BOOK REVIEWS

Botwinick, Aryeh, Skepticism, Belief, and the Modern: Maimonides to

Nietzsche (Ithaca and London: Contestations, Cornell Studies in
Political Theory, Cornell University Press, 1997), 247 pp., £31.50
ISBN 0 801432081.

This ambitious book argues that the ways in which we tend to concep-
tualize the links between the past and the present in political theory,
and between the modern and the postmodern, need to be challenged.
We often think of Western intellectual history as changing from an ear-
lier period in which religion had more of a leading position which came
to be replaced by more secular ways of working as modernity became
established. Yet, according to Botwinick, this is profoundly mistaken,
since modernity has always been present in Western thought, at least
from Plato onwards, in the sense that an important chain of Western
thinkers embodied skepticism in their thought. He argues, not implau-
sibly, that Plato was aware of skeptical problems that make attempts at
defending and defining knowledge irretrievably circular and unsatisfac-
tory. Maimonides, Hobbes and Nietzsche are taken to follow the logic
of this, in the case of the two former, through defending a rigorous
form of monotheism. This sort of monotheism, which emphasizes the
huge distance between the human and the divine, removes from theo-
retical grasp the understanding of the deity, and puts a premium on
practice as compared with knowledge of the divine. The arguments in
favor of negative theology presented by both Maimonides and Hobbes
suggest an iconoclasm with respect to their predecessors, and an attempt
to chart new intellectual waters. This Botwinick sees as very much the
skeptical strand of Western thought, leading to the ways in which the
postmodernists seek to replace the pleasing certainties of theory with
respect for the transitory and fragmentary.
Readers of this journal will be most interested in the discussion of
Hobbes, which comprises at least half of the book, and they will find
much of interest in it. One useful aspect of the account of Hobbes is
the stress on his nominalist theory of meaning, which replaces reason
as the basis of political authority with the argument that reason itself
presupposes authority. In Leviathan Hobbes constructs an argument for
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the minimalist state whose main aims are the security and protection
of its citizens, and which can be theoretically interpreted as based in
consent. The point of reason is to serve the passions, and not act as
the intellectual underpinning of the passions, and this extreme form of
skepticism ends with the construction of the Hobbesian solution of the
contract. The contract ends in an action, in the establishing of what
particular words and actions mean, surrounded as they are by nothing
ultimately more real nor solid than they are themselves. This stress on
the significance of the negative also comes out in the account of liber-
alism as a form of negative politics. Liberalism establishes what cannot
be done to enforce values or ideas, or to allow the opinions of the
majority or even of the minority to prevail. Liberalism insists that the
ends of politics must be constrained and limited, so that we as citizens
are told what we cannot want and what the state cannot be allowed
to do. Botwinick links the approach to politics with the negative theol-
ogy of both Maimonides and Hobbes, where we are told what we can-
not say about God, but provided with no information about what can
positively be attributed to him.
Indeed, that immense distance which separates us from God is used
by Hobbes to replace the theology of the Puritans. For them the abil-
ity of God to be both near and far is an overwhelming mystery, and
one which they used in support of their pursuit of radical political action.
Since they felt that God was in communication with them, and since
he advocated the subversion of the political order, the Puritans had
every motive to indulge in revolutionary behavior. In an attempt at
explaining what is wrong with such a position, Hobbes replaces an arbi-
trary and personal God with the secular concept of the pursuit of peace,
which serves as the basis to our understanding the ways in which the
distance between people is to be respected. The epistemological basis
to this principle is the Hobbesian argument that so much resembles
that of Maimonides, namely, a basic skepticism with respect to our grasp
of what God wants us to do. From this follows the antagonism to rev-
olutionary change. 'I'he only acceptable change is that which eventu-
ally does not prove to be entirely disruptive, and which can be shown
after the event to have preserved continuity with the past. The mean-
ing of an action is not entirely under our control, and only the future
will show what the action really means, hence revolution must be avoided,
according to Hobbes, since it is based on the idea that the actor knows
entirely the extent and sense of his action. Skepticism serves to restrain
what we can justifiably say about what we do.