Quentin Skinner on Meaning and Method

Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University
College London. He is the author of numerous books and articles on early modern political
thought and is a founder of the so-called Cambridge School of the history of political thought.

Recently, Teresa Bejan sat down to interview Professor Skinner in his London home. What
follows is Part I of that conversation. You can read the continuation, Quentin Skinners
Context, by clicking here.

Art of Theory: What brought you to the study of history, specifically intellectual history and the
history of political thought? Did it arise out of any particular political engagement when you
were younger?

Skinner: Well, at school, when we specializedand of course English schoolboys and girls
specialized very earlyI studied three subjects. I studied the classicsa great deal of Latin and
some Greekhistory, and English literature. So, the first question in going to university was
which of those subjects I would continue with, and history was the very obvious answer.

I wasnt a gifted classicist, and as to the study of literature, at that point it would have seemed
obvious to schoolteachers who were advising you that the study of literature at an advanced level
was a kind of dilettante subject. It didnt have the kind of high seriousness that people of that
generation would have associated with the study of history, which was meant to be, after all, a
nursery of statesmen. So, there was no contest as it were, I was going to study history.

What turned me on to the history of ideas is harder to say, but I have a very particular adolescent
memory of coming upon Bertrand Russells History of Western Philosophy. I remember, as I was
a bookish adolescent, thinking that this was just the most exciting book I had ever come across.
Dazzlingly written and with an extraordinary scale and scope. I remember settling down to read
it and then beginning to take notes, which more or less consisted of copying the book out. It
seemed to me a marvel, and if theres one work that really made me feel I want to know more
about this subject, it was that one.

As to why, if I was interested in the history of philosophy, it turned out to be the history of
political philosophy, I suspect the answer to that is simply that it was an artifact of the
Cambridge syllabus. That is what was taught.

When I became a professional historian, I did at various times try to burst out of those bounds
because, obviously, theyre arbitrary. And one wants to study the history of moral theory and
social theory as well as political theory, and also other kinds of philosophy. So, I think that
although political theory was an important engagement of mine, thats probably the answer to it.

But I was very politically engaged as a teenager and as a student. That was commonplace of
course, at the time. Especially in Great Britain, practically everyone of my generation was
politicized by that final gasp of empire in the [1956] Suez expedition, its calamitous collapse,
and the parting of the ways between Foster Dulles and the American regime, on the one hand,
and Eden with dreams of glory, on the other. That was both a great national humiliation and a
great moment of national crisis. Almost immediately after that came the complete divestment by
the British of their empire. So to have lived through that was to be politicized.

Art of Theory: Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, your major
methodological essay, was published over 40 years ago and it remains your most cited work.
What do you think accounted for its impact?

Skinner: Yes, its a bit humiliating that something that I wrote in my mid 20s should turn out to
be my only piece of work that people read. But I think that [Meaning and Understanding], in
retrospect, turns out to have been part of a kind of cultural movement of the mid- to late 60s in
which people became less interested in the idea that we studied the history of philosophy in order
to winnow the true things they said from the false things they said and to focus on the true things
and became more interestedin a kind of anthropological spiritin the question of whether
what they said might have been interesting, although we might not ourselves be disposed to
affirm it. And, in the idea more generally that there are many cultural worlds that differ radically
from each other, but they each have their own internal logic and our aspiration should be to try to
recapture them on their own terms.

Its hard to remember how central anthropology was as a humanistic discipline at that time. I
suppose it was in 73 when Clifford Geertzs classic text, The Interpretation of Cultures, was
published, but that collected essays that he had been writing over the last ten years.

The other personwho was a close friend of [Geertz]who emerges from that period saying
something similar was Thomas Kuhn, especially in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; the
idea that when Galileo debated with Bellarmine, that this was a collision of world systems in
which both were able to produce a rational and strongly defensible account of the positions they
held. Although it took Richard Rorty later to say that when we chose Galileo over Bellarmine,
that was what he calls the rhetoric of science.

Well, that was the pure relativistic story that emerged a decade later. But my essay was part of a
kind of mild relativism. What I was attacking in that essay essentially was the view that unless
the forebears whom we study can be shown to be asking our questions than it would be pure
antiquarianism to study them, and that must have seemed at the time to have been part of a wider
movement.

