Professor Skinner's Visions

Skinner's Method and Its Context

Skinner is a (perhaps indeed the) leading light among the Cambridge ‘new historians’ who, since the 1960s, have advanced a distinctive programme of historical research and textual interpretation. Its origins may be traced in part to R. G. Collingwood's approach to the history of philosophy (Collingwood, 1978 [1939]; compare Skinner, 2001; I, p. 83). That history, he said, was not about an eternal but finite set of questions to which different philosophers have proposed different answers; it was, rather, about historically variable problems to which particular philosophers proposed particular answers. In his Autobiography Collingwood wrote:

If there were a permanent problem P, we could ask ‘what did Kant, or Leibniz, or Berkeley, think about P?’ … But what is thought to be a permanent problem P is really a number of transitory problems p₁ p₂ p₃ … whose individual peculiarities are blurred by the historical myopia of the person who lumps them together under the one name P (Collingwood, 1978 [1939], p. 69).

In contrast to those who claim that there are ‘perennial’ questions or problems in philosophy and political theory Collingwood argued that the questions themselves change in subtle but significant ways. If we are to understand the meaning of something that a particular political theorist wrote, we must first understand the problem they were addressing and attempting to solve.

Something like this Collingwoodian approach informs Peter Laslett's lengthy and learned introduction to his edition of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Laslett, 1960), which restored Locke's political treatise to its political and historical context in the Exclusion Crisis of the early 1680s. Far from having his head in the clouds of philosophical abstraction, Locke was deeply involved in the radical parliamentary politics of the Shaftesbury circle. By means of some brilliant historical detective work, Laslett showed that Locke's Two Treatises had been written nearly a decade earlier than anyone had heretofore supposed and that, far from offering a post hoc justification of the Glorious Revolution, Locke was prescribing and legitimising just that sort of revolutionary action, and well before the fact. Laslett's scholarly sleuthing paved the way for subsequent interpretations of Locke by John Dunn, James Tully and Richard Ashcraft in particular, and of other works of political theory more generally.

If Laslett was circumspect about articulating and defending his method of historical investigation and textual interpretation, others were not. J. G. A. Pocock, John Dunn and – most especially and extensively – Quentin Skinner mounted deflationary critiques of traditional ‘textbook’ approaches to the interpretation of works of political theory. Despite minor disagreements, they agreed that most of what has heretofore passed as the history of political theory has been insufficiently historical, i.e. concerned with the context and situation in which Locke and others found themselves and the problems with which they dealt. Skinner and his fellow Cambridge historians view works of political theory as forms of political action, grasping the point or meaning of which requires that one recover the intentions of the actor/author and the linguistic resources and conventions available to him or her (I, chs 3–7).

One of Skinner's principal innovations has been to incorporate ‘speech act’ theory, as formulated by J. L. Austin and further developed by John Searle and others, into the interpretation of texts in political theory (see especially I, ch. 6). According to this view, a work of political theory is itself a political act or intervention consisting of a series of interconnected actions with words – ‘speech acts’ in Austin's sense – that are intended to produce certain effects in the reader: to warn, to persuade, to criticise, to frighten, to encourage, to console, etc. Political theorists have not, by and large, been armchair philosophers engaged in abstract thinking; they have been political actors engaged in high-level propaganda and persuasion on behalf of this or that political cause: the critique (or defence) of democracy; the critique (or defence) of royal absolutism; likewise for religious toleration, resistance and regicide, the French (or other) revolutions, capitalism, the emancipation of slaves and/or women, and so on, through a rather long list of political causes and campaigns. Textual interpretation is largely a matter of restoring a text to the historical context in which it was composed and the question(s) to which it was offered as an answer or the problem(s) to which it was proposed as a solution.

