The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (review)

388 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Man is created in the image of God--the most important late scholastic argument in favor of human dignity--and is therefore a creator, like God. By acknowledging his limits as a creature, he frees his energies to work creatively with God in history. Authoritative opinions are therefore neither truth nor binding on him; they are opiniones which have to be tested against Christian revelation and against the intentions and experiences of the living human beings who receive them (pp. 179ff.). Petrarch thus establishes a new rhetorical model (pp. 189-97 ) which is able to preceive the past under the aspect of its usefulness. It opens to contemporary man new possibilities for action and self-realization to which he is entitled and destined in the unfolding of history. Kessler's book is not another monograph on Petrarch's life and works. The author has proven what he set out to do: to trace the genesis of the poet-philosopherhistorian Petrarch and to elucidate Petrarch's great powers of synthesis in a time of philosophical and theological crisis. Thorough philological, philosophical, and historical analysis combined make Kessler 's book a very valuable addition to Petrarch scholarship. CHARLOTTE L. BRANCAFORTE University of Wisconsin Quentin Skinner. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Voi. 1, pp. xxiv + 3o5; vol. a, pp. 4o5 . For years political theory has been presented to students in textbooks and in university courses as if the ideas of one theorist simply descended like the gentle dew of heaven upon the head of the next theorist in "the great chain of being" which, in these texts, extends from Plato to J. S. Mill. In this fashion, students may perhaps acquire a certain mental agility as they leapfrog across centuries and cultures from the lilypad of one "great" theorist to that of the next (viz., Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel, etc.); but the "history" pretended to in these accounts serves as a metaphor designed to mask a series of arbitrary and unexamined assumptions subscribed to by the interpreter. Space and time are, at best, mere inconveniences for this traditional approach in its quest for timeless ideas, perennial questions, and eternal essences. Several generations of instruction in this view of "political theory" have fostered a kind of conceptual illiteracy as to the origins, nature, and purposes of political theorizing. As anyone familiar with Quentin Skinner's writings on methodology and the interpretation of political theory would expect, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought begins on different ground and pursues different objectives from those characteristic of the traditional approach. In addition to providing an explicatory account of "the principal texts of late medieval and early modern political thought," Skinner seeks "to use" these texts "to indicate something of the process by which the modern concept of the State came to be formed" (p. ix). His "third concern is to exemplify a particular way of approaching the study and interpretation of historical BOOK REVIEWS 389 texts" (p. x). It is the latter of Skinner's three main objectives which is likely to draw the most critical fire from readers of Foundations, which represents, in substance more than in direct methodological discussion, an attack upon some of their basic and long-cherished presuppositions about political theory. Skinner's methodology prompts him to focus upon "the more general social and intellectual matrix" out of which political theories of this period emerged rather than upon an elucidation of the "classic texts." Relatively speaking, this represents a minor but tolerable disagreement as to how political theory should be interpreted when compared to the assertion, which Skinner takes to follow from this interpretive axis, that the history of political theory is "a history of ideology" and that those who study political theory ought therefore to regard themselves "essentially as students of ideologies " (pp. x-xiii). This admonition, to put it mildly, is not likely to be well received. Ideology is a word that sticks in the craw of most traditional interpreters of political theory, and, more often than not, their rejection of it as a useful term of interpretive analysis is framed under the pretense that they do not understand...