Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (review)

For historians and other Renaissance scholars unfamiliar with Vickie Sullivan's previous work, she has already established herself among political theorists as a respected and creative scholar by authoring a series of important articles as well as the 1996 book Machiavelli's Three Romes. Her earlier research charts an independent position in the crowded field of Machiavelli studies. In particular, she has brought critical scrutiny to widely accepted views concerning Machiavelli's place in intellectual history while also contributing original and provocative interpretations of his teachings.

Sullivan's new book continues this research program but extends it in innovative ways. Simply stated, she argues that the supposed tension between liberalism and republicanism, born in early modern Europe and reproduced in Western political thought ever since, was already being challenged and even resolved during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Sullivan posits the emergence of a "liberal republican" doctrine, understood as a systematic effort to integrate the two strands of thought, in the writings of the English authors Marchmont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and, most importantly and fully, "Cato" (John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon). Her archetype of republicanism is, of course, Machiavelli, and of liberalism, more problematically, Thomas Hobbes.

The book opens with a necessarily compressed account of the republican and liberal positions. Machiavelli's republicanism is conceived as modern, rather than classical, in orientation (a claim that she earlier defended in opposition to John Pocock's influential reading and that also relies heavily on the scholarship of Paul Rahe). As Sullivan herself acknowledges, her approach reinforces a sharp dichotomy between these two incommensurable forms of republicanism. She does not seem cognizant of scholars who have treated republican thought in a more pluralistic way (for example, by decomposing the presumed unity of any form of republican doctrine — classical, modern, or [entirely overlooked by Sullivan] medieval). To insist upon a fixed trait or traits essential to republicanism (whether classical or modern) imposes an artificial filter upon the process of interpretation that screens out inconvenient counterexamples. In the case of Sullivan's reading of Machiavelli, for instance, she neglects the overtly Ciceronian rhetorical dimensions of his thought that highlight the countervailing classical emphasis on reasoned public discourse in contrast to the supposedly modern republican obsession with war.

Sullivan's selection of Hobbes, rather than John Locke, as the anchor of the liberal side of her account poses further dilemmas. While there is a body of scholarly literature that treats Hobbes and Locke as but two sides of the same coin, this position remains controversial. Why, then, does Sullivan proceed along this path? The reason is that many of the English figures whom she wishes to include under the "liberal republican" umbrella either wrote before or evinced minimal awareness of Locke's political writings. Hobbes must therefore become more or less the proxy for Locke. Certainly, it is true that Locke and Hobbes share some language and conceptual apparatus (right of nature, social contract, liberty, equality), but Hobbes's unremittingly absolutistic agenda renders him a poor candidate to be the quintessential liberal. More accurate (and more plausible) perhaps would be the phrase "Hobbesian republicanism" to describe the synthesis that Sullivan identifies during the second half of the seventeenth century. Liberalism is really tangential to the enterprise, at least until Locke's work is widely disseminated.

The a priorism of Sullivan's broad interpretive scheme also sometimes infects specific textual analyses. For example, she asserts that "Neville imports . . . Hobbes's doctrine that individuals consent to government in order to escape from a state of war and thus satisfy their desires that arise from their basic needs" (178–79). She supports this claim by quoting Neville's statement that the first government "was made by the persuasion of some wise and virtuous person, and consented to by the whole number" (179). Of course, this isn't the view of Hobbes...