Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on Power and the State

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History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 234–255

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Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida onPower and the State

Michael Drolet

Lady Margaret Hall, and Wolfson College, Oxford, UK

Available online 5 February 2007

Abstract

This article compares and contrasts the work of Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on power

and the State. It argues that despite Skinner’s explicit repudiation of Derrida’s method of

philosophising, he has come to advocate an approach to the history of ideas that bears important and

striking similarities to Derrida’s thought. I attribute this intellectual gravitation toward Derrida as

the logical outcome of a shared understanding on the nature of the cosmos and man’s place within

it—an understanding profoundly indebted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the

genealogical history of Michel Foucault. As a means to illustrate the narrowing intellectual gulf

between Skinner and Derrida, I compare their respective thoughts on the nature of the modern and

contemporary State, a State that both intellectuals see as emerging from a dominant western

philosophical tradition that, at its core, is marked by the idea of fear. For both Skinner and Derrida

this has profound consequences for the possibilities open to individuals and societies for free thought

and political action.

r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Isaiah Berlin; Deconstruction; Foucault; Nietzsche; Post-structuralism; Quentin Skinner; Derrida;

Thucydides

This essay is about two different approaches to philosophy and a history of ideas. It isabout how Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida have thought about power and the State.This may appear to be an odd topic of study. The nature of comparative analysis demandsthat there be some common basis for comparison and it is hard to see how that might beestablished on Skinner’s and Derrida’s markedly different approaches to philosophy andpolitical ideas. When viewed against the backdrop of Skinner’s harsh criticisms of Derrida

see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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ARTICLE IN PRESSM. Drolet / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 234–255 235

and Derrida’s critique of the Western philosophic tradition of which Skinner is a part, thisattempt may seem like an act of folly. Skinner has repeatedly attacked deconstruction, andconsistently contended that his own approach to the history of ideas, which is grounded inthe idea of textual interpretation and the discovery of authorial intentionality, isfundamentally antithetical to Derrida’s philosophical enterprise.1 Derrida, who neverdirectly commented on Skinner’s work, believed the idea of textual interpretation as themeans to discover authorial intentionality to be wholly mistaken and utterly impossible.2

From the time of his earliest works, such as his 1966 critique of Claude Levi-Straussentitled ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, he associated the kind of enterprise Skinner engages inwith what he called logocentrism, a way of thinking about language, truth and reality inwhich meanings are derived from an empirical reality and conveyed through the ability ofwords to refer to things.3 Derrida saw logocentrism, or, as he also called it, the metaphysicsof presence, as fundamentally flawed and ultimately destructive to morality and thought.

Despite the open variance that exists between Skinner and Derrida, I believe that thereexists a shared underlying intention that brings both thinkers close together at animportant level, and justifies the comparison I propose. I will contend that despiteSkinner’s harsh criticisms of Derrida, his approach to the history of ideas has undergoneimportant changes over the years that have led him in a direction that is much closer toDerrida’s enterprise than he is prepared to acknowledge. Though Skinner explicitlyrepudiates deconstruction, my analysis of Derrida will serve as a template against which tomeasure the degree to which Skinner has moved toward and embraced the kinds of post-structuralist ideas that underpin Derrida’s thought. Skinner’s recent pronouncements, andthe re-working of a number of his texts assembled in the three volume collection Visions of

Politics (2002), suggest that his ideas have shifted away from the kind of psychological andpoetic imaginative historical enterprise that might be distantly associated with WilhelmDilthey—an enterprise governed by the motive of establishing a claim to truth—towardthe genealogical and post-structuralist approach associated with the writings of MichelFoucault—an approach that is overtly political. As I will show later, I believe this turntoward Foucault is a natural outcome of Skinner’s understanding of epistemology andhow humans make sense of the world they inhabit. This cognisance is principally informedby Skinner’s reading of Lucretius, Machiavelli and Hobbes, and, as we will see, it hasimportant implications for the neo-republicanism he advocates and the conceptual form ofliberty he defends.

Skinner’s move toward Foucault has been paralleled by a similar shift of position onDerrida’s part. Whilst Derrida was from the late nineteen-sixties fiercely critical ofFoucault, his recent work, especially those writings devoted to reflections on the role ofphilosophy in a time of international terrorism and his thoughts on the contemporaryState, reveal an important, though not fully acknowledged, move toward a shared intentand purpose with Foucault’s genealogy. Derrida came to recognise the value of Foucault’s

1Quentin Skinner, ‘From Hume’s intention to deconstruction and back’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 4(2)

(1996) 147. See too Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. I, Regarding Method. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2002) 122.2Derrida’s most thorough treatment of the idea of textual interpretation as the means to discover authorial

intentionality can be found in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Ed. Elisabeth Weber (trans.) (Paris: Galilee, 1990).3Derrida’s critique of logocentrism can be found in his account of Levi-Strauss’s method, and in particular in

his discussion of ‘totalization’. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, Writing and Difference. Alan Bass

(trans.) (London: Routledge, 2002) 365.

ARTICLE IN PRESSM. Drolet / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 234–255236

objections to deconstruction, which were that it was incapable of an active engagementwith the politics of knowledge. This prompted him to re-evaluate and alter his ownintellectual enterprise, and it led him to render it more explicitly political.4

The re-orientation of Derrida’s thought toward that of Foucault’s, does not, I stress,permit an accommodation with the kind of history of ideas Skinner is associated with; tomake such a claim would be absurd. Derrida repeatedly made clear that deconstructionemphasised language’s capacity to escape a determinate or definitive meaning, or what hetermed ‘totalization’. Deconstruction revealed that language was about ‘play’, thatmeaning was forever deferred.5 It showed, in the words of Jonathan Culler, that the‘exercise of language and thought involves us in intractable paradoxes, which we cannotescape but only repress.’6 It thereby exposed the illusory nature of traditional philosophyand ways of thinking about the world. And it was central to Derrida’s belief that, in thewords of Eric Matthews, ‘reality is to be understood both in terms of difference, ratherthan self-identity, and in terms of perpetual deferment, rather than eternal presence.’7

As deconstruction presented a singular challenge to the traditional practice ofphilosophy, it posed no less of a challenge to the discipline of history and Skinner’sunderstanding of it. Derrida’s thought stressed ruptures, paradigmatic shifts, and rejectedthe idea of temporal continuity. When these elements were coupled with his deconstructivemethod, Derrida’s thought was nothing short of an absolute repudiation of philosophyand history as these disciplines are generally understood: something very far removed fromthe kind of intellectual activity Skinner is engaged in.Given these many fundamental differences between Skinner and Derrida where does the

basis for comparison lie?

The grounds for comparison

From the beginning, Jacques Derrida’s philosophical enterprise was motivated by strongethical and political considerations. Its purpose was nothing less than to overturn theestablished canons of philosophy and other humanities, and thereby restore thought tointegrity and creativity. His engagement, as we have already seen, took the form of thestrategy of deconstruction. This strategy, which he described as ‘without any finality’,8 hada clear point of departure. It was to be a thoroughgoing critique of the logic of identity andnon-contradiction, of logocentrism itself.9 It involved what Vincent Descombes describedas ‘a double game (in the sense that a ‘double agent’ serves two sides), feigning obedience tothe tyrannical system of rules while simultaneously laying traps for it in the form ofproblems which it is at a loss to settle. The strategy of deconstruction is the ruse that makes

4We may well speculate that Gilles Deleuze’s attempts to wed Foucault’s genealogy with Derrida’s method of

deconstruction may well be the principal source of Derrida’s own evaluation of his philosophical enterprise.5Jacques Derrida. ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, ‘Writing and Difference’. Alan Bass (trans.) (London: Routledge,

