Visions of Politics. Vol. 1, Regarding Method.

Quentin Skinner. Visions of Politics. Vol. 1, Regarding Method.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvi + 210 pp. index. bibl. $65 (cl), $23 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-58105-2 (cl), 0-521-58926-6 (pbk).

Quentin Skinner. Visions of Politics. Vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ix + 462 pp. + 12 col. pls. index. illus. bibl. $65 (cl), $23 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-58106-0 (cl), 0-521-58925-8 (pbk).

Quentin Skinner. Visions of Politics. Vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvii + 386 pp. index. bibl. $65 (cl), $23 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-81368-9 (cl), 0-521-89060-8 (pbk).

Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge since 1997, ranks among the most original, prolific, and widely admired contemporary historians of early modern political thought. Thirty-six essays published between 1965 and 2001 have been revised, rebaptized with new titles, and republished in the volumes under review. In addition to the correction of errors and the introduction of gender-neutral language, Skinner has included new research, an updated bibliography, and the latest replies to his critics. Cutting and pasting, he has also fused parts of different essays and eliminated distracting rhetorical flourishes. The revisions are testimony to the author's industry and admirable resistance to treating his own utterances as immaculately conceived.

The revisions have also been subjected to criticism. For one thing, anyone intent on charting Skinner's intellectual development and career, from the excitement of discovery and the polemics of the earliest essays to the eventual institutionalization of his intellectual agenda at Cambridge University, must return to his writings as they were originally published. For another, in revising essays that were written in the heat of earlier debates, Skinner has been charged with violating his own teachings on the priority of situating texts in their relevant ideological and linguistic contexts. In addition, I believe that readers would have benefited if Skinner had embraced the editorial principle that less is more and republished fewer essays. Two volumes of essays would have been sufficient. Editorial self-restraint would have reduced repetitious and overlapping passages that made me feel on occasion that the essay I was reading was a rerun of one I had just read.

A master revisionist, Skinner, in his essays and books--the Foundations of Political Thought (1978), Machiavelli (1981), and Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996)--has sought to provoke a rethinking of contested concepts, including citizenship, liberty, state, and sovereignty. His overarching aim, he explains, has been to illuminate the history of two central, yet rival, visions of politics that continue to be debated: "One speaks of sovereignty as 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 representative of the state. One assigns priority to the duties of citizens, the other to their rights" (1:viii).

Acknowledging that his own methodological agenda is indebted to the ideas of, among others, Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, J. G. A. Pocock, and Clifford Geertz, Skinner has waged an assault on the study of political thought grounded in a determinate set of past canonical authors for the ahistorical purpose of recuperating universal truths and timeless fundamental concepts. He has excoriated scholars on the left and right--for instance, Leo Strauss and his disciples--who transformed (and deformed) the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke into anticipations of their own politically and socially engaged agendas. Mercilessly deconstructing Geoffrey Elton's pronouncements on writing objective history, he shows that the meaning of ideas in the early modern period cannot be boiled down to self-evident facts ordered objectively and dispassionately into a narrative of origins and endings, causes and effects. What one takes to be a simple fact may actually represent an "oblique rhetorical strategy" on which the meaning of an expression depends. The texts from which we derive so-called facts demand meaningful interpretation.

But how does one avoid committing the intellectual transgressions of anachronism and Whig history? First, one must treat past beliefs and ideas, no matter how bizarre or irrational they may appear today when measured against contemporary standards of knowledge, as "rational" to the persons holding them. Second, one must focus on the questions to which the beliefs and ideas were addressed (as Skinner's idol, R. G. Collingwood, insisted) and the larger ideological contexts in which the beliefs and ideas were held. These exhortations are unexceptionable and were long ago put into practice by anthropologically inclined social historians. Yet Skinner's approach differs from the social historians' in that the ideological context refers not to socioeconomic patterns and institutions but to proximate and remote linguistic contexts in which thinkers perform speech acts. Skinner's commandment to banish all forms of present-mindedness from the act of historical interpretation may be commendable as an ideal, but it is intellectually and psychologically impossible to carry out. It is delusional to imagine that one can put oneself into the nuanced life of someone who lived in Quattrocento Italy. Further, as Skinner is well aware, excessive historicism can easily descend into an unthinking acceptance of all sorts of odious beliefs, such as the rampant anti-Semitism and misogyny characteristic of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Skinner's methodology is amply displayed in the classic essays on Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Machiavelli, More, Milton, and Bolingbroke (vol. 2) and on Hobbes (vol. 3). If each essay can be read its own right, the essays are also united by thematic coherence. Skinner finds Hans Baron's research on civic humanism worthy, but disagrees with Baron that the Renaissance was a period that commenced in Florence around 1402. Instead he locates the origins of the Renaissance in the activities and writings of republican and pre-humanist rhetoricians and historians operating in the Italian communes of north and central Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. His account of Italian pre-humanism, indebted to Kristeller, must now be read together with the magisterial works of Ronald Witt (2000) and Robert Black (2001) on the medieval origins of Renaissance humanism. What is valuable in Skinner's account is a demonstration of the indelible impact of the republican ideology of Cicero and Sallust on the moral-political thought of the humanists. On the other hand, Skinner's enthusiasm for neo-Ciceronian humanism is marred by the recurring anachronisms and pejoratives "schoolmen" and "scholastics" to designate invidiously a rather diverse body of university-trained theologians and jurists, and "scholasticism" as a blanket term to characterize their complex and varied ideas.