Art of Theory: That piece is notable not only for its argument, its also quite passionate in the
way you take on what you see as the prevailing orthodoxies.
Skinner: Yes, well [Meaning and Understanding] was sort of fierce. I would never write like
that now. That may well be because I had to re-read it. I try never to re-read my works but I had
to when I collected my papers about ten years ago, and I hadnt in the intervening 30 years. And I
was struck, if I may say this, that it was very funny. I thought it had a lot of quite good jokes in
it. And yes, maybe that had a certain shock value, because it was a satire amongst other things.

Art of Theory: Did any of the people that you wrote about respond?

Skinner: Oh yes, oh yes, it caused some hurt. But it was intended to.

Art of Theory: Did you have difficulty in getting it published?

Skinner: I did, yes. If you know the essay, which was published in the end in History and
Theory, which is a large format journal, it occupied nearly 60 pages of that journal. So, the
important thing to say, over the fact that it was turned down by two journals, is that it was an
extremely long essay to be asking any journal to publish uncut. And one journal did accept it but
with the condition that it was cut down to 10,000 words, I dont know how long it was but I think
it was easily twice that length.

What I probably should have done is to have published it as a little book. But at that time, I had a
very deferential view of books. I was quite shocked by some of the books that my
contemporaries published, plus I felt in those days you shouldnt really publish a book unless it
was something definitive. And this was actually a kind of polemical squib, thats all it was. So I
had no such ambition for it, but it is true that it wasnt simply its length that got it into trouble.

It did shock the referees for the two journals I sent it to. And I did get some remarkably hostile
reactions to it. And this is the sort of thing that Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
tells us about, that if there is a strongly established paradigm and you challenge it, the first
attempt that will be made is to sideline you, and I certainly had that experience.

On the other hand, and this is something that Kuhn is not sufficiently sensitive to in that book I
think, is that there isnt ever just one paradigmin the humanities, at leastthere are going to
be several, and this article in the end had the good fortune to come into the hand of Maurice
Mandelbaum, who was a German-trained historicist on the editorial board of History and
Theory, and he was a very major thinker at that time in the subject, and he simply commanded
them to publish it, which they did. He had great authority, and also he deeply believed in some of
the things that I was saying. So there wasnt one paradigm. For all of the people who were
hostile to what I was saying, there were also people who were very happy to have it said.

Art of Theory: In Meaning and Understanding, you made the case for a kind of third way in
the history of political thought, between an ahistorical textualism on the one hand and a
reductive, mostly Marxian, contextualism on the other. You argued that the relevant context in
which to situate texts were intellectual and discursive as opposed to socioeconomic.

Yet people seem to have lost sight of that latter target and the attempt to claim the middle ground
and instead associate that pieceand the Cambridge school more generallywith a strict
contextualism and antiquarianism. Why do you think that is, and can you reflect a bit on the
reception of the argument?

Skinner: Yes, well I think thats extremely perceptive.

I was disappointed that nobody much picked up on what I thought was the most important, or at
least the most novel thing I was trying to say, which was that it was meant to be a critique of the
then very prevalent Marxist theories of ideology. And I wanted to make the anti-Marxist point
that there is a causal role of ideas in relation to the explanation of social and political action, but
that causal role does not have to run through the assumption that an avowed principle can help
causally to explain a course of action if and only if the principle is the motive for the action.

Now that had been the position which it was assumed would be taken by anyone who was
adopting a non-Marxist stance. Then, of course, it was easy to make it seem intolerably naive to
imagine that peoples professed principles are generallyor even everthe actual motives for
their behavior. What I wanted to say was, Lets concede that case. Lets suppose that my
avowed principles are never the motives of my conduct.

Its nevertheless the case, because of the importance of being able to legitimize what Im doing,
that what I do should be compatible with the claim that it was motivated by some avowed
principle. That requirement of legitimation, which generates the requirement of compatibility in
turn, places very strong restrictions upon what you can do. Because if what you can do is only
what you can both do and legitimize, then some reference to the legitimizing principles will have
to enter into the causal account of why this particular course of action was undertaken.

Now, thats not a completely straightforward argument, and I dont think I put it very well in the
article. I restated it later, in a 1974 article called Some Problems in the Analysis of Political
Thought and Action in Political Theory, and there I think I managed to get it more or less
exactly as I would want to put it. But it was there in the 1969 article, as you rightly say, as an
attempt to question the idea that the context that would have to be explanatory of social and
political principles and actions would have to be socioeconomic, and that wasnt taken up at all.

