Skinner, Quentin. From Humanism to Hobbes:Studies in Rhetoric and Politics

As one of the most influential and leading intellectual historians in the world, Quentin Skinner has offered a series of outstanding works centering on the history of early modern Europe for the past few decades. His early works on the Foundation of early modern political thought, and monographic studies on Machiavelli and Hobbes shaped the way a generation understands the political thought to a large extent,while his continuing engagement in methodological debates provides a new approach for students and fellow researchers to conduct the study of intellectual history.

Some people attribute Skinner’s great success to his excellent skill in writing philosophically sophisticated essays in English language and his unparalleled power of combing methodological pursuits with historical enquires. Others focus on the eminent achievement by him and his peers,i. e. John Dunn, J. G. A. Pocock, Richard Tuck, etc. of establishing the socalled “Cambridge School” in the academic field of arts and humanistic.For most of his admirers and readers, his works are both intellectually challenging and eloquently persuasive, always beautifully written with solid historical facts and clear structure, which could be qualified as a perfect example of what he is always trying to demonstrate — the power of words and how to wield them. This also makes him one of the greatest living humanists, and his new book on the humanistic tradition and Hobbes in the early modern Europe proved this point again.

This new book is based on two main preoccupations which could be considered as the pivotal theoretical commitments of all Skinner’s works. One is that he simply doesn’t think it’s possible to write a history of concepts. Instead of tracing the origins and evolutions of words lexiconically, what we can do if we still hold the fidelity of the past important is to recover and represent how certain words are understood and used differently even under the same social circumstances and in the same period of history. He has always been quite straightforward about this point and as a matter of fact, he constantly elucidates his disputes and differences with the study of the history of ideas practiced by historians like Arthur Lovejoy and Raymond Williams, as well as the continental approach of Begriffsgeschichte mainly developed by Reinhard Koselleck which are getting more and more popular recently. Treating Nietzsche and Michel Foucault as his academic heroes, he believes what can be done in terms of the intellectual history is to map out the complex usage of terms in disputes, which amounts to the genealogy of it from certain perspectives. To prove this point, he has both written on the methodology and on a few important terms in the past, while in chapter 9 and 10 of this book, he continues this project by showing us that even with the most common yet fundamental terms like “representation” and the “state”, there has never been an agreed definition of them.

Another underpinning hypothesis of this book is that, despite the fact there’s no such thing as a fixed concept, we can still get close and even understand people from the past by recovering the exact discourse which they were engaging. This is obviously not an easy task, let alone the methodological controversies around it, but to Skinner, the most illuminating and practical way would be to treat the canonical texts as an intervention to pre-existing debates, and “to concentrate on trying to recover the problems they were originally designed to solve” (p. 11). Adopting the discourse analysis approach what we termed as the Cambridge School that is inspired by Wittgenstein, Austin and other philosophers, Skinner has successfully defended his stance in his former works of Hobbes and Machiavelli.

But how does this new book differentiate from all the studies he has completed around those topics from the past, or to put this another way, dose this book offer anything new to the already abundant storage of intellectual history? The answer is definitely yes.

For one thing, this book could be read as the newest thoughts and findings Skinner has on some of the major topics he wrote in the past. As a scholar who never hesitates to put new words on the pre-existing researches, he adapted and revisited a bunch of essays with new evidence to form the main structure of this book. Thus, we could see this book as an updated version of some of his continuing studies. He divides the book into two parts. The first part concerns the status quo of the humanistic tradition in early modern England. By “humanism” and “the humanities,”Skinner means the “specific academic curriculum widely followed in the grammar schools and university of early-modern England” (p. 1). The reason why to understand “humanism” in this perspective is very obvious, since we can never speak consciously and coherently without the aid of some sort of education, how and what knowledge and skills were taught to constitute an important aspect in recovering the past. The emphasis on education gains more weight if we put our sights in the early modern world, where humanistic education is the most important way to provide basic capabilities of working in public domains.

The argument continues that, if humanistic education is the basic, then what it taught would influence on how people in this period perceives and presents. To illustrate this further view,Skinner first offers a detailed picture of the education early modern people receive through the example of William Shakespeare and John Milton in the introduction. We later encounter Milton and his school life in Cambridge in detail in chapter 6. Other than that, this first part are mainly cases on the shaping force of the humanistic tradition of rhetoric, especially Ad Herennium,Cicero and Quintilian on the way early modern writers and thinkers think and write. We learned that for people in renaissance, the most important aim of learning humanism is to master the way of persuasive writing and speech. (p. 3) In order to achieve that, we must know how to arouse the emotions of the audience since as Cicero has warned us long time ago, that “it will always be possible to adduce good reasons in utramque partem” (p. 5). This follows that by using certain skill of rhetoric, especially energeia in Quintilian’s words, we could manipulate people’s emotions and persuade them, even when the odds are against us.

In terms of energeia, what humanism understands is presenting the audience with the picture to make them feel as if they were present at the scene. This technique could be further understood from three levels. First, by using figurae, cultivating tropi, applying simile and metaphor in the speech, you could move the listeners. Besides, actual images can also be used in this way,embodying certain information with vivid visual presentation that both constitute a sight to the eyes and lesson to the mind.

