Polity . Volume 41, Number 2 .

April 2009
r 2009 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/09
www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

Helping the Dead Speak:

Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner
and the Arts of Interpretation
in Political Thought*
Ian Ward
University of Maryland

In the wake of the ‘‘hermeneutical turn,’’ two approaches to textual interpretation

have come to wield considerable disciplinary influence in North American political
theory circles: those of Leo Strauss and Quentin Skinner. Their respective
approaches to texts in the history of political thought are generally regarded as
competitor endeavors; indeed, the view that these approaches are downright
antithetical enjoys the status of a disciplinary commonplace. I interrogate this
commonplace and attempt to clarify what exactly is at stake in the differences
between these two thinkers’ interpretative approaches. Such efforts are repaid,
I believe, by a more nuanced methodological self-awareness that discloses a more
cooperative, and less antagonistic, view of the relationship between the two
thinkers’ hermeneutical understandings.
Polity (2009) 41, 235–255. doi:10.1057/pol.2008.29;
published online 12 January 2009

Keywords Leo Strauss; Quentin Skinner; interpretation; rhetoric;

hermeneutics; historiography

Ian Ward is an assistant professor of Government and Politics at the University

of Maryland. His research interests include contemporary political philosophy,
critical social theory, and the academic study of Religion. He is currently working on
a book, Democracy After Secularism: Public Reasoning and Religious Difference,
inspired by his doctoral dissertation at Princeton. He can be reached at
iward@gvpt.umd.edu.

*The author would like to thank the following for their comments, criticisms, and questions
concerning earlier drafts of this article: three anonymous reviewers at Polity, Michael Frazer, Nathaniel
Klemp, John Lombardini, Matt Moore, Sankar Muthu, Alan Patten, Jennifer Pitts, Jeffrey Stout, Jack
Turner, and participants in the Political Theory Research Seminar and the Religion and Critical Thought
Workshop at Princeton.
236 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

Introduction

In their heyday, hermeneutical debates were diverse and wide-ranging,

occupying many of the human sciences through the latter half of the twentieth
century.1 The ‘‘hermeneutical turn’’ and associated controversies have left their
mark on political theory no less than on other disciplines, partly by virtue of the
substantive concerns bequeathed by key hermeneutical figures (most promi-
nently, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur), and partly through a heightened
methodological self-consciousness on the part of political theorists engaged in
the interpretation of texts. In the wake of this turn, two approaches to textual
interpretation have come to wield considerable disciplinary influence in North
American political theory circles over the ways in which we read and teach the
writings of the dead: those of Leo Strauss and Quentin Skinner.2 Their respective
approaches to texts in the history of political thought are generally regarded as
competitor endeavors; indeed, the view that these approaches are downright
antithetical enjoys the status of a disciplinary commonplace. Commonplaces, in

1. The lodestar for philosophical hermeneutics in the latter twentieth century was Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2004); for historical and philosophical-
reconstructive account of hermeneutics’ subsequent influences on Anglo-American social inquiry, see
Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), Charles Taylor, ‘‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,’’ in
Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 15–57, and Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society and Politics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); for an account of parallel debates in philosophy and literary
criticism, see David C. Hoy, The Critical Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); for a critical
survey of hermeneutical positions in legal scholarship, see Keith E. Whittington, Constitutional
Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent and Judicial Review (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1999); and for a brief account of hermeneutics’ influence on religious studies, see Dan R. Stiver,
The Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol and Story (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
2. I do not mean to diminish the importance of Strauss’s and Skinner’s influences on continental
European political thought. On this front, see Nadia Urbinati, ‘‘The Historian and the Ideologist,’’ Political
Theory 33 (February 2005): 89–95, Mark Lilla, ‘‘Leo Strauss, the European,’’ New York Review of Books 51
(October 21, 2004), Robert B. Pippin, ‘‘Being, Time, and Politics: The Strauss–Kojève Debate,’’ History and
Theory 32 (May 1993): 138–61, Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Leora F. Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas:
Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Generally
speaking, Skinner has proven more influential in Britain, while Strauss’s influence has enjoyed wider
currency in Continental Europe (although the affinities between Skinner’s historiography and that of
Reinhart Koselleck qualify this generalization). Tracing these patterns of influence, while an important
and interesting exercise, lies beyond the scope of this article. I have tried to avoid the ‘‘Cambridge
School’’ and ‘‘Straussian’’ labels (although the latter is sometimes used to denote Strauss alone), which
obscure important differences between Skinner and his closely allied colleagues (such as Peter Laslett,
John Dunn, and J.G.A. Pocock) as well as between Strauss and his prominent students (such as Allan
Bloom). Cf. Rafael Major, ‘‘The Cambridge School and Leo Strauss: Texts and Context of American
Political Science,’’ Political Research Quarterly 58 (September 2005): 477–85. On Strauss’s approach to
interpretation from a pedagogical point of view, see Michael Frazer, ‘‘Esotericism Ancient and Modern:
Strauss contra Straussianism on the Art of Political-Philosophical Writing,’’ Political Theory 34 (February
2006): 33–61.
 Ian Ward 237

turn, are ripe (in this particular case, I want to suggest, overly ripe) for critical
interrogation. In what follows, I want to clarify what exactly is at stake,
methodologically speaking, in the differences between these two thinkers’
interpretative approaches.3 Such efforts are repaid, I believe, by a more nuanced
methodological self-awareness that discloses a more cooperative, and less
antagonistic, view of the relationship between the two thinkers’ hermeneutical
understandings.
Before proceeding, however, I wish explicitly to disavow two commitments.
The first is to the notion that Strauss and Skinner represent the only viable—or
even the most interesting—ways to do things with texts in the history of political
thought. That the rich and varied list of political thinkers whose interpretive work
falls neatly under neither category includes Isaiah Berlin, G.A. Cohen, Alasdair
MacIntyre, C.B. Macpherson, Pierre Manent, Robert Pippin, Judith Shklar, Charles
Taylor, Robert Wokler, Allan Wood, and Sheldon Wolin is a sufficient reason for
letting a thousand interpretive flowers bloom. The second is to the notion that
Skinner and Strauss represent the most important methodological alternatives
in contemporary intellectual history more generally. As the prominence of
Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Dominic LaCapra, and F. R. Ankersmit among
intellectual historians suggests, the latter’s methodological horizons are much
wider than the following essay would lead one to believe.4 What motivates my
principle of selection is rather, as I suggested above, the significant influence
each figure’s interpretive commitments has on the study of the history of political
ideas in North America; here I am interested less in cataloguing species of
interpretative technique than in an exercise of disciplinary self-clarification. But,
as we shall see, this by no means diminishes the interest of the conceptual and
practical stakes involved.5