2002) 365–366.6Jonathan Culler, ‘Jacques Derrida’, Structuralism and Since: From Levi Strauss to Derrida. Ed. John Sturrock.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 156.7Eric Matthews, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 168.8Jacques Derrida, ‘The time of a thesis: punctuations’, Philosophy in France Today. Ed. Alan Montefiore.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 50.9Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference. Alan Bass (trans.) (London: Routledge,

2002) 113.


it possible to speak at the very moment when there is, ‘‘when all is said and done’’, nothingmore to say since the absolute discourse has been achieved.’10 But this game was deadlyserious. And if there was any doubt about its profoundly political and ethical intent, thiswas scotched by Derrida himself in an early essay dating from 1964 entitled ‘Violence andMetaphysics’. In this essay he argued that metaphysics was, as he called it, an act of‘violence’ or ‘war’. Like Nietzsche, who, as a consummate stylist and rhetorician, wagedhis solitary campaign against metaphysics on the terrain of language, Derrida believed thatthe campaign against metaphysics should be waged on the field of battle of language.11

Deconstruction was to be Derrida’s preferred weapon of attack. It stressed language’sradical and thoroughgoing polemical nature, and actualised language’s subversivepotential.12 It rendered language the ideal medium through which to overturn metaphysicsand the established canons of Western philosophy.

In spite of radical differences, Derrida and Skinner share similar visions of language.They agree on its subversive deployment, and see it as a vehicle through which theestablished canons of thought can be overturned. In Visions of Politics, Skinner stressedthe power of language to, as he put it, ‘underpin or undermine the construction of oursocial world.’13 This understanding of language has, according to Skinner, emerged as ‘oneof the most salutary achievements of post-modern cultural criticism’. It has, he believes,‘improve[d] our awareness of the purely rhetorical aspects of writing and speech, therebyheightening our sensitivity to the relations between language and power.’14 By stressing therelationship between language and power, Skinner joined Derrida and other post-structuralist and post-modernist writers in an attempt to break free of the limitations oftraditional modes of thought. To live ‘in post-modern times’ imposed an obligation uponhistorians and philosophers, which was to expose the intellectually constraining power ofestablished canons of thought. According to Skinner these canons ‘bewitched us intobelieving that the ways of thinking about [normative concepts] bequeathed to us by themainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them.’15

Skinner acknowledged that his approach to the history of ideas is indebted to thepost-modern contribution to rousing us from the hypnotic stupor in which we havebeen held by our intellectual heritage. The distant source of inspirationunderlying this commitment lay, as Foucault made clear in an important article What is

10Vincent Descombes, ‘Modern French Philosophy’. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding (trans.) (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1980) 138–9.11Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference, 146. Michel Foucault used a similar

vocabulary, invoking too the idea of ‘war’. But, as we shall see later, Foucault’s use of this vocabulary was

conceived of as an indirect assault on Derrida’s method. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected

Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. (London: Pantheon, 1980) 114.12A similar point is made by Jean-Franc-ois Lyotard, who in drawing direct inspiration from Ludwig

Wittgenstein, prefers to describe, what for Derrida is titanic stuggle in philosophy, as a ‘language game’. Lyotard

stresses the tactical and strategic nature of this ‘game’; in his words: ‘the first principle underlying our [his] method

as a whole: to speak is to fight’. Its purpose is the same as Derrida’s ‘war’: the overturning of the established

cannons of thought. See Jean-Franc-ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Geoff

Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans.) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) 10. As we will see later,

Skinner is also indebted to Wittengstein’s understanding of language. His debt is similar to Lyotard’s and

Derrida’s.13Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 5.14Ibid.,15Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 116. The same

sentence is used in Skinner’s introduction to Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 6.


Enlightenment?,16 in Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question What is Enlightenment?: theadmonition against a ‘laziness and cowardice’ in thought that leads to a life of immaturity,and the adoption of a way of living that has at its core the motto: ‘Sapere aude! Havecourage to use your own understanding!’17 But unlike Kant, who, despite the radicalnovelty of his work, failed to break free of established modes of thought, Foucault,Derrida and Skinner took his work as a starting point from which to effect athoroughgoing rupture from conventional principles of reflection.Derrida, like Foucault, repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Kant. In a number of works

dating from the late 1990s and early second millennium, including De l’hospitalite (1997)Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (1997) and L’Universite sans conditions

(2001) Derrida paid homage to Kant. In interviews with Giovanna Borradori, published asPhilosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) and in Voyous: deux essais sur la raison (2003) hestressed the importance of Kant’s Enlightenment essay to his own strategy ofdeconstruction. Reflecting on the events of 11 September 2001, Derrida admitted howhis own engagement with philosophy, which is about destabilising the foundations of ourintellectual heritage, fundamentally shared Kant’s understanding of Enlightenment.

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Such an ‘‘event’’ surely calls for a philosophical response. Better, a response that callsinto question, at their most fundamental level, the most deep-seated conceptualpresuppositions in philosophical discourse. The concepts with which this ‘‘event’’ hasmost often been described, named, categorized, are the products of a ‘‘dogmaticslumber’’ from which only a new philosophical reflection can awaken us, a reflectionon philosophy, most notably on political philosophy and its heritage.18

Derrida was most pre-occupied with reflecting on political philosophy and its heritage inthe months up to his death. From articles such as ‘Le lieu dit: Strasbourg’ and ‘lamondialisation, la paix et la cosmopolitique’ to his book Voyous, he explored anddeconstructed concepts such as globalisation, international law, the nation state, terrorismand war. He revealed their contingent nature and narrow specificity to particular contexts.He showed how they were products of, and forces that have prolonged, the ‘dogmaticslumber’ of Western philosophy. At the same time as he focused on the contingent, theparticular, and the oppressive, Derrida also evoked the promise of intellectualemancipation and universal justice. This he did through the deconstruction of conceptssuch as democracy and cosmopolitanism with two important works of the 1990s, Spectres

de Marx (1993) and Politiques de l’amitie (1994), being devoted to these topics.19 Derrida’scalling to mind of the promise of intellectual emancipation and universal justice wassuggestive of, and resonated with, Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. According to Blochthis principle was the means of ‘venturing beyond’ and ‘grasp[ing] the New as something

ichel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed.

abinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), 32–50.

manuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’,’ Political Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss,

isbet (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 54. The quote Sapere Aude! is from Horace’s

s, I, 2, 40. It literally means, ‘Dare to be wise’.

ovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida

go: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 100.

cques Derrida, Spectres de Marx. L’Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris:

, 1993); Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitie (Paris: Galilee, 1994). These themes are explored in greater

in Jacques Derrida, Voyous: deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilee, 2003) 125–34.


that is mediated in what exists and is in motion½. . .� and activates the tendency which isinherent in history.’20

Activating a tendency inherent in history is a central tenet of Skinner’s work. Skinnerproceeds by trying, in his words, ‘to uncover the extent to which the current historicalstudy of ethical, political, religious, and other such modes of thought is contam-inated by the unconscious application of paradigms the familiarity of which, to thehistorian, disguises an essential inapplicability to the past.’21 Skinner’s reading of ThomasKuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions left a profound impression on him.22 Itcaused him to move toward the adoption of an epistemological and moral scepticismthat was greatly indebted to post-modern cultural criticism. This enabled Skinner toexamine political concepts in an entirely new light and prompted him to repudiatethe notion ‘that the classic texts in moral, political, religious and other such modes ofthought contain a ‘‘dateless wisdom’’ in the form of ‘‘universal ideas’’.’23 This rejectionof universals was inextricably bound to a critique of objectivity, and these servedas important facets to Skinner’s thoughts on ‘particular’ contexts and his view onauthorial intentionality. The locus of the ‘particular’ conjoined to the rejection of theuniversal, as we shall see, bears the striking similarity of radical otherness central toDerrida’s concept of differance—though it does not contain differance’s other meaning,that of deferral.