The application of the first perspective explains why writers including Machiavelli,Shakespeare and Milton wrote certain works the way they are. But Skinner does not take this phenomenon at face value, instead, what he really wants to point out, is that all those writers are concerned with the impact rhetoric has on the real life. Speaking explicitly, that some figurae have a moral and even epistemological importance in those people’s mind, Skinner embarks on the path of tracing what exact effect they have. As a result, he explains how paradiastole is understood in The Prince by Machiavelli, suggesting that one of the warning Machiavelli expresses, but largely neglected by his readers and researchers, is that rhetorical redescription is a major threat to civic life. This is also true in the case of Shakespeare, who Skinner has explained in huge details in his last book by recovering the education and life he has and in consequence the way he designed his plays related to forensic speeches. Here in the new book, Skinner narrows his attention to the figure of Coriolaus, maintaining that for Shakespeare, the moral importance paradistole has by excusing vices as virtues is a question that’s far from being solved.

What’s more influential is the way humanistics and Hobbes understand the second use of figurae-prosopopeia-inventing fictitious speeches and attribute them to persons. This brings out another argument in shore, that Hobbes develops his theory of political representation in Leviathan largely under the guidance of the humanistic teachings of Quintilian, and Cicero, and with the aid of stage-play discourse. In chapter 12, Skinner shows that with small alteration, what Quintilian terms as personae fictione was used as the way to describe the personhood of the state, combined with Cicero’s definition of the persona, we now have the basic ingredient of Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign, the person authorized to wear the mask of the state.

The last aspect of the influence of humanism derives from the need of energeia as well. Other than using words and speeches to arouse feelings, actual pictures are also proved to be of great help in terms of making the audience aware of the gist of certain works, and that’s what Hobbes and his contemporaries did in book design. In one way we could say this is simply another study of iconography, but provided with all the amazing details of the development of the humanist frontispiece in England and examining Hobbes’s works under this view, it can be counted as one of the best examples of how iconographical studies could be conducted in other fields of interest rather than pure aesthetic evaluation. This is also the longest essay of this book, and is largely newly written.

The link between humanism education and Hobbes’ theory is another major topic of this book. Skinner has already proved that Hobbes does not only master the rhetoric technique from humanism very well, but a lot of his concerns and critics about the situation the England he lives in are related to this in his other famous studies on Hobbes, especially Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. This is not to say that what Skinner offered in this new book is just putting old wine into new bottle. Of course, Skinner is very insistent on his preoccupation and methodology of how to study Hobbes and his work, and this basically stays the same. Still, if we take a closer look at this book, at least three new ingredients are very self-manifest regarding Hobbes.

Chapter 10 constitutes the first kind for providing us with a great example of how to illustrate Hobbes ichnographically. Another one is the newly expanded discussion on Hobbes’ theory of civil science and absolute monarchy. By introducing the psychological analysis of laughter in the mind of humanist, a new interpretation of Hobbes’ idea of civil conversation suggests that Hobbes himself is both the child and the rebel of humanistic tradition, that he tried to contain all the possibilities of contempt and hurtful feelings breeding in the mind among the members of a society, but never really arrived at a clear formula to solve the problem. Nevertheless, Hobbes is quite explicit that in terms of the state that’s covenanted, an absolute king or representative would always be preferred and he takes pain to defend his position. According to Skinner, Hobbes knows clearly that the succession issue is not only a problem to the critics of absolute monarchy, but also constitutes a part of the complete and undivided character of it. In chapter 11, he uses texts and manuscripts of Hobbes to piece Hobbes’ idea of the hereditary right together, and interpret Hobbes’ final words on the subject while offering an explanation of his silence on the real issue at the time being.

The last new ingredient of this book is the composition of these essays and the whole layout of the book. This takes us back to the major theoretical hypothesis Skinner draws out at the beginning. The humanism tradition of education is the context of all those writers and thinkers in early-modern time work in the shaping force is so pervasive that they contemplate, speak and write within this tradition using it as a tool to solve the practical problem, and sometimes even attribute the cause of the problems that bothers them to it. Thus, every article of this book contains both the outlining of specific context of humanism, and using it as the background to explain certain authors’ acts and works. Moreover, if we take this analytical approach to another level, we can see clearly that all the illustrations on rhetoric and writers at the first part of the book serves as the grand context of understanding and appraisal of Hobbes, which starts from the analysis of the origins of the personation of state in classical rhetoric and ends with Hobbes’ formulation of the concept of the state. In this process, the depiction of Milton’s campus life and the discourse of liberty in the English revolution act as the bridge to link the book together.

There is perhaps another point worth mentioning. For all the efforts to recover the past by putting texts into context, Skinner never lost sight of the problems we are facing nowadays. This is partly why he put the genealogy of the modern concept of the state at the beginning and the end of the book and makes considerable efforts to elucidate the confusion between the state and the government. To some degree, we can qualify the last chapter of this book as the finale of his study on the concept of the state, which both offers us a closer look at how different people use the word differently and equips us with the tool to criticize the popular usages we encounter. (p. 379)