LIBERTY BEFORE LIBERALISM

Liberty before Liberalism

Liberty before Liberalism

Introduction

There are, it seems, two Quentin Skinners. On the one hand, the Cambridge historian of early modern political thought writes the meticulous history of concepts in their political contexts. For Skinner, ideas do not "cause" political events because political actors are noble individuals who stick to their principles; in his more subtle account of causality, concepts are used to legitimise and defend conduct, frequently after the event.

Analysis of Skinner

There are, it seems, two Quentin Skinners. On the one hand, the Cambridge historian of early modern political thought writes the meticulous history of concepts in their political contexts. For Skinner, ideas do not "cause" political events because political actors are noble individuals who stick to their principles; in his more subtle account of causality, concepts are used to legitimise and defend conduct, frequently after the event. But when politicians and parties use ideas to justify their conduct they trap themselves into having to act in accordance with them later on -- or at least, when new circumstances arise which require a change of policy -- they have to come up with a convincing explanation. To take a modern example: "Peace, Bread and Land" might have just been the slogan which a group of Russian Marxists used merely to gain popular support; but the Bolshevik Revolution wouldn't have got very far if Lenin and comrades hadn't at least looked like they were acting according to it.

Skinner the intellectual historian can certainly be faulted for not paying too much attention to the broader institutional contexts from which his political actors speak. He has very little to say about the form in which political texts are published; he has remained silent on the relationship between political thought and what began to be called "public opinion" sometime in the eighteenth century. As such, Skinner's works sometimes make the history of political thought look like a parlour game in which the same set of elite political actors tirelessly try to outwit their opponents with elaborate rhetoric strategies, only interrupted by maids and butlers bringing in more tea or occasionally demanding a pay-rise. But Skinner's parlour game is important, interesting, and complicated nonetheless, as a perusal of the best sections of his two volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978) or the excellent article on "Bolingbroke and Walpole" easily makes clear (in Historical Perspectives: Essays in Honour of J.H. Plumb, ed. N. McKendrick, London, 1974).

The other Skinner, Quentin Skinner the political theorist, is less meticulous Rather than placing ideas in their immediate intellectual contexts or locating concepts in the cut and thrust of immediate political debate, he charts broadly schematised ideas very much out of context. This is the import of the extended version of his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, published as Liberty before Liberalism. Skinner's point is to describe a "neo-Roman" concept of liberty which, he argues, predated modern "liberalism". The focus is on the English civil war: a "neo-Roman" notion of ...