LIFE AND WORKS

OF QUENTIN
SKINNER

NAME: TIMOTHY JOHN P. GALPO

YEAR AND SECTION: ABPS 3A
PROFESSOR: SIONIDA BAES
SUBJECT: ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL & MODERN
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Biography

Quentin Skinner was born the second son of Alexander Skinner (died 1979), and Winifred
Skinner, née Duthie (died 1982). He was educated at Bedford School and, like his elder brother,
won an Entrance Scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated
with a double-starred First in History in 1962. Skinner was elected to a Fellowship of his College
on his examination results but moved later in 1962 to a teaching Fellowship at Christ's College,
Cambridge, where he remained until moving to the University of London in 2008. He is now an
Honorary Fellow of both Christ's College and Gonville and Caius College.
Skinner was appointed to a lectureship in the Faculty of History at Cambridge University in
1965. He spent a sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1974-5,
where he was invited to stay, and where he remained until 1979 when he returned to Cambridge
as a Professor of Political Science. He was appointed to the post of Regius Professor of History
in 1996, and in 1999 as Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University.
In 1979 he married Susan James, later a Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College London.
They have a daughter and a son, and two grandchildren, both born in 2015. He was previously
married to Patricia Law Skinner, who was later married to Bernard Williams.
Although Skinner has spent most of his academic career at Cambridge, he has held a number of
visiting appointments. He has been Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Social Science at
the Australian National University (1970, 1994, 2006); Visiting Professor at Washington
University in St. Louis (1982); Directeur d’Etudes Associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
(1987); Professeur Associé at Université Paris X (1991); Visiting Professor at the University of
Leuven (1992); Visiting Professor at Northwestern University (1995, 2011); Professeur invité at
the Collège de France (1997); Fellow at the Wissenschafstkolleg zu Berlin (2003-4); Visiting
Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (2008); Laurence Rockefeller
Visiting Professor at Princeton University (2013–14) and Spinoza Visiting Professor at the
University of Amsterdam (2014).
Skinner has delivered a number of prestigious lecture series, including the Gauss Seminars at
Princeton (1980), The Carlyle Lectures at Oxford (1980), The Messenger Lectures at Cornell
(1983), The Tanner Lectures at Harvard (1984), the Ford Lectures at Oxford (2003), the
Clarendon Lectures at Oxford (2011), the Clark Lectures at Cambridge (2012) and the Academia
Sinica Lectures in Taiwan (2013).
Skinner has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1981 and is also a foreign member of a
number of national academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986),
the Academia Europaea (1989), the American Philosophical Society (1997), the Royal Irish
Academy (1999), the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2007), and the Royal Danish Academy
(2015). He has been the recipient of Honorary Degrees from the University of Aberdeen,
University of Athens, University of Copenhagen, University of East Anglia, University of
Chicago, Harvard University, University of Helsinki, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, University
of Oslo, University of Oxford, Adolfo Ibáñez University (Santiago), and the University of St
Andrews. He was awarded the Wolfson History Prize in 1979, the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize of the
British Political Studies Association in 2006, the Benjamin Lippincott Award (2001), the David
Easton Award (2007) of the American Political Science Association, the Bielefelder
Wissenschaftspreis (2008) and a Balzan Prize (2006). Since 2009, he has been a member of the
Balzan Prize Committee.
Academia

Skinner is regarded as one of the founders of the 'Cambridge School' of the History of political
Thought, best known for its attention to what J.G.A. Pocock has described as the ‘languages’ in
which moral and political philosophy has been written. Skinner’s contribution has been to
articulate a theory of interpretation in which leading texts in the history of political theory are
treated essentially as interventions in ongoing political debates, and in which the main focus is
on what individual writers may be said to have been doing in what they wrote. One consequence
of this view is an emphasis on the necessity of studying less well-known political writers as a
means of shedding light on the classic authors – although it also consciously questions the extent
to which it is possible to isolate so-called ‘classic’ texts. In its earlier versions, this added up to
what many have seen as a persuasive critique of the approach of an older generation, particularly
of Leo Strauss and his followers.
Skinner's historical work has mainly focused on the political thinking in early-modern Europe.
He has written a book on Niccolò Machiavelli, three books on Thomas Hobbes, and his The
Foundations of Modern Political Thought covers the whole period. He has specifically been
concerned with the emergence of modern theories about the nature of the state, and with debates
about the nature of political liberty. He has written one book about what he calls the ‘neo-
Roman’ view that liberty essentially consists in not being dependent on the arbitrary will of
others (Liberty Before Liberalism, 1998), and another about Hobbes’s largely successful
challenge to this view with the claim that liberty simply consists in absence of impediments to
action (Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 2008).
The other main focus of Skinner’s research, which can perhaps be traced to the influence of
Wittgenstein and Austin manifest in his early philosophical articles, has been on the history of
rhetoric. The first volume of his Foundations traces the re-emergence of classical rhetoric in the
Renaissance. His Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996) examines the attempt
to discredit rhetorical methods of argument in the scientific revolution. His latest
monograph, Forensic Shakespeare (2014) illustrates how, in a group of ‘forensic’ plays of which
the most important are Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Othello, Shakespeare makes extensive use of
the classical theory of rhetorical ‘invention’ to structure a number of speeches and scenes.

