Abstract

Quentin Skinner’s work since his turn to rhetoric has not been extensively discussed. My thesis is that with this turn Skinner has invented another novelty in the study of political thought, by including the analysis of the rhetoric of debating pro et contra among political agents as sources of political thought. The exemplary institution for such debates is the Westminster Parliament, and Skinner extends the analysis of the rhetorical culture of English Renaissance to studies on parliamentary debates. Here I am first comparing Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought and Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes in their relationship to rhetoric. Subsequently I discuss Skinner’s comments on English parliamentary debates, including his recommendation to read Hobbes’s Leviathan “as a speech in Parliament.” Reason and Rhetoric has inspired valuable studies on English Renaissance political rhetoric, shortly discussed here. For the understanding of the distinct parliamentary variety of deliberative rhetoric, I refer to the formation of a specific parliamentary procedure and to procedural tracts from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Westminster, which among others create a parliamentary vocabulary and rules for conducting and regulating parliamentary debates. The parliamentary procedure institutionalizes the principle of in utramque partem disputare, central in Skinner’s rhetorical studies. By this manner we can re-activate the link between political thought and parliamentary studies as well as explicate a dissensual alternative to Jürgen Habermas’s views on the political thought studies and parliamentary debates.