ABSTRACT SKINNER

ð His text issues to criticize and discredit Leo Strauss assumption about the ‘classical works’ as extemporal sources to be applied on relevant themes at every historical time

ð We must classify in order to understand and we can only classify the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar

ð Starauss historical method is impregnated with currently belonging paradigms which disguises an essential inapplicability to the past.

o It drives to results which may be classified not as histories but as mythologies.

1. Mythology of Doctrines

i. Converting scattered or incidental remarks by a classic theorist into their “doctrine” on one of the expected themes.

ii. Anachronism – specially in ‘history of ideas’

a. Raises the importance of distinguishing different meanings of similar terms in different periods.

# Quotes the debate over Marcilius contributions or not to the principle of separate powers, failing to observe that this idea couldn’t have been discussed by him because it was not born yet.

# Quotes the attribution of the doctrine judicial review to Sir Edward Coke, who was absolutely not aware of the meaning this terms would take after, but just denying James I statement that the source of law is the sovereign will, and not the custom.

iii. Finding inductive continuities among unrelated authors.

a. Reveals a tendency of seeing inductive birth of doctrines and putting texts in wires they don’t really belong

# Quotes the association of Hooker to Locke, what is wrong because Hooker just tried to see the civil birth of religions, but not synthesize any base of civil association.

Hooker -> A -> B -> C -> Locke

o If the writer meant to articulate the doctrine with which they are being credited, why is that they so signally failed to do so, so that the historian is left reconstructing their alleged intentions from guesses and hints?

ð The third aspect of Mythology of Doctrines - Finding inductive continuities among unrelated authors – drives to the emergence of another Myht:

2. Mythology of Continuities

o The tendency to search for approximations to the ideal type yelds a form of history almost entirely given over to pointing out earlier ‘anticipations’ of later doctrines, and hence to congratulating individual writers for the extent of their clairvoyance

Example of this mistake:

Marcillius -> Machiavelli -> Marx

Says that the doctrine of the social contract was not already there in the case of Hugenots pamphlets in France

ð Drive one to tricky deductions about whether such author would have agreed to a theme he didn’t worked on it but which is supposed to be in the same continuity inductive association

ð This tendency of shaping doctrines and forcing classical authors to take a position sometimes criticizes them for unsaid positions, and sometimes, for the very fact that they don’t talk about the seized doctrine

§ Quotes people who criticizes Plato for NOT debating the influence of public opinion;

§ Quotes people who criticizes Locke for omitting all references to family and race while debating the universal suffrage.

# I particularly disagree with this examples because in both cases the isues have already been raised, for example, by Heraclito and Phroudon, and Plato and Locke happen to know and, still, didn’t talked about. Seems to me that it is a case in which the negligence is not a matter of belonging to a historic time before the born of the debate, but much more as a political choice of neglection. For example, just like somebody today choose to talk about politics without considering gender.

ð Skinner poses the question: Whether any of these writers ever intended, or could have intended, to do what they are castigated for not having done.

3. MYTHOLOGY OF COHERENCE

ð Classical writers are not altogether consistent, or even fail to give any systematic account of their beliefs and, for so, a reading based on Leo Strauss turns dangerously easy for the historian to treat it as his or her task to supply these texts with the coherence they may appear to lack

o The ambition is always to arrive at a unified interpretation to gain a coherent view of an authors system.

§ Quotes Karl Marx case, in which the mainstream interpretation divergences with his earlier works are denied by saying it was not a relevant work. The interpreter chooses what is and what is not relevant.

§ There’s also an attempt to separate Marx and Engels contributions in their works together, as to safe Marx of any possible incoherence.

ð This Myth leads to a metaphysical coherence in the worst sense:

a) Discount statements, or whole works, of authors which seems to impair coherence of their systems of thought.

b) The assumption that the correct question to ask is not whether the given writer was inconsistent, but rather, “how are his contradictions (or apparent contradictions) to be accounted for?”

o Points that following this would drive us to the scholastic path of RESOLVING ANTINOMIES, which is; forgetting the task of tracing developments between different works to, instead, construct a scheme of beliefs sufficiently generalized to resolve apparent antinomies and paradoxes.