Very recently, Professor [David] dAvray, in his book Rationalities in History, has quite
explicitly made your point and has said that this seems to him the most original thing that I said,
and that he wants to make it more widely accepted, but its true that it wasnt much taken up. So
one was left with the idea that what I defended was a kind of contextualism so strict that it was
just antiquarian.

Now, that was always a philistine argument because I had wanted, quite explicitly, to say that the
fact that the texts I was studying did not necessarily share our questions, let alone our answers to
those questions, didnt mean that they werent worth studying.

So to call that antiquarian is almost doubly philistine. I mean, maybe there would be other
reasons for studying these texts, for one thing. But for another thing the point I earlier made
about how we might learn from looking at worlds very alien to our world and its belief systems
and practices. That point was one that the accusation of antiquarianism, it seems to me, also
failed to get to grips with.

Art of Theory: Education as a process of alienation.

Skinner: Thats nicely put. Yes, exactly. Finding out about something other than yourself.
Getting lost in something other than yourself. Thats very important.

Art of Theory: Some of your early polemical targets seemed to approach historical texts with
the presumption of their own infallibility and to fault past authors for failing to conform to
present sensibilities (e.g. why didnt Locke talk about race or universal suffrage?). On the other
hand, Leo Strauss, who is often regarded as a key antagonist of the Cambridge School,
recommended approaching great texts with a presumption of their infallibility and the authors
superior intelligence.

How would you characterize your own mindset when approaching a text in the history of
political thought?

Skinner: Well, one doesnt want to be too prescriptive because there is much to be said for
Gadamers hermeneutics herethat is to say, the view that essentially you must just lie down in
front of the text and let it roll over you.

But I would want to say two things. One is that, for me, the unit is always the text, and I think it
is a great mistake to presume that what one should be looking for is a unified set of beliefs across
an oeuvre. We all experience changing our minds. It would be extraordinary if thinking people
over their lifetime didnt radically change their minds about important aspects of what they
thought and said.

I am very often criticized for having changed my mind, but that really is an extremely strange
criticism to make of someone who is a professional thinker. I mean, suppose the evidence was
such that you felt you had to change your mind. It would be irrational not to, wouldnt it? So, I
feel that if we apply those very obvious thoughts to an oeuvre, we would want to say that if there
is any unit it cannot be a larger unit than a single text in which we are looking for coherence or a
particular viewpoint.

My second thought would be that, yes, I think we should do something rather along the lines of
what you describe Strauss as saying. That is to say, assume that these thoughts hang together,
assume that they are rationally grounded, assume that we are dealing with someone upon whose
thinking processes a good deal of weight can be placed so that you find yourself saying, Well
here they say this, so theyre going to have to say that, or they cant say the other.

But the injunction has to stop short of any kind of belief in their infallibility, of course. Again, it
is a very common experience that we reach the limits of our intelligence and we get confused
and we say things that dont fit together, and that is going to be true of the greatest thinkers as
well, so be ready for your assumptions about rationality and coherence not to work.
Art of Theory: You mentioned elsewhere your love of Bertrand Russell and his History of
Western Philosophy, and in that book he describes his mindset as one of hypothetical
sympathy.

Skinner: Very good, yes. One of the extraordinary achievements in that text, which simply
reveals his remarkable literary skills is that he is brilliant at paraphrase, and you can read a
paraphrase of his which is very accurate and yet is full of ridicule at the same time. And it would
be wonderful to know how to do thatits quite unfair, of course. His sympathies are very easily
engaged at the level of wanting to reproduce what someone has said, and hes brilliant at doing
that. But of course, at another level his sympathies may not be engaged at all.

Art of Theory: Yes, and the difficulties of paraphrase are

Skinner: Endless.

Art of Theory: Meaning and Understanding started out as a conference paper called The
Unimportance of the Great Texts, and youve acknowledge that it was intended as an attack on
the idea and importance of a canon. You have continued to affirm your 1969 position that
because the questions asked in texts in the history of political thought are not our questions, we
must learn to do our thinking for ourselves.

But in recent years, it seems that your friend and early methodological ally, John Dunn, has
moved more towards the position that we should read the canonical authors in particular because
of their intellectual power and insight in addressing some of the same problems we confront in
contemporary political life. Is there a genuine tension here between your positions?