The first volume of Professor Skinner's Visions – Regarding Method – opens with a brief overview and defence of his method (he stoutly eschews ‘methodology’). The title of the introductory essay – ‘Seeing Things Their Way’ – nicely captures Skinner's sense that we modern interpreters ought not to impose our own concepts, categories and concerns upon texts written by authors long dead. Rather we should, in so far as possible, try to inhabit their world instead of making them inhabit ours and forcing them to address questions and concerns that they would have found alien if not incomprehensible. Skinner's conception of historical understanding bears more than a passing resemblance to the late Clifford Geertz's view of anthropological explanation in the latter's ‘From the Natives’ Point of View’ and other seminal essays (Geertz, 1983). (The resemblance is hardly surprising inasmuch as Skinner and Geertz were long-time friends and fellows at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and the influence and indebtedness apparently ran both ways.) To ‘see things their way’ is not somehow to read their minds (as if that were even possible) or to experience a sense of Einfühlung or to walk in their shoes; it is, rather, to reconstruct the conceptual and imaginative framework through which they view the world and act in it through deeds and (to paraphrase Wittgenstein) with words that are deeds. What concepts and categories are available to political thinkers and actors in a particular culture and age? How do they use particular words (or combinations thereof) to perform this or that speech act? What (for example) is Hobbes doing when in Leviathan he defines liberty as ‘the absence of external impediments’ to motion (Tuck, 1996, ch.14)? (He was in fact repudiating and attempting to replace the old civic republican understanding of liberty as requiring self-rule. What at first sight looks like a descriptive scientific definition of a term actually has a political and polemical intention [III, ch. 7]). How are we to understand puzzling silences or omissions – as when, for example, Machiavelli omits any mention of ‘justice'? These are among the questions that are to be addressed and answered if we are to ‘see things their way’.

A good many of Skinner's critics have not seen fit to see things his way. Margaret Leslie (1970) and Joseph Femia (1988), among others, have taken Skinner to task for his critique of anachronistic readings of texts and have mounted their own ‘defence of anachronism’ (Leslie, 1970). Strained analogies, and even anachronisms, as Femia and Leslie aver, may, in the hands of an ingenious writer such as Antonio Gramsci, prove to be politically persuasive when addressed to a certain sort of audience. In redescribing the Communist party as the ‘modern prince’, Gramsci (1971) adapted and made creative use of what he took to be Machiavelli's notion of a ruthless and all-powerful principe. On Gramsci's reading, the party, like Machiavelli's prince, must be prepared to use guile, cunning, deceit and violence to achieve worthy ends. By substituting ‘party’ for ‘prince’ Gramsci was able to adapt Machiavelli's arguments to a more modern context. That Gramsci's use of Machiavelli's text was admittedly anachronistic is beside the point. For as a political actor Gramsci had, and used, the political equivalent of poetic licence.

Skinner's rejoinder, in effect, is that no such licence is granted to historians of political thought. For if we are to understand the meaning that particular terms, utterances, claims and arguments had for certain authors and their audiences then surely we must, at a minimum, know something about the linguistic conventions of the day and the political concepts, languages or idioms available to them. Thus it would in this instance be important to note, for example, that the modern concept of the ‘political party’, as understood by Gramsci and his audience, was not available to Machiavelli and his contemporaries (Ball, 1989). One might also note that certain key concepts in Machiavelli's vocabulary, such as fortuna, have no place in, and are indeed at odds with, Gramsci's own rather more deterministic Marxian framework. To make these observations is of course to take nothing away from Gramsci, who wrote not as a scholar or historian but as an engaged political actor and activist. An interpretation may be adjudged good (innovative, ingenious, path-breaking, persuasive, etc.) on political grounds even as it is adjudged deficient on scholarly grounds, and vice versa. In short, Skinner draws a fairly sharp distinction between historians of political thought like himself and ‘innovating ideologists’ such as Machiavelli (and Gramsci). An innovating ideologist attempts, via a variety of rhetorical stratagems and other ploys, to ‘legitimise some form of social behaviour generally agreed to be questionable’ (I, p. 148).

We must remember that political actors, past and present, are apt to fight dirty by, for example, misrepresenting opponents’ views, constructing arguments ad hominem and using almost any rhetorical weapon that comes to hand. And success in such endeavours depends, as often as not, upon one side's skill or sheer good luck in hitting upon an illuminating image or telling metaphor to make its case persuasive or at least palatable (Ball and Pocock, 1988, p. 2). But it is also important, as Skinner reminds us repeatedly, to note that such arguments and appeals must be tailored to the tastes, standards and outlook of the audience at which they are aimed. If one fails to take one's audience's attitudes, beliefs and standards into account, one runs the grave risk of having one's actions viewed as unintelligible and/or illegitimate. Both desiderata – intelligibility and legitimacy – are, for political agents, considerations of surpassing importance. As Skinner notes elsewhere, the problem facing an agent who wishes to legitimate what he is doing at the same time as gaining what he wants cannot simply be the instrumental problem of tailoring his normative language in order to fit his projects. It must in part be the problem of tailoring his projects in order to fit the available normative language (Skinner, 1978, vol. I, pp. xii–xiii; see also I, pp. 148–9).