Skinner’s acceptance of epistemological and moral scepticism, and his contention thatlanguage is both the most important area of historical analysis and locus of social power,rendered explicit the ‘political’ importance of his work. This shift removed an earlycriticism made by John Gunnell and Charles Tarlton,24 which derided his approach to thehistory of ideas for robbing the subject of its point and emptying it of everything but ‘thedustiest antiquarian interest.’25 The political importance Skinner attaches to his work isemphasised by the favourable comparisons he has made between his enterprise and MichelFoucault’s. In the first volume of Visions of Politics Skinner stressed that he was‘influenced by Foucault’s Nietzschean contention that ‘‘the history which bears anddetermines us has the form of war’’.26 Skinner’s acknowledged debt to Foucault served as aprelude to the assertion that his own approach to the history of ideas would, in his words,‘treat our normative concepts less as statements about the world than as tools and weapons

20Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (trans.) (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1986) 4.21Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 59.22Quentin Skinner, ‘Introduction’, The Return of the Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1985) 10–11; See too ‘Meaning and Understanding’, Visions of Politics: Regarding

Method, 59.23Ibid., 57.24John G. Gunnell, ‘Interpretation and the history of political theory: apology and epistemology’. American

Political Science Review 76 (1982) 317–27; Charles D. Tarlton, ‘Historicity, Meaning and Revisionism in the Study

of Political Thought’. History and Theory 12 (1973) 307–328.25Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 5–6.26Ibid., p. 177. What Foucault actually says is this: ‘Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be to the

great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The History which determines us has the

form of a war rather than that of a language; relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no

‘meaning’, though this is not to say that it is absurd or incorherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be

susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail—but this in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of

strategies and tactics.’ Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977. Ed.

Colin Gordin, (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 114.


of ideological debate.’27 The similarities between Skinner’s and Foucault’s respectivehistories are striking; they mirror too Derrida’s own claims dating from ‘Violence andMetaphysics’ that language was to be the weapon used in the ‘war’ against metaphysics.Skinner’s method of analysis has been directed toward concepts that are now central to hispreoccupations: power and the State. His recent pronouncements on language whenconjoined with his considerations on power and the State bear a number of strikingsimilarities to Foucault’s 1976 and 1977–1978 College de France lectures )Il faut defendre

la societe* and )Securite, Territoire, Population* .28 These concerns were also, as I havenoted, central to Derrida.Skinner’s and Derrida’s common intention is to free us from the shackles of hegemonic

accounts of the world. Their motives are neither unthinking nor merely iconoclastic. Theyare derived from a considered reflection on the nature of the cosmos as being devoid oforder and inherent meaning. Derrida came to that understanding through his explorationsof Nietzsche and Heidegger; Skinner reached it through his study of Lucretius, Machiavelliand Hobbes. This view of the cosmos caused both thinkers to reflect upon dominantcurrents of Western philosophy and the history of ideas. Both concluded that Westernthought embodied a psychologically consoling activity that involved a strategy of humanself-empowerment whereby chance, contingency and the brute particularity of existencecould be made to appear intelligible and manageable. This strategy resulted in anintellectual complacency and dependency, which for Skinner and Derrida resulted in a lossof intellectual, moral and political liberty. Whilst the approaches Skinner and Derridaemployed to restore this lost liberty were different, both believed the philosophy oflanguage was integral to the diagnosis of the ills of Western philosophy and to its cure.In the realm of political ideas and their history, the object of this paper, Derrida and

Skinner presented a similar radical challenge to established conceptions of the liberal State.Skinner’s challenge stemmed from a particular reading of the history of political ideas inwhich a radical subversive, counter-political tradition, that of republicanism, was pittedagainst a dominant tradition of, what he termed, the juridical state, classically stated in thework of Thomas Hobbes. Derrida’s challenge arose out of a deconstruction of the meaningof democracy, and the positing of its radical otherness, which encompassed, among otherelements, cosmopolitanism and hospitality. Both Skinner’s and Derrida’s approaches tothe history of politics and political ideas revealed that they shared a very similarunderstanding of the past in which a hegemonic ideology is periodically challenged by acounter-ideology that exists alongside it. For Skinner, as I have just noted, the hegemonyof the juridical State is challenged by republicanism. For Derrida a similar conception ofSkinner’s juridical State, the State of law and order, the Rechtstaat, is challenged by itsradical other, what he called, in a subtle and sophisticated play on words, the Rogue State

[L’Etat Voyou], which embodies the promise of, what he described as, a ‘democracy tocome’ [democratie a-venir].Both critiques are directed toward the immediate and lofty goal of establishing a

genuinely cosmopolitan Europe: not just a Europe in which the ideas of power,sovereignty, and the State have been radically re-thought, but a Europe in which these

27Quentin Skinner, Op. Cit., 177.28Michel Foucault, )Il faut defendre la societe* . Cours au College de France. 1976 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard,

1997); Michel Foucault, )Securite, Territoire, Population* . Cours au College de France. 1977– 1978 (Paris: Seuil/

Gallimard, 2004).


concepts and the institutions of which they are a part have been radically reconfigured.29 Autopian Europe. How they set out to achieve that goal is the object of the remainder of thisstudy.

I shall proceed first with an account of Skinner’s method as an historian. I will pay closeattention to the role he believes language performs in, as we have already noted,underpinning and undermining ‘the construction of our social world.’30 I will focus onSkinner’s skilful analysis of Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ and,second, on his discussion of neo-Roman liberty. Skinner’s analysis and discussion are verygood examples of his stated intention, which is ‘to try to uncover the extent to which ½. . .�current historical study ½. . .� is contaminated by the unconscious application of paradigms’,to break free of those paradigms, and fulfil the task of the historian consonant with ourpost-modern condition.

Of critical importance to Skinner’s critique of Berlin is his analysis of Thomas Hobbes.From the beginning of his academic career, Skinner has been fascinated with Hobbes.Hobbes represented the archetypal theorist of the juridical state, but he was also a thinkerfascinated with the concept, and obsessed by the emotion, of fear.31 Hobbes’s treatment offear offers both a direct and indirect link between Skinner and Derrida. Both thinkersacknowledge Hobbes’s use of the emotion and concept as the foundation to the state oflaw and order. This emphasis on rule and stability is set against Skinner’s and Derrida’sbelief in the formlessness and ultimate meaninglessness of the cosmos. Their sharedadmiration of Nietzsche, who famously sketched out in The Birth of Tragedy the conflictbetween order and symmetry, chaos and formlessness, is drawn upon to illustrate theirrespective endeavours to shake to the core the established values and paradigms ofWestern thought.

By way of comparison with Skinner, I will then examine the way Derrida deconstructedthe concepts of democracy and the modern state in one of his last major works, Voyous.Derrida’s deconstruction of these concepts is exemplary for the way it shows how theWestern philosophical enterprise and its psychologically consoling activity of imposingorder and meaning on what is fundamentally chaotic and formless, results in—ironically inthe case of democracy—a loss of power and liberty.

The exploration of Derrida’s deconstruction of democracy will serve to mirror Skinner’shistorical account of the struggle between a dominant ideology and its subversivecounterpart. I will conclude by contending that Skinner’s attachment to post-structuralism, with its emphasis on rupture and discontinuity—the logical outcome ofstructualism’s and post-structuralism’s fundamentally spatial orientation toward reality—results in history being directed toward present-day and explicitly political considerations.History thereby loses any pretensions to objectivity, however modest they might be. Itbecomes selective and partisan, a weapon in a clash of ideologies. The consequence of thisis that Skinner’s historical account of the struggle between the ideologies of the juridical

29This intention has been made explicit in a recent collection of essays on the republican tradition in Europe

edited by Skinner. See Eds. Quentin Skinner, et al., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002). Derrida has also made this a stated intention. See Jacques Derrida, The Other

Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Eds. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1992).30Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 5.31For a excellent analysis of fear as a political concept see Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).


state and that of republicanism loses the credibility it needs if it is to succeed as anauthoritative account of the past and thereby convince readers of the present and partisansof the future.

