This is a list of books and articles by and interviews with the British intellectual historian, Quentin Skinner. [1] Regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought for his work on historical method, [2] Skinner's principal empirical focus as a historian has been on the history of Early Modern political thought. Has he written extensively on the political philosophies of Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Milton. He has also published books and articles on the reception of classical conceptions of liberty in the Early Modern period, the history of rhetoric, and the rhetorical techniques of William Shakespeare. [3]
1. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume I: The Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1978. ISBN 978-0-521-29337-2 (Translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish.)
2. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume II: The Age of Reformation, Cambridge University Press, 1978. ISBN 978-0-521-29435-5 (Translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.)
3(a). Machiavelli, Oxford University Press, 1981.
3(b). Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction [A revised version of 3(a)], Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-19-285407-0 (Translated into Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Malay, Polish, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.)
3(c). Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction [a new and updated edition of 3(b)], Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-19-883757-2
4. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0-521-59645-9 (Translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese.)
5. Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-1-107-68953-4 (Translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.)
6. Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-521-58926-0 (Translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish and Portuguese, Spanish.)
7. Visions of Politics: Volume II: Renaissance Virtues (with 12 colour plates), Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-521-58926-0 (Translated into Italian.)
8. Visions of Politics: Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-521-89060-1
9. L’artiste en philosophie politique (with 8 colour plates), Editions de Seuil, Paris, 2003. ISBN 978-2-912107-15-2
10. Hobbes and Republican Liberty (with 19 illustrations), Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-2-912107-15-2 (Translated into Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish.)
11. La verité et l’historien, ed. Christopher Hamel, Editions EHESS, Paris, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7132-2368-6
12. Die drei Körper des Staates, Wallstein, Göttingen, 2012. ISBN 978-3-8353-1157-2
13. Forensic Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-19-955824-7
14. From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (with 45 illustrations), Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-107-56936-2
1965: ‘Hobbes on Sovereignty: an Unknown Discussion’, Political Studies 13, pp. 213–18.
1966: ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, Philosophy 41, pp. 199–215.
1970: ‘Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts’, The Philosophical Quarterly 20, pp. 118–38.
1971: ‘On Performing and Explaining Linguistic Actions’, The Philosophical Quarterly 21, pp. 1-21.
1973: ‘The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and their Critics’, Political Theory 1, pp. 287- 306. 1974: ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, Political Theory 2, pp. 277–303.
1975: ‘Hermeneutics and the Role of History’, New Literary History 7, pp. 209–32.
1978: ‘Action and Context’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 52, pp. 57–69.
1980: ‘The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution’ in After the Reformation, ed. Barbara Malament (London, 1980), pp. 309–30.
1985: ‘Introduction: The Return of Grand Theory’ in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1-20.
1986: ‘The Paradoxes of Political Liberty’ in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume VII, ed. S. McMurrin (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 225–250. [Reprinted in Liberty, ed. David Miller, Oxford Readings in Politics and Government (Oxford, 1991) and in Equal Freedom: Selected Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Stephen Darwall (Ann Arbor, 1995). Also available in Chinese and Romanian.]
1988: ‘Warrender and Skinner on Hobbes: A Reply’, Political Studies 36, pp. 692–5.
1989a: ‘Il concetto inglese di libertà’, Filosofia politica 3, pp. 77–102.
1989b: ‘The State’ in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr and R. L. Hanson, Cambridge, pp. 90–131. Also available in Czech in Quentin Skinner (2012). O státě, Prague, pp. 9-54.
1992a: ‘On Justice, the Common Good and the Priority of Liberty’ in Dimensions of Radical Democracy, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London, 1992), pp. 211–24. Also available in French.
1992b: ‘Les idées républicains de liberté et de citoyenneté’, Rue Descartes 3, pp. 125–44. 1992c: ‘Liberty and Legal Obligation in Hobbes’s Leviathan’ in Cambridge Essays in Jurisprudence, ed. Ross Harrison (Oxford, 1992), pp. 231–56.
1992d: ‘The Italian City-Republics’ in Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, ed. John Dunn (Oxford, 1992), pp. 57–69. 1993: ‘Two Concepts of Citizenship’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, pp. 403–19. Also available in French.
1994: ‘Modernity and disenchantment: Some historical reflections’ in Philosophy in an age of pluralism, ed. James Tully (Cambridge 1994), pp. 37–48. Also available in German. Reprinted in The Politics of Postmodernity, ed. James Good and Irving Velody (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 49–60.
