Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes

Por Quentin Skinner

Cambridge University Press, 1996. Page: 284

The attack on the vir civilis Hobbess attack on humanist civil science is not confined to the rhetorical codes in which it was expressed. He also sets himself to discredit the ideal of citizenship underlying the classical and Renaissance theory of eloquence. As we saw in chapter 2, the classical rhetoricians had sought to equate the figure of the good orator with the good citizen, the bonus civis who willingly serves his community by pleading for just verdicts in the courts and beneficial policies in the assemblies. We also saw how this ideal of active citizenship was revived in the English Renaissance, in the course of which it came to be connected with a mastery of the studia humanitatis and employed to foster and legitimise the involvement of the nobility and gentry in the business of government. Hobbes shows himself acutely and uncomfortably aware of the extent to which this specific political agenda underlay the revival of classical eloquence in Renaissance England. When he discusses the ars rhetorica in part II chapter 5 of The Elements, and again in chapter X of De Cive, he does so in the context of criticising the theory and practice of democratic government. And when he returns to the figure of the rhetorician in part II chapter 8 of The Elements, and once more in chapter XII of De Cive, his discussion is mainly aimed at stigmatising the art of rhetoric as a cause of the dissolution of commonwealths. His principal concem throughout these chapters is to confront and repudiate the connections drawn by the classical and Renaissance theorists of eloquence between a mastery of rhetoric and a capacity for good citizenship. Hobbes opens his critique by reminding his readers, most explicitly in De Cive, of the views generally expressed by the rhetoricians about the ideal of the vir civilis. He first observes that questions about rhetoric and its political implications arise most obviously in the case of democratic communities. The defining characteristic of such communities is that everyone has a role to play in public deliberations, in consequence of which everyone needs to know how to make speeches in the style known to rhetoricians as the genus deliberativum. But anyone who aspires to have their advice adopted by a popular assembly will find it necessary to speak not just with wisdom and scientia, but also with powerful eloquentia. This is because they will need to be able not merely to give their reasons for preferring a certain course of action, but at the same time (and here Hobbes invokes the terminology of the ars rhetorica) to hold them forth to their audience with suitable emphasis. Hobbess main purpose in recalling these arguments is as usual to remind us of the position he hopes to undermine. His ensuing attack is rendered all the more pointed by the fact that, as the title of his treatise indicates, he too takes himself to be writing de five, about the ideal of citizenship. He can hardly have been unaware that most political writers of the English Renaissance who had focused on the ideal of the vir civilis had drawn a sharp distinction between citizens and mere subjects. They had generally described the citizen as an active, participative figure, someone capable of helping to frame the laws as well as administer them. As Elyot had put it, a true citizen can be described as a governor, someone with a duty of acting together with his sovereign and as it were aiding him in the distribution of justice. By contrast, they had viewed the figure of the subject in wholly passive terms as someone whose sole duty, as the word implies, is that of living in obedient subjection to the laws.