And, as often as not, the available normative language is more malleable than one might think. Through rhetorical redescription untoward actions, proposals or policies can be painted in a positive light and made to appear more attractive than they otherwise would be. Skinner pays particularly close attention to paradiastole, the rhetorical technique of changing an audience's attitudes by making vices into virtues, and vice (sic) versa – a technique that he traces as far back as Thucydides’ account of the revolution at Corcyra in Book 3 of his History of the Pelopponesian War (III, pp. 113–4).

Another criticism levelled repeatedly (and in my view wrongly) against Skinner is that the recovery of authorial intention, even if possible in principle, is unimportant or irrelevant in interpretive practice. For, these critics contend, even if we accept Skinner's claim that political writing is a species of action, the fact remains that these sorts of actions – like all human actions – sometimes misfire and produce consequences unintended, unforeseen and perhaps even unforeseeable by the actor/author. Hence to recover an author's aims or intentions, even if possible, is beside the point (Boucher, 1985; Shapiro, 1982). The history of political thought is, or at any rate should be, about the consequences of actions, i.e. the uses to which an author's ideas were later put by actors whose interpretation of the meaning of a term (utterance, phrase, passage or entire text) may not and need not accord with the author's own intentions. Or, to put it another way, the historian's task is to trace the unintended consequences of purposive political action, in this instance the action of writing a political tract or treatise.

While it is of course true that actions, including the act of writing, often produce unintended consequences, the claim that intentions do not matter does not follow. For it is logically impossible to claim validly that a certain consequence X was unintended unless one can do two things. One must first be able to identify and describe what consequence(s) the author actually did intend (or could conceivably have intended) to bring about; and then one must note that X differs from the end(s) that the author (could conceivably have) intended to bring about. In other words, the very identification of a consequence as ‘unintended’ logically requires that one be able to identify what the agent's/author's intentions actually are, or were. Hence it cannot be the case that reference to an author's intention(s) is irrelevant or beside the point – particularly for anyone wishing to write the history of political thought (or particular episodes therein) as the story of ‘unintended consequences'! A good many dismissive assertions about the supposed irrelevance of intentions are wrecked on the reef of this logical commonplace, and I find it surprising that Skinner does not avail himself of this rather obvious line of defence (see I, pp. 109–10).

A further criticism commonly levelled against Skinner's method is that it produces purely ‘antiquarian’ accounts of politics and political theories past that have no bearing on present-day political theorising. Toward the end of Regarding Method Skinner resolutely (and rightly) rejects that charge, arguing that frameworks, concepts and categories change over time as authors and audiences attempt to cope with changing circumstances and new problems of political and social life. Any attempt to devise a theory that purports to freeze historical time is a misguided and mistaken denial of the reality of ‘conceptual change’, i.e. the fact that concepts have historically mutable meanings (or rather, more precisely, concepts are put to different uses by actors/authors in different eras and circumstances). And yet a number of modern theorists – John Rawls perhaps most notably – have attempted this Canute-like feat. Without ever mentioning Rawls by name Skinner comes out squarely

against all those neo-Kantian projects of our time in which we encounter an aspiration to halt the flux of politics by trying definitively to fix the analysis of key moral terms [e.g. justice]. I continue to harbour a special prejudice against those who, in adopting this approach, imagine an ideal speech situation in which everyone (everyone?) would make the same moral and cognitive judgements. There are no moral and cognitive judgements which are not mediated by our concepts, and it seems to me that even our most apparently abstract concepts are historical through and through (I, p. 177, emphasis in the original).

Thus Skinner's method leads not only to a concern with understanding theories past, but with politics and political theorising in the present, and pungent proscriptions about how not to theorise. But the merit of any method is to be found in what it does (or does not) yield in actual historical and interpretive practice. And on that score Skinner delivers the goods, as can be seen again and again in the second and third volumes of his Visions.

