Quentin Skinner
Quentin Skinner is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 1996 to 2008 . He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.
A Genealogy of Liberty
(2016)
Among contemporary political theorists in the West, the idea of individual liberty is generally defined in negative terms as absence of interference. In this lecture, Quentin Skinner argues that if the concept is instead approached genealogically, this orthodoxy begins to appear in need of qualification and perhaps abandonment. Because the concept of interference is such a complex one, there has been much dispute even within the liberal tradition about the conditions under which it may be legitimate to claim that freedom has been infringed. Skinner is chiefly concerned, however, with the many political theorists who have wished to challenge the core liberal assumption that freedom is best understood as absence of interference. Some doubt whether freedom is best defined as an absence at all, and instead attempt to connect the idea with specific patterns of moral behaviour. Other critics, meanwhile, agree that the presence of freedom is best understood as the absence of something, while arguing that freedom fundamentally consists in the absence not of acts of interference but rather of broader conditions of arbitrary domination and dependence.
Niccolò Machiavelli
How Machiavellian was Machiavelli? (2013)
A talk delivered at the University of York on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the composition of Machiavelli's The Prince (1513).
A Very Short Introduction to Machiavelli (2020)
Machiavelli’s The Prince
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Thomas Hobbes and the State
Thomas Hobbes: Picturing the State (2019)
A Geneaology of the State (2013)
Intellectual History and its Methodology
Truth and the Historian (2013)
Belief, Truth and Interpretation (2014)
Lecture by Quentin Skinner that he gave on 18 November, 2014 during the conference “Ideengeschichte. Traditionen und Perspektiven” at Ruhr-University, Bochum.
