Since the publication of Quentin Skinner's magisterial two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), the historiography of political ideas has been indelibly marked by his influence in a number of ways. Among the most invaluable of these are a greater emphasis on setting so-called canonical political writers in the contexts of the ideological polemic in which they operated; a more responsible awareness of how developments in the philosophy of language and rhetoric complicate our understandings of concepts like “author,” “text,” and “intention”; and a generation's worth of archival attention to the complicated political terrain of the Renaissance and Reformation. Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Skinner's latest major work, is both an exemplification of these virtues and a sophisticated elaboration of one of his long-standing intellectual preoccupations: the history of ideas of freedom.
Skinner's principal concern is to mark a crucial turning point in this history, in which a widespread idea of liberty with origins in Roman law came to be supplanted in the early modern period by a competitor notion, which, he claims, has achieved hegemony in contemporary discourses about freedom, liberty, law, and the state. The older notion descended from a basic distinction in Roman legal practice, that between slaves and free citizens. The latter were considered free insofar as they were under their own power, while slaves were considered unfree because they were under the power of others. What is special about this distinction, Skinner claims, lies in its elaboration in a number of traditions that contributed to the ideological matrices of Renaissance and early modern political discourse.
The idea of being under the power of another came to be interpreted expansively, in two crucial respects. First, it was applied to situations in which one agent merely possessed the capacity to exercise power over another, even if this capacity was not actively exercised. In the hypothetical scenario of a slave and his or her benevolent master, whose wills, by stipulation, coincide perfectly, the slave remained unfree in a very real sense: He or she was always liable to suffer interference at the master's will. This will, insofar as its exercise was not bound by law, was considered arbitrary in character. In this tradition, slavery was glossed as the state of being dependent on the arbitrary will of another, and named domination. Freedom then, consisted in security against domination, which in turn was explicated in terms of the rule of law and the absence of arbitrary power within a polity.
This stress on nonarbitrariness sustained a second expansive interpretive trajectory. One could be a free citizen, secure against domination, only insofar as one inhabited a polity in which political power was disciplined to operate in nonarbitrary ways. A precondition of such a political arrangement, in this tradition, was that the polity be self-governing, that is, that the terms of its basic political arrangements not be subject to the will of an arbitrary power, whether a foreign power or a monarch with prerogatives. Being a free citizen, and inhabiting a self-governing state, were presented as corollaries.
A good deal of argument has arisen over what name to give this tradition, with “republican” (e.g., see Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1997) and “neo-Roman” (e.g., see Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 1998) being proposed as candidates. The republican label has attracted controversy insofar as some early modern figures (such as Locke) employed something like this idea of liberty but did not describe their politics as republican. In addition, both republican and neo-Roman labels have come under criticism insofar as they have been developed in an invidious comparison with a “liberal” idea of freedom as mere noninterference. This notion of freedom construes the idea of being under the power of another more narrowly, and would not exclude the case of a benevolent master or monarch (both of whom might have the capacity to impose their wills on those under their power, but simply refrain from doing so). The problem with this contrast, as defenders of liberalism are quick to point out, is that a number of figures in liberal traditions (such as Locke, Mill, Constant, and Dewey, for example) do not conceive of freedom in such a reductive fashion.
In Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Skinner refreshingly directs our attention away from wrangling over labels and toward a contextually sensitive inquiry into the greatest criticism launched against liberty as nondomination in the history of Anglophone political thought, Hobbes's Leviathan. This criticism is expressed through a proposal of a revisionist account of liberty as a lack of external impediment to one's motion. Skinner presents this account as the product of a series of descriptions, definitions, and redefinitions through which liberty moved from a relatively marginal concern of Hobbes's Elements of Law to a central component of an eventual Latin edition of Leviathan. By means of painstaking archival research into the writings of Hobbes and his contemporaries, Skinner argues that these twists and turns reflect Hobbes's engagements with traditional humanistic education, the new science of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the varying fortunes of royalist and parliamentarian factions before, during, and after the English Civil War.
Hobbes's novel account of liberty, Skinner shows, reflects a deliberate antirepublican concern that is central to Leviathan (pace Jeffrey Collins's The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 2005). It enabled Hobbes to argue, against proponents of freedom as nondomination, that one could be the subject of an absolute sovereign invested with arbitrary powers and no less “free” for that—on the grounds that liberty, properly understood as the absence of external impediments to one's motion, was something enjoyed to some degree in any polity that delivered individuals from the state of nature. It also allowed Hobbes to position himself politically in a way that was palatable to both critics and defenders of the Rump Parliament. This “eirenic defence of the English commonwealth” (p. 203) is described through a wonderful examination of the frontispiece of Leviathan, which Skinner, reflecting his long-standing interest in the juxtaposition of word and image in the Renaissance ars rhetorica, sets in the context of early-modern political emblematic art.
While historians of political thought will find this study edifying, political philosophers focusing on contemporary concerns may wonder about Skinner's claim that Hobbes's conception of liberty has “won the battle” (p. 216) and dominates the way in which we now talk about freedom. Here, in contrast with the extensive archival support of his historical claims, the evidentiary basis of Skinner's contemporary argument is rather slim: He points to the well-worn notion of “negative liberty” propounded by Isaiah Berlin, and the writings of a handful of contemporary Anglophone philosophers (pp. 212–15). Students of abolitionist discourse in antebellum America, anticolonial political thought, and traditions of indigenous politics may legitimately wonder if Skinner underestimates the currency that liberty as nondomination has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, in democratic political cultures worldwide. (For a study along these lines informed by Skinner's work, see James Tully's two-volume Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2008.) To the extent that political authorities remain capable of wielding power arbitrarily (in the extralegal treatment of terrorism suspects, for example), such a conception of freedom retains considerable political relevance, and we are indebted to Skinner for his work in charting its history.
