of nations would not
support such a sharp analytical distinction between the internal and the exter-
nal spheres. Though he admitted that the insecurity of individuals in the state
50 John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined [1832], ed. Wilfrid E. Rumble
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 19, 112, 171, 229–33n.
51 Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a
Political Symbol (1938), trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1996), pp. 47–8.
52 Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy, pp. 232–3.
53 Stephen Leacock, Elements of Political Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 89; com-
pare Westel Woodbury Willoughby, ‘The Juristic Conception of the State’, American Political
Science Review 12 (1918), p. 207.
54 James Bryce, International Relations (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. 5.
Foundations of modern international thought 233
thus ‘a law unto themselves’, it followed that ‘[t]he condition of the world,
from an international point of view, has long been one of polite anarchy’.55
Pluralist critics of the juristic theory of the state contended that it not only
described but in fact created a condition of international anarchy; they, too,
invoked Hobbes in support of their contentions.56 Conformity to the theory of
sovereignty as independence ensured that ‘the condition of international society
would, indeed, be that which Hobbes in his day conceived it to be’.57 ‘The state
is irresponsible’, Harold Laski concluded, summing up this line of criticism: ‘It
owes no obligation save that which is made by itself to any other community or
group of communities. In the hinterland between states man is to his neighbour
what Hobbes says was true of him in the state of nature – nasty, mean, brutish.’58
Hobbes assumed his place among the founders of international thought as
much in spite of as because of his own statements on the law of nations and the
relations between states. Like many later critics of an allegedly ‘Hobbesian’
account of international relations, he recognised the limited analytical utility of
the analogy between individuals and international persons in a state of nature.59
He acknowledged that, though states could be just as fearful, vainglorious and
competitive as individuals in their relations with one another, they were not
vulnerable to the same degree nor was their existence as fragile. Agreements
and exchanges were possible both in the interpersonal state of nature and the
international state of nature. If the Hobbesian theory of international relations
rests on a conception of international anarchy characterised by interstate com-
petition without any possibility of cooperation, then Hobbes himself was no
Hobbesian.
The standard account of Hobbes as an international theorist arose in condi-
tions not of his own making. Positivists battled naturalists, pluralist theorists of
the state criticised juristic theorists, and political scientists defined their disci-
pline against international law and international relations theory. Hobbes could
be invoked on both sides of each dispute. The naturalists pointed to his confla-
tion of the law of nations with the law of nature as a foundational insight, while
the positivists invoked Hobbes’s command theory of law to deny the validity
55 David Jayne Hill, World Organization as Affected by the Nature of the Modern State (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1911), pp. 14, 15.
56 Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy, pp. 164–87; on the pluralists and their debts to
Hobbes see David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
57 James W. Garner, ‘Limitations on National Sovereignty in International Relations’, American
Political Science Review 19 (1925), pp. 23–4.
58 H. J. Laski, ‘International Government and National Sovereignty’, in The Problems of Peace,
1st ser. (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 291.
59 Edwin DeWitt Dickinson, ‘The Analogy Between Natural Persons and International Persons in
the Law of Nations’, Yale Law Journal 26 (1916–17), pp. 564–91; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical
Society: a Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977),
pp. 46–51.
234 David Armitage
the historical and conceptual foundations of the Westphalian order and has
proclaimed the advent of ‘post-sovereignty’.64 The contingent conditions and
overdetermining theories that gave rise to the ‘Hobbesian’ theory of interna-
tional relations have now either been unsettled theoretically or discredited his-
torically. This has occurred in tandem with an expansion of the definition of
political theory itself to include the international, the global and the cosmopoli-
tan.65 There are already signs that the boundaries of the history of political
thought are being redefined to take account of that expansion.66 This bodes
well for the future study of the foundations of modern international thought.
Quentin Skinner
I
David Hume observes at the beginning of his autobiography that ‘it is difficult
for a man to speak long of himself without Vanity: Therefore I shall be short’.1
I would go further and say that, in writing the kind of autobiographical essay
on which I am embarking here, it is impossible to avoid some element of self-
praise. Moreover, I cannot agree with Hume that the best means of coping with
the problem is simply to speak as briefly as possible. The foregoing chapters
about my work are of such an exceptionally high level of interest and originality
that they demand to be examined at length. The only solution, as far as I can
see, is to apologise at the outset for any crassness of tone and press on with the
task in hand.
II
I am deeply indebted to Annabel Brett, James Tully and Holly Hamilton-
Bleakley for editing this volume, and for giving me an opportunity to reflect
anew on my intentions in writing The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.
Re-reading the book, however, what chiefly strikes me is how far it falls short
of the aspirations I originally had for it. My initial ambition – as I recorded
in the acknowledgements – was to produce an historical survey encompassing
the entire period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. While this was
still a gleam in my eye, I delivered a course of lectures in Cambridge (as Mark
Goldie recalls) under the title ‘The Making of Modern Political Thought’ in
which, among other things, I vainly strove to understand the ideological origins
of the French Revolution. I wish I could report that my decision to abandon
my initial plan arose from recognising that there was something inherently
questionable about the idea of tracing the rise of something called modernity
in political thought. The more prosaic truth is that I despaired of acquiring
sufficient learning to write with any confidence about such a long span of time.
1 David Hume, ‘My Own Life’, in Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (London:
Nelson, 1954), Appendix A, p. 611.
236
Surveying the Foundations 237
John Pocock in his great work, The Machiavellian Moment, was among those
who were influenced by Baron’s line of thought, although Pocock informs us
in his contribution to the present volume that this was never the case.
