In Liberty as Independence, Quentin Skinner outlines a history of freedom in which the concept itself undergoes a substantial transformation – from being concerned with non-interference to advancing an argument for individual autonomy. Conceived as a history-of-political-thought project, Skinner’s task, as he sees it, is to identify and explore the eclipse of one view of freedom by another. Taking this as a starting point, this review accepts Skinner’s basic premise that there was a fundamental change in the way liberty came to be understood. Yet it will argue that the new ‘republican’ form of liberty defended by Skinner is underpinned by a distinctly Protestant conception of freedom that remains unacknowledged.
Tracing the idea of liberty from its Roman origins, through the Renaissance and Humanism, and up to the eighteenth century, Skinner argues that a transformation took place from an account of liberty grounded in civic-republican values to one based on the principle of non-interference. This conceptual framework allows Skinner to argue that the transition from a republican understanding of liberty to one centred on non-interference occurred decisively in the late eighteenth century. Beginning with Roman authors such as Tacitus and Livy, he shows how a distinctive form of liberty emerged that took seriously the idea of individual autonomy. This model of civic independence was taken up by Renaissance humanists – Machiavelli and the civic humanists – and cast in terms of liberty as a collective condition.
Following this, Skinner argues that through the writings of Milton, Nedham, and Harrington, liberty became tied to institutional design. Subsequently, via Locke and the Whig settlement, this view of independence as the dominant ideal was consolidated. Finally, after the American and French Revolutions, a shift occurred from a conception of liberty grounded in civic independence towards an ideal of freedom as non-interference.
The success of the book is that it offers a distinctive account of the history of liberty that forcefully demonstrates that, in the eighteenth century, a fundamental change occurred in the way liberty was conceived. Indeed, the sense of liberty as non-interference has a certain modern resonance in critiques of COVID lockdowns, mask-wearing, and social distancing. Such concerns broadly fit the general pattern of development within the history of liberty in terms of the rise of liberal individualism. Yet this pattern seems both over-deterministic and neglectful of the range of moral critiques of individualism that persisted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Furthermore, while the narrative is bold and clearly articulated, the primary concern with recovering an ideal of republican autonomy suggests that such a task was inherently a good thing.
Such a view characterises the whole book, and it is at the centre of Skinner’s claim that the shift towards autonomy within eighteenth-century discourse on liberty and personal freedom is decisive. In Chapter Five, Skinner outlines his central vision of the step change towards a new concept of liberty, focused on republican autonomy, personal freedom, and independence. As he states: ‘They live in untroubled independence, not subject to the arbitrary will of any ruthless employers or haughty grandees, and they possess the fullest possible security for their lives, liberties and estates.’Footnote 1 This celebration of individual autonomy, prized by Skinner, has been challenged, notably by neo-Aristotelian writers who have questioned the fundamental ethics of autonomy.
An example of this is Alasdair MacIntyre, who in After Virtue argues that the central aspects of human life require a degree of interconnectedness and reliance on others. This claim reflects a post-Enlightenment critique of the autonomous individual: humans cannot survive in isolation, for they depend by nature on help, solidarity, and shared forms of life. MacIntyre identifies such forms of behaviour as practices – coherent and complex modes of socially established cooperative activity through which internal goods are realised by participants striving to meet the standards of excellence appropriate to that activity. Such a view cannot be accommodated by Skinner, precisely because it violates the principle of individual autonomy by recognising a shared dependence among individuals. On this account, human agency is inherently relational: the achievement of internal goods presupposes mutual dependence, apprenticeship, and shared judgement. Thus the ethics of Skinner’s argument are exclusionary, because they treat the fact of dependence as a diminution of personal liberty. Such a model sits uneasily with Skinner’s celebration of the autonomous individual, for it suggests that the conditions enabling human flourishing necessarily involve constraints that cannot be captured within a purely autonomy-centred account of liberty. This difficulty in accommodating dependence is not confined to Skinner’s ethical framework, it also shapes his treatment of the theological sources that inform early modern arguments about liberty.
A curious fact of the text is the way Skinner employs a particular reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans in order to defend a secular account of the history of liberty. This is an odd move, given that Skinner is on record as being sceptical of the claim that religion exerted a normative influence on early modern political thought. By drawing on Paul in this way, Skinner inadvertently grounds his secular history in a distinctly Protestant genealogy of freedom. For Skinner, the rhetorical appeal of the Dissenting clergy to Romans 8:21 was driven by a need to ground the basis of personal liberty on theological premises. In their hands, according to Skinner, Paul’s promise of deliverance from the ‘bondage of corruption’ became a defence of personal liberty, such that to forego this liberty was to disobey God and to give in to temptation.
In Liberty as Independence, Quentin Skinner sets out to establish the existence of two distinct and rival traditions of thinking about the history of freedom: one based on a liberal, non-interference account of liberty, and the other grounded in the republican conception of liberty as personal autonomy. In the process, Skinner succeeds in demonstrating how the liberal conception eclipsed its rival. He suggests that this eclipse has had negative consequences for the development of liberty. Yet in making this claim, Skinner overlooks the limits of the republican version of liberty, namely its failure to engage with MacIntyre’s notion of practice and its partial endorsement of a particularly Protestant theological history of liberty. Such an omission ultimately throws open the question of the universality of Skinner’s concept of liberty. These omissions force us to question the universal nature of Skinner’s claims and to recognise the need for a wider social conception of liberty, one that acknowledges the importance of partnership and cooperation.
