| Review of: | Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric by Kari Palonen |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Amit Ron |
| Reviewed in: | Constellations |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 14, Issue 1, Pages 147-156 |
Book Reviews
Kari Palonen's intellectual biography of Quentin Skinner ends on a somber note. The burden of heavier teaching loads, administrative duties, and increasing specialization discourage today's young scholars from "even thinking about attempting to create work like Skinner's" (173). Incidentally, this is the only occasion in the entire book that Palonen considers the relevance of the social or economic context in which ideas are produced. I will return to this point later. Nevertheless, Palonen doubtlessly succeeds in portraying Skinner as an intellectual giant. The study describes the development of Skinner's ideas in a clear, simple, and readable way without taking away from the complexity of the arguments. The surveys of the intellectual context are indispensable and make the book accessible for those new to Skinner's work or to the topics he studied. The comparisons with European scholars such as Weber, Koselleck, and Sartre are illuminating, though sometimes stretched. If young scholars cannot aspire to emulate Skinner, they can surely take Palonen's work as a model.
The thematizing argument of the book is that Skinner revolutionized not only the study of the history of ideas but also that of political philosophy. For Skinner, the study of intellectual history is a normative enterprise which is itself part of the political
Palonen argues that Skinner's mature social ontology shares the perspectivist worldview of Nietzsche and Weber. While it is unfortunate that Palonen does not discuss perspectivism more systematically, scattered references suggest it entails an acknowledgment that there is no "neutral point of view" from which to study society because the questions that we ask and the evidence we seek depend on our perspective (138). Perspectivists reject the idea of progress (59) and the reliance on rationality as an explanatory device, and consequentially reject the project of Critical Theory (137-8). Skinner's perspectivism does not amount to relativism, however (59). Rhetorical moves must be understood against the linguistic context in which they are made. Therefore, the perspectives we can adopt to understand a social situation are limited in that they must take into account the self-understanding and conceptual wholes of the participants (143).
Skinner thus refuses to follow the Hegelian creed that "[t]o him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back." [1]To be sure, Skinner's refusal is not a modish poking of Enlightenment ideas but the disillusioned conclusion of an experienced historian who knows how frail grand historical narratives are. Nonetheless, Skinner situates himself uncomfortably close to the philosophers Hegel characterized as those who boast of not being able to "see the wood for the trees." [2] Particularly troubling is his refusal to study the relationship between concepts and the social conditions within which they are produced. It is very difficult to espy in Skinner's work any mention of large-scale transformations such as the agricultural and scientific revolutions, industrialization, urbanization, improvements in the technologies of transportation, communication, and mass destruction, or an account of how these developments affect our thinking about politics. We learn from Skinner that we can no longer understand Machiavelli's notion of
While Skinner's approach to the Marxist tradition can be characterized as ungenerous, his readings of Rawls and Habermas are simply wrong. Rawls does not view rights as natural and "beyond history and politics" and Habermas does not argue that an ideal speech situation would necessarily lead to consensus or that it is situated outside history (127 and 139, respectively). Skinner, who made these observations in the 1980s and early 1990s, should have known better. Palonen, writing a decade letter, must have known better, since both Rawls and Habermas went out of their way in that decade to clarify their argument against such misinterpretations. In many respects, in their later work Rawls and Habermas moved closer to Skinner's radically historicized understanding of politics and language. In their work, they study the ways deliberating citizens can reflect upon and morally evaluate the rhetorical moves Skinner celebrates, to "go beyond local practices of justification and to transcend the provinciality of their spatiotemporal contexts" without relying on timeless Platonic ideals. [3] It is indeed true that at some stages of their careers Rawls and Habermas emphasized the 'scientific' and 'rationalistic' aspects of their projects, but so did Hobbes. Skinner, who was able to read through Hobbes's scientific pretensions, missed an opportunity to engage more constructively with the democratic, discursive, and political elements of Rawls' and Habermas's work.
Palonen emphasizes and endorses Skinner's rejection of the theoretical orientation and politics of Critical Theory. But what alternative political view is proposed? If theoretical maneuvers are political in that they are directed at an "audience to be moved," in what direction is Skinner's audience encouraged to move? For a study that places politics at the center of Skinner's work, there is surprisingly little discussion of his views on the political questions of the era. We learn at the beginning of the book that as a young student Skinner "opposed the policy of the Eden government during the Suez crisis, and had quarreled with his father on British colonial policy" (hopefully Junior opposed it, 11). In the very last pages of the book we learn that "Skinner has always been both a
Perhaps, however, I am off the mark. Maybe it is not the substance that matters but the 'movement' itself. Political philosophy is a 'shock tactic' that forces its audience to rethink their conceptual maps and thus to realize, as Skinner recently argued, that "we may be freer than we sometimes suppose" (132). Our range of political possibilities is broader than what politicians and academic ideologists want us to believe. For example, if we thought that we had to choose between Berlin's negative freedom and a minimal state and positive freedom and a paternalistic state, Skinner's study of liberty tells us that we have other viable options. If this is indeed Skinner's political vision, it is only partially satisfying. In justifying our putative freedom, Skinner argues that it is "the power of normative language" that holds our practices in their place and prevents change. [4] To make good on this claim, more would need to be said about how "the power of normative language" relates to other sources of social power, such as class, gender, and race. I assume - indeed hope - that Skinner does not want to argue that language is an independent source of power. Once again, the burden is in part on Palonen, who argues that Skinner is not only the most innovative and prolific intellectual historian of our generation, but also a "'contemporary thinker' in a pre-eminent sense" (180) and a scholar whom Max Weber would have recognized as a successor (173).
These friendly questions and requests for elaboration should not take away from Palonen's achievements. I believe he is right in emphasizing that the study of the history of ideas can be a form of political action and in christening it the "Skinnerian Revolution." Palonen also successfully demonstrates how the study of conceptual change is the best remedy for nomothetic inclinations in the study of politics or history, and he follows Skinner in deriving the conversational, deliberative, and essentially democratic implications of this revolution.
[1]G.W.F. Hegel,
[2]G.W.F. Hegel,
[3]Jürgen Habermas,
[4]Quentin Skinner,