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Quentin Skinner's State: Historical Method and Traditions of Discourse*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Cary J. Nederman
Cary J. Nederman
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Abstract

In contrast to recent commentators on Quentin Skinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought, this work argues that Skinner's approach to the development of the modern theory of the state is strictly consistent with his earlier methodological proposals. But it is also established that Skinner's consistency ultimately leaves him without a “genuinely historical” basis for a unified state-tradition within late medieval and early modern Europe. The article proposes an alternative historical methodology which allows for the explanation of persisting traditions of discourse (such as that of the state) within a coherent historical framework.

Résumé

Dans cet article, I'auteur prend le contre-pied des opinions émises récemment par un certain nombre de commentateurs de l'oeuvre de Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, et avance l'idée que la méthodologie mise en oeuvre par Skinner dans son étude du développement de la théorie moderne de I' État cadre parfaitement avec ses recherches antérieures. Mais l'auteur établit que cette cohérence méthodologique de Skinner, en dernier ressort, ne lui permet pas de donner des assises « authentiquement historiques » à une tradition d'un État unifié dans l'Europe de la fin du Moyen-Âge et du début de l'époque moderne. L'auteur propose une autre approche méthologique qui permet d'expliquer les différentes traditions du discours (tel que celui de I'État) dans un cadre historique cohérent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 339 - 352
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1985

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References

1 Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, henceforth cited as Foundations.

2 Ibid., I, ix–xvi.

3 Essentially affirmative reviews of the Foundations include those by Franklin, Julian in Political Theory 7 (1979), 552–58;Google ScholarGiesey, Ralph in Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980), 60–62;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHolmes, S. T. in American Political Science Review 73 (1979), 1133–35;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Pocock, John in Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3 (1979), 95–113.Google Scholar Stern criticism of the Foundations is offered by Black, Antony in Political Studies 28 (1979), 451–57;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKelley, Donald in Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979), 663–73;CrossRefGoogle ScholarNederman, Cary J. in Renaissance and Reformation 17 (1981), 229–33;Google ScholarOakeshott, Michael in The Historical Journal 23 (1980), 449–53;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Shklar, Judith in Political Theory 7(1979), 459–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Minogue, K. R., “Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner's Foundations,” Philosophy 56 (October 1981), 543.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Black, review in Political Studies, 454.Google Scholar

6 Oakeshott, review in The Historical Journal, 452.Google Scholar

7 Shapiro, Ian, “Realism in the Study of the History of Ideas,” History of Political Thought 3 (1982), 548.Google Scholar

8 Others who have pointed to the same problem include Boucher, D. E. G., “On Shklar's and Franklin's Reviews of Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,” Political Theory 8 (1980), 407Google Scholar, and “New Histories of Political Thought for Old?,” Political Studies 31 (1983), 118; and Gunnell, John, “Interpretation and the History of Political Theory: Apology and Epistemology,” American Political Science Review 76 (1982), 325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Foundations, I, xi.

10 Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” History and Theory 8 (1969), 5–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses the connection between saying and doing.

11 Foundations, I, xiii.

12 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 8, 11.

13 Ibid., 50, 48.

14 Ibid., 28.

15 Skinner, Quentin, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action, ” Political Theory 2 (1974), 279.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Skinner, “ Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, ” 37.

17 Ibid., 50.

18 The details of the debate are summarized by Skinner in “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy, ” in Aylmer, G. E. (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (London: Archon Books, 1972), 79–98;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “The Context of Hobbes' Theory of Political Obligation,” in Cranston, M. and Peters, R. S. (eds.), Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City: Anchor–Doubleday, 1972), 109–42.Google Scholar

19 Skinner, “ Conquest and Consent,” 80.

20 Ibid., 97.

21 Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” 298.

22 Femia, Joseph V., “An Historicist Critique of ‘Revisionist’ Methods for Studying the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 20 (1981). 127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 38.

24 Foundations, I, ix. As Skinner remarks in the final sentence of the Foundations, “ With this analysis of the State as an omnipotent yet impersonal power, we may be said to enter the modern world: the modern theory of the State remains to be constructed, but its foundations are now complete” (2, 358).

25 Ibid., I, x.

26 Minogue, “Method in Intellectual History.” 545.

27 Foundations, 2, 351.

28 Ibid., 2, 352.

29 Ibid., 2, 354.

30 Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), 47.Google Scholar

31 Strayer, Joseph R., On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 9–10.Google Scholar

32 Foundations, 2, 358.

33 This distinguishes my approach from the concept of tradition proposed by Pocock, J. G. A.. For Pocock, whose fear of “reductionism” has long been apparent (see Politics, Language and Time [New York: Atheneum, 1971], 10Google Scholar, and his “Communication” in Political Theory 3 [August 1975], 318)Google Scholar, what is crucial is the “autonomy of the history of political language” (Politics, Language and Time, 13). As a consequence, when Pocock sets out to write “history” (as in The Machiavellian Moment), his “historical agents are players of language games. The contextual effort is not primarily one of identifying economic interests, or affective political connexions, or psychic motivations, but the recovery of linguistic conventions” (Goldie, Mark, “Obligations, Utopias, and Their Historical Context,” The Historical Journal 26 [1983], 730)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pocock has, I take it, allowed himself to be lulled into complacency by the contemporary liberal democratic view that politics is essentially the art of discussion and compromise. This is a position to which not very many historical figures in political theory—from Plato to Marx—would subscribe. Pocock's, “traditionalism,” as the “history of abstraction” (Politics, Language and Time, 39, 40–41, 237–39)Google Scholar, is not very far removed from the customary “history of ideas” approach which Skinner has so effectively criticized.

34 Wood, Neal, “The Social History of Political Theory,” Political Theory 6 (1978), 360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 On the importance of these themes, see Nederman, Cary J., “State and Political Theory in France and England, 1250–1350” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, York University, 1983)Google Scholar, chap. 6; and Wood, Ellen, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983), 294–98, 301–15.Google Scholar

36 Femia, “An Historicist Critique of‘Revisionist’ Methods,” 132.

37 A recommendation already proposed by Wood (“The Social History of Political Theory,” 345–46) and Shapiro (“Realism in the Study of the History of Ideas,” 578).

38 For the relevant passages from Marsiglio, see Defensor Pacis, Prèvité-Orton, C. W. (ed), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928)Google Scholar, Discourse 1, chaps. 12 and 17.

39 Richard Ashcraft, “One Step Backward, Two Steps Forward: Reflections on Contemporary Political Theory,” in Nelson, J. S. (ed.). What Should Political Theory Be Now? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 537Google Scholar and passim.

40 Dyson, Kenneth H. F., The Stale Tradition in Western Europe (Oxford: Martin Robinson, 1980), 2.Google Scholar