Journal of the History of Ideas

Visions of Politics, Quentin Skinner's impressive three-volume collection of essays, does not offer a systematic defense of any particular theory of politics. Skinner's vision is what I refer to as a "rhetorical" vision of politics. In this essay I do not want to criticize this fundamental vision of politics; instead I would like to spend time thinking about its political implications. I hope to suggest that we can acknowledge and even endorse the centrality of rhetorical contestation in political life without accepting the view that liberalism is an unhealthy Hobbesian or neo-Kantian project to "halt the flux of politics." In fact an important strand of liberalism was motivated by a desire to save republicanism from those who would use its language against its essence—those who would use republican rhetoric to stifle the sort of contestation important to republican politics.