Hobbes Quentin Skinner's Hobbes and the Neo-Republican Project[1]

Modern Intellectual History, 6, 2 (2009), pp. 343–367 C© 2009 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S1479244309002121 Printed in the United Kingdom

quentin skinner’s hobbes and

the neo-republican project∗

jeffrey r. collins

Department of History, Queen’s University

E-mail: [email protected]

For nearly half a century, Quentin Skinner has been the world’s foremostinterpreter of Thomas Hobbes. When the contextualist mode of intellectualhistory now known as the “Cambridge School” was first asserting itself in the1960s, the life and writings of John Locke were the primary topic for pioneers suchas Peter Laslett and John Dunn.1 At that time, Hobbes was still the plaything ofphilosophers and political scientists, virtually all of whom wrote in an ahistorical,textual-analytic manner. Hobbes had not been the subject of serious contextualresearch for decades, since the foundational writings of Ferdinand Tonnies.2 ForSkinner, he was thus an ideal subject, providing a space for original research on amajor figure, and an occasion for some polemically charged methodologicalmanifestos. Both of these purposes animated his 1965 article “History andIdeology in the English Revolution,” and his 1966 article “The Ideological Contextof Hobbes’s Political Thought”.3 The latter of these remains to this day one of themost widely cited scholarly articles in the fifty-year run of Cambridge’s HistoricalJournal.4 Among other results of these early efforts was the scholarly controversy

∗ I would like to thank Mark Kishlansky, John Morrill, Andrew Jainchill, Jeffrey McNairn,Matthew Maguire, Ana Siljak, and the editors of Modern Intellectual History for commentson this essay.

1 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960); JohnDunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge, 1696).

2 Ferdinand Tonnies, Hobbes: der Mann und der Denker (Stuttgart, 1910).3 Quentin Skinner, “History and Ideology in the English Revolution”, Historical Journal

8 (1965), 151–78; and idem, “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought”,Historical Journal 9 (1996), 286–317. Both have been revised and republished in idem,Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge, 2002).

4 Mark Goldie, “Fifty Years of the Historical Journal”, Historical Journal 51 (2008), 851.

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during which Howard Warrender chided Skinner for having reduced the “classictexts in political philosophy” to mere “tracts for the times”.5

Needless to say, Skinner was undaunted. His articles of the 1960s and 1970slaunched modern Hobbes scholarship, and made Hobbes a central subject ofresearch within the entire Cambridge School project. As a result, few figuresin the history of European political thought have been treated so regularly andso well by contextualist historians. The past four decades have seen biographicalstudies of Hobbes, reception studies, linguistic contextualizations, and contextualinterpretations variously concerned with political, social and religious questions.Quentin Skinner, in many respects, presided over the entire enterprise. His ownoriginal interpretation of Hobbes stimulated a great deal of new work. Previousstudies—if they attended to context at all—had tended to portray Hobbes as apolitical theorist who either wrote in the kind of splendid isolation befitting agrandee of the philosophical canon, or whose absolutist account of sovereigntywas intended straightforwardly to serve the royalist cause during the English CivilWar. Hobbes was also implicitly cast as John Locke’s interlocutor, as foil to theAnglo-American constitutionalist tradition, and as court theorist for Europe’sancien regime.

Skinner upset this tidy conventional wisdom by taking a fresh look at Hobbes’sinteractions with the actual texts and debates of the English Civil War. Heforegrounded the dispute about political obligation that roiled England afterthe regicide of Charles I.6 As a rights-oriented contractualist, Hobbes rejecteddivine-right legitimism and emphasized the link between political obedienceand protection. This deference to de facto power-holders marked Leviathanin particular, and served to justify accommodation with the post-regicidalCommonwealth. Skinner’s careful reconstruction of the revolutionary debatesover obligations that informed Leviathan opened up whole new angles of visionon Hobbes’s writings and their political implications. Hobbes scholarship sincethat time has largely been constructed on this cornerstone achievement.7

The publication of Skinner’s monumental The Foundations of Modern PoliticalThought in 1978 marked an inflection point in his career, one that would redirecthis Hobbes scholarship in fundamental ways. The Foundations was a work in

5 “To consign them to their contemporary milieu, with whatever honours, is to bury them.”Howard Warrender, “Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Professor Skinneron Hobbes”, Historical Journal 22 (1979), 931–40.