Language, ideology and liberty: thoughts on Skinner’s historical method

Quentin Skinner’s writings are varied and diverse. He has made numerous andsignificant contributions to the methodology of history, to social science and literarycriticism, to the history of political thought, and to contemporary political philosophy.32

His studies in the philosophy of meaning and his works on the Renaissance and earlymodern periods have proven to be significant contributions to those broad fields. He hasbeen eager to show that the history of political thought is, and ought to be, guided by thejudgements and concerns of the practitioner, whether it be about Machiavelli in his adviceto princes, or his own discussion on a republican, or neo-Roman, as he prefers to call it,conception of liberty.33 This prescription for the history of ideas he set out in his importantarticle ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.’34 Though Skinner stressedthe importance of guidance from the judgements and concerns of the practitioner,‘Meaning and Understanding’ had a more overriding concern. This was to show thatpolitical theories are about ideologies and the legitimation crises to which they aresubjected. These crises were, according to Skinner, caused by shifting political relations.35

He argued that

32Ja33Se

Skinne34Qu

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to recognise, moreover, that our own society is no different from any other in havingits own local beliefs and arrangements of social and political life is already to havereached a quite different and, I should wish to argue, a very much more salutarypoint of vantage. A knowledge of the history of such ideas can then serve to show theextent to which those features of our own arrangements which we may be disposed toaccept as traditional or even ‘timeless’ truths may in fact be the merest contingenciesof our peculiar history and social structure. To discover from the history of thoughtthat there are in fact no such timeless concepts, but only the various differentconcepts which have gone with various different societies, is to discover a generaltruth not merely about the past but about ourselves aswell.36

Skinner believed that the task of the intellectual historian was to reveal the dynamic ofthose ‘shifting political relations’, for in so doing he/she could, in his words, ‘help us toappreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways ofthinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times betweendifferent possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any onehegemonic account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood.’37

mes Tully, ‘‘Overview’’. Eds. James Tully and Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Context, p. 3.

e Quentin Skinner, ‘‘The Idea of Negative Liberty’’. Eds. Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin

r, Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 193–221.

entin Skinner. ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8 (1969) 3–53.

ted in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 57–89.

mes Tully, ‘The Pen is a Mighty Sword’. Eds. James Tully and Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Context, 13.

entin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 88–9.

entin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 116–7.


Crucial to understanding the task given to the intellectual historian by Skinner was theplace he assigned to language in his analysis of political ideologies. As we will see later, thestature he gave it in his examination of political ideologies involved a thoroughappreciation of rhetoric.

The impetus and broad outlines of Skinner’s approach owe a great deal to anunderstanding of language discussed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical

Investigations and in On Certainty.38Wittgenstein conceived of language as bothintersubjective and woven deeply into human action. In presenting this view, Wittgensteinsought to rid us of a picture of language that, according to him, ‘held us captive’, a picturewe could not ‘get outside’ of. Wittgenstein believed, as he made clear in the Investigations,that the problems of thought arose out of ‘misrepresentation of our forms oflanguage.’39The clearest expression of this was a reformulation of what first appeared inSection 4.5 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

38Qu

in the

Chang39Lu40Ib41Ib42Qu

‘‘The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.’’—That is the kind ofproposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracingthe outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracingaround the frame through which we look at it.40

This picture of language, which held us captive for so long seemed to lie, in Wittgenstein’swords, ‘in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’41HisInvestigations were a remarkably successful exercise in liberating us from that. Skinner’s1997 inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History, published as Liberty Before

Liberalism sought to tread the same ground as that trod by Wittgenstein, but instead ofengaging in a philosophical examination of language, Skinner opted to analyse a particularpolitical concept that had held us captive for over 40 years: the positive–negative typologyof liberty made famous by Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. Bytackling that topic, Skinner engaged in a wider philosophical and historical enterprise, onethat has defined him as an historian and an intellectual: to reveal not only that in thehistory of political thought there are no timeless truths, but that this in itselfcommunicated a ‘general truth not merely about the past but about ourselves aswell’:42that there is no inherent meaning to the world except that which is imposed upon itby successive generations.

Though there was an obvious lineage with Wittgenstein here, Skinner first began thinkingabout this matter in the more parochial context of crude empiricism in its relation tohistorical scholarship, with the writings of the historian Sir Geoffrey Elton as his chosenexample. When Skinner began working on this in the 1960s he turned to ‘speech act theory’,developed by J.L. Austin, J.R. Searle, P.F. Strawson, and H.P. Grice. Within this theory,linguistic activities were seen to comprise at least two kinds of action. ‘First, the author issaying or writing something: putting forward words, sentences, arguments, theories and soon with a certain ‘‘locutionary’’ or ‘‘propositional’’ meaning (with, that is, sense and

entin Skinner, ‘From Hume’s Intentions to Deconstruction and Back’, 151 & ‘Meaning and Understanding

History of Ideas’, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, ‘Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual

e’, Ibid., 176.

dwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, I, y111.id., I, y114.id., I, y115.entin Skinner. ‘Meaning and Understanding’, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, 67.


reference). Second, and of more importance for Skinner, the author will be doing something

in speaking or writing the words, sentences, arguments and so on: he will be doing so with apoint or intended force.’43 Skinner fully embraced speech act theory. He used it todevastating effect in his polemic against empiricism. It was his chief weapon inrevolutionising the history of ideas. After adopting speech act theory, Skinner was able tomove the focus of his attention to the ‘history of ideologies’ and construct a generalframework within which the writings of the more prominent theorists could be situated. Thisapproach revealed the dynamic and circumstantial nature of political ideologies. It showedthat they were relatively specific epochs, and thus historically contingent. Skinner believedthat the theorist, when armed with this knowledge, could both hope to understand thehistorical links between political theories and political life and establish a clear connectionbetween contemporary political theory and political practice.44 By viewing history as the‘history of ideologies’, the historian of ideas could discover that in the manipulation ofwords’ speech act potential a society could succeed in altering its moral and political identity.Skinner argued this knowledge, while illuminating the past, would simultaneously serve toliberate thought in the present. It is Skinner’s historical engagement with, and ideologicalelevation of, republican values that he believes offers the best prospects of freeing us fromthe hegemony of liberalism and its core concepts of negative liberty and the juridical State.Skinner’s magisterial The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was a classic example

of the kind of ‘history of ideologies’ he set out to construct. The work was also a seriouscontribution to discussions on the nature and meaning of liberty. In this work Skinnertraced the emergence of the dominant ideology of the West: the ideology of law, power,legitimation, and the formal, autonomous, or, as he called it, juridical State. The ideologyof the juridical State was, in part, the consequence of a struggle with a serious ideologicalrival, the counter-ideology of republican humanism. Republican humanism, as Skinnerskilfully demonstrated, presented a radical challenge to the ideology of the juridical Statefrom the Renaissance to the present. Its central characteristic was the elevated status itassigned liberty and the way it described that concept.Skinner developed this idea in his more narrowly focused texts, which treated the idea of

freedom. His overriding concern was, first, to show that the descriptive/evaluativeclassification of negative-positive liberty reinforced the dominant ideology of the juridicalState,45 and second, to show, by way of scholarly study and the most formidable erudition,the contingent nature of both this classification and the ideology to which it was bound. Ashe made clear from the opening sentence of an essay from 1984, ‘The idea of negativeliberty: Machiavellian and modern perspectives’, his intention was ‘to explore a possiblemeans of enlarging our present understanding of the concepts we employ in social andpolitical argument.’46 His contribution, here and elsewhere, to discussions on liberty

43James Tully, ‘The Pen is a Mighty Sword’. Eds. James Tully and Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Context, 8.44Quentin Skinner, Foundations, vol. I, xii–xiii.45See in particular, Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives’.