1995: ‘The Vocabulary of Renaissance Republicanism: a Cultural longue-durée?’ in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford 1995), pp. 87–110.
1996a: ‘From Hume’s Intentions to Deconstruction and Back’, Journal of Political Philosophy 4, pp. 142–54.
1996b: ‘Rede en retorica in de filosofie van Hobbes’, contribution to ‘Dossier Quentin Skinner’ Krisis 64, pp. 9–16. 1998: ‘Machiavelli’s Political Morality’ European Review 6, pp. 321–5.
2001a: ‘Political Theory after the Enlightenment Project’ in Schools of Thought, ed. Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates (Princeton 2001), pp. 15–24.
2001b: ‘Why laughing mattered in the Renaissance’, History of Political Thought 22, pp. 418- 47. Also available in French, Greek, Portuguese.
2001c: ‘The rise of, challenge to and prospects for a Collingwoodian approach to the history of political thought’ in The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 175–88.
2002a: ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 117, pp. 237–68. Also available in Chinese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Romanian, Spanish. An abbreviated version published as 2006d.
2002b: ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’ in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Volume II: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge 2002), pp. 9-28. 2002c: ‘Visions of Civil Liberty’ in The Future of the Past, ed. Peter Martland (London, 2002), pp. 104–12. 2003: ‘States and the Freedom of Citizens’ in States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bo Sträth (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 11–27. Also available in Chinese, Greek.
2004a: ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’ in Leviathan After 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford 2004), pp. 139–66.
2004b: ‘Considerazioni sulla libertà repubblicana’ in Libertà politica e virtù civile, ed. Maurizio Viroli (Torino, 2004), pp. 249–60. 2005b: ‘On Intellectual History and the History of Books,’ Contributions to the History of Concepts, 1, pp. 29–36.
2006b: ‘Afterword’ in British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge 2006), pp. 278–85.
2006c: ‘Surveying the Foundations: a retrospect and reassessment’ in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 236–61.
2006d: ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’ in The Liberty Reader, ed. David Miller (Boulder, 2006), pp. 243–54.
2006e-2007a: ‘La teoría evolutiva de la libertad de Thomas Hobbes’, Revista de Estudios Politicos 134 pp. 35-69 and 135, pp. 11–36.
2007b: ‘Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives’ in The Cambridge Companion to Leviathan ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge 2007), pp. 157–80.
2007c: ‘The Monarchical Republic Enthroned’ in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England, ed. John F. McDiarmid (Farnham, 2007), pp. 233–44.
2007d: ‘Wie ich Ideenhistoriker wurde’, Zeitschrift fűr Ideengeschichte, 2, pp. 79–88. 2008a: ‘Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power’ in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford, 2008), pp. 83–101. Revised and extended version in Ideas in History 3 (2008) pp. 11–37. Also available in French, German, Norwegian.
2008b: ‘Is it still possible to interpret texts?’ The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89, pp. 647–54.
2008c: ‘Political Rhetoric and the Role of Ridicule’ in The Politics of Democratization in Europe: Concepts and Histories, ed. Kari Palonen (Farnham, 2008), pp. 137–49.
2008d: ‘History: Transformation and Immutability’ in The University of Cambridge: an 800 th Anniversary Portrait, ed. Peter Pagnamenta (London, 2008), pp. 122–6.
2009a: ‘Afterword: Shakespeare and humanist culture’ in Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, ed. David Armitage, Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 271–81.
2009b: ‘Értelem és retorika Hobbes filozófiájában’, Helikon 1–2, pp. 50–69.
2009c: ‘On trusting the judgement of our rulers’ in Political Judgement, ed. Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss, Cambridge, pp. 113–30.
2009d: ‘Reply’ in ‘Book Symposium: Hobbes and Political Theory’ in Hobbes Studies, 22 pp. 199–207.
2009e: ‘On the slogans of republican political theory’, European Journal of Political Theory 9, pp. 1–8.
2009f: ‘Repenser la liberté politique’, Raisons politiques 36, pp. 109–30. 2010a: ‘Truth and Explanation in History’ in Truth in Science, the Humanities, and Religion, ed. Nicolette Mout and Werner Stauffacher (Dordrecht, 2010), pp. 89–95.
2010b: [with Hent Kalmo] ‘Introduction: a concept in fragments’ in Sovereignty in Fragments, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 1-25.
2011: ‘El historiador y la verdad’ in Historia del análisis politico, ed. Pablo Sánchez Garrido (Madrid, 2011), pp. 53–64.
