Chapter 3 goes back to Skinner’s “rhetorical turn” and the paradoxical consequences of it. As it shows, Skinner will focus exclusive on one rhetorical figure: paradiastole, which became at once an object and a heuristic tool. It is connected with his perspective of conceptual change as a form of transvaluation. This leads, in turn, to distinguish between the “reproducers of ideology” and the “innovators of ideology,” and posit the latter as the demiurges of conceptual change. At that juncture, there appears the figure of the “author.” Yet, as is shows, it is contradictory with the theoretical premises he established. At that point, we can observe the collapse of his original proposal of a “discursive contextualist” approach. Lastly, this leads his view to relapse into the dualism between “ideas” and “reality” proper to the traditional history of ideas that he intended then to counter.

Chapter 6 considers two works that respond both to the polemical writings of c. 1588–89 (discussed in Chapter 5) and the immediate political circumstances of the failed Estates General of 1593 and the (re)conversion of Henri de Navarre to Protestantism. These are the Dialogue d’entre le maheustre et le Manant and the Satyre ménippée. I argue that these works redescribe politique qualities and behaviours as a means of intervening in the end stages of the civil wars. The Dialogue resists redescription whereas the Satyre constantly engages in redescription of the terms of conflict and the moral status of the key players. Both texts are strongly focused on Paris, the Catholic stronghold; the Dialogue seeks to defend Paris as a world unto itself and as a city loyal to supranational Catholicism; the Satyre sees it as a crucial microcosm of France as a whole and seeks to establish French (and Gallican) independence from external influences. The term politique is a kind of boundary marker here, invested with proto-Marxist class struggle as well as being represented as an agent in the rhetorical battles that accompanied the wars, and in the outcome of the conflict.