Eds. Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, Philosophy in History; Quentin Skinner, ‘The

Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’. Eds. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli and

Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the Proper

Signification of Liberty’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 40 (1990) 121–51; and Quentin Skinner,

Liberty Before Liberalism.46Quentin Skinner. ‘The idea of negative liberty: Machiavellian and modern perspectives’, Visions of Politics,

vol. II, Renaissance Virtues, 186.


sought both to discredit this descriptive/evaluative classification and reanimate a neo-Roman conception of liberty.

In his critique of Berlin, Skinner sought to show that Berlin’s typology, and hispreference for negative liberty, was bound up with a subtle insinuation that negative libertywas modern and sensible whilst positive liberty was ancient and suspect. Negative libertywas defended by enlightened political philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu,Constant, Mill, and Tocqueville. The partisans of positive liberty, by contrast, werebrooding romantics such as Herder and Hamann, advocates of rustic authenticity likeRousseau, or revolutionary iconoclasts, chief among them Marx. By characterisingnegative liberty as modern and positive liberty as ancient, Berlin advanced a ‘scenario ofheroes and anti-heroes’, and thereby joined a tradition established and defended byBossuet, Saint-Evremond, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Constant that distinguishedancient from modern liberty. The clear suggestion was that positive liberty was somethingof the past, i.e., the liberty of the ancients corresponding to a different and more primitiveage, and thus should be rejected. Negative liberty, however, was a truly modern ideal. Itembodied enlightened ideals, which conformed to reason and its reign over the humancondition. It gave men the ability to choose, in Berlin’s words ‘between ultimate values ½. . .�because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories andconcepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, part of their being andthought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human.’47 As such,negative liberty should be embraced. Skinner concluded that Berlin’s analysis followed‘exactly the same path as the classical liberal theorists had earlier followed in their effortsto discredit the neo-roman theory of free-states.’ Berlin himself had become, according toSkinner, ‘bewitched’ into believing that the ways of thinking about liberty handed down tous by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about it.48

After rejecting Berlin’s positive–negative typology, Skinner moved to re-animate anancient neo-Roman concept of liberty. He drew on ancient, Renaissance, and earlymodern sources with the express purpose of resurrecting neo-Roman liberty, the theory offree government. His approach was so persuasive that it spawned a wide following in theAnglophone and Francophone world, with leading theorists such as Philip Pettit and Jean-Fabien Spitz broadly endorsing his views. This was particularly true of Pettit whoundertook the ambitious enterprise of theorising this neo-Roman conception of liberty,and did much to influence Skinner’s own views on the concept. Pettit described the neo-Roman, or as he called it, republican ideal of liberty as identified by non-domination, ‘acondition under which a person is more or less immune, and more or less saliently immune,to interference on an arbitrary basis.’49 It embodied ‘the absence of mastery by others’.50

According to Pettit, republican liberty meant ‘freedom as non-domination’, a form ofliberty which both had ‘attractive institutional implications’ and avoided the conceptualdeficiencies associated with negative liberty, particularly the deleterious consequences thatarose from a politics shaped by it, a politics that was reduced to procedural, legal,contractual arrangements; a political life, which, because it was rendered whollyinstrumental, was significantly diminished. Neo-Roman liberty did not succumb to this

47Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 171.48Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 116.49Philip Pettit, Republicanism, vii–viii.50Ibid., 22.


conceptual weakness. According to Skinner its adoption would greatly enrich con-temporary political thought, which has for too long been under the tutelage of thepositive–negative dichotomy that has forced liberals to choose between two narrowideological visions: a liberalism which is crudely libertarian or a liberalism which isinstrumentally utilitarian. In either case the form of political society is exclusively legal andformal, and this, ultimately, is corrosive to liberty, the principal value of liberalism itself.51

Skinner believes that in adopting a neo-Roman conception of liberty, the core concepts ofa just society could be placed on centre-stage rather than relegated to secondary roles asthey are in liberalism. The values of equality, virtue, security, liberty, fraternity, and trust,to name the most important, can be resurrected as the core values of a just society. Neo-Roman freedom allows for an expansive, inclusive, authentic, and genuinely inventive andinspiring political culture.Skinner’s critique of the positive–negative liberty dichotomy was exemplary of the

strategy engaged in by what he described as the ‘innovating ideologist’. According toSkinner the innovating ideologist manipulates ‘the standard speech act potential of anexisting set of descriptive terms’ in order to undermine an existing ‘normativevocabulary’.52 And though there are some significant problems with this strategy, whichI have analysed elsewhere,53 Skinner has nevertheless deployed it to great effect. Crucial tothis strategy is the rhetorical exercise of redescription or redefinition, whereby a concept’simportance can be re-evaluated by redefining it. Skinner wrote suggestively on this point inhis 1996 book on Hobbes, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.54 And hiscritique of Berlin, which appeared one year later, presented Berlin’s understanding ofnegative liberty as one closely allied with definitions of liberty proposed by Hobbes,definitions that were, according to Skinner quoting Berlin, not ‘incompatible with somekinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government’.55 Skinnerimpressed upon his readership this point when he showed, through an analysis of Hobbes,what happens to liberty when its boundaries are set out of physical necessity.According to Hobbes, individuals’ fear of violent death forced them to relinquish their

powers to a sovereign who, in establishing limits to individuals’ freedom, guaranteed theirsecurity. Skinner believed this Hobbesian view of liberty suffered from a similar fatal flawthat Berlin ascribed to the Rousseauian idea of ‘forcing’ a people to be free.

51Je

Micha

(Camb

Essays52Qu53M

(2001)54Qu

1996).55Ta

We can now see the sense in which you remain free according to Hobbes when youact in obedience to law. When the law coerces you into obeying by activating yourfears about the consequences of disobedience, it does not do so by causing you to actagainst your will, thereby causing you to act less than freely. It always does so byinducing you to deliberate in such a way that you give up your will to disobey,

an-Fabien Spitz, La liberte politique, 42–46. This belief is powerfully expressed by communitarians such as

el J. Sandel. See Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy

ridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and most recently his collection of essays, Public Philosophy:

on Morality in Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

entin Skinner, Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action, Meaning and Context, 113.

ichael Drolet, ‘La liberte des modernes. Isaiah Berlin et les neo-republicains’, Politique et Societes 20 (1)

25–43.

entin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

Part I is of great interest here, particularly ch.4.

ken from Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 115.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

56Ib57Isa58Ta59Qu

Virtue60Qu61In

transv

M. Drolet / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 234–255 247

acquire a will to obey, and thereafter act freely in the light of the will you haveacquired.56

Because Berlin adopted a Hobbesian definition of freedom as the correct definition ofnegative liberty, his account of negative liberty also committed the same critical error. Inthis way Skinner was able to show that Berlin would have to concede that his definition ofnegative liberty would logically entail, as it did for Hobbes, a ‘voluntary’ or ‘free’obedience to a sovereign induced by fear. Skinner thereby showed that Berlin’s definitionof negative liberty was an important pillar buttressing the juridical state.