Miscellany

When Skinner was interviewed by Professor Alan MacFarlane as part of his series of online
interviews with academics, Skinner admitted that he had been a member of the Cambridge
Apostles, a secret debating society at Cambridge University. He also revealed that Amartya Sen
was a member at the same time. He commented that they had both been ‘outed’ in a book
published about the Apostles sometime before.
On 6 October 1995, Skinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought was included in the list
published by The Times Literary Supplement of ‘The 100 Most Influential Books since World
War II’.
On 14 May 2009, Times Higher Education, in an article about Skinner’s move from Cambridge
to the University of London, spoke of Skinner's republicanism, reporting that this led him to
refuse a knighthood he was offered when he became Regius Professor of History at Cambridge.
Principal Publications

Books
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, 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, 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, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish.)
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 and Polish.)
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
Books edited
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. (Co-editor), Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. Russell Price), Cambridge University Press, 1988.
ISBN 978-0-521-34993-2
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

Interviews
1997:  
2000a: 'Intervista a Quentin Skinner: Conseguire la libertà promuovere l'uguaglianza', Il pensiero
mazziniano 3, pp. 118–22
2000b: 'Entrevista: Quentin Skinner' in As muitas faces da história, ed. Maria Lúcia Pallares-
Burke, Brazilia, pp. 307–39 ISBN 978-85-7139-307-3 [Trans. in The New History: Confessions
and Conversations, ed. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Cambridge, 2003 ISBN 978-0-7456-3021-2]
2001: 'Quentin Skinnerin haastattelu', Niin & Näin 31, pp. 8–23
2002: 'Encountering the Past: An Interview with Quentin Skinner' Finnish Yearbook of Political
Thought [Redescriptions Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist
Theory] 6, pp. 32–63
2003: 'La Libertà Politica ed il Mestiere dello Storico: Intervista a Quentin Skinner', Teoria
Politica 19, pp. 177–85
2006: 'Historia intellectual y acción política: Una entrevista con Quentin Skinner', Historia y
Política 16, pp. 237–58
2007a: 'Neither text, nor context: An interview with Quentin Skinner', Groniek: Historisch
Tijdschrift 174, pp. 117–33 ISBN 978-90-72918-66-6
2007b: 'La Historia de mi Historia: Una Entrevista con Quentin Skinner', El giro contextual:
Cinco ensayos de Quentin Skinner y seis comentarios, ed. Enrique Bocardo Crespo, Madrid,
pp. 45–60.
2007c:  
2008: 'Concepts only have histories', interview with Quentin Skinner by Emmanuelle Tricoire
and Jacques Levy, EspacesTemps, document 3692
2009a: 'Making History; The Discipline in Perspective: Interview with Professor Quentin
Skinner', Storia e Politica, 1, pp. 113–34.
2009b: 'Wie frei sind wir wirklich?' Fragen an Quentin Skinner', Zeitschrift fűr Ideengeschichte
3, pp. 5–21.
2011  
2012a:  
2012b:   See also  
2013: ‘An Interview with Professor Quentin Skinner’ conducted by Jeng-Guo Chen and Carl
Shaw, Intellectual History 2, pp. 239–62
2014: ‘Interview met Quentin Skinner’, Skript: Historisch Tijdschrift 36, pp. 245–52.
2016: "'Ideas in Context': Conversation with Quentin Skinner" by Hansong Li. Chicago Journal
of History Vol. VII Autumn 2016.