Michael Meets Michel

Monster

You’ve seen it before – the famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan. Like an amulet, the image ascends over a village landscape from out of the depths, brandishing sword and scepter, staring outwardly into the distance not exactly at us but rather through us with a flaunted – even ecstatic – gaze of power.

Upon closer inspection the crowned figure also contains within it many smaller individual forms grouped together anonymously, facing towards the enormous being, as if their inclusion were actually conditional upon being captivated by its power in a state of awe. As Hobbes would write later in the text, “And though they shine, some more, some less, when they are out of his sight, yet in his presence they shine no more than the stars in the presence of the sun.”

Intriguingly, the mass accumulation of bodies also seems to constitute some coat of arms or bizarre costume which dresses – perhaps even obscures – the figure’s natural body ostensibly ordained. Perhaps they bear resemblance to the scales of a giant fish. Actually, the image can be said to encapsulate an absolute closure of politics by an act – or perhaps spectacle – of absolute state power. That was Hobbes’ intention. Yet that all is quiet and orderly in this image may make us wonder whether all can be truly secure and peaceful indeed. Of course, the point here is obviously not to press the purported accuracy of the frontispiece as a simple stand-in for Hobbes’ political theories but rather to prompt some questioning of those theories. How can the well-being, peace, and security of the populace, (“salus populi”,) be possible, at least theoretically we may wonder, amidst the unrestrained and arbitrary prerogatives of the state?

Upon pondering the frontispiece further we may also notice our own reflection mirrored in those who unassumingly fill out “his” form, as if to say we readers, we political theorists too, should see ourselves as another complicit party, falling in line and finding our place with all the rest when in the presence of Hobbes’ magnum opus. It has even been suggested, (but I cannot remember by whom,) that the figure donning the coat of arms of bodies on the frontispiece, waving sword and staff, bears a striking resemblance to Hobbes himself.

The politicization of theory by Hobbes was evident in his politicization of Scripture, as well as the Universities, which he likened to “the fountains of civil and moral doctrine,” and where the mighty Leviathan should “profitably” be taught. Hobbes was a self-admitted timorous man but also bold thinker armed to the hilt with numerous scientific methods and rhetorical means. That he certainly worried about the tumultuousness and stirrings of the demos did not however mean he liked to shrink from debating with other learned men like himself. Power was especially appealing to Hobbes, at least as a theorist, as manifest in his epic ability to wield numerous inquiries, interests, and “subjects,” (whether on religion, science, language, phenomenology, jurisprudence and law, ontology, etc.) into one goliath of a project. As one commentator put it, “Hobbes spoke to the men of science, to the men of commerce, and to Puritans alike, but (addressed) each of these constituencies with different arguments which required (being) mutually consistent.” Thus the frontispiece can be said to beckon deeper into the text a diverse array of readers, asking of us to philosophically confront its arguments, scrutinizing their many moves and gestures by opening to the possibilities presented by their author, tracing them into expected and logical areas as well as into their abrupt turns. In this respect, the frontispiece’s spectacle of power introduces a masterful rhetorical move which establishes a moment of reflection as readers simultaneously conjecture their eventual and absolute submission.

But let us emphasize that to understand is to interpret, not to replicate. That is why real theoretical success is not simply black and white, in or out, yes or no, right or wrong, regardless of what we may want to argue. We do not read a book like Hobbes’ Leviathan in its own terms but at least partially also in our own. Thus it is much to too easy and banal to tally up and blanket thinkers “right” or “wrong,” as if nothing remains of importance other than whether or not they measure up to questions, standards, and certainties we in the present happen to settle upon in advance. That is why great artists and great thinkers are not retrieved or grasped entirely or even definitely. Far more interesting and important is to look for the permutations and tenacity of their formulations which through careful and thoughtful reading enable their output to become “relevant” in a variety of ways, in a variety of contexts. “We must,” as Gramsci once wrote, “use the criterion that a philosophic position should be criticized and evaluated not for what it pretends to be but for what it really is…”

Quentin Skinner the Nominalist

For someone trained more in the Gadamarian practice of “ontological hermeneutics” I must admit the work of Quentin Skinner to be a little dry. And yet I count five of Skinner’s books on my bookshelves, as well as several others he has either edited or contributed to in essay form. While his work on Hobbes and Machiavelli is simply outstanding, (& I mean really superb,) Skinner is also known for a methodological approach to political theory which situates specific writings of the past within their own distinct historical and intellectual context. Bluntly put, Skinner dreads anachronisms. As one critic once put it, “historical interpretation,” for Skinner, “is synonymous with explications of what authors were self-consciously attempting in their creative acts of writing.” Hence it is tempting to treat Skinner more as a historian than a theorist. Indeed Skinner spends a great deal of his time sorting out and comparing who wrote what, when, and...even why.

Skinner has addressed his “methodological” critics at countless occasions. In one essay, he wrote, “I see no impropriety in speaking of a work’s having a meaning for me which the writer could not have intended. Nor does my thesis conflict with this possibility. I have been concerned only with the converse point that whatever the writer is doing in writing what he writes must be relevant to interpretation, and thus with the claim that amongst the interpreter’s tasks must be the recovery of the writer’s intentions in writing what he writes.” It is difficult not to see the value of Skinner's point. In another occasion, in an essay entitled “A reply to my critics,” he warned more specifically “it is only by refusing the vulgar demand for relevance that we can hope to indicate the serious way in which the study of intellectual history is indeed relevant to the assessment of our present beliefs.” Though Skinner has conceded that the failure to actually be able to go back into time and understand writers as they veritably understood themselves in the times and intellectual milieu they worked in may be inevitable; but, as he has often stressed, such shortcomings should NOT at all discourage or immobilize those who do the difficult work of interpreting the past. “How best to proceed” is thus an underlining subtext to Skinner’s writings.

And yet I think his choice to cling to specific contexts of the past as courts of appeal for assessing the plausibility of historical interpretations has certain implications which should be made clear. Choosing whether or not to sift through the writings or personal letters of some seventeenth century Englishmen in order to understand better what the hell Hobbes was arguing for in De Cive is a certain kind of political judgment. I mean is that what we want political theory to become? As Nathan Tarcov, a Straussian, declared perhaps a little unfairly, “Skinner’s warnings about the pitfalls of textualism are salutary insofar they protect us from assumptions that would prevent us from understanding texts, but detrimental insofar they forbid us to learn from them.” Yet the point, I think, seems clear enough: why presume to confine or “bracket” the works of a Machiavelli or a Hobbes within a historical setting we believe to be sui generis, or at least unique when juxtaposed to our own? When Skinner admits in the interview embedded below, (conducted by Ian McPharlane,) that we should consider Hobbes as if he were speaking in the British Parliament, (“though a very long speech,”) he does not seem to consider the possibility of Hobbes speaking at the Lyceum or the polis amongst Plato and his students as well. I mean, why is Hobbes quintessentially British, quintessentially of the seventeenth century? Did he not also debate “the vein schoolmen” represented by Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Thomists – and perhaps even Rousseau too who wrote a century later???

Anyway, thanks to Ian McPharlane for the extended interview which covers lots, (& I mean lots,) of personal ground, including Skinner's upbringing, background, and career experience, as well as some thoughts on political history, and a few choice words on anthropologist Clifford Geertz and C.B. MacPherson.