Reappraising the Renaissance

The second volume of Skinner's trilogy – Renaissance Virtues – opens with a resounding reaffirmation of ‘the reality of the Renaissance’. Against scholars who argue that ‘the Renaissance’ never happened, or that the term is too vague to denote any historical reality, or that it is an academic myth created by historical naïfs, Skinner says that ‘there is no escaping the fact that … there was something that, for some people, was undoubtedly reborn and restored’. He hastens to add that we of course cannot ‘point to a determinate moment at which (to invoke the other traditional metaphor) the dark ages ended and a new light began to dawn’ (II, p. 1). While there was no sudden and ‘decisive break’ between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there was arguably a gradual rebirth of classical learning. ‘If there was a rebirth, it was a protracted and difficult one’. It began in the twelfth century when ‘the Italian universities emerged as centres for the teaching of Roman law’ and the studia humanitatis, which included rhetoric, history and moral philosophy (II, p. 2). Unlike the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, whose teaching relied on reason and demonstrative proofs, Renaissance humanists emphasised the ars rhetorica and the indispensability of ‘eloquence’ and persuasion. They also espoused a Ciceronian-humanist view of history, viz. that one studies the past in order to learn lessons concerning the conduct of political life in the present. Sallust, Livy and other Roman historians were read as teachers of prudence and the other political virtues. And, not least, Renaissance humanists turned to classical moral theory for advice and guidance.

This was also the period in which ‘republican values’ were being ‘rediscovered’ in Italy (II, ch. 2) and ‘the state’ was beginning to acquire its modern meaning (II, ch. 14). In the late eleventh century the city states of Italy began to develop a recognisably ‘republican’ form of government that required legitimation, in as much as church orthodoxy ordained that monarchy was the best regime and that ‘all governments are imposed by God's ordinance as a remedy for human sinfulness’ (II, p. 31). Such legitimation came from several sources. One was the ‘Glossators [who] were beginning to reinterpret the passages on public law in Justinian's Digest in such a way as to support rather than to question the autonomy of the cities and their elective forms of government’ (II, p. 13). Another source was the Roman moralists and historians, particularly Cicero and Sallust (II, p. 18). And yet another (and later) fount of republican values was William of Moerbeke's translation of Aristotle's Politics (II, p. 30). ‘Aristotle gave [such authors as Giles of Rome and Marsilius of Padua] a new confidence as well as a new armoury of concepts’ with which they challenged church orthodoxy and created (or rather recreated) republican political discourse (II, p. 31, pp. 37–8). Republican political practice proved a bit more problematic, however, because ‘By the end of the thirteenth century … it appeared to … many commentators that self-government had simply proved a recipe for endless civil strife’ and that ‘it will always be safer to entrust our community to the strong government of a single signore or hereditary prince’ (II, p. 118). In this atmosphere the ancient philosopher-hero was not Aristotle but his teacher Plato and his Italian political progeny who mounted a ‘defence of the despotism of the wise’ (II, pp. 139–41). It was this mantle that the Medici, among others, assumed. Machiavelli stands astride the divide between monarchists and republicans, having written advice books for both (II, pp. 142–57).

Our modern concept of ‘the state’ is so common and so pervasive that we are apt to overlook the fact that it once represented a rather startling innovation in political theory and practice. Before the advent of ‘the state’ the sovereignty of the ruler resided in his person and the loyalty of subjects was owed not to an abstract institution but to the person of the ruler. When Machiavelli advised a prince mantanere lo stato he did not (quite yet) mean to ‘maintain the state’ but rather to maintain or uphold the status or ‘standing’ of the ruler (principe) (II, p. 374). In the century following Thomas Hobbes was among the first to speak of ‘the state’ as an agency distinct from the ‘natural person’ of the ruler, and, indeed, as an ‘artificial person’ in its own right (II, p. 404) – a startling conceptual innovation to which Skinner gives further and fuller treatment in ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State’ (III, ch. 6), and which I shall consider in the section following.

Renaissance Virtues is the longest and most varied of the three volumes of Visions of Politics. It includes two essays on the political meaning and import of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's series of frescoes depicting virtuous and tyrannical governments, painted in Siena in the late 1330s (II, chs 3 and 4), and which are beautifully illustrated with twelve colour plates. Skinner shows that their inspiration and provenance is – contrary to conventional scholarly wisdom – not Aristotelian but Roman. There are also paired essays on Machiavelli's view of liberty in which Skinner argues convincingly that the Florentine subscribed to a ‘negative’ view of liberty which nonetheless requires free citizens to perform public service – a view eschewed by modern negative theorists such as Isaiah Berlin as foreign to negative liberty and possible only under the aegis of ‘positive’ liberty (II, chs 6 and 7). In showing how and why the latter are mistaken Skinner demonstrates how historical inquiry can dissolve established philosophical dogmas and orthodoxies.