§ Quotes the tendency of resolving antinomies in Machiavelli works; Il Principe(1513) and the Discursi (1519).

§ Marx humanism in Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and the latter mechanistic Das Kapital.

o Leo Strauss even argues that paradoxes in classical works are purposely putted by the authors to show to their smart readers that they are against the orthodox position seemingly held.

§ Skinner counterpose two aspects:

i. The need of such technique points to the binding of revolutionary spirit and original essays, restricting the classical with paradoxes to be always subversive. What is not the case.

ii. Assuming that classical authors really write paradoxes as a hidden critiques of orthodoxy, how to recognize the ‘eras of persecution’ and, by consequence, how to know whether we should read or not between the lines? Looks like a circular argument in which it is between the lines because it is revolutionary and is revolutionary because it is between the lines.

ð To read a text looking for particular meanings it may have to us hardly left place for the analysis of what the author may have intended to mean.

4. MYTHOLOGY OF PROLEPSIS

ð Is the conflation of asymmetry between the significance an observer may justifiably claim to find in a given historical episode and the meaning of that episode itself.

ð It happens when we are more interested in the retrospective significance of a given episode than in its meaning for the agent at the time.

o Quotes the association made of Locke and Rousseau with the totalitarian state.

o Quotes less crude examples, like; Machiavelli to be considered a modern and Locke a liberal, without attempting that modernism and liberalism would be created after them, depending on their contributions. In simple, how can somebody be considered something he is about to create, or something to be further created due to his contributions?

ð Skinner points that the episode has to await the future to learn its meaning.

è EVEN WHEN ONE AVOIDS ALL THOSE MYTHS, THERE’S STILL THE DANGER OF SLECTING THE TEXTS ACCORDING TO THE READERS OWN FAMILIAR REALITIES, WHAT IS CALLED PAROCHIALISM

ð The attendant danger is that the observer may see something apparently familiar in the course of studying an unfamiliar argument, and may in consequence provide a misleading recognizable description of it. What can happen in two ways:

i. Using the concept of influence as an explanatory force without considering whether the conditions are sufficient or at least necessary for that may drive to a Mythology of continuity.

a. Points that that such considerations must check, in a A -> B influence:

# If B is known to have studied A

# If B didn’t found the relevant doctrines in any other writer

# If B could not have arrived to the doctrine independently

ii. Conceptualize an argument in such a way that its alien elements dissolve into a misleading familiarity. This can drive to anachronisms, myths of doctrines and, mostly, myth of prolepsis.

ð However critical to this fails, he admits that its inescapable for historians of ideas to approach their materials with preconceived paradigms. But, still, he claims to reduce such problems.

ð Skinner recognizes that one can take precautions to read the classics without falling in Parochialism or Mythological interpretations, however, he insists that it is not a prove that we should understand the meaning of what was said rather than what the author meant to say.

o The meaning of terms change across the time;

§ Quotes Hobbes Natural Law, nowadays understood as a perception of civil patterns, but, according to some interpreters, at his time it meant God’s Will.

§ The meaning changes also due to the question it was willing to answer.

o Oblique rhetorical strategies, like ironies, may get lost in the time

§ E.G. In Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Hoadly and John Locke treaties over religion just the last says anything resembling what he means

ð Points out that, according to Wittgenstein and Austin, the best technique of history of ideas is to understand what they meant by saying what they said.

ð Criticizes Lovejoy for trying to understand the meant of what was said by the ‘essential meaning’ of the terms used at that time. Instead, Skinner stresses the necessity to track all the possible uses of the term in that time.

ð There is no history of idea to be written. Only a history of its various uses and of the varying intentions with which it was used.

ð One must delineate the full range of communications that could have been conventionally performed on the giving occasion and then trace relations beween the given utterance and this wider linguistic context as a way to decoding the intentions of the given writer.