Academia
Skinner's historical writings have been characterised by an interest in recovering the ideas of Early Modern and previous political writers. This has been spread over Renaissance republican authors (see in Principal publications below, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought ), the 'pre-Humanist' dictatores of later medieval Italy, Machiavelli, and more recently (in Liberty before Liberalism ) the English republicans of the mid-seventeenth century (including John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney). The work of the 1970s and 1980s was in good part directed towards writing an account of the history of the modern idea of the state. In more recent publications he has preferred the more capacious term 'neo-Roman' to 'republican'.
He is generally regarded as one of the two principal members of the influential 'Cambridge School' of the study of the history of political thought. The other principal member of this school is the historian J.G.A. Pocock, whose The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) was a significant early influence. Another important stimulus came from the work of Peter Laslett, and more particularly from Laslett's decisive edition of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1960) which Skinner read as an undergraduate in his second year at Cambridge.
The 'Cambridge School' is best known for its attention to the 'languages' of political thought and the contextual focus this gives its distinctive blend of intellectual history and the history of political thought. Skinner's particular contribution was to articulate a theory of interpretation which concentrated on recovering the 'speech acts' embedded in the 'illocutionary' statements of specific individuals in writing works of political theory (Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Thomas Hobbes have been continuing preoccupations). This work was based on Skinner's study of the philosophical preoccupations of J. L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein. One of the consequences of this account of interpretation is an emphasis on the necessity of studying less well-known political writers as a means of shedding light on the classic authors - although it also consciously questions the extent to which it is possible to distinguish 'classic' texts from the contexts, and particularly the arguments, in which they originally occurred and as such it is an attack on the uncritical assumption that political classics are monolithic and free-standing. In its earlier versions this added up to what many have seen as a persuasive critique on the approach of an older generation, particularly on that of Leo Strauss.
Skinner's longstanding concern with the speech acts of political writing helps explain his turn at the beginning of the 1990s towards the role of neo-classical rhetoric in early modern political theory, which resulted in his study of Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). Skinner has since returned to what has often been seen as an enduring interest to the Regius Professors of History at the University of Cambridge (not least Lord Acton), the history of liberty and particular developing what he has articulated as a 'third form of liberty'. This can most effectively be described as a form of 'negative' liberty (or neo-Roman) which is characterised however by the active participation in government to remain free from interference and the slavery caused by succumbing to an arbitrary power. See for example Quentin Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 117 (2002), pp. 237–68. His most recent work was an analysis of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes as a polemical retort to those who, in the English civil war, espoused precisely such a 'neo-Roman' concept of human freedom.
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