Volume 26, Number 8 · May 17, 1979
Politics Recaptured
By Keith Thomas
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought Volume One: The Renaissance Volume Two: The Age of Reformation
by Quentin Skinner
Cambridge University Press, 405 pp., $9.50 each (paper)
Although the history of political thought has long been a recognized subject for academic study, there has never been much agreement on how it should be approached. Most commentators have been content to treat the great books of the past as if they were timeless meditations on perennial problems, capable of yielding their full meaning to any modern reader prepared to peruse them carefully from cover to cover, however ignorant he may be of their historical context. 'We learn more about their arguments,' wrote the late John Plamenatz of Machiavelli and Montesquieu, 'by weighing them over and over again than by extending our knowledge of the circumstances in which they wrote.' In keeping with this maxim, generations of students have been encouraged to pore over The Republic or The Prince or Leviathan, confident that microscopic analysis of the text will ultimately unravel its true import. It is not surprising that they have often emerged with interpretations which, however persuasive exegetically, are as bizarrely subjective and historically implausible as some modern readings of Hamlet offered by literary critics equally unhampered by historical constraints.
Review, 3973 words
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