ABSTRACT
Quentin Skinner’s 1996 work on Hobbes and rhetoric opened up a previously neglected field of study, both for students of Hobbes, and for students of early-modern rhetoric and science, concerned with the complex relationship of speech and scientific argument in the period of the “Scientific Revolution.” The premise of Skinner’s account was that Hobbes, in rejecting classical theories of politics, was also compelled to reject classical theories of rhetoric, which he understood as complementary to them. According to Skinner, in Hobbes’ early political texts, the Elements of Law and the De Cive, he deliberately strives to create a non-rhetorical (or perhaps anti-rhetorical) model of civil philosophy, involving a profound rejection of the classical art of rhetoric. Yet on Skinner’s account Hobbes’ rejection of classical rhetoric failed, even as his rejection of classical politics succeeded. Indeed, from the time of the English Leviathan onwards Hobbes was bound to acknowledge that “science” without rhetoric is powerless to persuade, and furthermore that “reason and eloquence ... may stand very well together” as foundation-stones of an ethos of “civil duty.”2 Hence the rejection of rhetoric was followed by a re-embrace of it.