The other thesis I wanted to question was more specifically concerned with
the interpretation of Machiavelli’s thought. I was writing at a time when the
German tradition – the tradition of Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Cassirer and
Leo Strauss – was still dominant in the historiography of Renaissance political
philosophy. One of the leading tenets associated with these scholars was that
Machiavelli was the first political theorist to organise his thinking around the
concept of lo stato, the concept of an impersonal and sovereign state. To which
they added that he was likewise the first to insist that states may have reasons
for their actions – ragioni di stato – that would not necessarily count as good
reasons in the mouths of their own subjects.
Against the first of these orthodoxies – that of Baron and his disciples – I
argued that the ideals of libertas and self-government were articulated in the
Regnum Italicum at a much earlier date than the magic year 1400. As Geuna
observes, this claim had already been put forward by a number of historians
who had associated these developments with the reception of Aristotle’s Politics
at the end of the thirteenth century. I was equally unhappy with this periodisa-
tion, however, for it seemed to me that the emergence of communal ideologies
predated the availability of Aristotle’s texts by several generations, and that
the pioneering celebrations of republican government were indebted entirely to
Roman rather than to Greek authorities. As for Machiavelli, I tried to show that
each of his major works attempted in its own way to offer a critical commentary
on these earlier and enduring patterns of neo-Roman thought. Although I called
the first volume of my book The Renaissance, my title embodied an intentional
irony: my emphasis was on the longue durée, not on any identifiable moment
of rebirth.
It remains to explain what attracted me to the very idea of writing a history of
early-modern political thought. It must be admitted that, at least at the outset,
I was not primarily interested in making a contribution to the history or the
historiography of the subject. As Goldie notes, I was much more concerned in
those far-off days with questions about interpretation, explanation and historical
method more generally. It is true that, during my first years of research (1963–6),
I had published some mainly historical essays about the political theories of
the English revolution, attending in particular to the figure of Hobbes. But the
more I puzzled over the interpretative literature on Leviathan, the more I found
myself worrying about the nature of interpretation itself, and in the following
years (1966–71) I wrote a series of articles attempting to work out my own
approach.8 When I turned to writing Foundations in 1972, it was basically
8 Some of the articles I wrote during this period were published several years later.
240 Quentin Skinner
with the intention of using a broad canvas on which to illustrate some of the
methodological and even philosophical conclusions at which I had by then
arrived.
I was especially interested in challenging two widespread assumptions about
the interpretation of political texts. One was that the most illuminating way of
analysing the œuvre of any major political writer must be to extract from their
various works the most coherent and systematic set of doctrines they can be
made to yield. Among the ‘classic’ political theorists, Machiavelli had been
subjected to this treatment with extreme severity. Federico Chabod, Gennaro
Sasso and other Italian scholars had made it their business, as Geuna reminds
us, to establish that Machiavelli’s Il principe and Discorsi are best viewed as
partial contributions to an overarching ‘Machiavellian’ whole, the underlying
structure of which they attempted to lay bare.
By the time I began studying Machiavelli’s texts for myself I had already
become suspicious of this approach. I owed this suspicion in part to my reading
of R. G. Collingwood, who had persuaded me that the most revealing way to
interpret any philosophical text is to consider it as an answer to a specific set
of questions, and to try to recover the questions being addressed. But I was no
less influenced by a number of scholars who had not only developed a similar
view of historical method in the 1960s but had gone on to put it to work. I am
thinking here in particular of John Pocock and John Dunn. Pocock in his chapter
in the present volume additionally singles out the name of Peter Laslett, whose
editions of Filmer and Locke undoubtedly embodied a question-and-answer
approach. But Laslett never supplied a theoretical account of his practice,
whereas Dunn and Pocock both published pioneering methodological articles
in the 1960s (Pocock in 1962, Dunn in 1968),9 after which they proceeded to
practise what they had preached. Dunn’s classic monograph on John Locke
appeared in 1969,10 and in the same year Pocock permitted me to read a com-
plete draft of his Machiavellian Moment, a masterpiece whose interpretation of
Machiavelli’s political theory exercised a profound influence on my own work.
We know how to speak de mortuis, but we are less adept at knowing how to
speak de viventibus. W. H. Auden offers us an excellent guiding principle: ‘Let
us honour if we can the vertical man’. Among the vertical men to whom I remain
most indebted is John Pocock, whose contribution to the present volume is a
splendidly characteristic one. As always he is deeply generous, but as always he
challenges us to re-examine our ingrained habits of thought. I demur only at his
11 For the sources of the quotations in this paragraph see Skinner, Visions, I, p. 57.
12 J. P. Plamenatz, Man and Society: a Critical Examination of Some Important Social and Political
Theories from Machiavelli to Marx (London: Longmans 1963), vol. I, p. ix.
242 Quentin Skinner
about the English revolution, and that there can be no prospect of understanding
his interpretation of such concepts as freedom, sovereignty and representation
without appreciating the specific character of the intervention he took himself
to be making in the politics of his time.
It was this intuition, as Hamilton-Bleakley notes, that drew me to the work
of Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle. Wittgenstein had enjoined us to ask not
about the meanings but the uses of words. Austin and Searle had extended this
insight into a general theory of speech acts, examining the multifarious ways in
which we may be said to be doing something as well as saying something in the
act of issuing any serious utterance. From their work I acquired the confidence
to argue that textual interpretation should be concerned not merely with the
recovery of the alleged meanings of texts, but also – and perhaps principally –
with the range of things that texts may be said to be doing, and thus with the
nature of the interventions they may be said to constitute.