3. Obviously, a full treatment of Strauss’s and Skinner’s thought cannot be accommodated within the
scope of this article. I draw on Strauss’s broader philosophical ambitions, and Skinner’s historical
investigations, to the extent that I take them to be connected to their interpretive commitments, which
are the object of inquiry here. For broader accounts, see Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics,
Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy,
Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and
Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American
Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
4. See, for example, Brian Fay, Philip Pomper, and Richard T. Vann, eds., History and Theory:
Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) and John E. Toews’s influential essay, ‘‘Intellectual
History After the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience’’
American Historical Review 92 (October 1987): 879–907.
5. An anonymous reviewer for Polity wonders why I do not foreground the ‘‘politics’’ of Strauss and
Skinner here, perhaps in the manner of Anne Norton’s Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), or Catherine and Michael Zuckert’s The Truth About Leo Strauss
(to take examples of two contrasting approaches to the issue of Strauss’s politics). While these are
important concerns, they have already received much scholarly attention. I have a further reason for
238 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

At first glance, finding a point of overlap for Skinner’s and Strauss’s

hermeneutical approaches does not appear too difficult, because both theorists
espouse general interpretive criteria that sound deceptively similar. For Strauss,
the mark of a proper interpretation of a text from the past is that it ‘‘understands
the thought of a philosopher exactly as he understood it himself.’’6 Skinner’s
criterion, while sounding less stringent, seems at least compatible: ‘‘no agent
can be said to have meant or achieved something which they could never be
brought to accept as a correct description of what they had meant or achieved.’’7
While Strauss’s criterion constitutes a positive aspiration to strive for an
understanding that exactly matches that of the author, Skinner issues a negative
injunction on interpretations clearly at odds with how the author could have
understood her or his own behavior. Both therefore stress fidelity to authorial
intention as the hallmark of their interpretive endeavors. Whence then, all the
disagreement?
The similarity of the two criteria by virtue of their emphasis on authorial
intention is, as I suggested, deceptive. This is because, although both theories lay
claim to the mantle of authorial intention, the term ‘‘intention,’’ when returned to
the contexts of their respective hermeneutic theories, assumes significantly
different meanings.8 Returning this term to the broader frameworks of Strauss’s
and Skinner’s theories reveals apparent disagreement on two interrelated topics:
those of discursive obliqueness and the role of truth in interpretation. Some of
these disagreements, we will see, can be dissolved through pragmatic re-
description, while others will prove more intractable. But such disagreement, I
will conclude by suggesting, operates against a shared background of agreement
that provides each thinker with grounds for viewing the other’s interpretive
endeavors as valuable ones.

focusing primarily on the two figures’ interpretive commitments, however. I believe it is important that
political theorists be able to reflect on their interpretive commitments without feeling pressured to yoke
these rigidly to pre-established approaches (Straussian, Skinnerian, or otherwise) to various political
questions. While interpretive and political commitments will influence each other holistically in various
ways, these patterns of influence will operate differently from one inquirer to another, especially as one
reflects on (what I call below) the various ‘‘why-questions’’ that motivate one’s interpretive efforts. If this
article has any political stake of its own, it is in greater acknowledgement of this pluralism; inquiry is not
well served when one can say, with Emerson, ‘‘If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.’’ ‘‘Self-
Reliance,’’ Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 264.
6. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959), 66.
7. Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 77; cf. Meaning & Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. Skinner and James Tully (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988), 48. Skinner’s methodological views have been revised significantly
over the years; I will generally discuss the most recent articulations available, while referring the reader
to earlier versions at relevant points of comparison in the notes.
8. Jeffrey Stout makes an analogous claim about the meaning of the term ‘‘meaning’’ itself in ‘‘What
is the Meaning of a Text?’’ New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982): 1–12.
 Ian Ward 239

Esotericism and Rhetoric

Leo Strauss’s hermeneutical method is (in)famous for its approach to

authorial intention through a theory of writing and a corresponding theory of
reading. The theory of writing, ‘‘esotericism,’’ posits that, for various reasons,
certain writers will conceal their intentions within their texts, using devices to
mask them behind an ‘‘exoteric’’ intention that is discerned more easily by most
readers. The most prominent variant of this theory is the ‘‘persecution thesis,’’ the
claim that the persecution of politically subversive authors ‘‘gives rise to a
peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in
which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the
lines.’’9 Since readers with the patience, skill, and leisure to discern the author’s
hidden intention will be few in number, this ‘‘literature is addressed, not to all
readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.’’10 That this minority
readership will happen to be friendly to the writer’s subversiveness presupposes
that ‘‘only thoughtful men are careful readers’’ and hence that there are no
‘‘thoughtful men’’ who occupy positions in a community’s oppressive apparatus;
Strauss claims that ‘‘a careful writer of normal intelligence is more intelligent than
the most intelligent censor, as such.’’11 Another variant can be labeled the ‘‘fidelity
thesis,’’ which, stated syllogistically, argues, ‘‘Philosophy is the attempt to replace
opinion by knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is
subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve
rather than subvert the city.’’12 Here the primary concern with concealing a
subversive doctrine is not the author’s personal safety, but rather the integrity of
the norms that members of a community hold as authoritative for the regulating
of their collective lives, norms jeopardized by the potentially aporetic
philosophical project of subjecting them to radical critique in order to replace
them with foundational certitudes.13 Finally, Strauss also advances a ‘‘didactic
thesis,’’ whereby authors conceal their intentions in order to educate young
students of philosophy, first by separating the wheat from the chaff (i.e., dropping

9. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 25.
10. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 25.
11. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 25–26.
12. Strauss, ‘‘A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss,’’ in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis
of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 463.
13. See Strauss, ‘‘On the Intention of Rousseau,’’ Social Research 14 (1947): 455–87, for an argument
along these lines concerning Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. The connection with the
persecution thesis is that what may ostensibly be a concern for the opinion of the community may
ultimately be grounded in a concern for the philosopher’s own safety, since communities that have
perceived their opinion as under attack have sometimes responded by persecuting the philosopher
(Persecution and the Art of Writing, 36). However, it is conceivable that, even in a setting where the threat
of persecution is not severe, authors may still conceal subversive teachings out of a concern for the
community’s well being.
240 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

