Political Thought in Early Modern Europe, I: The Renaissance

Abstract

Quentin Skinner's achievement in this volume and its companion on the Reformation is in many ways impressive. He writes as he talks, with verve and clarity, giving us an apparently full and yet succinct account of the literary traditions of political thought in the late medieval/early modern period-navigating with confidence the narrow channel between textual analysis and contextual description through which all exegetes of political ideas (thanks partly to his own strictures) now have to pass. For the first time we seem to have a book on Renaissance political theory for students which combines an account of the rise of communal and later despotic government in Italy with careful analysis of an impressively wide selection of texts, some little known except to specialists in the field until now. Yet, as Skinner is the first to admit, history offers a complex and probably contradictory matrix for ideas and events (Skinner, 1966, p. 213, to use his own bibliography and method of quotation), and the price we pay for his clarity is the loss of the true historical background of Renaissance thought. republics, wrote Machiavelli in The Prince (chapter 5), is greater vitality, greater hatred, greater desire for revenge. Yet both passion and politics are strangely lacking from Skinner's account. Far from being the preserve of preachers and teachers, political thinking was the allabsorbing activity of men engaged in politics. In Florence more than a tenth of the total population were active citizens, debating, advising, and voting on policies, travelling abroad and writing innumerable diaries and ledgers which they filled with new ideas, political opinions, and chronicles of events-all this in addition to reading Cicero's De officiis! Any account of political theory in which politics itself is largely absent is inevitably going to have serious gaps and weaknesses. With Skinner's exposition of texts and general thesis about the origins of the modern theory of the state in the Renaissance there can be little disagreement. Part I (chapters 1-3) on the origins of the Renaissance is particularly clear and well-argued, showing how northern Italy's early and distinctive form of republican self-government, which was commented on as