Underlying this analysis was Skinner’s conviction that the dominant currents of Westernthought harboured the psychologically consoling activity of human self-empowerment inwhich the random and accidental nature of existence could be made to appear intelligible,predictable and manageable. His attack on Berlin was indicative of this. As we have seen,Berlin believed negative liberty was critical to an individual’s discovery of the underlyinglaws or principles that governed the human condition and their ability to choose betweenthem. In Berlin’s words, negative liberty was fundamentally about a person’s freedom tochoose ‘between ultimate values ½. . .� because their life and thought are determined byfundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches oftime and space, part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part ofwhat makes them human.’57 The idea of near timeless ‘moral categories and concepts’emerges out of a strategy of psychic consolation and human self-empowerment in the faceof merely accidental and fundamentally unintelligible. Skinner’s examination of the historyof ideas made clear that by resorting to such a strategy, dominant currents in Westernthought created the conditions for intellectual complacency and dependency. This loss ofintellectual and moral freedom corresponded with the loss of political liberty and thewaning of the idea and practice of self-government, according to Skinner.58

In the revised version of his 1983 article ‘Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance ofliberty’, Skinner stressed that ‘liberta, both personal and public, can be maintained only ifthe citizen-body as a whole displays the quality of virtu. The possession of virtu is in turnequated with a willingness ‘‘to follow to the uttermost whatever course of action’’—whether conventionally virtuous or not.’59 Virtu, bound up with the vir, ‘the man of truemanliness’,60 is the quality associated with that individual or people who is able to imposeits will on fortune, that individual or people who is entirely independent of the will ofanother or of mere circumstance. Virtu is that concept to which Skinner ascribes a centralplace in his definition of neo-Roman liberty. But Skinner’s use of the concept of virtu isintegral to his strategy of freeing intellect from complacency and dependency, not just interms of reiterating the idea that a free-thinking people is a free people, but in terms ofstressing an individual’s or people’s heroism embodied in their fearless ability to accept acosmos without order or fundamental meaning.61

id., 8.

iah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 171.

ken from Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 115–6.

entin Skinner, ‘Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance of liberty’, Visions of Politics: Renaissance

s, 163.

entin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 40.

this sense Skinner’s intellectual and political aim is similar to what Nietzsche tried to achieve through the

aluation of all values. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, R.J. Hollingdale (trans.)


At the heart of Skinner’s evocation of virtu is a fascination with that emotion which firstarises out of the discovery of the fundamental unintelligibility of the cosmos: fear.Skinner’s interest in this emotion dates back to his writings on Machiavelli. He was drawnto Machiavelli’s descriptions of the Prince’s ability to inspire fear in the populace, but alsoto Machiavelli’s account of how the Romans used religion as a means to inspire andterrorise a populace into acting in the good of the community.62 Skinner’s interest instudying fear as the source of a people’s servitude has remained at the forefront of histhoughts. His concern with Hobbes and with what Hobbes had to say about fear isindicative of this continuing preoccupation. Skinner is fascinated by how Hobbes theorisesthat once a society’s shared moral ethos no longer exists, fear can be used to establish, inthe words of Corey Robin, ‘a negative moral foundation upon which men could livetogether in peace.’63 Hobbes’s account of the religious sources of fear as one of theprincipal sources of revolution and political servitude, and his discussion of fear asparalysing thought and action in the state of nature, thereby laying the foundation to theerection of the Leviathan are central to Skinner’s preoccupation with Hobbes, and his useof Hobbes in his assault on liberalism. The analysis that follows will serve to show how theconcept of fear is understood by Skinner and Derrida as that negative foundation tocontemporary thought, morality and politics. I will contend that both thinkers understandthis emotion in a way that brings their thought into greater proximity than has hithertobeen acknowledged.

Hobbes, Thucydide and Nietzsche on the politics of fear

Hobbes, who was born on 5 April 1588, was fond of repeating the joke that his motherfell into labour with him upon hearing a rumour that the Spanish Armada threatenedEngland’s shores: ‘so that fear and I were born twins together.’ In a manner akin to Freud,we may speculate that Hobbes’s enunciation of this joke was indicative of a psychicmechanism of human self-empowerment.64 By repeating this joke so often Hobbes mayhave sought to dominate the emotion that most dominated his life. We are reminded hereof Derrida’s discussion on the role of repetition in its relation to trauma: a relation he drewattention to in discussing the events of 11 September 2001, whereby, according to him, ‘byrepeating any fragment of the traumatic situation the victim tries retrospectively todominate it.’65

Hobbes placed the idea of fear of violent death at the centre of his political thinking.This should come as no surprise given that his life as a philosopher and writer spanned thereign of Charles I, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and the Stuart

(footnote continued)

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990); Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Eds. Walter Kaufmann and

R.J. Hollingdale (trans.) (New York: Basic Books, 1969).62Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli, 62. Against many of his critics who contend that Skinner ignores religion, I

believe that he is, like Nietzsche, disparaging of it because it is hostile to, and seeks to deny, man’s ability to stamp

his mark on the cosmos.63Corey Robin, Fear, 34.64Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconsciousness (James Stachey, trans.) Ed. Angela Richards

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983).65Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 147.


Restoration, one of the most tumultuous times in English history. But Hobbes’s interest infear as a political concept may well have begun when writing what would be his firstpublished work, a scholarly translation of Thucydides Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian

Warre (1629). He felt a great need to publish a reliable scholarly edition of this work, inorder, as Pierre Bayle put it when he captured Hobbes’s professed intention, ‘to arouse inthe English a disgust for the Republican spirit’.66 In Hobbes’s prefatory essay ‘Of the Lifeand History of Thucydides’, he judged that it was clear that Thucydides ‘least of all likedthe Democracy’. He went on to conclude that Thucydides ‘showed me how foolishDemocracy is, and how much wiser one man is than an assembly.’67 His assessment of theAthenian historian was based in part on Thucydides’s description of two important eventsduring the Peloponnesian war: his vivid depiction of stasis, or factionalism, of theCorcyræan Revolution, and his celebrated account of the plague that ravaged Athens in430BC.

Thucydides’s description of the Corcyræan Revolution portrayed a society that was‘divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow’ and was governed by a ‘franticviolence [that] became an attribute of manliness’. In this bleak account, Thucydides opinedthat ‘[i]n the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, gladlyshowed itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for justice, and the enemy of allsuperiority.’68 Thucydides’s account of the plague was even bleaker; it was anaccomplished and vivid depiction of an Athens gripped and paralysed by fear. Thucydides,who himself was struck down by the plague, described how the illness was indiscriminate inits victims: ‘strong and weak constitutions proved equally incapable of resistance’, with‘men dying like sheep’. As the disease ran its course, Athens descended into chaos witheven the most firmly held traditions disregarded, the burial rights being ‘entirely upset’.Individuals conducted themselves with ‘lawless extravagance’, the ‘fear of gods or law ofman there was none to restrain them.’69

Thucydides’s depictions of the states of lawlessness precipitated by man and nature wereat the forefront of Hobbes’s mind when he reflected on the state of nature as the state ofwar of every man against every man; the time when, in his words, ‘men live without acommon Power to keep them all in awe’; the time ‘wherein men live without security, thanwhat their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall’; the time of‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death’; the time when there is ‘no account ofTime’.70 For Hobbes it was our passions and our reason that, in his words, ‘encline men toPeace’. ‘Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and aHope by their Industry [men may] obtain them. And Reason suggesteth convenientArticles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement.’71 The sovereign, the

66Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire Historique et Critique (Rotterdam, 1697).67Thomae Hobbes Malmsburiensis, Opera Philosophica, vol. I. Ed., William Molesworth, (London, 1839),

pp.xiv, lxxxviii. Taken from Kinch Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the House: Hobbes and Democracy’, Eds. Annabel Brett

and James Tully, Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2006), 217–8.68Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (Richard Crawley, trans.) (London: J.M. Dent & Sons,

Ltd., 1933) 225–6.69Ibid., 131–3.70Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), pt.I, ch.13, 186.71Ibid., pt.I, ch.13, 188.


