Abstract

Reviews 341 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi + 477 pp. More than one historian has criticized the "history of ideas" approach: too many ideas and not enough history. Over the past twenty years, Quentin Skinner, along with fellow historians John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock, has attempted to correct this methodological bias by developing a contextualist approach to history. The result has been a new approach to the history of ideas and a growing body of scholarship that foregrounds rhetoric as both an intellectual tradition and as a method by which to study ideas in history. In his first major work, the two volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, (1978), Skinner began his analysis with an account of how the study of rhetoric in the Italian universities gave rise to the Republican civic ideology that would be so important in the political and religious revolutions in Europe (and America) between 1500 and 1800. In his latest book, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Skinner continues these inquiries and proposes a revisionist reading of Hobbes's civic and moral philosophy; one that positions it squarely within the humanist tradition of education in Renaissance England. Historians have previously understood Hobbes's intellectual development as paralleling the larger shift from humanism to science in seventeenth century European intellectual culture. Hobbes's earlier works, including his translations of Thucydides's Histories (1629) and his abridgment of Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric (1637), evidence his humanist phase. However, like Descartes and other philosophers looking for epistemological certainty in the seventeenth century, Hobbes loses faith in the humanistic rhetorical training of his youth and applies geometrical models to moral reasoning in his Elements ofLaw and De Give, both published in the early 1640s. Skinner argues that beginning about 1650, however, Hobbes began to doubt the possibility of constructing a science of virtue and vice. Contemplating the Leviathan, Hobbes began to ask himself, "If the findings of civil science possess no inherent power to convince, how can we hope to empower them?" (p. 351). This was, of course, the same question that 342 RHETORICA classical and Renaissance rhetoricians had addressed. Hobbes found the answer to this question, Skinner contends, in rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintilian who had argued that the dictates of ratio, or demonstrative moral reasoning, needed to be empowered by the "moving force of eloquentia" (p. 351). Thus, in the Leviathan (1651) Hobbes returned to the humanist training of his youth, arguing that eloquence is an indispensable partner to reason in the maintenance of the commonwealth. Skinner divides his book into two parts: "Classical Eloquence in Renaissance England" and "Hobbes and the Idea of a Civil Science." The first part, which can stand on its own, exhaustively reconstructs the place of classical rhetoric in the Tudor education of Hobbes's youth. The second part situates the development of Hobbes's philosophical thought in the educational context of English humanism delineated in the first part, examining Hobbes's initial enthusiasm for, later rejection of, and ultimate return to both the values and strategies of humanist rhetoric. Even if historians are not as interested in the second half of the book, Skinner has provided a great service to those interested in both classical and Renaissance rhetoric by surveying "the teaching of rhetoric in the grammar schools...and more broadly the place of the ars rhetorica in Tudor political argument" (p. 211). Historians of rhetoric in all periods will also be interested in Skinner's historiographical approach. Along with Pocock and Dunn, Skinner's work defines a specific approach to the history of ideas, known as "Cambridge contextualism," which he summarizes as "trying to place [historical] texts within [historical] contexts...to identify what their authors were doing in writing them" (p. 7). Following the lead of Ludwig Wittengenstein and later speech act theorists like John Austin, Skinner and other Cambridge contextualists separate the locutionary (propositional) and illocutionary (rhetorical) dimensions of language. They argue that to situate a text in context and understand its historical meaning, historians need to examine not only the sense and reference of words—what the author is saying—but...