hints of an esoteric intention that only careful readers will notice) and second by
training the student in the ‘‘very long, never easy, but always pleasant work’’ of
esoteric reading.14
The practice of esoteric reading, of establishing the hidden intention of the
author, begins with noticing ‘‘certain obtrusively enigmatic features in the
presentation of the popular teaching—obscurity of the plan, contradictions,
pseudonyms, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, strange expressions, etc.’’15
To fill in the ‘‘etc.’’ a bit further, one might add title pages, illustrations, parables,
allusions to other texts, events, and individuals, along with the use of different
languages, to the array of techniques for alerting readers to the presence of a
teaching concealed ‘‘between the lines.’’16 The question then becomes whether or
not such clues are ‘‘clues’’ at all, for the potential for interpretive arbitrariness on
the basis of an alleged ‘‘secret teaching’’ is significant. Accordingly, Strauss
advances at least six different criteria to guard against such arbitrariness: first,
‘‘Reading between the lines is strictly prohibited in all cases where it would
be less exact than not doing so;’’ second, ‘‘Only such reading between the lines
as starts from an exact consideration of the explicit statements of the author is
legitimate;’’ third, ‘‘If a master of the art of writing commits such blunders as
would shame an intelligent high school boy, it is reasonable to assume that they
are intentional, especially if the author discusses, however incidentally, the
possibility of intentional blunders in writing;’’ fourth, ‘‘The context in which a
statement occurs, and the literary character of the work as a whole as well as its
plan, must be perfectly understood before an interpretation of the statement can
reasonably claim to be adequate or even correct;’’ fifth, ‘‘the book in question
must have been composed in an era of persecution, that is, at a time when some
political or other orthodoxy was enforced by law or custom;’’ and, sixth, ‘‘if an
able writer who has a clear mind and a perfect knowledge of the orthodox view
and all its ramifications, contradicts surreptitiously and as it were in passing one
of its necessary presuppositions or consequences which he explicitly recognizes
and maintains everywhere else, we can reasonably suspect that he was opposed
to the orthodox system as such.’’17
One skeptical of esoteric reading is not likely to be persuaded by these
criteria. The first is vague (what is meant by ‘‘more exact’’?), the second seems to

14. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 36–37. It is primarily the didactic purpose that drives
authors to write esoterically in modern, liberal and more tolerant times, Strauss suggests (36–37). For an
elaboration on Strauss’s distinction between ‘‘ancient’’ and ‘‘modern’’ esotericism (which I frame as the
distinction between the persecution thesis, on the one hand and the didactic and fidelity theses on the
other), see Frazer, ‘‘Esotericism Ancient and Modern.’’
15. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 36.
16. One might also add conditional qualifiers. Strauss asks, ‘‘Cannot miracles be wrought by such
little words as ‘almost,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘seemingly’?’’ See Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 78.
17. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 30, 32.
 Ian Ward 241

defeat the purpose of esoteric writing (for what is the point of writing between the
lines if one is going to tip off readers with an ‘‘explicit statement’’?), the third
combines the problems of the first and the second (an ‘‘intelligent high-school
boy’’ constitutes an inexact standard, and again it would seem that such a
blunder would constitute an obvious tip-off), the fourth appears to be circular
(for it seems that the work must be understood correctly before one can gauge
if one has understood it correctly),18 the fifth only applies to one variety of
esotericism (the ‘‘persecution thesis’’), and the sixth infers a sweeping conclusion
from a single instance (what justifies the assumption that the author opposes
the orthodox system in toto, rather than on a piecemeal or reformist basis?). But
Strauss’s hermeneutical method need not stand or fall by these criteria if one
takes seriously his notion that such reading is a special skill in which one must be
trained over time.19 Instead of crudely applying such criteria as axioms to an
initial encounter with a text, the reader is meant to study the text (and its
context—see criterion number four) repeatedly, moving between part and whole
(i.e., between particular statements and the whole text), gradually ascending
from such inexact tools of suspicion to more exact axioms tailored to a particular
text and context under examination, an ascent that he illustrates in his discussion
of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed.20 For Strauss, the practice of decoding an
author’s hidden intention is one into which one must be habituated and trained,
like a craft, in which sensitivity to the particulars of the material under
consideration are paramount in determining interpretive criteria.
Skinner, like Strauss, operates with a highly specific understanding of authorial
intention. The key to this understanding is that it is developed in the context of
a variation of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, in which intention of an author
(i.e., the issuer of an utterance) to which Skinner argues we have access is
the ‘‘illocutionary’’ intention, that is, what an author is doing in issuing the
utterance.21 This is to be distinguished from both the ‘‘motivation’’ of an author to
undertake such an action, as well as the action’s ‘‘perlocutionary’’ consequences.
To take Skinner’s example, imagine a police officer who issues the following
utterance to a boy standing on a pond in the winter: ‘‘the ice over there is very

18. This circularity may not be vicious, however; it can also be interpreted as the repeated
movement between part and whole in the effort to determine a text’s meaning, the ‘‘hermeneutic circle.’’
As we will see shortly, it is something like this that Strauss seems to have in mind.
19. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 36–37.
20. Struass, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 60–78.
21. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 104–05. Cf. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). The variations in question follow modifications to speech-
act theory introduced by P. F. Strawson, John Searle, and Stephen R. Schiffer. For a historical-
reconstructive assessment of speech-act theory and the ‘‘ordinary language philosophy’’ movement that
formed it, see Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II: The Age of Meaning
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 65–220.
242 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

thin.’’ Presumably, the officer could have many different motivations for issuing the
utterance (perhaps he is concerned about the boy’s safety, or wants passers-by to see
that he is doing his job, or does not want to have to dive in after the boy should the
ice give way). In turn, the officer’s illocutionary intention, what the officer ‘‘does’’ in
issuing the utterance, is to warn the child. Finally, the act of warning may bring
about various perlocutionary consequences—the child may be frightened by the
warning, he may choose to ignore it, or may even be amused by it.22 What matters in
such cases, however, is both that the officer understands himself as engaging in the
act of warning and that the boy recognizes such action as a warning; that is, in order
to establish an agent’s intention in doing something, we must take into account not
only the utterance but the context in which it is uttered, which determines its
reception or ‘‘uptake.’’23 In other words, if we are to understand a given utterance as
an act or ‘‘move,’’ we must inquire into the rules of the prevailing ‘‘language game’’
that endow such moves with intelligibility. When it comes to interpreting texts, then,
‘‘We need to focus not merely on the particular text in which we are interested but
on the prevailing conventions governing the treatment of issues or themes with
which the text is concerned.’’24 If we assume that ‘‘any writer will normally
be engaged in an intended act of communication’’ then such intentions ‘‘must be
conventional in the strong sense that they must be recognizable as intentions
to uphold some particular position in argument, to contribute to the treatment
of some particular topic, and so on.’’25 In order to understand this act of
communication, we must therefore familiarize ourselves with the conventions that
form the background against which it can be recognized as such.
This does not commit Skinner to joining Foucault in depriving authors of
significant agency and claiming that the ‘‘author’’ qua subject disappears and that
‘‘the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analysed
as a complex and variable function of discourse,’’ or to affirm with Barthes that
‘‘the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.’’26 For,
as Skinner is fond of quipping, the author is not ‘‘dead’’ but rather in ‘‘extremely
poor health.’’27 There is a difference between being limited by conventions and

22. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 105.

23. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 101-102. But cf. J.G.A. Pocock’s argument that intention and illocution
cannot be strictly identified because ‘‘the possibility that one’s intention is modified in the act of uttering
a statement which then exerts illocutionary force can never be eliminated.’’ See his Politics, Language
and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 25 n10.
24. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 102.
25. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 102.
26. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1977), 138, and Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), 146.
27. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 118. Cf. Meaning and Context, 276: ‘‘language constitutes a resource as
well as a constraint. This means that, if we wish to do justice to those moments when a convention is
challenged or a commonplace effectively subverted, we cannot simply dispense with the category of the
author.’’
 Ian Ward 243

following them; authors still retain some capacity for novelty by employing
prevailing tropes in new and subversive ways that, if taken up, can legitimize new
kinds of utterance and other forms of behavior, including forms of political
behavior.28 While Skinner does concede that authors are limited by the array of
conceptual alternatives available in a given discursive setting,29 the conventions
found in these settings are not fixed, and authorial activity, strictly speaking, is not
a ‘‘function’’ of the conventions that govern these settings, insofar as authors
retain a degree of agency.
This raises the question of the relationship between conventions that govern
linguistic utterances and the various social practices that constitute our political
world, and how changes in such conventions and practices involve authorial
activity. For Skinner, the authorial activity (primarily the issuing of utterances in
texts) that characterizes the history of political thought is practical activity,
comprising a series of linguistic ‘‘moves’’ made by actors in disputes concerning
the character of their social practices and of particular disputes therein.
Accordingly, ‘‘it might be right to view with a certain irony those moral
and political philosophers of our own day who present us with overarching
visions of justice, freedom and other cherished values in the manner of
dispassionate analysis standing above the battle. What the historical record

28. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 117ff. Cf. Meaning and Context, 105. Robert Brandom, drawing on
Noam Chomsky’s views on linguistic innovation, makes a similar claim about the influence of novel
utterances on social practices. See his ‘‘Freedom and Constraint by Norms,’’ in Hermeneutics and Praxis,
ed. Robert Hollinger (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 173–91.
29. ‘‘The surest sign that a group or society has entered into the self-conscious possession of a new
concept is that a corresponding vocabulary will be developed, a vocabulary which can then be used to
pick out and discuss the concept with consistency. . . . The possession of a concept will at least
standardly be signaled by the employment of a corresponding term. As long as we bear in mind that
‘standardly’ means neither necessarily nor sufficiently, I think we may legitimately proceed.’’ Skinner,
Meaning and Context, 120–21. The loose fit between term and concept signaled by ‘‘standardly,’’ I believe,
underlies an ambiguity in Skinner’s teaching. On the one hand, he seems to maintain that the conceptual
alternatives available in a given context are limited by that context’s available collection of terms, while
on the other hand, after his recent rhetorical turn, he appears to emphasize changes in the terms we use
to express an ‘‘underlying concept’’ (Visions of Politics, 179–86). This notion of an underlying concept
would imply that we may seek evidence of the use of certain concepts—or their functional analogues—
in a past context that did not possess the term with which we designate it, a possibility Skinner concedes
in Meaning and Context at 120: ‘‘Although a history of the word originality and its various uses could
undoubtedly be written, such a survey would by no means be the same as a history of the concept of
originality.’’ But cf. Visions of Politics at 51, where he chastises Ernst Cassirer for discussing Machiavelli’s
political theory in terms of citizens’ rights and interests because Machiavelli did not employ the terms
diritti or interessi ‘‘at any point,’’ even though ‘‘It is of course possible that he possessed the concept of a
right.’’ Perhaps the most charitable way to resolve this ambiguity is to hold that such admonishments are
compensatory, warning historians of the ‘‘highest risk’’ of mis-describing an author’s behavior by not
limiting themselves to the terms the author used, while attributing to Skinner the view that going beyond
the author’s terms can be legitimate, and even necessary, as his example of the concept ‘‘originality’’
indicates; this compensatory intention is especially evident in Visions of Politics at 50–51.
244 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

strongly suggests is that no one is above the battle, because the battle is all
there is.’’30 Skinner’s view here should be taken neither as a kind of linguistic
idealism, nor as a crudely ‘‘superstructural’’ understanding of political thought.
He is careful to specify that linguistic conventions constitute the character of
social practices without necessarily constituting the practices themselves.
Authorial activity can help change the character of social practices in at least
two ways. The first is by ‘‘manipulating the speech act potential of certain
terms. . . to describe your actions in such a way as to make it clear to your
ideological opponents that, although you may be employing a vocabulary
generally used to express disapproval, you are using it to express approval or at
least neutrality.’’31 This might be called altering a term’s consequences of
application, that is, using a term in a way that authorizes readers to draw
different inferences from its use than had been done by readers hitherto; Skinner
offers as examples of this phenomenon the revaluation (from wholly negative to
neutral) of terms such as ‘‘ambition’’ in the early modern period.32 The second,
in turn, consists ‘‘of manipulating the criteria for applying an existing set
of commendatory terms.’’33 We can call this altering a term’s circumstances
of application, that is, changing the collection of conditions that must obtain
for a given application of a term to be regarded as appropriate. As an example of
such a move, Skinner points to the alteration of the circumstances of application
of the term ‘‘providence’’ and its cognates in the early modern period, through
the inclusion of action ‘‘with foresight in practical affairs’’ as an appropriate
condition for using the appraisive term ‘‘provident,’’ which had hitherto been
restricted to theological circumstances of application.34 These changes to the
character of certain practices in turn render certain practical moves legitimate
or illegitimate that were not so before, and issue new authorizations,
prohibitions, and obligations to the relevantly situated participants. So although
political–authorial activity is understood to derive from practical political
disputes (and is ‘‘ideological’’ in this sense), it can legitimate changes to
political practices, and in turn to the linguistic conventions that govern

30. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 7.

31. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 7.
32. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 152. The distinction between ‘‘consequences’’ and ‘‘circumstances’’ of
application in this paragraph is drawn from Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing
and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
33. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 153.
34. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 153. This is also seen in Skinner’s well-known discussion of the
rhetorical technique of paradiastole, in which a given behavior can be described by the skilled
rhetorician as virtuous or vicious as the practical occasion requires, a technique that plays off the
Aristotelian notion of virtues as existing on a continuum between vices. See his Reason and Rhetoric in
the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 138–80.
 Ian Ward 245

them.35 Linguistic conventions and social practices are thus mutually constitutive
over time, and the relationship between them is mediated in part by the activity
of authors, who respond to practical impetuses for change and in turn authorize
new behaviors themselves.36 Skinner’s recent Liberty Before Liberalism, for
example, is an outline of such linguistic moves, originating in practical political
disputes in seventeenth-century England, which have in turn provided
justificatory strategies for the myriad of practices that constitute the modern
liberal state.37
All this presupposes, however, an argument about why interpreters ought to
privilege illocutionary intention. Skinner’s argument, in turn, is that it provides the
most useful insights into the behavior of an author in a past historical context as
compared with other prevailing approaches to textual interpretation. He rejects
the approach of the New Critics, who argued that authorial intention is irrelevant
to a text’s meaning (which is instead to be found in the presence of certain
literary forms) claiming they provide little guidance concerning what sorts of
activities those in the past were engaged in.38 Regarding reader-response theory,
in which the reader is the locus of textual meaning, Skinner argues that different
conceptions of ‘‘meaning’’ are being employed in the dispute (one grounded in
illocutionary intention and the other in what responses are elicited from
the reader), and that the historian and reader-response theorist are engaged
in different (rather than competing) projects with different objectives.39 In
defending his approach to interpretation, Skinner also confronts Strauss, who is
singled out as an adherent of the ‘‘mythology of coherence’’ (in Skinner’s view,
one of several ‘‘mythologies’’ that haunted intellectual history in the 1960s)
whereby the interpreter’s impulse to transcend contradictions overcomes a
sensible commitment to Okham’s Razor.40 Owing to his adherence to this
mythology, Strauss allegedly espouses a theory of esoteric writing (and reading)
characterized by four flaws: (1) equating originality with subversion; (2)
presuming that thoughtless men are careless readers and thereby insulating
‘‘esoteric’’ interpretations from criticism; (3) failing to provide determinate

35. The term ‘‘governed’’ should be used with caution here, for in his later work, after engaging in the
study of ancient and renaissance rhetoric, Skinner has come to hold a more fluid view concerning the
terms with which we describe and evaluate our social world, revising his previous view that ‘‘for every
evaluative term there will at any one time be a standard and accepted meaning and use’’ (Visions of
Politics 182), endowing the rhetorical strategies just described with even greater potency.
36. It should be noted here, however, that Skinner does not view changes to social vocabularies as
exclusive causes of historical change; indeed, he professes, ‘‘I have no general theory about the
mechanisms of social transformation, and I am somewhat suspicious of those who have,’’ Visions of
Politics, 180.
37. See Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
38. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 100.
39. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 100.
40. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 70.
246 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

criteria for what constitutes an ‘‘era of persecution’’ that authorizes an esoteric

reading; and (4) failing to account for strategies authors might voluntarily use to
be oblique.41
These objections represent, I think, a missed opportunity for fruitful exchange
between these two prominent theories of interpretation. While Strauss does appear
to restrict his concerns to cases of subversive originality, it is unclear as to how the
interpretation of texts that are original in non-subversive ways is excluded from his
approach. Skinner’s second objection does raise an important issue—the notion
that oppressors and censors of various sorts inherently have limited interpretive
abilities seems a dubious empirical assumption at best. However, this would only
seem to apply to the ‘‘persecution thesis,’’ and this is not the only argument Strauss
advances in favor of his method (this applies to Skinner’s third objection as well).
It should also be noted that Strauss did not understand his views as immunizing
‘‘esoteric’’ readings from criticism; indeed, he concedes that his method will
generate a variety of alternative and rival readings, as other interpretive methods
do.42 Finally, it would seem that the ‘‘fidelity thesis’’ and the ‘‘didactic thesis’’
constitute instances of voluntary obliqueness, a form of obliqueness that Skinner
claims we should take into consideration.43
If Skinner’s specific methodological objections do not stand in the way of a
creative exchange between his theory and Strauss’s, then we must dig deeper for
the ultimate sources of disagreement. The first likely candidate is Skinner’s general
claim about the ‘‘mythology of coherence’’: it does not pay sufficient heed to the
reality of contradiction, even among authors of exceptional talent. Since we have
already touched upon Strauss’s view concerning contradiction (that it can be a clue
to an esoteric intention), we should now turn to Skinner’s in order to gauge just how
incompatible their respective approaches are on this thorny interpretive question.
Skinner adopts what he considers to be a ‘‘weak’’ variant of Donald Davidson’s
philosophy of interpretation, according to which we need attribute only certain
basic norms of rationality to agents in order to recognize their behavior as
linguistic in character. Such an attribution is necessary if we are to describe any
of an agent’s particular beliefs as irrational, with irrationality here being
understood as ‘‘against the norms of justification prevalent in that agent’s
context.’’44 On what grounds can these assumptions (one of the most important of
which is that of non-contradiction) be overridden?

41. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 71–72 and 79–81; cf. Meaning and Context, 42–43, 51.
42. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 30–31.
43. Perhaps this is why Skinner drops this criticism of Strauss in the recently revised version of
‘‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’’ in Visions of Politics at 79–81. Here Skinner links
‘‘voluntary obliqueness’’ with the rhetorical trope of irony, a link that will become important below.
44. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 54. Cf. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
 Ian Ward 247

Before we characterize an author’s commitment to two contradictory

propositions as irrational, a ‘‘last resort,’’ Skinner argues that interpreters should
‘‘start by assuming that we must in some way have misunderstood or
mistranslated some of the propositions by which they are expressed.’’45 If this
effort fails, then ‘‘we are left with no alternative’’ but to regard such a commitment
on the part of the author as an irrational one.46 But this inference is made too
quickly. For, as Skinner claims, authors sometimes issue utterances that are ironic,
and while we ought not to proceed on the assumption that all authors potentially
do the same, he states that this is a possibility that must be considered in some
cases.47 A possibility exists then, that contradictory commitments might be
undertaken as part of an ironic rhetorical stance; in fact, ‘‘writers often
deliberately employ a range of what might be called oblique rhetorical strategies.
Of these the most obvious is irony, the deployment of which has the effect of
prising apart what is said from what is meant.’’48 When an author is described as
adopting such a stance, it is implied that she or he is not being sincere about the
utterances being issued, inviting readers (and not necessarily all readers) to
attempt to discern a sincere commitment behind the fac¸ade. Since Skinner
describes his understanding about how changes in linguistic conventions
(discussed above) are brought about as ‘‘rhetorical,’’49 and since a sophisticated
theory of rhetoric would surely account for ironic stances, then he appears to be
committed to at least considering the possibility of contradiction-as-irony
(between what is ‘‘said’’ and what is ‘‘meant’’) before turning to the ‘‘last resort’’
of describing an author as irrational. But if we make room for irony and other
rhetorical strategies that can involve deliberate obliqueness, why not admit
esoteric activities into the class of possible oblique discursive moves? Were such
an admission made, interpreters following the two methods might discover that
they are concerned with similar linguistic techniques, a shared interpretive
interest that is evident, for example in their respective analyses of the titles of
Xenophon’s Hiero and Hobbes’s Leviathan.50 We must therefore push on in order

45. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 38, 55.

46. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 56.
47. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 40, 80.
48. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 80.
49. While in his more recent work Skinner generally emphasizes the theories of ancient rhetoricians
more frequently than Austin’s speech-act theory, his inclusion of these two sources side-by-side in the first
volume of Visions of Politics, the definitive and most recent statement of his methodological
commitments, suggests that he views these different sources as basically compatible. On Skinner’s
rhetorical turn, see his own account in chapter ten of the first volume of Visions of Politics, as well as Kari
Palonen’s discussion in Quentin Skinner at 133–72.
50. Compare Skinner et al., ‘‘Political Philosophy: The View from Cambridge,’’ Journal of Political
Philosophy 10 (2002): 13–14 with Strauss, ‘‘Title and Form,’’ in Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, On Tyranny,
revised and expanded edition, including the complete Strauss–Kojève correspondence, ed. Victor
Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 31–35.
248 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

to clarify the points of convergence and divergence between their approaches

and to consider whether or not the latter can be mediated. We turn, then, to what
Skinner calls a distinction between considerations of ‘‘rationality’’ and
considerations of ‘‘truth,’’ as the next likely source of disagreement.

Interpretation and Truth

We recall that, for Skinner, the activity of explaining authors’ behavior requires
grasping the illocutionary intentions expressed in their utterances, intentions that
can only be understood through reference to the linguistic conventions prevalent
in the authors’ contexts. This activity, in turn, is considered by Skinner to be
wholly distinct from, and independent of, that of assessing the truth-value of such
utterances: ‘‘the concept of truth is irrelevant to the enterprise of explaining
beliefs.’’51 While he believes that historians are compelled to inquire into the
rationality of a historical figure’s beliefs in order to explain what she or he was
doing in undertaking a certain action (such as authoring a text), Skinner
introduces a distinction between rationality (which is relative to the ‘‘prevailing
norms for the acquisition and justification of beliefs’’ within a given set of
linguistic conventions) and truth (which is not relative to such conventions).52 To
take one of his examples,53 when inquiring into Bodin’s belief in witches, the
historian need not, Skinner claims, inquire into the truth or falsity of such beliefs
in order to explain them. Instead, the historian must attend to the prevailing
norms of justification in Bodin’s context to gauge the context-relative ‘‘rationality’’
of his belief. Skinner writes,

If I am to identify the nature of Bodin’s beliefs about witches, or even to

establish that they are beliefs about this particular subject-matter, it certainly
seems plausible to assume that Bodin and I must share a considerable number
of ancillary beliefs. . . . Certainly it does not follow that I need to assume that
Bodin’s beliefs specifically about witches are mainly true before I can be sure
of identifying them as beliefs about witches. It may be that practically
everything Bodin says about that particular topic strikes me as obviously false.
But by learning his language (an easily recognisable form of French) and by
seeing what concepts he uses and how he reasons with them, I can

51. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 2, 29ff.

52. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 37, 52. There is nothing inconsistent in holding both a contextualist
theory of justification and a non-relativist account of truth. See Jeffrey Stout, ‘‘Radical Interpretation and
Pragmatism: Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom on Truth,’’ in Radical Interpretation in Religion, ed. Nancy
Frankenberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 25–52.
53. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 30.
 Ian Ward 249

nevertheless hope to identify without much difficulty where he is talking

about witches and what he thinks about them.54

Skinner then, wants to block the inference from the assumption (1) that
interpreter and interpreted must share an unspecified number of beliefs (in order
for interpretation to be possible) to the claim (2) that we must assume (at the
outset, at least) that all of an agent’s beliefs are true in order to identify their
conceptual contents. Having blocked this inference, he takes himself to be
entitled to the view that we can explain beliefs without making use of the
concept of truth.55
Strauss’s commitments on this matter appear to stand in marked contrast with
Skinner’s. Strauss argued that the modern who wanted to comprehend tyranny in
a totalitarian world ought to begin with a close reading of Xenophon’s Hiero.56 In
On Tyranny, Strauss rejects an approach to Xenophon’s texts similar to the
approach defended by Skinner: ‘‘I have not tried to relate his thought to his
‘historical situation’ because this is not the natural way of reading the work of a
wise man; and, in addition, Xenophon never indicated that he wanted to be
understood in that way.’’57 Strauss’s primary historiographical commitment, then,
is to the view that the philosopher does indeed attempt to transcend the
ideological and practical ‘‘battles’’ of her/his specific historical situation, and that
the philosopher’s context-transcending teachings are concealed through esoteric
writing. The practice of esotericism is thus more than a methodological
commitment; it is also part of an argument against the view that ‘‘human thought
is essentially limited in such a way that its limitations differ from historical
situation to historical situation and that the limitation characteristic of the
thought of a given epoch cannot be overcome by any human effort.’’58 This view,
which Strauss labels ‘‘historicism,’’ is necessarily opposed to the very possibility of
‘‘philosophy,’’ understood as ‘‘the quest for universal knowledge. . . the attempt to
replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole.’’59 Political
philosophy, in turn, is ‘‘the attempt to replace opinion about the nature of political
things by knowledge of the nature of political things’’ and of ‘‘the right, or the
good, political order.’’60 Political philosophy thus aspires to transcend local
practical disputes, something which distinguishes it from ‘‘political thought’’

54. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 30.

55. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 2, 29ff.
56. Strauss and Kojève, On Tyranny. Helpful accounts of the Strauss–Kojève debate are found in
George P. Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969), 79–109 and Robert B.
Pippin, ‘‘Being, Time, and Politics.’’
57. Strauss and Kojève, On Tyranny, 25.
58. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 21.
59. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? 11.
60. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? 11–12.
250 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

(or, using Skinner’s language, ‘‘ideology’’): ‘‘A political thinker who is not a
philosopher is primarily interested in, or attached to, a specific order or policy;
the political philosopher is primarily interested in, or attached to, the truth.’’61 If,
as Strauss argues, interpreters ought to strive to understand authors exactly as
they understood themselves, then interpreters of philosophers must attempt to
understand them as philosophers, that is, as those who inquire into the truth
about certain fundamental political matters, and thus ought consider their
teachings as making claims of this sort: ‘‘To understand a serious teaching, we
must be seriously interested in it, we must take it seriously, i.e., we must be willing
to consider the possibility that it is simply true. The historicist denies that
possibility as regards any philosophy of the past.’’62
The purpose of the study of the political philosophy of the past, in turn, is
awareness of these fundamental problems, an awareness that forms the core of
what Strauss calls ‘‘liberal education.’’63 Liberal education is simultaneously
training in humility and in boldness. One learns humility by letting the texts of
past philosophers make truth-claims upon us that we consider as truth claims,
thus accepting the possibility that minds from other contexts have insights that
are more accurate, or profound, than our own.64 This acceptance in turn enables
a kind of boldness, a willingness to view prevailing political beliefs as something
contingent and to call their truth-values into question: ‘‘It demands from us the
boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or
to regard average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be
wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions.’’65
The disagreement between Strauss and Skinner, then, seems to turn in part on
competing interpretations of what the practice of political philosophy consists in,
whether one ought to view Hobbes and Kant, for example, as propagandists or
seekers of the political Good and Right. Fortunately, neither Skinner nor Strauss
appears to force an either/or response to this question. While Skinner’s earlier
methodological writings did not deny that political philosophers (such as
Hobbes) may have had ambitions to offer reasons that transcended the
immediate ideological battles in which they were engaged,66 his claim about
the battle being ‘‘all there is’’ does suggest such a denial. Here it seems best to
emphasize the more careful of Skinner’s two positions, for the alternative would
be to attribute interpretive commitments to him that strike us as intuitively
implausible, for example, that Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative

61. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? 12.

62. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? 68.
63. Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968).
64. Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 8.
65. Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 8.
66. Skinner, Meaning and Context, 104, 102.
 Ian Ward 251

were merely intended as contributions to ideological debates swirling around

eighteenth-century Prussia, and were not attempts simply to understand the truth
about the character of practical agency. And Strauss, for his part, does not deny
that political philosophers, as part of their exoteric activities, engage with
prevailing conventions and contemporary political disputes. Indeed, if he were
not to leave such room he would find himself quickly forced to defend some very
questionable claims (e.g., that Locke’s and Sidney’s criticisms of Filmer were only
‘‘timeless’’ teachings that had little to do with the political disputes of seventeenth-
century England). In other words, both leave room for ‘‘ideological’’ and
‘‘philosophical’’ activity on the part of political philosophers. If this is the case,
then an important point of disagreement between Skinner and Strauss can be
overcome through re-description: they are merely emphasizing different activities
engaged in by authors, one seeking to illuminate their ideological moves, and the
other attempting to access the potentially trans-historical teachings of especially
ambitious thinkers.
Once we recognize this overlap between Strauss and Skinner, how should we
understand their disagreement concerning the importance of considering the
truth-value of past political philosophers’ beliefs? While Skinner considers such
consideration irrelevant to his enterprise, Strauss considers it essential to his. The
first step to gaining clarity on this point is to see that Skinner’s claim that ‘‘the
concept of truth is irrelevant to the enterprise of explaining beliefs,’’ as it stands,
conflicts with assumption (1) above (which Skinner himself endorses as a
plausible constraint on interpretive activity): that interpreter and interpreted must
share an unspecified number of beliefs in order for interpretation to be possible.
For if (to return to his example of Bodin’s belief in witches) it has to be assumed
from the outset that the interpreter and Bodin ‘‘share a considerable number of
ancillary beliefs,’’ then the interpreter must, implicitly, regard Bodin as holding a
number of true beliefs. Since (a) believing is ‘‘believing-true’’ (i.e., since I, in
holding the belief ‘‘S is P,’’ become committed to the belief ‘‘it is true that S is
P’’ ),67 and (b) I must assume that Bodin holds a considerable number of ancillary
beliefs that I hold (and which I take to be true), it follows (c) that I must regard
Bodin as holding a number of true beliefs. Since (b) and (1) are equivalent, and
(c) follows from (b), it cannot be the case that the concept of truth is irrelevant to
the enterprise of explaining Bodin’s beliefs. Rather, the concept is essential to an
assumption that allows the process of interpretation to begin.
Perhaps we can soften Skinner’s claim a bit: while being indispensable at an
abstract methodological level, the concept of truth may play no significant role in
the enterprise of explaining particular beliefs a given author may have held. This

67. For a discussion of the view that belief aims at truth, see Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality:
Pragmatism and Deliberation (New York: Routledge, 2000), 51ff.
252 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

formulation modifies Skinner’s in two respects: it jettisons the claim of irrelevance

to avoid conflict with assumption (1), and directs our attention to the interpreter’s
process of explaining particular beliefs and away from general interpretive
assumptions about the overall character of the author’s beliefs, where the
concept of truth may play a more indispensable role.68 Even at this more specific
level, however, the concept of truth appears to play a larger role than Skinner
seems to accord it. To return to the example of Bodin’s belief in witches: suppose
that ‘‘witches’’ are defined as people with certain characteristics (e.g., super-
natural powers), and Bodin believed that such figures existed. Notice that a great
deal hangs on whether or not we share this belief; if we believed that witches
exist (or existed), we would explain how Bodin (and his contemporaries) came
to hold this belief, and how this belief figured in his overall behavior, differently
than if we did not share such a belief. In the latter case, because we have deemed
Bodin’s belief in witches to be false, we are forced to fetch around for other lines
of explanation that otherwise would not have been open to us (e.g., through
reference to a category of socially marginalized women who were portrayed in
the popular imagination as having certain powers, etc.). The concept of truth
(along with that of falsity) seems no less important to the interpreter here. This
does not mean—as Skinner seems concerned it may in blocking the inference
from (1) to (2) above—that interpreters are required to take (at the outset) an
author’s beliefs on a every subject as true, but rather that the interpreter’s
appraisal of the truth-value of the belief in question has a significant impact on
the explanatory enterprise as Skinner sees it. Truth turns out to be quite relevant
to this enterprise; the difference with Strauss, then, cannot be found here.
So both Strauss and Skinner must be conceived as allowing for both practical/
ideological and philosophical/truth-seeking activities by authors, and both must
be seen as undertaking commitments concerning the truth and falsity of authors’
beliefs. An important difference does lie in an ambiguity that comes to light when
we recall Skinners’ notion of ‘‘the enterprise of explaining beliefs.’’ The ambiguity
in question has to do with the concept of explanation—what exactly are we
doing when we read an author’s text with an eye to getting an explanatory grip on
something (concept, theme, author, etc.)? Bas van Fraassen replies,