With a giant leap of faith, this brought me to the principle on which Foun-
dations is based. If, I recklessly put it to myself, the most illuminating way of
writing even about Hobbes’s political theory may be to treat it essentially as
a political act, then perhaps this may be the most illuminating way of writing
about political theory tout court. I used the preface of Foundations to summarise
my scepticism about the rival view of the classic texts as timeless meditations
on perennial themes. ‘I take it’, I replied, ‘that political life itself sets the main
problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to appear
problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading
subjects of debate’.13 As Kari Palonen has recently stressed, my entire book
was an attempt to substantiate that argument.14
My overriding aspiration in Foundations was thus to write the history of polit-
ical theory essentially as a history of ideologies.15 Goldie’s chapter provides a
highly perceptive analysis of the style of history to which this commitment gave
rise, and I cannot hope to improve on it here. The one point I should like to under-
score relates to the practical orientation of my approach. As Hamilton-Bleakley
remarks, one of my aims was to give ‘forms of life’ priority over theories, and
thus to challenge the assumption that intellectual history is separate from the
history of institutions and behaviour.16 I wanted, in other words, to undermine
13 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. I: The Renaissance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. xi.
14 Kari Palonen, ‘Political Theorizing as a Dimension of Political Life’, European Journal of
Political Theory 4 (2005), pp. 351–66.
15 My references to ‘ideologies’ occasioned some confusion, so it is perhaps worth reiterating that
I was employing the term not in a Marxist sense to refer to distortions of social reality, but rather
in a Weberian sense to refer to discourses of legitimation.
16 For a valuable elaboration of this point see Annabel Brett, ‘What is Intellectual History Now?’
in David Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 113–31, esp.
p. 115.
Surveying the Foundations 243
the usual distinction between theory and practice. Writing in Weberian vein, I
highlighted the fact that political practices normally require to be legitimised.
As I argued, however, the ability to legitimise our behaviour while getting what
we want depends in part on being able to show that our actions can be described
by reference to some accepted value or principle. There is thus a sense in which
the direction of political life will always be controlled by such principles, and
will remain so even when the agents involved have no genuine attachment to
the values for the sake of which they profess to act. This is how it comes about
that, in Tully’s pithy summary, the pen is a mighty sword.17
This account of my procedures – and especially of my desire to focus on
legitimising discourses rather than classic texts – may suggest that I squarely
accepted the claims that Michel Foucault was propagating at around the same
time about the death of the author.18 But as Hamilton-Bleakley rightly empha-
sises, I have always wanted to retain a place for the traditional figure of the
author in the broader study of political ‘languages’. One reason is that there is
otherwise a danger (as Goldie notes) of slipping back into writing a disembod-
ied history of ‘isms’ or ‘unit ideas’, a kind of history that readily loses sight of
the varying purposes that different systems of belief can be made to serve. But
my main reason for wanting to speak of authors and not merely of texts has
always been to try to make sense of those moments when a prevailing episteme
(to cite Foucault’s terminology) is questioned or undermined. It seems to me a
weakness of Foucault’s more structuralist approach that he finds it so difficult
to explain how such conceptual changes take place.
Consider, for example, the humanist vision of politics that I discuss in volume
I of Foundations. According to this view of public life, the quality of virtù is at
once the means to attain civic gloria and at the same time a summary of the moral
virtues. These assumptions were subjected to an epoch-making challenge when
Machiavelli proposed in Il principe that the quality of virtù must be the name
of whatever range of attributes (moral or otherwise) conduce to the attainment
of gloria. The outcome was a furious argument over whether there are any
distinctive ragioni di stato that transcend ordinary moral rules. How can we
hope to explain this development unless we are prepared to single Machiavelli
out as the author of the work that sparked the argument off?
Apart from this traditional element in my narrative, however, it was certainly
my aspiration in Foundations to focus as much as possible not on individual
authors but on broader genealogies of discourse. I wanted to make it as clear
as possible that even the most original authors are never the inventors of the
language they speak, but are always the products of a pre-existing culture with
17 James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1988), pp. 7–25.
18 See especially Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 141–60.
244 Quentin Skinner
which they inevitably enter into dialogue.19 As Goldie points out, my book
was aggressively organised in such a way as to force the reader to confront
this argument. If, for example, you consult the bibliography of primary texts in
volume I, you encounter a list of nearly two hundred titles. But if you turn to
the table of contents, you find only one political writer mentioned by name: the
author (sic) of Il principe.
My attempt to show that political theory forms a part of political life initially
occasioned much outrage. Michael Oakeshott was only the most distinguished
of several hostile critics who berated me for failing to understand that ‘genuine’
political theory occupies an autonomous philosophical realm.20 (Nor was he the
only critic to make things easier for himself by inserting his preferred conclusion
into his premises.) Since then, however, times have changed; and very much for
the better, I think. None of the contributors to the present volume seems to find
any difficulty with my cardinal assumption that, because in political argument
there is nothing but the battle, the idea of being above the battle makes little
sense. On the contrary, several of them explicitly align themselves with this
essentially Nietzschean point of view.
Nevertheless, several contributors raise an interesting doubt about the scope
of my argument. Goldie objects that it lacks what he describes as generic expan-
siveness.21 Once we accept, he argues, that the characteristic activity of political
theorists is that of legitimising or challenging existing institutions and beliefs,
it becomes merely arbitrary to concentrate on self-confessedly ‘political’ texts
as a means of illustrating the point. We ought instead to recognise that the
poet, the painter and the musician may be no less skilled at mounting political
arguments, and may even be capable of doing so with unmatchable force.
This strikes me as a justified criticism, and one that I would nowadays want
to carry still further. Once we take Goldie’s argument seriously, the notion of a
distinct ‘history of political theory’ begins to melt into air. We need to replace
it, I would now contend, with a more general form of intellectual history in
which, even if we continue to centre on ‘political’ texts, we allow the principle
of generic expansiveness the freest rein. If, for example, I were now to rewrite
the chapters in volume I of Foundations about the early republicanism of the
Regnum Italicum, I should certainly want to pay as much attention to the frescoes
of Ambrogio Lorenzetti as to the treatises of Marsilius of Padua.22 If, in the
same vein, I were to write about the revival of libertà as a rallying cry in the
19 For this formulation see Brett, ‘What is Intellectual History Now?’, p. 118.
20 Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Foundations of Modern Political Thought’, The Historical Journal 23
(1980), pp. 449–53.