Skinner: Yes, I think there is.

I havent very much talked to John about this of late times, but I wrote an essay that was
published in his Festschrift in which I went back over the evolution of his thinking about John
Locke, and its very striking that he began by wanting, as it were, to alienate himself from
Lockes questions and to reconstitute the work in purely historical terms. And that later, what he
wanted to tell us, was that it was a text to be read to solve some of our current problems,
especially about the role of trust and representation in government.

I have always preferred a not very brilliant metaphor of mine about buried treasure, but I suppose
that arises out of thinking in Foucauldian terms about archaeology. For me, what has always
been more of a guiding light is the idea that if you begin by alienating yourself from the past,
seeing it as strange, and trying to see things their way, seeing things their way would be trying to
reconstitute answers to questions that we do not ask, and trying to make coherent concepts the
readings of which are for us completely different readings.

Nevertheless what you might find is that that operation turns out to carry with it some very
interesting implications for our current thought, and that has been the direction of my thinking in
all of the work that Ive done in the last two decades about the theory of freedom and of the state.
I got interested in the latter as a kind of pre- or, if you like, anti-Weberian way of thinking about
the state as a moral person and trying to make sense of the very unfamiliar idea that the state is
not just the name of the government, but a distinct, if fictional person and trying to make sense of
that.

But, once I had to my satisfaction made sense of it through working on questions about
authorization and representation, I came to the conclusion that the setting aside of this idea of the
moral personality of the state within liberalismin some way either confused, or sinister or both
was a great mistake and has lost us something extremely valuable in our political discourse.

Likewise, and even more important to me, has been the work Ive been doing on the theory of
freedom, which began with my essay in a volume that Richard Rorty and I edited in 1984, trying
to show that there was a negative view of freedom which was not the view that freedom is
simply the absence of interference with our powers.

I was greatly helped in the 90s by Philip Pettits wonderful work on this topic, and I dont think
I would have got as far as I eventually did without his help, but I ended up as Philip did in a
slightly different way, with a picture of negative freedom seen as something completely other
than absence of interference, and thus completely opposed to contemporary liberal ways of
thinking about what un-freedom consists of.

Now Ive come to feel that this alternative view, which sees freedom essentially as the absence of
arbitrary power and hence as absence of dependence, is a more interesting way of thinking about
freedom, more valuable for us here and now and something that gives us a better way of getting
into what goes wrong with relations between government and the governed, and how we should
be thinking about citizenship and the state. Now all of that emerged precisely from not going to
the past texts in the hope that they had a better account of freedom than we had, but finding that
they had a very different viewwhich at first I couldnt make much sense ofbut which, when
I thought I had made sense of it, suddenly seemed to me much more illuminating than our own
ways of thinking.

Art of Theory: In your early work, you emphasized the importance of recovering an authors
intention in any particular intervention to an interpretation of their work. More recently, it seems
that youve shifted away from this focus on authors as human agents in favor of an almost anti-
humanistic emphasis on the text as the unit of analysis. The meaning of a text is to be discovered
not in the authors intentions but intertextually, as in your recent book, Hobbes and Republican
Liberty. Has there been a shift, and if so, why?

Skinner: Yes, there has been a shift. I made the shift in the name of protecting and trying to
strengthen my original and basic argument.

What I originally tried to argue has been much misunderstood. I didnt want to say that the
meaning of the text is whatever the author meant. That was a complete misunderstanding. I
wasnt talking about the meanings of texts, I was talking about speech acts.

The sense of meaning in which I was interested was the sense of somebody meaning something
by doing something. Thats to say, with what intentions did they do them? Then it was objected
against me, and it was objected still against the recent book on Hobbes that you mention, that I
did not succeed in establishing that Hobbes intended his analysis of freedom and subjection in
Leviathan as a criticism of, and an attempt to discredit (notice all those speech acts) the
republican theory of freedom and government.

Now the reason, as it turns out, why these critics think that I havent established that this was
Hobbess intention, is that they believe that intentions are irrecoverable mental entities, and that
in order to establish that this was Hobbess intention you would have to get inside Hobbess head
at the moment that he picked up the pen and started to write.