Even so, Skinner's feel for what one might term the literary dimensions of the texts he studies sometimes leaves something to be desired. To cite but one of several instances: the interpretation advanced in Skinner's superlative study of Thomas More's Utopia (II, ch. 8) relies in part on his reading of More's title page. ‘Almost everything about Thomas More's Utopia is debatable’, Skinner writes with some understatement, ‘but at least the general subject-matter of the book is not in doubt. More announces his theme on the title-page, which reads: De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia. His concern, that is, is … with “the best state of a commonwealth”’ (II, p. 213). One of More's main intentions in writing Utopia is to sketch in some detail the kind of social, economic and political system that would be most conducive to that end.

But what Skinner's brief and seemingly literal reading of More's title page omits entirely is that Utopia is further said by More on the very same page to be libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus – a ‘truly golden handbook, no less beneficial than entertaining’ (Logan and Adams, 2002). Given what More says about gold in Utopia – viz. that it is valued only by children, Europeans and ninnies, and is in fact fit only for slaves’ chains and chamber pots – his calling Utopia a ‘golden handbook’ suggests in a self-mocking way that its contents may be of questionable value, except perhaps as entertainment or as a decorative bauble. Here, as so often in Utopia, More says something that seems seriously meant (that his topic is ‘the best state of the commonwealth’), only to undercut it with whimsy or irony (that his is a ‘truly golden handbook’). Thus it seems to me that the meaning of More's text (including its title page) is a good deal less determinate than Skinner suggests, and lends itself to a variety of interpretations and leaves its author's intentions (intentionally?) unclear and ambiguous, not to say multiple and contradictory. Utopia sometimes seems a kind of Derridean dream in which the text's ‘signifiers’ float freely and playfully apart, awaiting an attentive and imaginative reader to put them back together as his or her fancy dictates. Skinner is surely among More's most attentive and imaginative readers; but in the end his is but one of several ways of putting the pieces together and teasing out their meaning.

Hobbes’ Civil Science Reconsidered

The third and final volume of Visions of Politics is devoted to Thomas Hobbes, the most systematic seventeenth-century critic of civic humanism and Renaissance republican political thought. Skinner is particularly concerned to trace the twists and turns in Hobbes’ thought. Very roughly and crudely, Skinner discerns three fairly distinct periods in Hobbes’ life. Hobbes began as a devotee of the studia humanitatis, as exemplified by his translation of and introduction to Thucydides’ History in 1629. Hobbes’ introduction is the very model of a humanist text, employing all the conventions and practices of the ars rhetorica to make an eloquent and persuasive case that the study of history provides the surest guide to the present and future (III, ch. 2). In the second phase of his life Hobbes repudiated the classical Ciceronian conception of scientia civilis which combined reason with rhetoric in favour of a more truly ‘scientific’ approach involving deductive reasoning from first premises, and primly eschewing ‘eloquence’ and the tricks of the rhetorician's trade, including paradiastole and the practice of arguing both sides of any question with equal persuasive force. Demonstrative reasoning would henceforth replace rhetoric. This middle period saw the publication of The Elements of Law in 1640 (Tönnies, 1928) and more especially De Cive in 1642 (Tuck and Silverthorne, 1998), both of which are spare and shorn of rhetorical colour and flourish. In Hobbes’ third period he came to recognise that ‘science is small power’ in comparison with rhetoric or ‘eloquence’, and averred that the latter must henceforth serve the former. Eloquence in the service of science produced Hobbes’ greatest and most memorable work, Leviathan (1651), which Skinner reckons was written in a mere eighteen months (III, p. 19).

In ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’ (III, ch. 5) Skinner shows that in antiquity and again during the Renaissance, laughter was no laughing matter, and was indeed a subject for serious philosophical and medical investigation. Aristotle was arguably the first in a surprisingly long line of philosophers and physicians to inquire in a serious and systematic way into the causes of this apparently uniquely human phenomenon. Laughter was linked with wit which was in turn tied to derision: someone who thinks himself to be in a position of superiority is likely to laugh at the infirmities or deformities of his or her inferiors. There were disagreements aplenty as to whether this or other rival theories were adequate, as Skinner shows in characteristically meticulous detail. But what (you ask) does this have to do with politics? For Hobbes, just this: derisive laughter is a form of insult and injury to the person on the receiving end of such ridicule; resentment and a desire for revenge are the all but inevitable result; and laughter is thus a violation of the ‘articles of peace’ that comprise the law of nature, and laughter therefore poses a danger to peace and public order (III, p. 172). The risible is the political only in a negative sense.