21 Goldie, ‘The context of The Foundations’, in this volume, pp. 3–19.
22 As I did when I returned to writing about trecento political theory in the 1980s. See Quentin
Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), pp. 39–92.
Surveying the Foundations 245
25 Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir: (Paris: les Editions de
Minuit, 1979), esp. pp. 7–9, 35–43.
26 Martin van Gelderen, ‘Aristotelians, Monarchomachs and Republicans: Sovereignty and respub-
lica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought, 1580–1650’, in Martin van Gelderen and
Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: a Shared European Heritage, vol. I: Republicanism and
Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
pp. 195–217.
27 Annabel Brett, ‘Scholastic political thought and the modern concept of the state’, in this volume,
p. 142.
Surveying the Foundations 247
III
I began by noting that I originally planned to bring Foundations to an end with
the politics of the English revolution, and more specifically with the philosophy
of Hobbes. However, far from encompassing the first half of the seventeenth
century, as the fulfilment of this ambition would have required, I eventually drew
to a close with the theorists of absolute sovereignty and their constitutionalist
adversaries in the final decades of the sixteenth century. Pocock remarked at
the time that, in view of my over-arching preoccupation with the idea of the
state, this seemed a peculiar moment at which to sign off, and Goldie in the
present volume roundly asserts that my book ‘stops somewhat abruptly around
1600’.29
The accusation that I constructed a broken column is not I think justified.
As I emphasised in my introduction, I was addressing an essentially Weberian
theme. I was trying to recover the preconditions, material as well as intellectual,
for the increasing acceptance in western Europe of the belief that the business
of government should be placed in the hands of unitary authorities enjoying a
monopoly of legitimate force. I took it that, with the statement of the theory
of absolute legislative sovereignty in the work of Jean Bodin and his follow-
ers, and with their articulation of the accompanying distinction between states
and forms of government, my story was at an end. I still feel that this judg-
ment was intellectually defensible, and it is worth recalling that even Julian
Franklin, one of the most unsatisfied of my original critics, took it to be beyond
dispute.30
I must admit, however, that I had a further reason for abandoning any attempt
to cover the first half of the seventeenth century. I could not fathom the process
by which, in the course of that period, the ‘subject’ of absolute sovereignty came
to be identified in turn with the persona ficta of the state. I could see that this
28 Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 2, 4, 5.
29 Goldie, in this volume, p. 13.
30 Julian Franklin, ‘Review of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought’, Political Theory 7
(1979), pp. 552–8, at p. 553.
Surveying the Foundations 249
would need to be my guiding theme, and I could see that Hobbes’s declaration
in Leviathan that the state is ‘One Person’ would make an appropriate finale.
But I could not see much more.31 As a result, Hobbes is undoubtedly the
most important missing person in my book. This being so, I feel especially
grateful that no fewer than three chapters of the present volume are devoted to
Hobbes’s theory of the state. They provide me with a welcome opportunity to
say something more about the evolution and orientation of his political thought.
David Armitage’s chapter serves to remind me that, had I carried out my
larger design in Foundations, I would have perpetuated a restriction of coverage
observable throughout the book. As Armitage points out, I examine the state
almost solely in relation to its internal organisation and capacities, and have
almost nothing to say about its role as an international agent. This is undoubtedly
a defect, but I am not sure how far it would have been exacerbated if I had written
about Hobbes without examining this dimension of his thought. Why, after all,
does Hobbes discuss the relations among states? Armitage does not raise the
question, seemingly taking it for granted that Hobbes must have regarded the
issue as an inescapable one. But it is I think arguable that the main reason
why Hobbes introduces the topic is not because he is interested in the theory of
international relations in itself, but rather because he wants to make a polemical
point about the nature of the state.
One of the claims that Hobbes is most anxious to overturn in Leviathan is
that we can only hope to preserve our liberty if we live as citizens of republics
or ‘free states’. He speaks with detestation of ‘those Democraticall writers’
who insist ‘that the Subjects in a Popular Common-wealth enjoy Liberty; but
that in a Monarchy they are all Slaves’.32 To see how Hobbes’s account of
the relations between states enables him to discredit or at least to ridicule this
line of thought, it will be helpful to begin with Armitage’s careful anatomy
of Hobbes’s views about the international realm. As Armitage shows beyond
doubt, Hobbes’s basic contention in every mature version of his political theory
is that the law of nations or ius gentium is straightforwardly identical with the
law of nature or ius naturale. As Hobbes summarises in ch. 30 of Leviathan,
they amount to ‘the same thing’.33
To understand Hobbes’s views about the relations among states, what we
therefore need to grasp is what he means by the ius naturale. Hobbes supplies
his most considered answer in ch. 14 of Leviathan, in which he enunciates two
31 The attempt to make sense of the idea that the state is a represented persona ficta has in
consequence been a theme of much of my recent research. See especially Skinner, Visions,
II, pp. 386–413; Visions of Politics, vol. III: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), pp. 177–208; Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Representation’, European
Journal of Philosophy 13 (2005), pp. 155–84.
32 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall
and Civill, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 226.
