Interpretation A JOURNAL A OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Winter 2000-2001 Volume 28 Number 2 119 Lee Ward Rhetoric and Natural Rights in Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government 147 Ian Donaldson Democratic Theory and the Significance of Walter Kaufmann's Aristotelian Nietzsche Book Reviews 165 Scott R. Hemmenway The Paradox of Political Socrates' Philosophy: Philosophic Trial, by Jacob Howland 173 Harrison Sheppard What, Then, Is Time?, by Eva Brann 181 Susan Orr Philosopher at Work: Essays by Yves R. Simon, edited by Anthony O. Simon Interpretation Editor-in-Chief Hilail Gildin, Dept. of Philosophy, Queens College Executive Editor Leonard Grey General Editors Seth G. Benardete Charles E. Butterworth Hilail Gildin Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Howard B. White (d. 1974) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell Joseph Cropsey Ernest L. Fortin John Hallowell (d. 1992) Harry V. Jaffa David Lowenthal Muhsin Mahdi Harvey C. 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Printed by the Sheridan Press Hanover, PA 17331 U.S.A. Inquiries: (Ms.) Joan Walsh, Assistant to the Editor interpretation , Queens College, Flushing, N.Y 1 1367-1597, U.S.A. (718)997-5542 Fax (718) 997-5565 E Mail: interpretation [email protected] Rhetoric and Natural Rights in Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government Lee Ward Kenyon College Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government present something of a paradox for the modern reader. On the one hand, they were widely recognized in the eighteenth century as being among the seminal texts of early modern constitutionalism (Montesquieu, 1989, pp. 159-60; Wood, 1972, p. 298; Tren- chard and Gordon, 1995, pp. 188-94, 262-66; Karsten, 1978; Houston, 1991, chap. 6; Adams, 1971, p. 598; Jefferson, 1984, p. 479). On the other hand, until recently Sidney's work suffered from a widespread neglect among scholars of the history of political thought. The Discourses have received only cursory and generally dismissive treatment in the accounts of many notable twentieth- century commentators (e.g., Sabine, 1937, p. 514, and Pocock, 1975, pp. 420- 21). Even Sidney's more enthusiastic commentators criticize the lack of clarity and poor organization of the Discourses (e.g., Fink, 1962, p. 164). Happily, there has been a revival of interest in Sidney over the last two decades. This renewed interest, however, has not produced a consensus regarding the character of Sid ney's political thought. He has been identified variously as a Christian-Aristote lian, a classical republican, a Machiavellian republican, and as an exponent of a hybrid of these strands of thought (Brown, 1984; Fink, 1962; Pangle, 1988, pp. 64-65; Wood, 1972; Sidney, 1996, West's introduction, pp. xxiii-xxv; Nel son, 1993; Scott, 1991; Worden, 1985). While all of these elements are present in the Discourses, in the current debate among Sidney scholars his status as a natural rights thinker has been largely underappreciated (two notable and valu able exceptions are Houston, 1991, and Sullivan, forthcoming). This study will attempt to address this issue. In order to demonstrate Sidney's standing as a modern natural rights thinker we must overcome a central difficulty. The Discourses is a notoriously dense and voluminous book and inasmuch as Sidney offers it as a detailed refutation of the divine right monarchist Robert Filmer, it appears to contain no rhetorical structure or internal design independent of Filmer's unsystematic presentation in Patriarcha. In the course of his refutation of Filmer, Sidney presents and defends positions consistent with Christian-Aristotelianism and classical as well as Machiavellian republicanism. While this situation does invite the cacophony of interpretive voices that we hear in Sidney scholarship today, I argue that Sidney's modern natural rights teaching can be identified by paying careful interpretation, Winter 2000-2001, Vol. 28, No. 2 120 Interpretation the attention to the plan of the book and the movement of the argument in Discourses. complex. he sought to Sidney's rhetorical strategy in this work was First, defend the doctrine of natural liberty against divine right theory. Filmer was a in a highly polemical writer who vigorously opposed and critiqued, typically disjointed and unsystematic fashion, practically every strand of thought in the natural liberty school of the mid-seventeenth century. This diverse body of thought, including Jesuit scholasticism, classical and Machiavellian republican ism, as well as the natural jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, was by no means univocal in the specifics of consent theory. The natural liberty school was, however, united in its opposition to divine right and in its support for the general principle of consent. With his critique of Filmer, Sidney sought to locate his own defense of the Whig position in England within the broad spectrum of the loosely aligned natural liberty camp. As such, he defended several theoretical positions, such as those commonly ascribed to him, which were grounded on that doctrine. By this Sidney hoped to demonstrate the nov elty, indeed the perversity, of Filmer's position by showing its hostility to the commonly accepted doctrine of natural liberty central to so many influential strands of thought in seventeenth-century Europe. Sidney's second and more fundamental aim was to use this defense of tradi tional notions of natural liberty in order to introduce, by means of these estab lished and respectable premises, his more radical version of that doctrine: a modem theory of natural rights. Like Locke, Sidney was not insensitive to the potential personal dangers and political disadvantages attached to his argument being publicly associated with the modern natural rights theories of the "justly decried" Hobbes and Spinoza. (For Locke's public disassociation of his work with that of Hobbes and Spinoza, see Locke, 1988, p. 74; and for good discus sions of Locke's famous caution, see Cox, 1960, pp. 1-44; Pangle, 1988, pp. 132-38; Strauss, 1953, pp. 206-9, 220, 246; Zuckert, 1974, pp. 544-64, 1977, pp. 55-66.) In the politically charged climate of Exclusion-era England, Sidney saw the necessity to devise a rhetorical strategy somewhat obscuring the radical character of his rights theory. The plan of the Discourses allowed him to make the case for natural rights in a manner possessing broader political appeal than that of the publicly condemned works of his philosophical kindred spirits Machi avelli, Hobbes and Spinoza. In effect, Sidney turned Filmer's eclectic combat- iveness to his own rhetorical advantage by using this defense of the natural liberty doctrine broadly conceived as a more or less respectable and largely unobjectionable platform for his own more radical position. Sidney guides his reader through carefully calibrated arguments from a moderate antiabsolutist stance to an increasingly populist version of consent theory and natural rights. shall argue that the first two of I the book's three lengthy chapters advance arguments and positions which are modified in Sidney's subsequent discussion. the phase of his of In initial refutation Robert Filmer, Sidney defends two major Rhetoric and Natural Rights in Algernon Sidney 121 alternatives to divine right monarchy: Christian-Aristotelian consent theory and classical republicanism. In the latter portion of the work, however, Sidney modi fies and ultimately rejects these traditional models of political thought in favor of a distinctly modern natural rights teaching paralleling and deeply influenced by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Spinoza. The unfolding and increasingly radical character of Sidney's argument culminates in a defense