For readers of the history of political thought, the publication of a new book by Quentin Skinner is an occasion of some significance. A leading authority on the history of political philosophy in western Europe between 1450 and 1700, Skinner stands among the world’s foremost practitioners of intellectual history. From the commencement of his career in the early 1960s, he has also proven one of the most influential.
Together with fellow historians John Dunn and J.G.A. Pocock, forming a loose association labelled the Cambridge School by commentators, Skinner was instrumental in lending a new sense of form and purpose to a disciple that was still a marginal pursuit by the publication of his famous article, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas (1969).
Noted as much for his pioneering studies of Thomas Hobbes and Niccolo Machiavelli as for his revisionist accounts of Francis Bacon, John Milton, and William Shakespeare, among others, Skinner is unique among historians for his ability to marry rarefied empirical research with sophisticated methodological inquiry.
Skinner has often been classified as a philosopher more so than a historian; though largely at the behest of critics who see in the combination of history and philosophy a relationship like that of oil and water. He has navigated the intricacies of that relationship with admirable adroitness, bringing the insights of linguistic philosophy to bear on questions of historical interpretation.
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In his three-volume essay collection from 2002, Visions of Politics, he equipped intellectual historians with a valuable set of tools. Skinner stipulated that we ought to allow past thinkers to speak for themselves, in their historically-conditioned languages, rather than recruit them as advocates to our partisan causes. It was the historian’s task to avoid subordinating interpretation to doctrine in an attempt to excavate the actual intentions of historical thinkers. Accordingly, Skinner would have us “see things their way”. One source of recent contention among theorists and historians has been whether Skinner himself has been able to adhere to this maxim.
His new book, Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (2025), marks a culmination in several respects. First, it is Skinner’s most ambitious and historically rich effort to address a topic of long-standing interest: what he identifies as a significant transformation that occurred in the late 18th century among political theorists about the meaning of the term liberty.
Second, it provides the fullest articulation of a normative political agenda that Skinner has been advancing since the 1990s, in which the ideal of “liberty as independence” occupies a central role.
This ideal of liberty, Skinner contends, “was almost universally accepted in early modern anglophone political theory”. This he sets out to demonstrate, ranging from the “affirmation” of liberty as independence in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to its supposed eclipse on the “triumph” of “liberalism” following the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century.
What advocates of liberty as independence believed, according to Skinner, was that a person or people were “free” only insofar as they possessed a “distinctive status in social life”. On this view, liberty is not restricted to considerations of personal action, as we might believe. This is owing, Skinner suggests, to our acquaintance with its successor, “liberty as noninterference”, the central presupposition of liberal politics.
Liberty as independence, on the other hand, directs one to the logically prior question of whether they are “subject to the arbitrary power of any other person or institution within civil society or the state”. If so, a person’s actions will never be free, for they are dependent on the capricious will of another.
Real freedom, on this view, consists in one’s status as an autonomous individual unto oneself. Their choices can be restricted, but their status as free persons remains undisturbed.
Advocates of this position, among whom Skinner numbers theorists like John Locke, David Hume, and Mary Wollstonecraft, believed that civil liberties were safeguarded by constitutions composed of “laws, and not men”, to quote James Harrington. For present-day politics, the main lesson we can draw from this intellectual tradition is that “a democratic form of representative government is the only form in which liberty as independence can be guaranteed”. “No democracy, no liberty”, Skinner concludes.
Skinner relates a fascinating story of how the ideal of liberty as independence was articulated, defended, and modified by some of the leading anglophone political theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries. We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that Skinner is employing history to vindicate specific political principles.
The idea of liberty as independence was supposedly defeated on the ascent of “Hobbesian” liberalism. But, some argue, the history of liberalism is more complicated than this particular rendition seems to allow. Whereas Skinner would have us “see things their way”, we are left here to see things his way.
- Adam Coleman is a doctoral student in history at Trinity College, University of Cambridge