33 Ibid., p. 244.
250 Quentin Skinner
closely connected arguments. One is that the ius naturale can be equated with
the right of nature, the right possessed by everyone in the state of nature to
do whatever they deem necessary to protect themselves. The second argument
is that this right of nature can in turn be represented as a specific form of
freedom or natural liberty. As Hobbes summarises at the outset, ‘the RIGHT
OF NATURE, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each
man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his
own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life’.34
Armed with this analysis, Hobbes proceeds in ch. 21 of Leviathan to bring
off one of his most cunning rhetorical effects. Now we can see, he declares,
what the democratical writers must be talking about when they extol the liberty
of ‘free states’. Given that the law of nations is nothing other than the liberty
of nature, they must simply be talking about the same kind of freedom that
every individual person may be said to possess in the state of nature. Just as
‘every Particular man’ in his natural condition has ‘a full and absolute Libertie’
to protect himself, so ‘every Common-wealth, (not every man) has an absolute
Libertie, to doe what it shall judge’ to be ‘most conducing to their benefit’.35
Hobbes’s brilliantly deflationary move is thus to insist that the much-vaunted
liberty allegedly attainable only in ‘free states’ amounts to nothing more than the
liberty to defend themselves against other states. As he sardonically concludes,
‘the Athenians, and Romanes were free; that is, free Common-wealths: not that
any particular man had the Libertie to resist their own Representative; but that
their Representative had the Libertie to resist, or invade other people’.36
Armitage rightly remarks that Hobbes’s reflections on the relations among
states are noticeably ‘cursory’ and even ‘meagre’ in quality.37 The reason, I
am postulating, is that it may be false to Hobbes’s conception of his project to
suppose that he was attempting to make a ‘contribution’, as Armitage assumes,
‘to international thought’.38 Hobbes’s sarcastic dismissal of the democratical
writers and their claims about the special merits of ‘free states’ is one of the
great rhetorical coups in Leviathan, and it is wholly dependent on his underlying
equation between the law of nations and the right of nature. But it is possible,
I am suggesting, that if he had not been so anxious to engineer this coup, he
might not have paid any attention to the law of nations at all.
I next want to examine the connections between the story I tell in Foundations
and the development of Hobbes’s theory of the state. My own view of Hobbes,
as I have tried to show in my recent work, is that he deserves to be recognised as
the leading counter-revolutionary writer of his age.39 To understand his stance,
we need to begin by considering the era of revolutionary politics in France and
the Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century. Seeking to legitimise their
protests against the Valois and Habsburg monarchies, the radical Calvinists in
both these countries began to vindicate the lawfulness of resistance to heretical
and tyrannical rule. I argued in Foundations that these ‘monarchomach’ or
king-killing theorists, as William Barclay stigmatised them, made use in turn
of Lutheran doctrines originally deployed against the Emperor Charles V. I now
see that, as van Gelderen points out, this further argument may be questionable,
since the Lutherans generally confined themselves to vindicating the right of
self-defence. But there can be no doubt about my main contention: that among
the leading Calvinist monarchomachs – such writers as Johannes Althusius in
the Netherlands and the author of the Vindiciae, contra tryrannos in France –
the general right of the people or their representatives to engage in forcible
resistance to tyranny was unequivocally upheld.
Faced with this revolutionary challenge, a number of political writers
responded by insisting on the need for absolute and irresistible sovereignty,
among them Jean Bodin and William Barclay in France and Hugo Grotius in
the Netherlands. Hobbes belongs, I would argue, essentially in the company
of these counter-revolutionaries. With the outbreak of the English civil wars in
1642, such parliamentarians as Henry Parker, William Prynne and their follow-
ers succeeded in introducing the most radical arguments of the monarchomachs
into anglophone political thought. The Leviathan, as I see it, is essentially
Hobbes’s response to these democratical writers and the blood-dimmed tide
they loosed.40
Richard Tuck’s main purpose in his scintillating chapter is to question this
entire genealogy. Far from being a sworn enemy of the democratical writers, he
retorts, Hobbes was ‘a sophisticated and deep theorist of democracy’.41 One of
Hobbes’s great achievements, especially in the earlier versions of his political
theory – on which Tuck chiefly concentrates – was to provide a ‘new theory of
democracy’.42 ‘Hobbes’s contribution to democratic theory’, we are told, was
‘perhaps one of his most important legacies.’43
According to Tuck, the form of democracy in which Hobbes was primarily
interested was the one described by Aristotle in his Politics as ‘radical’ or
‘extreme’. Aristotle is quoted as saying that, in the ‘extreme’ form, ‘not the
law, but the multitude, have supreme power, and supersede the law by their
decrees’.44 Tuck has two main claims to advance about this type of government,
the first of which concerns the relationship between Aristotle’s and Hobbes’s
accounts of it. There was a key intermediary, Tuck contends, in the form of Pietro
Vettori’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics, first published in 1576. When
Vettori comments on the phrase princeps enim populus fit, ‘the people becomes
a monarch’, he explains that this transformation arises from the people’s ‘all
coming together and making one man’. Fastening on Vettori’s reference to
the people as ‘one man’, Tuck declares that this ‘must have been a source of
Hobbes’s thinking on the subject’.45 This is certainly a possibility, but there
is no independent evidence that Hobbes knew of Vettori’s translation, so the
affirmation that it ‘must have been’ in Hobbes’s mind seems rather strong.
Besides, a more likely source is surely John Dee’s English version of the Politics,
first published in 1598, in which we read in the relevant passage that ‘the people
becometh a monarch’ when they rule ‘altogither as one’.46
The question of transmission, however, is of less importance for Tuck than
the second and pivotal claim he wishes to make about ‘extreme’ democracy.
He argues that this form of government was ‘special’ for Hobbes, and in two
distinct ways.47 He first asserts that, when Hobbes discusses ‘the formation of
each kind of commonwealth’, especially in De Cive, he maintains that ‘extreme
democracy is the paradigm commonwealth’.48 One way, in other words, in
which democracy is ‘special’ for Hobbes is that all other forms of government
are said to arise out of it.
