Skinner, Quentin

Abstract

Quentin Skinner (1940- present) is a British intellectual historian, who since the mid-1960s has significantly influenced the study of political thought. His work is indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Robin George Collingwood, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and Peter Laslett. In his methodological essays, Skinner directs attention to the thinkers’ speech acts in their contemporary context. In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, he reinterprets European political thought from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth century by analysing the vocabularies and moves of theorists like Machiavelli and Hobbes as political actors. In Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, he turns to classical and Renaissance rhetoric as a political language based on debating in utramque partem. In Liberty before Liberalism, Skinner introduces the ‘neo-Roman’ concept of liberty from dependence as opposed to the Hobbesian freedom from interference.