2012a: ‘On the Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns: A Reply to my Critics’ in ‘Symposium: On Quentin Skinner, from Method to Politics’, Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2012), pp. 69–146, at pp. 127–46.
2012b: [with Christopher Ricks] ‘Up for Interpretation or What Is This Thing that Hearsay Is Not?’ Literary Imagination 14 (2012), pp. 125–42.
2012c: ‘Philosophical analysis and the interpretation of texts’ Rivista di filosofia 103, pp. 465- 77.
2012d: ‘Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince’ in Philosophy Bites Back, ed. David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton (Oxford, 2012), pp. 37–50.
2012e: [with Carole Pateman] ‘Hobbes, History, Politics and Gender’, in Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Joanne H. Wright (Philadelphia, 2012), pp. 18–43.
2013a: ‘What does freedom mean to us?’ [Text in Russian; discussion in English] Ab imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism 1, pp. 21–63.
2013b: ‘Liberty and Security: The Early-Modern English Debate’ in Sicherheit in der Frühen Neuzeit: Norm, Praxis, Repräsentation, ed. Christoph Kampmann and Ulrich Niggemann (Köln, 2013), p. 30–42.
2014: ‘Freedom of inclination: On the republican theory of liberty’ Juncture 21 (2), pp. 131- 5. 2015: ‘O svobode respublik’, in Sovremennaya Respublikanskaya Teoriya Svobody, ed. Evgeny Roshchin (St Petersburg, 2015), pp. 25–42.
2016b: ‘Shakespeare and the Legal World’ Counsel Magazine, June, pp. 29–31.
2016c: ‘Thinking about Liberty: an Historian’s Approach’, The seventh annual Balzan Lecture (Olschki, Florence), 75pp. 2017b: ‘Der dreifaltige Staat’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 11, pp. 79–92.
2017c: ‘Wahrheit, Uberzeugung und Interpretation’ in Ideengeschichte Heute, ed. D. Timothy Goering, Bielefeld, pp. 55–68. 2018a: ‘Climate Change in the Light of the Past’ in Nature, Action and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment, ed. Katrina Forrester and Sophie Smith, Cambridge, pp. 221–30.
2018b: [with Kinch Hoekstra] ‘The liberties of the ancients’, History of European Ideas 44, pp. 812–25.
2019: ‘The last academic project’ in Between Utopia and Realism: The Political Thought of Judith N. Shklar, ed. Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess (Philadelphia, 2019), pp. 253–66.
1. (Co-editor and contributor), Philosophy, Politics and Society: Fourth Series, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1972. ISBN 978-0-631-14410-6
2. (Co-editor and contributor), Philosophy in History, Cambridge University Press, 1984. ISBN 978-0-521-27330-5
3. (Editor and contributor), The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 1985. ISBN 978-0-521-39833-6
4. (Co-editor and contributor), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-521-25104-4
5(a). (Co-editor), Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. Russell Price), Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-521-34993-2
5(b) (Editor), Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. Russell Price, with revisions by Quentin Skinner) Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-107-14586-3
6. (Co-editor and contributor), Machiavelli and Republicanism, Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 978-0-521-43589-5
7. (Co-editor and contributor), Political Discourse in Early-modern Britain, Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0-521-39242-6
8. (Co-editor) Milton and Republicanism, Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0-521-64648-2
9. (Co-editor and contributor), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage; Volume I: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-521-67235-1
10. (Co-editor and contributor), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage; Volume II: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-521-67234-4
11. (Co-editor and contributor), States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects, Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-521-53926-5 (Translated into Chinese.)
12. (Co-editor), Thomas Hobbes: Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, Edited by Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner (The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, Volume XI), The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-923623-7
13. (Co-editor and contributor) Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-107-00004-9
14. (Editor) Families and States in Western Europe, Cambridge University Press 2011. ISBN 978-0-521-12801-8
15. (Co-editor) Freedom and the Construction of Europe Volume I: Religious Freedom and Civil Liberty, Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-107-03306-1
16. (Co-editor) Freedom and the Construction of Europe Volume II: Free Persons and Free States, Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-107-03307-8
17. (Co-editor) Popular sovereignty in historical perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-107-13040-1
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, occasionally rendered in English as Nicholas Machiavel, was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince, written in about 1513 but not published until 1532. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.
Political philosophy or political theory is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics include politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of laws by authority: what they are, if they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect, what form it should take, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown, if ever.