6 Also opening up this subject was John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism ofAndrew Marvell (New York, 1968).

7 For an excellent overview of Hobbes’s place within post-regicidal debates over politicalobligation, one that charts Skinner’s modifications to his original position, see KinchHoekstra, “The De Facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy”, in Tom Sorell and LucFoisneau, eds., Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford, 2004), 33–74.

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two volumes, the first dedicated to the political thought of the Renaissanceand the second to that of the Reformation era. The latter volume containedsome of Skinner’s most original arguments; it remains the only major work ofhis career centrally oriented around religious categories.8 From this point on,however, it was the Renaissance and the intellectual patterns of humanism thatwould dominate his scholarship. Indeed, for the next decade he wrote chieflyon Machiavelli and republicanism, a topic that had been anticipated a few yearsearlier by J. G. A. Pocock’s masterpiece, The Machiavellian Moment.

Skinner’s interests in republican humanism and in Hobbes finally conjoinedin the 1990s. The conjunction, in fact, produced two very different (althoughcompatible) contextualizations of Thomas Hobbes. The first, presented in Reasonand Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), charted Hobbes’sparticipation in Renaissance debates about the political and philosophicalimplications of rhetoric. The book posited a shift in Hobbes’s understanding ofrhetoric, which moved him from an unalloyed hostility to it for its lack of scientifictransparency, towards a regretful acceptance of rhetoric as necessary to the art ofpersuasion. Skinner thus presented Hobbes as he had earlier presented Machi-avelli, as a thinker driven by the scholarly categories and disputes of humanism.The English Civil War played a causal role in Reason and Rhetoric, forcing Hobbesto “reconsider his views about the place of rhetoric in public debate”.9 The book,in fact, had little to say about the Civil War, but Skinner tentatively theorizedin its conclusion that Hobbes’s re-evaluation of rhetoric had been forced bythe malignant rhetorical effectiveness of religious zealots and the parliamentaryrepublicans (or “democraticall gentlemen”).10 Skinner thus imputed a certainfoundational importance to Hobbes’s anti-republicanism, but his book did notpresent a sustained reading along these lines. Indeed, though the Civil Warand its political factions functioned as something of a backdrop to Reason andRhetoric, the book’s attentions were largely directed towards the chronologicallyand geographically broad context of humanist intellectual culture.

Increasingly, however, Skinner was signalling an engagement withrepublicanism (or, in his then-preferred terminology, “neo-romanism”) as aparticular tradition of thinking about liberty. This was not a new interestper se. Indeed, early approaches to the topic had appeared in articles of the1980s, and in his classic essay of 1990, “The Republican Ideal of Political

8 Mark Goldie, “The Context of The Foundations”, in Annabel Brett and James Tully, withHolly Hamilton Bleakley, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought(Cambridge, 2006), 3–19.

9 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 431.10 Ibid., 435.


Liberty.”11 Here Skinner formulated a critique of the dominant polarizedmodel of positive and negative liberty most famously sketched by IsaiahBerlin. Concerned that modern liberalism was “sweeping the public arenabare of any concepts save those of self-interest and individual rights”, butunwilling to join more foundationalist communitarians in espousing traditional“common meanings and purposes”, Skinner presented what he took to bea “third concept” of political freedom. This republican tradition protectedindividual liberty but demanded civic participation. It eschewed any common,comprehensive definitions of human flourishing, but relied upon a sharedunderstanding of civic virtue. Republican law “forces” us to exercise honestlyour civic responsibilities (it is a “positive liberty” in this limited sense), butin the service of our own private freedom, rather than of a single moralvision.12

