Quentin Skinner on Machiavelli's Discourses and The Prince

Introduction

In a brillant and equally iconoclastic article of 1969, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," Quentin Skinner identifies a series of intellectual errors that he contends are commonplace within the history of ideas. One of these fallacies, or mythologies, as Skinner calls them, is the mythology of coherence, which he defines as the dogmatic search for a unified interpretation or a coherent view of a given author's ideas or work. In the excerpt reproduced below, Skinner quotes W. Harrison and C.B. Macpherson as two general representatives of the mythology of coherence. The Machiavelli interpreters, who are accused of downplaying the differences between The Prince and the Discourses, are Federico Chabod, Friedrich Meinecke and, notably, Leo Strauss. In a footnote, Skinner acknowledges Hans Baron's article of 1961, "Machiavelli the Republican Citizen and the Author of The Prince." as a source of inspiration.

... The other metaphysical belief to which the mythology of coherence gives rise is that a writer may be expected not merely to exhibit some 'inner coherence' which it becomes the duty of his interpreter to reveal, but also that any apparent barriers to this revelation, constituted by any apparent contradictions which the given writer's work does seem to contain, cannot be real barriers, because they cannot really be contradictions. The assumption, that is, is that the correct question to ask in such a doubtful situation is not whether the given writer was inconsistent, but rather 'How are his contradictions (or apparent contradictions) to be accounted for?' The explanation dictated by the principle of Ockham's razor (that an apparent contradiction may simply be a contradiction) seems not to be considered. Such apparent incompatibilities, it is often said instead, should not simply be left in this unresolved state, but should be made to serve instead in helping towards 'a fuller understanding of the whole theory' - of which the contradictions, presumably, form only an unsublimated part. The very suggestion, indeed, that the 'contradictions and divergences' of a given writer may be 'supposed to prove that his thought had changed' has been dismissed by a very influential authority as just another delusion of nineteenth-century scholarship. So it comes about that much current practice in the history of ideas deliberately endorses one of the more fantastic doctrines of the scholastics themselves: the belief that one must 'resolve antinomies'. The aim, for example, in studying the politics of Machiavelli need not therefore be restricted to anything so straightforward as an attempt to indicate the nature of the developments and divergences from The Prince to the later Discourses. It can be - and has been - insisted instead that the appropriate task must be to construct for Machiavelli a scheme of beliefs sufficiently generalized for the doctrines of The Prince to be capable of being aufgehoben into the Discourses with all the apparent contradictions resolved.

Quentin Skinner : "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53; later reprinted in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. J. Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 29-67; the quote is from the latter version, pp. 41-42.

... These conclusions can also be stated in the form of a further methodological precept. If as historians we come upon contradictory beliefs, we should start by assuming that we must in some way have misunderstood or mistranslated some of the propositions by which they are expressed.

As a simple instance of what I have in mind, consider yet a further example from Machiavelli's political works. In his Discourses Machiavelli affirms that liberty is possible only under a repubblica. But he also affirms that Rome lived in libertà under her early kings. What then does he believe? Does he or does he not think that liberty and monarchy are incompatible?

Historians have tended to reply that he seems to be confuse: he accepts but also denies that liberty is only possible under a republic. I am suggesting, however, that before we endorse such a conclusion we ought first to consider whether we may not in some way have misunderstood what he said. Sure enough, if we investigate the full range of contexts in which the term repubblica occurs, we discover that in Machiavelli the term is used to denote any form of government under which the laws may be said to foster the common good. It follows that for Machiavelli the question of whether a monarchy can be a repubblica is not an empty paradox, as it would be for us, but a deep question of statecraft. The question is whether kings can ever be relied upon to pass only such laws as will serve the common good. This gives us an alternative reading: Machiavelli is telling us that, under Romulus and his successors, the laws of Rome served the common good, so that the government, although monarchical in form, was an instance of a repubblica. Since this has the effect of resolving the contradiction, I am suggesting that this is also the interpretation we ought to prefer.

But what if the initial contradiction had refused to yield to any such re-interpretative efforts? I have already given my answer: at that point we have to admit that we cannot say what Machiavelli believed at all ...

Quentin Skinner : "A reply to my critics," in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. J. Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 231-88; quote pp. 258-59.

"[Quentin Skinner] takes it for granted that The Prince and Discourses should be studied in separation from one another. His reason for doing so is that he is combatting the methodological viewpoint, represented most ably by Ernst Cassirer, which postulates a vital center from which all the individual works of a given thinker radiate as do the spokes from the center of a wheel ... As a corrective to Cassirer, Skinner's point is well-taken. It is to Skinner's apparent reversal of an priori assumption of unity into an a priori assumption of disunity that we must object."