Leviathan, was that power which could keep ‘all in awe’ and safeguard the peace necessaryfor the fulfilment of individuals’ passions and their reason.Hobbes’s description of peace emerging out of a condition of lawlessness, was indebted

to Thucydides. It was also redolent of a struggle that manifested itself in ancient art: thestruggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies that lay at the heart of Greekart; the struggle first described by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), andlater returned to by Nietzsche in later works such as Twilight of the Idols (1888). A briefdigression to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy will serve to illuminate the rich and variedsources of Skinner’s thought. For it is through the intellectual trajectory of Hobbes,Thucydides and Nietzsche that Skinner’s defence of neo-Roman liberty is united with hisadmiration and endorsement of a post-structuralist genealogy associated not only with thework of Michel Foucault, but that of Jacques Derrida.In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that the Apollonian and Dionysian duality of

Greek art embodied the duality between the apparent and the real that characterisedWestern philosophy. For Nietzsche the Apollonian was the art of appearance, sculpture,painting, and above all, epic. It embodied the qualities associated with the plastic arts:beauty, hard edges and clarity. The Dionysian, was the art of reality. Dionysian art wasaligned with intoxication, lack of clarity and the merging of individualities through theshared experience of ecstasy. According to Nietzsche these two different tendencies ranparallel but were in opposition to each other. Their parallel movement but open variancecaused them to ‘continually incite each other to new and more powerful births.’72 Thebalance between Dionysian and Apollonian was the special quality of Greek tragedy. TheApollonian, associated with poise, individuality and consciousness, allowed the Greeks toface the raw, chaotic and terrifying impulses of nature called up by the Dionysian. Thebalance between these two elements allowed the Greeks to comfort themselves after, inNietzsche’s words, ‘having looked boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-calledworld history as well as the cruelty of nature.’73 Nietzsche believed this special quality ofGreek tragedy afforded the Greeks both ‘an interpretation of life’ and a way to ‘train’themselves for it. But this was lost with the advent of Thucydides’s history and Plato’sphilosophy, which, because of a secret loathing of randomness, chance, contingency andthe brute particularity of nature, emphasised a timeless, never-changing world of order,symmetry and perfect form. Thucydidean history and Platonic philosophy becamecomplicit with the Apollonian, which soon dominated the Dionysian. The result was thatform and beauty suppressed formlessness, ecstasy and terror. Plato’s philosophy justifiedthe illusion that form and beauty were the true reality. Thucydides’s history justifiedpolitical order at the expense of popular participation. According to Nietzsche, whoseobject of attack was, as he characterised it, ‘the life denying philosophy’ of Plato andPlatonism ‘the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has everbeen subjected’, the domination of the Apollonian over the Dionysian was part of astrategy of human self-empowerment. It was a way of turning the blind and capriciousforces of nature into something comprehensible and therefore less terrifying, a way ofmaking the world manageable, as well as technically manipulable. It was what Nietzschecalled man’s ‘revenge against time’. Overturning this ‘life denying order’ and the ‘dogmatic

72Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Walter Kaufmann, trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), y1,33.

73Ibid., y7, 59.


slumber’ it brought on required a ‘destroyer’ of established canons, an individual whodares to break conventional values.

As we have already seen, Skinner has repeatedly acknowledged his intellectual debt toNietzsche.74 It is therefore no coincidence that Skinner has, from his earliest publishedwork, demonstrated a preoccupation with Hobbes, the modern thinker who was mostconcerned with the life of ‘continuall feare’ and erection of an all powerful sovereign as theinstitution best capable of guaranteeing security. In Nietzschean terms, Hobbes’spreoccupation with wiping out randomness, disorder, and the fear they spawned, madehim the ultimate modern exponent of the Apollonian. Skinner’s attempt to trace acommon lineage between Berlin and Hobbes, we may conclude, symbolises a sophisticatedNietzschean overturning of an established dogma. Fear, Skinner concludes, like Hobbesbefore him, is the negative foundation to the state. It is also the basis of servitude inthought and therefore an important constraint on liberty. As we already noted, Skinner’sgenealogy of liberty and its attendant overturning of an established dogma, is an enterprisehe shared with Foucault; it is an activity he also shares with Derrida.

Jacques Derrida and the politics of logocentrism

The exploration of the emotion of fear moved to the centre of Derrida’s work in 2001.His interviews from that year with Giovanna Borradori and one of his last books Voyous:deux essais sur la raison engaged with the concept as synonymous with terror. The analysisof terror furnished Derrida with the ideal opportunity to deepen his critique oflogocentrism, showing the extent to which deconstruction was subversive to bothphilosophy and politics. The impulse underlying these reflections was similar to thatunderlying Skinner’s historical enterprise. It is the urge to liberate us from the establishedand complacent ways of thinking about the world, to awaken us from a ‘dogmaticslumber’.75

As we discussed earlier, Skinner’s influential The Foundations of Modern Political

Thought was a classic statement of the kind ‘history of ideologies’ he believed would rouseour sleeping intellects. Foundations traced the emergence of the dominant ideology of theWest, the ideology of the juridical State. It showed how that ideology emerged out of astruggle with a rival, or counter-ideology, that of republican humanism. Skinner’sfascination with fear and his identification of fear’s relation to a conception of the cosmosthat is devoid of order and meaning is something he shared with Derrida. It is a measure ofhow far Skinner has moved toward post-structuralism and how explicitly political Derridahad become toward the end of his life that we can now explore the extent to whichSkinner’s history of ideologies is—without subscribing to the principles of deconstruc-tion—strikingly similar to Derrida’s analysis of democracy and the modern State outlinedin the pages of Voyous.

Derrida used the term Voyous, or rogues in English, to stunning effect in hisdeconstruction of democracy and the modern state. He began his deconstruction bypresenting the reader with an etymology of the term. This was entirely in keeping with his

74See also his remark in ‘Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change’, Visions of Politics: Regarding

Method, 176.75Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida

100.


method. He traced the origins of voyous in French to 1830 and the invasion of Algeria bythe French under Charles X. According to Derrida the term was a form of slang, alwaysdescriptive and most often highly pejorative and accusatory. The voyou, or rogue, was alibertine, or rake; he was crafty, a trickster, a knave, or a cheat. He was delinquent, andalways outside the boundaries of the law.76

The word acquired a political connotation when, in 1865, Flaubert coined the termvoyoucratie. According to Derrida it ‘was a way to designate, in truth to suspect anddenounce before the law, an organised force, not yet the quasi-state of a mafia, but a sortof occult and alien power, the delinquent counter-power of a secret society or conspiracy,the counter-institution of a clandestine brotherhood that would embrace those outside thelaw and those who had been led astray.’77 The voyoucratie was the contrary to law andorder. It was a state of licence.According to Derrida licence was one of the chief characteristics of democracy in the

ancient world. The Greeks placed licence [exousia] alongside liberty [eleutheria] as amongthe defining attributes of democracy. Plato’s description of democracy in Book VIII of theRepublic stressed its licentiousness. He described democracy in terms of a loss of authority.A democracy entailed the refusal to restrain through the force of law those who, inDerrida’s words, were literally the ‘unchastisable, the uninhibited, the intemperate, thelicentious, the indisciplined, delinquent, wasters, the rogues and rakes, the ‘‘wild’’.’78 Theabsence of will to restrain the ‘intemperate’, licentious, and indisciplined within societybelied the fact that the rogue belonged to the most popular section of the people.According to Derrida, when one spoke of the rogue the demos was never far-removed: ‘norwas democracy very far away from rogueaucracy.’79

76Ja77Ja78‘[.

et les r79Ib80Ib

The rogueaucracy ½voyou cratie� represents a sort of competing power, a challenge tothe power of the State, a criminal and transgressive counter-sovereignty, we havehere all of the ingredients of a Batailleian counter-concept of sovereignty.80

Derrida’s introduction of the counter-concept of sovereignty as understood by GeorgesBataille and its association with transgression into the irrational, violent and destructive,allowed Derrida to signal a close association with Michel Foucault’s genealogical historyand politics because of Foucault’s fulsome acknowledgement of his profound debt toBataille. The concept, and its deployment by Derrida, was astonishingly similar toSkinner’s use of neo-Roman liberty, with its emphasis on self-government, and thecounter-ideology to which it belongs, republicanism. The vividness of similarities wasfurther enhanced with the introduction of Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity, a conceptthat, in undermining the idea of sovereignty itself, resonated with Skinner’s objections tothe concept of liberty associated with the juridical state, a concept whose negativefoundations in fear undermined liberty itself by creating the conditions for servitude inthought and action.

cques Derrida, Voyous, 96.