I agree that, when Hobbes considers how civil associations are ‘instituted’ –
in The Elements of Law as well as in De Cive – he takes democracy to be, as he
says in The Elements, ‘first in order of time’.49 Hobbes’s clearest explanation
of why this is so is given in ch. 7 of De Cive. When the members of a multitude
come together to create a commonwealth, they must be assumed to agree that
any decisions taken by the majority will be binding upon the rest. As soon as
they begin to operate this principle, however, they will in effect be operating a
democratic system of rule.50 This is how it comes about that, as Hobbes puts it
in The Elements, ‘democracy precedeth all other institution of government’.51
Nevertheless, there are two doubts to be registered about this part of Tuck’s
argument. Kinch Hoekstra duly registers them in the course of his tenacious and
overwhelmingly learned critique, and I am bound to say that both of them strike
me as well-founded. First of all, it is an overstatement to claim that, in discussing
the origins of government, Hobbes takes democracy to be ‘paradigmatic’ in
every case.52 Hobbes formulates two distinct paradigms in every version of
his political theory, one of which he labels ‘government by institution’ and the
other ‘government by acquisition’. A government is said to be ‘instituted’ when
the members of the multitude agree among themselves to establish a sovereign
Tuck treats this passage as the crucial one in support of his own argument. It is
here, he maintains, that we encounter the suggestion that Vettori developed out
of Aristotle’s Politics and bequeathed to Hobbes. We are being told that there
is a form of government – a form that Hobbes takes to be admirable – in which
the people is one man and is at the same time the king. But it seems to me that
this is precisely the opposite of what Hobbes is claiming here. He is not saying
that it is possible for the people to be a king; he is saying that it is possible
for a king to be the people. He is not claiming that there is an extreme form
of democracy in which the people is king, and that this is an admirable form
of government. He is not even talking about democracy, extreme or otherwise.
66 Hobbes, The Elements of Law, pp. 63, 124. 67 Hobbes, De Cive, p. 89.
68 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 112, 114. 69 Ibid., pp. 122–4.
70 S. R. Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, 3rd edn
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. 386–7.
71 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 130. 72 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Bodley Head, 1960), p. 6.
256 Quentin Skinner
and perhaps Rousseau, and it was in De Cive that his views about ‘extreme’
democracy were most fully laid out.
I can readily imagine an important book about the history of ‘extreme’ democ-
racy, and it is devoutly to be hoped that Tuck will himself write it. The only
cautionary note I would sound is one that echoes Boutcher’s argument. Hobbes’s
De Cive may well have inspired later writers on popular sovereignty, and its
possible influence on Rousseau would be especially worth investigating. While
this may have been an important element in the afterlife of Hobbes’s text, how-
ever, I remain convinced that Hobbes himself would have found it a deeply
unwelcome example of the kind of irony he normally relished so much. He
may have influenced the evolution of democratic theory, but the democratical
writers of his own time were nevertheless the ones he feared and hated most of
all.
IV
I should like to express a special word of thanks to those contributors who
have recognised that one of my foremost aims in Foundations was to puncture
an historical myth that enjoyed extensive vogue at the time. The myth centred
around the alleged contribution of the Protestant reformation to the modern
world. According to one part of the story, the modern theory of constitutionalism
arose out of the monarchomach attack on tyranny and the subsequent ‘revolution
of the saints’. As Goldie and Brett both emphasise, however, one of my main
ambitions in volume II of Foundations was to establish that the arguments
deployed by the Protestant revolutionaries were almost entirely taken from
their Catholic enemies. It was in late-medieval conciliarism and in the natural-
law theories of the second scholastic that the fundamental concepts of modern
constitutionalism were originally forged.
According to a second element in the myth, the growth of constitutionalism in
the seventeenth century gave rise to a theory of liberty that proved to be among
the most valuable items in our intellectual heritage. The concept of liberty came
to be understood in negative terms as absence of interference, and it came to be
accepted that one of the principal duties of the state is to protect and enlarge this
area of non-interference as far as possible. However, as Geuna and van Gelderen
both point out, volume I of Foundations was in part designed to suggest that
the triumph of this vision of politics embodied a serious loss. The enthroning
of the idea of freedom as non-interference involved the rejection of a far more
exacting understanding of the concept that I associated with the humanism
of the Renaissance. According to the humanist ideal of the vivere libero, the
freedom of individual citizens is undermined not merely by active constraint
but also, and more fundamentally, by background conditions of dependence and
servitude. It was only with the rejection of this more democratic understanding
Surveying the Foundations 257
73 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
74 Pocock, ‘Foundations and moments’, in this volume, p. 43.
75 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Henry Hardy (ed.), Liberty (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002), pp. 166–217.
76 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, p. 170.
77 For Berlin’s different formulations of the concept see Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, pp. 178–80; on the
incompatibility between them see Quentin Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings
of the British Academy 117 (2002), pp. 237–68, at pp. 238–40.
78 See Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, p. 180, where ‘positive’ freedom is equated with self-realisation,
and above all with the idea (as Berlin expresses it) of my self at its best. His most considered
view of the positive concept is that, as he finally summarises (p. 180), ‘whatever is the true goal
of man . . . must be identical with his freedom’.
258 Quentin Skinner
83 Pocock, in this volume, p. 46. 84 Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents, pp. 66–70.
85 The term is sometimes printed as two words, sometimes as one, but is generally hyphenated.
86 See Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, pp. 250–3.
87 Henry Parker, Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses (London,
1642), pp. 9–10, 17, 43–4.