Five concepts of what Skinner styles, with admiration, the neo-Roman ideal of free citizens and free states are put into relief. First is the civil status of free persons (libertas), to be distinguished from the status of slaves, who are subject to the arbitrary will of another. Second is the free state (civitas libera), referring to an independent self-governing political body "in which the will of its citizens is recognized as the basis of law and government" (2:6). Next are the citizens (cives). In contrast to subjects (subditi), who must comply with laws imposed on them by a superior, citizens are the ultimate source of the laws which, as a matter of self-governance, they willingly obey. Fourth is the active participation of citizens in serving the common welfare of their city-republic. Fifth is the cultivation among the cityrepublic's citizens of manly civic virtue, which includes prudence, courage, and temperance and on which the welfare and the glory of the city-republic depend. The neo-Roman ideal of liberty and participative citizenship, with few exceptions (Florence and Venice), was trampled in Italy by tyrants and signori, sustained as well as subverted by Machiavelli, and wielded by neo-Harringtonian thinkers against the Stuart monarchy. The greatest challenge to the neo-Roman tradition came from Hobbes, whose theory of sovereignty collapsed the essential distinction between subject and citizen.

As in any collection of studies that ranges impressively over a capacious intellectual territory, there are inevitable soft spots and shortcomings, many of which could have been averted if Skinner had systematically consulted European and American scholarship of the past twenty-five years. For example, the scholarship on the treatment of jurisdiction by the Bolognese jurist Azo and his followers is extensive, and in it Skinner would have discovered that the story about the Emperor Henry VI (not Henry IV) and the glossator Lothair is apocryphal. Similarly, the Regnum Italicum does not include all the cities and territories directly north of Rome (e.g., the Papal State). He would have profited from the instructive scholarship of Ulrich Meier and Klaus Schreiner on the theological, philosophical, and legal conceptions of liberty and citizenship in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy, Alberto Tenenti's and Bueno de Mesquita's valuable contributions to the concept of the state in the Renaissance, and the many studies of Diego Quaglioni on the contributions of jurists to late-medieval and early modern political thought. Skinner's observation that the transformation of communes with elective governments into regimes ruled by signori was generally accepted by the "the relevant body of citizens" is untenable. Which specific body of citizens was relevant, and which irrelevant? We are never told. The source for his observation is Francesco Ercole's books Dal comune al principato (1929) and Da Bartolo all'Althusio (1932), which appeared when their author was a member of the Partito nazionale fascista. Ercole, who detested the untidy world of medieval republicanism and pronounced Bartolus of Sassoferrato's influential condemnation of tyranny dead on arrival, silently overlooked the brutal and bloody acts (including the murder, exile, and confiscation of property of their enemies) committed by the signori in illegitimately seizing and maintaining power.

The introduction of gender-neutral language hardly suffices for the lack of attention given to women as cives. Skinner implies that since the humanists placed a premium on the manly pursuit of glory, resulting in the exclusion of women from civic life, he himself had no alternative but to exclude them from his own study. His position is unpersuasive, and worse, unwittingly serves to validate the humanists' anti-feminism. The chief justification for the exclusion of women from public office and functions was not, as Skinner assumes, their alleged lack of manly virtues per se. Rather, it was based on the authority of Aristotle, who asserted in the Politics that women could never be complete citizens, for it was in men's nature to command and in women's to obey, and on the authority of Justinian's Corpus iuris, which declared unconditionally that women are excluded from all civil and public duties and therefore may not be judges or magistrates. Yet it is a fatal mistake to assume, as Skinner does, that since women did not play a significant role in the politics of city-republics that they were absent from public life. The myriad ways thousands of women citizens of different social classes are visible in public documents as property holders, taxpayers, state creditors, workers, procurators, and litigants, claiming private and public rights and fulfilling civic obligations, are well known to archival historians.

The moral welfare and financial security of every city, whether an oligarchic republic or one ruled by a prince, moreover, was contingent on the moral virtues of its female citizenry. How else does one explain the stream of municipal laws concerned with preserving the morality of women's monasteries, with the sumptuary legislation restricting women's ability to wear expensive clothing and accessories, and with marriage and the limitation on the size of dowries? Indeed, the single largest item in the government's budget of mid-Quattrocento Florence was the obligations incurred by the city's Dowry Fund. The Florentine humanist Matteo Palmieri was on target in his Della vita civile when he envisaged his native city as a body of interconnected lineages. Women, of course, were crucial in cementing alliances among patrician case and in the perpetuation of the political classes.

Skinner's methodological and substantive essays are essential reading for historians of political thought, for whom the archeology of early modern conceptual vocabularies and organizing principles of political conduct are paramount. But the volumes will be of less interest to historians whose vision of what constitutes the Renaissance political universe encompasses institutions, family matters, public finance, as well as political and legal thought.

JULIUS KIRSHNER

University of Chicago