This is philosophically primitive to a shocking degree. If you look at a review of my book like
the one by Blair Worden, it makes no sense when he says this is all in my mind and not in
Hobbess at all, except on the hypothesis that this is what he must suppose it would be to recover
someones intentions. But of course thats a mistake about intentionality.

Intentions are ways of describing actions. The intention with which I did something identifies the
act as being an act of a certain kind. The intentionality is in the action. An act of waving your
arms in greeting is different than the act of waving your arms in warning, although the gesture
might be identical. But thats to say that if were going to be able to discriminate which it is, it
must be because of a context and an assumption about what this person is doing, thats to say
intentionally doing, in waving.

So once you see that thats the way Im thinking about intentions, theres no objection to my
putting it as I originally put it, except of course that I then get vulgarly misunderstood as making
a point about intentionality and meaning, which Im not.

However, I think it was due to conversations with Annabel Brett and certainly through reading
her beautiful essay on intellectual history in the collection What is History Now? that I came to
see that a good way of protecting my position would be to say, Well, you may think I havent
shown that it was Hobbess intention in Leviathan to repudiate republican theories of
government, but the Leviathan constitutes such a repudiation.

That is without question the case. We may say that thats true about the text and forget about the
author, or if you were going to go back to Wittgensteinian and Austinian terminology, you would
want to say maybe I havent shown the illocutionary act that was performed, namely the act of
discrediting, but Ive shown the force of the actions. The actions have the force of repudiating
just as my wave may have had the force of a warning.

So it was an attempt to protect my basic position, but of course I still want to say that the idea
that intentionality has no place in interpretation is a really quite primitive misunderstanding of
intentionality, or else is a mistake about the two admittedly and unfortunately easily confused
senses of the word meaning that we use in this context.

Im not saying that intentions give you meaning, Im saying intentions give you action. Well,
everybody thinks that intentions give you action. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as
criminal responsibility. I think, although I dont like to put it quite like this, that although I
decided to protect my position by retreating in exactly the way you have identified, I did so in
the face of arguments against my position which are not good arguments.

Art of Theory: In an earlier answer you also talked about beginning with the text as a way to
avoid the temptation of imposing coherence on an author. Is that also a consideration here? Is
beginning with the text as opposed to the author a safeguard against that?

Skinner: Yes, because then you might find as I did find in writing a book about Hobbes, that if
you begin with Leviathan, theres a completely clear and coherent understanding of the theory of
freedom in government and obligation to government. But its not the same as you would find if
you read the De Cive. And if you go back from the De Cive to The Elements of Law, its not the
same there.

So theres an evolution of his thinking here, and one that I find it very interesting to trace. But
once youve started to talk like that, youre back in traditional humanistic terms talking about the
evolution of somebodys thinking, and theres no reason not to do that.

Art of Theory: You have frequently compared the task interpreting Leviathan to that of
interpreting a speech in Parliament. Is there a problem with approaching a text like Hamlet or
Alls Well that Ends Well in a similar way? How do you approach these texts as opposed to texts
in the history of political thought?

Skinner: Well, of course, theres a difference. The point of that observation was to try to say that
what may appear at first sight a completely abstract work of philosophy like Hobbess Leviathan
may nevertheless be a political and a highly polemical political intervention, so that
understanding it would require you to understand not merely the character of the philosophy but
the character of the intervention. So that was my point there.

Now, the obvious point I would therefore have to add is that Im by no means saying that all of
our references constitute polemical interventions. And maybe the idea of a lyric poem or a sonnet
as a polemical intervention is simply ludicrous, so that you would want to say that this just
doesnt apply.

Now, that is often going to be so, but the caution I would want to sayand I cant really get
away from my own hermeneutics very readilyis that this claim that the idea of a contextual
hermeneutics centered on the idea of speech acts just wouldnt apply to poetry, for example, that
cant be right. It cannot be a point about genre. So, for example, Jonathan Bate in his recent book
on Shakespeare has a brilliant chapter in which he shows that Shakespeares sonnets were
intensely polemical about the conventions of sonneteering and that many of those sonnets can
only be understood if you recognize that hes satirizing a number of these conventions.

So, there we are back to the kind of hermeneutics that Im most comfortable with, but were
talking about a sonnet sequence. So its not a point about genre, but of course, there may be
utterances in respect to which the application of this kind of hermeneutics would not be very
fruitful.
Art of Theory: If we turn to the particular authors to whom youve devoted much of your
scholarly attention, Machiavelli and Hobbes, both are often lumped together in a sort of rogues
gallery in political theory, and theyre renowned among other things for their reputed atheism or
more or less explicit anti-Christianity.