88 John Marsh, An Argument Or, Debate in Law (London, 1642), pp. 13, 24.
89 A Soveraigne Salve to Cure the Blind (London, 1643), pp. 16–17, 36–8.
90 An Honest Broker (London, 1643), Sig. C, 2v –3r , Sig. E, 3v –4v .
91 Touching the Fundamentall Lawes (London, 1643), pp. 10, 12 (recte 14).
92 John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme (London, 1642), pp. 38–9.
260 Quentin Skinner
crown’s opponents in early Stuart England. The basic contrast on which they
all insist is between liberty and dependence, and hence between free-men and
slaves. This is not a contrast that Berlin’s distinction between ‘positive’ liberty
and liberty as non-interference is capable of accommodating, and it may be
because Pocock continues to follow Berlin’s analysis that he remains, as he
puts it, ‘a little suspicious’ of my references to neo-Roman freedom.93 My own
view is that Berlin’s distinctions are best forgotten: when applied to the early-
modern period they are not only anachronistic but completely fail to capture
the range of categories in use at the time.
Despite these differences, I agree with Pocock that there is something ‘oddly
incomplete’ about the discussion of freedom and citizenship in early Stuart
England by comparison with Renaissance Italy.94 As I see it, the incompleteness
stems from the fact that almost nothing is said about the need for the body of the
people to cultivate the civic virtues. The reason, I would argue, is that the English
writers are no longer taking the polis or civitas as their model of civil association;
they are thinking instead about the government of large-scale territorial states.
Within such communities, as Henry Parker explains, the body of the people
is prevented by ‘the vastnesse of its owne bulke’ from being able to act for
itself. As a result, it is necessary ‘to regulate the motions’ of ‘so cumbersome
a body’, and the best method of regulation, as most countries have discovered,
is to institute representative assemblies to which the people hand over their
political rights to be exercised in their name.95 The people of England are being
told, in other words, that there is no longer any need for them to exercise the
qualities of active citizenship. They remain free-men, they are assured, because
the House of Commons ‘is’ (by the alchemy of representation) the body of the
people, so that the people may still be said to rule.96 Nevertheless, they are now
assigned a politically passive role all too familiar to us from our own frustrating
experience of living under modern democratic regimes.
Pocock ends by generously asking about the direction of my current research.
As will by now be clear, I have come to feel that among the key concepts in early-
modern political theory that need to be further explored are those of freedom and
representation, especially in relation to the ideal of popular sovereignty. These
were the topics on which I focused in my Ford Lectures, about which Pocock
enquires at the end of his chapter. I now hope to deepen my understanding of the
process by which the Renaissance ideals of civic liberty and self-government
came to be supplanted by the oxymoronic concept of representative democracy
throughout so much of the modern world.
V
While writing this reply to my critics, I have more than once found myself
thinking about Turner’s famous painting of the Téméraire. Against a setting
sun we see a steam tug towing the old sailing-ship away. The image is an
embarrassingly hackneyed one, but it is hardly surprising to find it flitting
through my mind. There is no denying that Foundations is a very ancient vessel
by the standards of contemporary scholarship. And although it is still afloat,
it is undoubtedly holed beneath the waterline in a number of places, as the
contributors to the present volume have all too clearly pointed out. But this
makes me all the more grateful to them for their willingness to write about
my book, and for their generosity in reconsidering and commenting on its
arguments. I thank them all, in Hobbes’s fine phrase, for thinking my studies
something.
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262
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Bibliography 287
288
Index 289
Bartolus of Sassoferrato 11, 12, 52, 116, 133, Calvinist political theory 13–15, 150–1,
153, 157, 166, 191 152–3, 156–8, 251
Baumgold, Deborah 209, 212 Calvino, Italo 10
Baxter, Richard 162 Cambridge History of Political Thought
Bayle, Pierre 199 1450–1700 139, 141
Bellarmine, Robert 15, 117, 163 Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy
Bentham, Jeremy 66 64, 69
Berlin, Isaiah 32, 43–4, 46, 48–9, 58–9, 65, Cambridge school of history 17–18, 95
66, 98–9, 257, 258–9, 260 Cano, Melchor 114, 143, 146
Beza (de Bèze), Théodore 14, 149 canon law 126, 135–6
Bidle, John 162 ‘canonical’ texts/study method 20–2
Bismarck, Otto von 16 objections to 8–9, 22, 24–5, 53–4, 241
Black, Anthony 54, 107, 179–80 qualifications for 84–5, 86–7
Boden, Joseph 166 see also Foundations . . .