. .] les non chaties, non reprimes, intemperants, licencieux, indisciplines, delinquants, gaspilleurs, les voyous

oues, les )sauvageons* .’ Ibid., 44.

id., 97.

id., 100.


The limits of comparison

In a work dating from 1996 entitled Foi et Savoir Derrida attempted, as he put it, to‘formalise a general law’ of the process of auto-immunity [le processus auto-immunitaire].The auto-immunitary process, Derrida defined, as ‘that strange behaviour where a livingbeing, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘‘itself’’ works to destroy its own protection, to immuniseitself against its ‘‘own’’ immunity.’81

Derrida believed that democracy embodied such an auto-immunitary process. In seekingto protect itself from that which threatens it, le voyou, the rogue, the democracyextinguishes itself. This, according to Derrida, was democracy’s ‘double bind’, its aporia.82

According to Derrida modern democracy’s defining characteristic, equality of condition,embodied this process of auto-immunity. The near eradication of difference Derridaassociated with equality of condition he believed illustrated this process.83 His analysisfollowed closely Foucault’s explorations of forms of self-discipline, or the policing of theself. But whereas Foucault undertook his studies in relation to mental illness, crime,deviance and sexuality, Derrida’s interest was more circumscribed. Its focus was narrowedand sharpened by circumstance, by that which was unpredicted, by the ultimate self-destructive act of the ultimate rogue, by the act of kamikaze terrorism. In his analysis ofthe democratic state’s response to global terrorism, Derrida concluded that the democraticstate itself could be viewed as having succumbed to auto-immunity, or self-destruction,precisely because in its attempt to stamp out its radical other, the unpredictable andultimately self-destructive rogue, or voyou, it became that other: democracy becamevoyoucratie. Derrida pressed the point further arguing that sovereignty, the State, and therule of law became their opposites.

81Ed82Ja83Ja84Ib85Ib

Those States that are in the state of waging war on rogue States are themselves, intheir most rightful sovereignty, rogue States abusing their power. As soon as there issovereignty, there is abuse of power, and rogue State. ½. . .� It follows that there areonly rogue States. In power or in action. The State is a rogue.84

This mode of proceeding was typical of Derrida. Deconstruction played on this duality ofmeanings and binary paradox: the ‘abuse of power’ integral to power’s legitimate exercise,to sovereignty itself.85

The concept of auto-immunity, in stressing democracy’s self-destructiveness or self-contradiction, encapsulated an idea that, as I have mentioned, was at the heart of Skinner’sunderstanding of the concept of liberty central to liberalism, the ideology of the juridicalstate. As we have seen, Skinner grasped at the centrality of the concept of fear in Hobbes’sthought. In particular, he seized on the idea that fear represented the negative foundationof the state, and ultimately was the basis of servitude of thought—an issue thatpreoccupied Hobbes in parts three and four of Leviathan. As Hobbes showed in hisaccount of the state of nature, fear ultimately arrested thought. But he also showed,especially in his treatment of religion, that fear could be used to limit the scope of free

. Giovanna Borradori, ‘Philosophy in a Time of Terror’, 94.



id., 145–6.

id., 145.


thinking and thereby create the conditions necessary for the development of intellectualcomplacency, conditions necessary to civil and political peace.The concept of auto-immunity, whilst suggesting striking similarities between Derrida

and Skinner, also represented the limits to any comparision. As part of Derrida’s critiqueof sovereignty and power, the concept of auto-immunity was part of a wider engagementof exploring the suggestive, the hopeful, the utopian in human history. Derrida’sexploration of concepts such as khora, mourning, and hospitality, particularly in theirrelation to cosmopolitanism, along with evoking ideas such as forgiveness—forgiving theunforgivable, in relation to events such as the Holocaust, and other crimes againsthumanity, including apartheid in South Africa, and 11 September 2001—opened the realmof the incalculable, the immeasurable, and the irresolvable—a realm well beyond the scopeof Skinner’s enterprise. For Derrida these concepts upset the ‘ordinary course of history,law, and politics’.86 They showed the limits to ‘totalization’, of logocentrism, by referringto activities that never resulted in any final resolution or completed outcome. Theycorrelated with differance—that which is indeterminate, radically incommensurable, andwhose meaning is forever deferred—and they were suggestive of Kant’s discussion in The

Critique of Judgement of the faculties of cognition and understanding in their relation tothe mathematical and dynamical sublime. They stressed the cosmos’s randomness andfundamental incomprehensibility.

Conclusion

If the concept of auto-immunity highlighted similiarities between Derrida’s andSkinner’s thoughts on power and the State it also set the boundary to any comparisonbetween them. Nevertheless, the genealogical impulse running through both thinkers’works established the foundation upon which I have sought to justify my comparison.Skinner’s attempt to erect a conception of self-government founded on virtu is integral tothe strategy of freeing the mind from complacency and dependency and of preparing it toface a formless and capricious universe that is fundamentally devoid of meaning. Skinner’shistorical enterprise, when understood in this way, would result in a form of self-government that is not inimical to accommodating the kind of openness and deferral ofmeaning central to those Derridian concepts of khora, mourning, hospitality, andforgiveness that are bound up with the differand.Despite Skinner’s and Derrida’s explicit repudiations of each other’s intellectual

enterprises, their shared Nietzschean intention to overthrow the established canons ofthought combined with their intellectual and political debt to Foucault has resulted in asignificant narrowing of the divide separating both thinkers. The consequence of this forkind of history Skinner has sought to erect is significant. As I suggested earlier, Skinner’sembrace of post-structuralism has resulted in history being directed toward present-dayand explicitly political considerations. History becomes selective and partisan; it is drivenless by considerations of objectivity and more by the concerns of rhetoric. As a result,Skinner, in his ambitious desire to transplant a moribund liberalism, with its narrowproceduralism and accompanying barren political life, has, remarkably for a historian,ignored strands of liberalism, such as the new liberalism of late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century Britain, or the liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, that are more

86Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 144.


communitarian in their orientation, and hence, more accommodating to the kind ofrepublicanism he mistakenly pits against them. This lack of historical sensitivity results in aloss of credibility in the republican project Skinner seeks to uphold, for the contours of hispolitical project are much easier to discern than those of Derrida’s impossibly high andultimately nebulous politics. And whilst this loss of credibility might be partially temperedby the aesthetic and intellectual pleasure derived from envisaging the scope and breadth ofSkinner’s attempted transvaluation of all historical and political values, one mightlegitimately ask of Skinner, Derrida, and those who embraced the post-structuralist attackon modernity, whether to wage war against ‘laziness and cowardice’ in thought throughaesthetic considerations is as implacable as it is presented? Or is it fundamentally merelyrhetorical?

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to Robert Burns and Keith Jenkins who invited me togive a version of this article to the Philosophy of History Seminar, Institute of HistoricalResearch, University of London. Their questions and comments helped me to improvemany aspects of this article. Penelope Corfield, David McLellan, Justin Champion andAndrew Gow all read versions of this text. Their exacting questions and comments forcedme to think hard about important aspects of this essay. Thanks too to Pierre Boyer,Beverley Southgate and Richard Whatmore for advice and encouragement.

Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on Power and the State

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