Being an explanation is essentially relative, for an explanation is an

answer. . . . Since explanation is an answer, it is evaluated vis-à-vis a question,
which is a request for information. But exactly what is requested, by means of
the interrogative ‘‘Why is it the case that P?’’, differs from context to
context. . . .69

68. David Hoy calls these second-order beliefs ‘‘beliefs about belief.’’ See The Critical Circle, 138ff.
69. Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 156.
 Ian Ward 253

If an explanation is a response to a request for information—formulated

paradigmatically as a why-question—then it stands to reason that different why-
questions will generate different explanatory enterprises with different methodo-
logical commitments in different contexts of inquiry. The reverse also holds: we
should be able, given two explanatory enterprises with different methodological
commitments with respect to interpreting texts from the history of political
thought, to find the most substantial disagreements between them by ferreting
out the why-questions that drive their endeavors. For Strauss, some of the most
prominent such questions might be pithily formulated as ‘‘why tyranny?’’ ‘‘why
philosophy? (or Athens? Or reason?)’’, and ‘‘why modernity?’’ For Skinner, the
why-questions are different, requesting information concerning the genesis of the
modern idea of the state, the role of republican discourse in early modern
thought, and the rise of a certain idea of liberty in the modern world.
Great as the temptation may be to wind our discussion down on this note of
seemingly benign pluralism, Strauss and Skinner will not let us slip away so
easily. This is because both, in addition to the different why-questions that
drive their respective enterprises, hold strong beliefs about the origins and
statuses of these why-questions. For Strauss, these arise from ‘‘fundamental
problems and. . . fundamental alternatives, which are, in principle, coeval
with human thought.’’70 The context from which Strauss takes his why-questions
to emerge is nothing less than that comprised by the totality of possible
human intellectual endeavor, a totality characterized by certain fundamental
problems to which fundamental alternatives present themselves. Skinner, for his
part, can be fairly characterized as denying the existence of such problems
and alternatives:

The task of the historian of ideas is to study and interpret a canon of classic
texts. The value of writing this kind of history stems from the fact that the
classic texts in moral, political, religious and other such modes of thought
contain a ‘‘dateless wisdom’’ in the form of ‘‘universal ideas.’’ As a result, we
can hope to learn and benefit directly from investigating these ‘‘timeless
elements,’’ since they possess a perennial relevance. . .These are the
assumptions I wish to question, criticise and if possible discredit. . .71

If we substitute ‘‘fundamental problems’’ and/or ‘‘fundamental alternatives’’ for

‘‘timeless elements,’’ then we can imagine that Skinner would want to ‘‘question,
criticise and . . . discredit’’ the assumptions undergirding Strauss’s why-questions.
Strauss sees his enterprise as occurring in a context constituted by certain

70. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 35.

71. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 57 (emphasis added).
254 HELPING THE DEAD SPEAK

fundamental problems ‘‘coeval with human thought;’’ Skinner denies that there
are such problems. As differences go, there are not many deeper than this.

Boldness and Humility

I want to conclude, however, by pointing out that this deep difference occurs
against a significant background of agreement, a partial and modest fusion of
horizons that would give each reason to see value in the interpretive enterprises
of the other. As we saw, Strauss saw ‘‘liberal education’’ as imparting both a kind
of humility (the concession that our contemporary ways of thinking about
political things may not be correct) and boldness (the willingness to adopt a
critical posture toward prevailing political opinions). Such humility and
boldness, Strauss contends, are necessary to interrogate contemporary political
beliefs that he considers inadequate to moderns’ political situations, an
inadequacy he believes is only disclosed through confrontation with the radically
different assumptions undergirding classical political philosophy:

It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and

intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with
unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity.
We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West.72

Skinner’s historiography, for all its skepticism regarding Strauss’s approach, shares
aims that I want to claim are similar in certain respects. By excavating past
linguistic contexts and the conceptual possibilities they made available, Skinner
attempts to expose the contingency of our current political concepts (the moment
of boldness) and to present alternative ways of thinking about political things for
our consideration (the moment of humility).73 To take one example, in Liberty
Before Liberalism, Skinner brings to light how the reception of a ‘‘Hobbesian’’
theory of liberty as non-interference has informed our current ideas about
freedom (ideas displayed in, among other places, Isaiah Berlin’s seminal Two
Concepts of Liberty), laying the basis for an encounter with a Roman and
republican conception of liberty as non-domination, seen in the neglected texts
and discourses of ‘‘neo-roman’’ authors such as Harrington. His magnum opus,
the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, accomplishes a similar and related
goal with the modern concept of the state.74 Of his recent methodological
writings, Skinner claims:

72. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 1.
73. This dimension of Skinner’s work is emphasized in Urbinati, ‘‘The Historian and the Ideologist.’’
74. See Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 Vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978).
 Ian Ward 255

There is thus a sense in which the following chapters, far from reflecting a
depoliticised stance, may be said to culminate in a political plea. The plea is
to recognise that the pen is a mighty sword. We are of course embedded in
practices and constrained by them. But those practices owe their dominance
in part to the power of our normative language to hold them in place, and it is
always open to us to employ the resources of our language to undermine as
well as to underpin these practices. We may be freer than we sometimes
suppose.75

Both Strauss and Skinner, then, see the study of past political thought as issuing in
a certain boldness and a certain humility. These virtues serve different purposes
for the two thinkers. For Strauss, the radical alterity of classical political thought
enables a more adequate understanding of modernity’s crises. Skinner, for his
part, does not appear committed to talk of modernity crises; in his case, it is an
appreciation of the continuity of a certain republican idea of freedom in classical
and modern political thought that is enabled by the humility and boldness that
the texts of the dead can provide us. Both, however, value these virtues for their
ability to unsettle our current political beliefs. Strauss, focusing on the
transcendent ambitions of a select number of exceptional thinkers, raises one
collection of why-questions in order to instill these virtues; Skinner aims to instill
them by focusing on the practical ambitions of a large group of major (and, in
many cases, minor or otherwise neglected) figures and the discursive novelties
they generate, bringing a different group of why-questions to the fore. The basic
difference underlying their respective collections of why-questions, and hence
their overall methodological commitments, stems less from issues concerning
esotericism and notions about the conceptual role of truth in textual
interpretation, than from a deep difference concerning the existence of problems
that are ‘‘coeval with human thought.’’ My final suggestion, in an effort at
methodological diplomacy, is that, this difference notwithstanding, practitioners
of each approach should be able to recognize in the other the salutary ambition
of imparting readers with the boldness and humility to peek beyond the horizons
of our present political thinking.

75. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 7.