Yet Skinner is arguably mistaken in finding a ‘tension’ (not to say contradiction) between Hobbes’ politic condemnation of laughter and the ‘withering tones of scorn and contempt that Hobbes liked to visit upon his intellectual adversaries, in particular the schoolmen whom he mocks so relentlessly in Book 4 of Leviathan’ (III, p. 176). But this seems to me something like a category mistake, inasmuch as heaping scorn upon long-dead intellectual adversaries – Cicero, as well as Aristotle and his scholastic successors (St Thomas Aquinas foremost among them) – is of a quite different order than one citizen heaping scorn upon another living contemporary. The schoolmen targeted by Hobbes were long dead and he was by then hardly alone in ridiculing these already stock figures of fun. Some 40 years later, when John Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding these same schoolmen and their prime mover Aristotle had long since become the butt of philosophers’ jibes – including the only joke Locke ever told in print. Chiding the schoolmen Locke retorted, ‘But God was not so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational’ (Nidditch, 1975, Bk IV, ch. 17) – a jest of which Hobbes might have approved heartily had he not died a dozen years earlier.

In ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State’ (III, ch.6) Skinner further develops his interpretation (introduced in II, ch. 14) of a major conceptual innovation – ‘the state’ – which has loomed large in the discourse of modern politics and political theory. In the emergence of ‘the state’ Hobbes, though hardly alone, was innovator-in-chief. Before the invention of ‘the state’ the sovereignty of the ruler resided in his person and his subjects owed allegiance not to the abstract institution of the state but to the person of the ruler.

Hobbes’ conception of the state relies in large part upon the distinction he draws between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ persons in chapter 16 of Leviathan:

A PERSON, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing, to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction. When they are considered as his own, then he is called a natural person: and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then is he a feigned or artificial person. [Emphasis in the original.]

After quoting this passage Skinner writes:

Since the distinction between natural and artificial persons turns out to be fundamental to Hobbes’ theory of the state, it is unfortunate that he introduces it in such an ambiguous way. In the second paragraph … strict grammar requires that the referent of the final ‘he’ should be ‘an other’.

And yet, Skinner continues, the sentence as written ‘suggests that the referent of “he” must be the natural person mentioned at the start of the first paragraph in which case the artificial person must be the representative’. He goes on to say that ‘Hobbes initially [in 1651] resolved the ambiguity by endorsing the latter alternative’. However, in the Latin Leviathan, written shortly after the Restoration, Hobbes deletes ‘the passage from chapter 16 in which Hobbes lays it down that representatives are artificial persons’; and this, Skinner suggests, ‘strongly implies that he had come to feel that he initially misstated his own argument’ (III, pp. 187–8).

But I wonder whether instead of coming to think that Hobbes had either been ‘ambiguous’ or had ‘misstated his own argument’ his alleged ‘ambiguity’ (1) had been intentional or (2) he later came to believe that he had stated it initially in an impolitic way. The first would give Hobbes what the CIA today coyly calls ‘deniability’, and the second would be a way of backtracking to save his skin. Either would be politically prudent in the event that the monarchy was restored, as indeed it was nine years after publication of Leviathan. These, it seems to me, are alternative hypotheses worth considering, especially since Hobbes in the mid-1660s was in some personal danger. Some sixteen years after its publication, and seven years after the Restoration, Leviathan was still sufficiently controversial to be banned and burned publicly by parliamentary order. Not content with that mild measure, some clerical critics, as John Aubrey records in Brief Lives, ‘made a motion to have the good old Gentleman burn't for a Heretique’ (quoted in III, p. 27). This and other attacks might help explain why in the Latin Leviathan Hobbes’ strictures regarding religion were toned down or eliminated entirely (III, p. 30). It might also shed some light on the (intentionally?) ambiguous wording used by Hobbes in drawing the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ persons at the beginning of chapter 16 of Leviathan, and its subsequent deletion from the Latin version. Ambiguity is without doubt a logical vice, but it may prove to be a personal and political virtue; and silence is positively golden. Perhaps Hobbes was hedging his bets, at least so far as his personal safety was concerned. Skinner cautions that we should not make too much of Hobbes’ fear for his personal safety (III, p. 28). But I wonder whether Skinner sometimes makes too little of the fear felt by a man who was by his own admission the most fearful of men.