But for you, it seems one is a kind of Neo-Roman hero, and the other youve described as a
nemesis. Can you say a bit about what in particular inspired your choice of subjects, and what
they might have to do with each other?

Skinner: My early interest in both of these writers, was philosophical and methodological rather
than historical. I wanted to argue the kind of case that weve just been talking about as a general
way of thinking about hermeneutics.

And Machiavelli and Hobbes are both wonderful examples, because if you read Machiavellis
Prince, you find if you know enough about the tradition of writing advice for princes and ruling
classes and if you go right back into classical humanism, that much of what hes doing in that
text is satirizing those assumptions, quoting Cicero and mocking him by reversing what he
wanted to say about the lion and the fox.

Of course, youd have to know that he was quoting Ciceros De Officiis, and as far as I can see
commentators havent noticed that. But once you see what hes doing, you understand the
direction of his thinking, that its a satire.

So, for me that was perfect: What is he doing? Hes challenging, hes satirizing, hes repudiating
some of the central tenets of classical humanism. So theres a moment where its very hard to get
away from the idea of the author but likewise with Hobbes, my very earliest historical work
was on Hobbess theory of obligation, and I tried to show that what motivated this, as Hobbes
himself says at the end of Leviathan, was a wish to come to terms with the fact that the English
had abolished the monarchy and set up a republicshould you obey this newly established
power?

I wanted to say that to understand why Hobbes yokes obligation not to the concept of right, but
to the idea of protection so strongly would be to understand that he is trying to defend and
validate the new arrangements and give you reasons for accepting them. So thats what hes
doing, and thats what it is to understand the direction of his thinking. In both cases, they were
very dramatic examples for me of what I wanted to state in general terms.

Art of Theory: One of the great things about your work on Hobbes is the attention to his
dripping sarcasm and irony, which people sometimes seem determined to overlook.

Skinner: Its full of jokes that book isnt it? Yes, hes a notable satirist. I sometimes thought that
the mistake in the wider conspectus of Hobbes studies was to think that the person we most need
to read in order to understand Hobbes is Descartes, when the person you most need to read to
understand Hobbes might be Rabalais.
Art of Theory: Youve insisted before that youre not a political theorist and that your intention
has always been to make the history of political thought a properly historical subject, and yet The
Art of Theory is a political theory journal. How do you account for the persistence of political
theorists interest in your work?

Skinner: Well, if I say Im not a political theorist, Im just insisting on a professional identity.

Whats been very important for me is that political theory when I was first studying and teaching
was the kind of subject that had a canonical set of questions, a particular analytical idiom for
addressing them, and an accompanying contempt for the historical. And Ive wanted to challenge
that. But, Im not an antiquarian. The reason for studying the past is that, as my great mentor in
Princeton, [Clifford] Geertz always used to say, These guys are meant to be working for us!

I think thats a really fine remark. We are trying to find out what these guys think and were
trying to take it on their terms. Were trying to reconstitute their world. But of course we hope
that that will illuminate our world, and if it doesnt were not going to publish our results because
theyre not going to be important. So where you have to be willing to spend a lot of time when it
doesnt work, and where youve got to be willing to press your luck where it does, is where you
find that you have come upon a configuration, a theory, a way of viewing the world in the past
which we have lost sight of, but which is well worth recapturing.

So theres the Foucauldian image of buried treasure once again. And, I do think that that is a way
of doing political theory. Its rather labor intensive, and it doesnt always work. But if it works,
as for example in Philip Pettits writings on the theory of freedom, the payoff can be absolutely
colossal. I mean Philip has single-handedly reconstituted a central feature of the discipline of
political theory by making people think again about whats wrong with both Aristotelianthats
to say perfectionistand liberal or individualist ways of thinking about freedom.

If hes right, weve got to think again about several core concepts of our political theory and how
they fit together. I certainly hope that I have made some contributions to political theory,
especially with my own work about freedom, and my own work about the concept of the state.

I dont say that these are important contributions but theyre definitely contributions to political
theory. But they are the contributions of an historian.

This is Part I of a two-part series. You can read the continuation, Quentin Skinners Context,
by clicking here.