Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes

"I selected this book because not only is Quentin Skinner one of the foremost historians of political thought living today—and in particular of Renaissance political thought—but he is also one of the foremost Hobbes scholars. It’s a wonderful book because it exemplifies something that Quentin Skinner is very well known for what is sometimes called the Cambridge School and sometimes the ‘Skinnerian’ method. It’s a methodology of thinking about how to read texts in the history of political thought that seeks to place them in their historical context. So what Skinner, methodologically, has been arguing for many decades is that in order to fully understand a philosophical text from a different era, we have to be able to understand the nature of the language that that person is using in context. The way that you understand the meanings and the way that they use language in that time is by looking both to the way that people use language in their linguistic community and also the way that people read that text in that particular time. So you look both at the source material—what are the materials that the author is reading and so on—and also how the texts are received. And this provides you, according to Skinnerian methodology, with valuable insight into the nature of the philosophy and what the claims actually mean, in context. This book is exemplary in this way because it’s focused partly on Hobbes’s evolution from the Elements of Law and De Cive to Leviathan . And it’s focused, in particular, on Hobbes’s view about the relationship of rhetoric to science and philosophy. The first half of the book is not really about Hobbes, it’s about his context. Skinner looks at how people in 17th century England are trained. How did they think about the nature of language and rhetoric? How was Hobbes trained? And he says that Hobbes was trained as a humanist. And so how did humanists in that period think about rhetoric? He goes through their reading of the classics, such as Cicero and Quintilian. He also goes through 17th century English theorists of rhetoric, to see how these humanists thought about the proper use of language. Following from this Ciceronian tradition, the key theme is that, for these humanists, science or wisdom, without eloquence, is impotent. What you need to do is to marry these two together, so that you have science on the one side, and on the other the eloquence that is given by training in rhetoric, to become a good orator to be able to convey wisdom to others. And this is part of the humanist ideal of a good citizen. For them, the good citizen is a citizen who is active in political life, and who is able, through the use of eloquence, to contribute to the deliberations of the political community. So, in a way, a good citizen is an orator. That’s exactly the view that Hobbes takes, in Skinner’s argument. In his attack on his humanist past in Elements of Law and De Cive he argues that he is not going to deploy any of the techniques of rhetoric. And rhetoric here, by the way, isn’t just the way that we use language to persuade people. It’s an articulated theory with different techniques, from Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian. There are all these different classical texts that 17th century humanists are using to articulate how it is that you know what’s the proper art of rhetoric. What Hobbes does in the Elements of Law and in De Cive , at least in the first edition, is to eschew all of that, to say, ‘I’m not going to do any of this.’ Why? Because I’m engaged in science and reason and, contrary to what the humanists think, reason is capable of compelling belief on its own. There’s a great story of Hobbes, the first time he opens up the book of Euclid’s geometry, he’s astonished that it starts out with some axioms that he sees are self-evident, and then, as he reads along, he’s able to see how conclusions that initially did not seem obvious at all are deduced from those initial premises. He describes himself as being in awe of this, that this is a real revelation to him about the capacity of reason. And that’s what he is invested in, in the Elements of Law and in De Cive. He wants to say, ‘Well, look, I don’t need any of the classical techniques.’ One of the techniques of the classical rhetoricians is that you start out your text with an attempt— it’s called ethos —to establish the probity of your own character. ‘I’m a trustworthy individual and, therefore, you should take this as authoritative in some way, because you can trust me.’ In the introductions to these texts, Hobbes doesn’t do any of that. He says, ‘I’m just going to leave the arguments to be what produces belief in my readers.’ It’s an attack on that humanist tradition. It’s precisely what you were saying: this great suspicion of the role of rhetoric as a source of deception. “Rhetoric is dangerous politically, because it can lead to sedition; eloquent speakers can persuade others to engage in rebellion. Hobbes is very suspicious about that” But for Hobbes, it’s also political, because as I said, for the humanists rhetoric had to do with being an active citizen, you are contributing to deliberation—whereas Hobbes is not interested in an active citizenry. De Cive is ‘The Citizen’ in Latin, but he is explicit that by citizen, he just means subject, the subject of the sovereign. You let the sovereign decide what the right thing is, and you follow, you obey. So there’s a twofold attack on rhetoric. Rhetoric is dangerous politically, because it can lead to sedition; eloquent speakers can persuade others to engage in rebellion, and so on. Hobbes is very suspicious about that, at least in these texts. Skinner lays this all out in the second half of the book, showing Hobbes’s attack on each of the various techniques that the classical theorists of rhetoric had espoused as effective for the art of rhetoric. And he shows how he attacks these. And then he argues that Hobbes changes his mind in Leviathan . He argues that Hobbes comes to believe that science must use the powers of eloquence, the powers of rhetoric, because even though he still believes that it’s dangerous, he does think that science needs help in order to be effective politically, and to have a wider readership. He’s now writing again in English; his masterpiece is not in Latin like De Cive was. And he comes to believe that—at least this is Skinner’s argument—these two go together. What then Skinner does, is he documents not just Hobbes’s theoretical defence of the techniques of rhetoric, when they are appropriately used, but he also documents the way that he uses them in Leviathan . That is part of the reason why Leviathan is such a literary and not just a philosophical masterpiece. Hobbes is using all of these techniques, which he has mastered, because he was educated in them. He knows this stuff, even though he had attacked it earlier in his career. He knows how to do it, and he does it. Part of it is through the use of humour and scorn and making fun and various other techniques that he uses in order to get his point across. Metaphors and similes and so on are all over the place in Leviathan —even the name of the text itself. Yes, it’s also visual. It has a picture of a realm that is overlooked by a huge—what looks like, if you look at it from a distance—giant man. But if you look at it more closely, the man is not a natural man, but an artificial man, whose body is made up of what looks to be all of the various subjects of the realm over whom he rules. He has in his two hands the sword and the sceptre, the signs of authority. It’s a view of Leviathan. And what’s interesting about this frontispiece is that it is an attempt to show the way that the individuals who make up the commonwealth have themselves brought into creation the sovereign that rules over them. There’s a visual representation of Hobbes’s political philosophy, which is that—because he’s a social contract theorist—the way you set up a commonwealth or a political society is that all of the individuals contract with each other. Yes, absolutely, because what he’s trying to show you is that you are the ones who have authorized and brought this Leviathan into being. That’s part of his political philosophy, because what he wants to say is that you’ve authorized the Leviathan, you’ve authorized the sovereign to represent all of you. And, therefore, you own what it is that the sovereign does. You can’t disown it. It’s your action, in a way, because the sovereign is your representative. One of the great things about Skinner’s book is that, because he has given you a rundown of all the various different rhetorical techniques, and all of their Latin names, reading Hobbes through his eyes becomes like going through a forest with a botanist. When I go through a forest, all I see is just tree, tree, tree, tree. But a botanist doesn’t see trees, a botanist sees the particular plant that it is, because the botanist has all of the conceptual apparatus and all the names in their mental space. Skinner is like the botanist who has the entire conceptual apparatus in the book laid out for you, and then goes through systematically showing you that when Hobbes uses this sentence, here is the technique that’s being used. We don’t know this because we’re no longer trained in classical rhetoric. But Hobbes was, and that’s how his readers would have seen what he is doing. So that’s a very interesting feature, I think, of this book. Absolutely. Yes."