Hobbes’ conception of the state as an ‘artificial person’ offered an answer to a question posed forcefully during the Interregnum, and most especially during the Engagement controversy – viz. to whom is allegiance owed? If to the ‘natural person’ of the king, the loyal royalist is in a quandary, since one king is dead and the other has fled, replaced by a regicide regime. If to the natural person of Cromwell and the Protectorate he heads, then allegiance is owed to a regicide and usurper – and that is both immoral and absurd. Hobbes’ answer is: allegiance is owed to neither natural person but to the artificial person of the state, whose head can be either a hereditary monarch or a Lord Protector. This supplies a neat and even elegant solution for people with ‘tender consciences’ and royalist sympathies who resided in Cromwell's commonwealth and who, on the one hand, did not wish to endanger their liberty or their property by defying the edict to swear the Oath of Engagement (i.e. allegiance) to the new republic but, on the other, did not wish to lend legitimacy to the new regime. Under Hobbes’ new and ingenious theory of political obligation they could in good conscience swear the oath, since allegiance was owed to no natural person but to the purely artificial person of the state (III, ch. 10).

Hobbes and Civil Science is concerned mainly with Hobbes’ scientia civilis (III, chs 2–4), his conception of liberty (III, ch.7) and his theory of political obligation (III, chs 8–10). It concludes, however, on a less lofty and more personal plane with accounts of Hobbes’ disciples in France and England (III, ch. 11) and of the reasons for his having failed to become a member of the Royal Society (too controversial by half: III, ch. 12).

Conclusion

Visions of Politics is remarkable for many reasons. Not the least of these is Skinner's pellucid prose which is always a pleasure to read. No matter how complicated the argument, he makes it in a manner that is almost crystalline in its clarity. Skinner has also written new introductory chapters to the three volumes which should be of considerable help to the uninitiated reader. The most delightful of these is ‘Hobbes's Life in Philosophy’ (III, ch. 1), a richly compact biographical sketch that effectively sets the scene for the eleven essays that follow.

But those familiar with Skinner's prodigious labours over many years are bound to be disappointed in some respects. Gone are many (indeed most) of the fierce polemical jibes that marked much of Skinner's early work. He now confesses that he has ‘toned down the noisy polemics I used to enjoy’ (I, p. vi). In this respect Skinner differs from Hobbes, who remained a fiercely combative polemicist until the end of his long life (III, p. 32). There would appear to be, here at least, no return to the thrilling days of yesteryear when the young tough-talking gun-slinger rides into town to challenge his established elders in a fierce and uncompromising way. But that is no doubt due to Skinner himself having become a particularly well-established elder.

There is, however, one respect in which Skinner's newly acquired politesse is compromised, and that is when some critic chides him for being backward-looking and having nothing to say about the problems of the present. ‘To many of my critics it seems that, by treating these texts as elements in a wider discourse, whose contents change with changing circumstances, I leave them bereft of anything except [in Charles Tarlton's words] “the dustiest antiquarian interest”’. Skinner bracingly (and in my view rightly) rejects ‘this depressingly philistine objection’, adding that he has tried repeatedly – and apparently unsuccessfully – to address and overcome it (I, pp. 5–6; compare I, ch. 4, ch. 6).

In a very real sense the essays collected in Visions of Politics are not the original ones, but are revised, rewritten, shortened or expanded versions of previously published essays. Some, indeed, are effectively new essays, consisting of pieces pulled from earlier essays and combined to form new ones (e.g. I, ch. 5, ch. 8; II, ch. 2, ch. 9; III, ch. 3). Despite his claim to the contrary, Skinner has in several instances ‘moved the targets’ (I, p. vi), making his critics’ prey more elusive – or perhaps giving them new targets at which to aim and shoot. This is in my view unfortunate, inasmuch as his earlier essays are themselves historical documents which have advanced innovative interpretations and have endured criticism from various quarters. To revise and ‘update’ them as Skinner has done is in a sense to distort the historical record and to make them address thinkers (e.g. Derrida and Foucault) and themes that were no part of their original remit.

In the end, however, these are minor quibbles about a delightfully readable and invariably valuable collection of essays marked by great ingenuity and, sometimes, sheer genius.