Bodin, Jean 9, 11, 12, 13, 131, 182–3, 195, capitalism 8
196, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 248, 251 Carranza, Bartolomé 143
‘body politic’, notion of 98, 126, 179–81, 183, Carta, Paola 87
209–10, 214 Cassirer, Ernst 60, 239
la Boétie, Etienne de, De la servitude Cassius Dio 178
volontaire 73, 74, 84–8, 90, 91, 217, Catholicism, and political theory 16, 17,
245 137–8, 140–1, 256
Bolingbroke, Viscount 6–7, 10 Cavendish, William, second earl of
Boncompagno da Signa 52, 61 Devonshire 221, 222
The Siege of Ancona 76, 77 Horae Subsecivae see under Hobbes
Borrelli, Gianfranco 191 Cavour, Camillo de, Count 245
Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 16 Chabod, Federico 56, 58, 240
Böttcher, Diethelm 153 change (political), role of theory in 30
Boulainvilliers, Henri, comte de 13 Charles I of England 14, 43, 111–12, 165,
Boutcher, Warren ix, 245, 256 255
Bracciolini, Poggio 55 Charles IX of France 88
Bracton, Henry de 99 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 141, 143,
Brady, Robert 37 150, 154, 157, 166, 251
Bramhall, John 192, 208 Cicero, M. Tullius 12, 42, 44, 52, 53, 54, 61,
Brett, Annabel x, 149, 157, 236, 246–7, 63, 70, 96, 108, 136, 157, 161, 164, 178,
256 179, 181, 258
Brooke, Henry 10 De officiis 58, 121, 124
Brown, Alison 98 De optimo genere oratorum 77
Bruni, Leonardo 44–5, 51, 55, 59, 75, 77, 180, De republica 178
181 as translator 120
Buchanan, George 14, 15, 130–1, 139, citizens, concept/role in government 98,
149–50, 152, 161, 163, 165, 191 100–1, 102, 159, 174–5, 184–5
The Right of the Kingdom in Scotland Clarendon, Edward Hyde, earl of 211, 217
152 classics see canonical texts
Budé, Guillaume 8 Cleon (Athenian leader) 177
Bunel, Pierre 89 Collingwood, R. G. ix, 4, 20, 22–3, 24, 27,
Burke, Edmund 170 240, 241
Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques 229–30 Collinson, Patrick 97
Burns, James 138, 141 commerce, international/natural law of 226
Burton, Robert 112 commonwealth(s) (in Hobbesian terminology)
Butterfield, Herbert 16–17 184–5, 196, 208–10, 211–12
Bynkershoek, Cornelius van 229 defined 174–5
as international actor 226
Cajetan, Cardinal (Tommaso de Vio) 109, (mentality of) relations between 146,
110, 140, 143 227–8, 249–50
Calvin, Jean 12, 128, 149, 152, 165 origins 208, 212, 213
290 Index
Salmon, John 11, 139, 161 ‘History and Ideology in the English
Salomonio, Mario 132, 152, 157, 160, Revolution’ 3
191 ‘History of Political Thought, 1500–1800’
De Principatu 158 13
Salutati, Coluccio 51 ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: philosophical
Samaritano, Adalberto 52 and historical perspectives’ 58, 65–9
Sandel, Michael 66–7 impact on contemporaries 39–40,
Sasso, Gennaro 56, 240 49, 68
Savonarola, Girolamo 132 influences viii–x, 3, 20, 51, 240–1
Saxony, Elector of 153 innovatory approach 53
Schmitt, Carl 232 intellectual objectives 6
scholasticism 53, 54, 113, 246–8 Liberty before Liberalism 32, 46, 50,
assimilation into academic methodology 69–72, 94–5, 97, 102
129 ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti: the Artist as Political
broadening of definition 117–18 Philosopher’ 63–4
contemporary use of term 113–14 Machiavelli 55
internal differences 142 ‘Machiavelli and the Maintenance of
narrowly defined 114–17 Liberty’ 65–9
political/intellectual context 142–3 ‘Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the
political theory 125, 128–9, 130–1, 132–7, Pre-humanist Origins of Republican
139–42, 144–8, 247–8 Ideas’ 63, 64
terminology 114, 131–2 ‘Meaning and Understanding’ 8, 56–7
Schorn-Schütte, Luise 154 methodology ix, 3–4, 20–1, 27, 31, 33, 58,
scientia, academic concept of 121–3, 124–5, 73, 93–6, 142, 237–8, 241
128 ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’
Scipio Africanus (the Younger) 178 164–5
Scott, Jonathan 161, 162, 167, 168 ‘Motives, Intentions and Interpretation’ 26
Scotus, Duns 116 ‘The Paradoxes of Political Liberty’
Searle, John R. 242 65–9
Sebond, Raymond 89 philosophical approach 64–5
Seeley, Sir John 17–18 ‘Political Philosophy’ 93–4
Segonio, Carlo 182 possible future directions 48, 260
Seigel, Jerrold 51, 73 ‘The Principles and Practices of Opposition:
self-defence see armed resistance the Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole ‘
Seneca, L. Annaeus 54, 63, 70, 179, 6–7, 10
181 qualities as teacher 171
De clementia 58 qualities as writer 113
Shakespeare, William 9, 59 Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of
Richard III 166 Hobbes 46, 58, 100, 203
Shklar, Judith 9 ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’
Sidney, Algernon 66, 69, 167, 168–9 65–9
Sidney, Sir Henry 82 ‘The Rise of, Challenge to, and Prospects
Sidney, Sir Philip 10, 73, 91 for a Collingwoodian Approach to the
Arcadia 74, 79–81, 82–4 History of Political Thought’ 26
A Letter to Queen Elizabeth 77, 81–2 A Third Concept of Liberty 46
Siéyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, Abbé 189 ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the virtue of
Simon, Yves 210 true nobility’ 99–101
Skinner, Quentin treatment of opposing viewpoints 65–7, 72,
approach to history 112 73–4, 78
comments on own work 12, 31, 32, 71, 237, Visions of Politics 39, 41, 43, 45–6, 50,
238, 242–5, 246–7, 248, 257 71–2, 93, 94, 95, 96–8, 101, 137
critiques of predecessors/colleagues 4–5, 8, slavery 47, 211
30–1, 41, 54, 64 Smith, Sir Thomas 97
The Foundations of Modern Political social order, theories of 162–4
Thought see separate main heading Socrates 254
Index 297
Weber, Max 3–4, 7, 11, 13, 15, 16, 29, 152–3, Woolfson, Jonathan 97
243 Woolsey, Theodore, Introduction to the Study
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of of International Law 231
Capitalism 8 Wootton, David 131
Weiss, Matthias 155 Worden, Blair 79, 81, 82, 94–5, 97, 112
Westphalia, treaty of (1648) 147–8, 234
Wieruszowski, Hélène 52 Xenophon 199
William III of England (William of Orange)
169–70 Zabarella, Francesco 9
Witt, Ronald 51 Zamoscus 182
Wittgenstein, Ludwig ix, 4, 20, 24, 25, 28, 58, Zasius, Ulrich 9
242 Zouche, Richard 228–9