Republicanism is a political ideology centered on citizenship in a state organized as a republic. Historically, it emphasises the idea of self-rule and ranges from the rule of a representative minority or oligarchy to popular sovereignty. It has had different definitions and interpretations which vary significantly based on historical context and methodological approach.
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, theology, and ethics, as well as philosophy in general.
In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.
Intellectual history is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual history is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the thinkers who conceptualize and apply those ideas; thus the intellectual historian studies ideas in two contexts: (i) as abstract propositions for critical application; and (ii) in concrete terms of culture, life, and history.
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance—in the "Age of Reason" of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century "Enlightenment". Some commentators consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930, with World War II in 1945, or the 1980s or 1990s; the following era is called postmodernity. The term "contemporary history" is also used to refer to the post-1945 timeframe, without assigning it to either the modern or postmodern era.
Early modern philosophy is a period in the history of philosophy at the beginning or overlapping with the period known as modern philosophy.
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He is currently the Barber Beaumont 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.
Two Treatises of Government is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in 1689 by John Locke. The First Treatise attacks patriarchalism in the form of sentence-by-sentence refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, while the Second Treatise outlines Locke's ideas for a more civilized society based on natural rights and contract theory.
Broadly speaking, liberty is the ability to do as one pleases, or a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant. It is a synonym for the word freedom. In modern politics, liberty is understood as the state of being free within society from control or oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views;
Classical republicanism, also known as civic republicanism or civic humanism, is a form of republicanism developed in the Renaissance inspired by the governmental forms and writings of classical antiquity, especially such classical writers as Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero. Classical republicanism is built around concepts such as civil society, civic virtue and mixed government.
While the term "political science" as a separate field is a rather late arrival in terms of social sciences, analyzing political power and the effects that it had on history has been occurring for centuries. However, the term "political science" was not always distinguished from political philosophy, and the modern discipline has a clear set of antecedents including moral philosophy, political economy, political theology, history, and other fields concerned with normative determinations of what ought to be and with deducing the characteristics and functions of the ideal state. Political science as a whole occurs all of the world in certain disciplines, but can also be lacking in other specific aspects of the term.
John Greville Agard Pocock is a historian of political thought from New Zealand. He is especially known for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period, his work on the history of English common law, his treatment of Edward Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians, and, in historical method, for his contributions to the history of political discourse.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was an American-Canadian Marxist political theorist and historian.
A scholar of the history of British political discourse, J. G. A. Pocock, the Harry C. Black Chair of History Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, has enjoyed over 60 years of publication. Now in his tenth decade, he recently concluded Barbarism and Religion, a six-volume study of Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The first two volumes of B&R were awarded the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for the year 1999.
Neostoicism was a philosophical movement that arose in the late 16th century from the works of Justus Lipsius, and sought to combine the beliefs of Stoicism and Christianity. Lipsius was Flemish and a Renaissance humanist. The movement took on the nature of religious syncretism, although modern scholarship does not consider that it resulted in a successful synthesis. The name "neostoicism" is attributed to two Roman Catholic authors, Léontine Zanta and Julien-Eymard d'Angers.
Classical realism is an international relations theory from the realist school of thought. Realism makes the following assumptions: states are the main actors in the international relations system, there is no supranational international authority, states act in their own self-interest, and states want power for self-preservation. Classical realism can be differentiated from the other forms of realism since it places specific emphasis on human nature and domestic politics as the key factor in explaining state behavior and the causes of inter-state conflict. Classical realist theory adopts a pessimistic view of human nature and argues that humans are not inherently benevolent but instead they are self-interested and act out of fear or aggression. Furthermore, it emphasizes that this human nature is reflected by states in international politics due to international anarchy.
The body politic is a polity—such as a city, realm, or state—considered metaphorically as a physical body. Historically, the sovereign is typically portrayed as the body's head, and the analogy may also be extended to other anatomical parts, as in political readings of Aesop's fable of "The Belly and the Members". The image originates in ancient Greek philosophy, beginning in the 6th century BC, and was later extended in Roman philosophy. Following the high and late medieval revival of the Byzantine Corpus Juris Civilis in Latin Europe, the "body politic" took on a jurisprudential significance by being identified with the legal theory of the corporation, gaining salience in political thought from the 13th century on. In English law the image of the body politic developed into the theory of the king's two bodies and the Crown as corporation sole.
The following is a timeline of Catalan history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Catalonia and its predecessor states and entities. To read about the background to these events, see History of Catalonia.