In his 1998 Liberty before Liberalism (derived from his inaugural lecture as theRegius Professor of History at Cambridge), Skinner expanded on this thesis. Headopted a claim by the political theorist Philip Pettit that republican theorists didnot merely espouse what would become the classic liberal definition of freedomas “non-interference”. Instead, they defined freedom as “non-dependency”,a definition which forbade any “dependency on the good will of another,even dependency in the case where there is no actual coercion”.13 Republicanconcern to prevent interference in individual freedom was thus supplementedby a concern to root out the mere possibility of arbitrary domination inpolitical life. “Discretionary powers invariably serve to reduce free nations tothe status of slaves.” This doctrine, more than a hostility to monarchy, anattachment to mixed constitutions, or devotion to classicizing “civic virtue”,marked republicans out as “protagonists of a particular ideology”. This ideology,in turn, “rose to prominence in the course of the English revolution of themid-seventeenth century”, and animated the political thought of “supporters ofthe parliamentary cause”.14 After the regicide, “we find the neo-roman theory

11 Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty”, in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind andQuentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge, 1984); idem, “The Paradoxes ofPolitical Liberty” (Cambridge, 1985); Quentin Skinner, “The Republican Ideal of PoliticalLiberty,” in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli andRepublicanism (Cambridge, 1990), 293–311.

12 Skinner, “Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” 304–9. For Skinner’s engagement with thecommunitarian critics of liberalism see Marco Guena, “Skinner, Pre-humanist RhetoricalCulture and Machiavelli”, in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 66–9.

13 Philip Pettit, “Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with QuentinSkinner”, Political Theory 30 (2002), 339–41. More fully in idem, Republicanism: A Theoryof Freedom and Government (Oxford, 1997).

14 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), x, 10, 49.


at the heart of the propaganda commissioned by the new government in itsown defence.”15 Liberty before Liberalism thus made some strong claims, holdingthat a “non-domination” understanding of liberty was the glue that held theseventeenth-century English “republican” cohort together, and that their “neo-Roman”understanding of liberty was a major discourse of political oppositionduring the English Revolution.16

In his efforts to reconstruct, and to commend, the republican idea ofliberty, Skinner had from the start taken Hobbes as a foil. There has beena long tradition of reading Machiavelli and Hobbes as the twin progenitorsof modern statecraft, but Skinner has sought to pit them in opposition. InLiberty before Liberalism Hobbes figures as the primary alternative to the “neo-Roman” understanding of liberty as “non-dependence”. As a staunch absolutistand an uncompromising materialist, Hobbes rejected any definition of libertythat rendered it more than a mere absence of physical constraint. He believed thatrepublicans, by characterizing slavery as mere dependence (even in the absence ofactual interference), had spawned both an ontological and a political absurdity.This Hobbesian doctrine, in Skinner’s account, became hegemonic in utilitarianliberalism, and has left us moderns with both a reduced sensitivity to the dangersof servility and a worrisome tolerance for “liberal” authoritarians.17

Hobbes has thus long functioned as an important interlocutor in Skinner’saccount of neo-Roman liberty in England, and this “anti-republican” readingof Hobbes has proven influential.18 In spite of this, however, Hobbes was ratherschematically portrayed in Liberty before Liberalism. The text treated Leviathanin isolation (neglecting Hobbes’s other works), and it merely gestured at thespecifics of Hobbes’s presumed engagement with the republican theorists of theRevolution. Skinner’s latest book, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, is his effortto thicken this contextual reading of Hobbes as an anti-republican. For the

15 Ibid., 13.16 Skinner’s definition of English republicanism differs significantly from those of Pocock,

who emphasizes republican attachment to civic virtue, and Blair Worden, who hasconvincingly portrayed English republicanism as a fitful and late-developing reactionto constitional crises. See, for instance, Worden, “English Republicanism”, in J. H. Burnsand Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge,1991), 443–64.

17 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 59–60.18 In virtually all accounts of English republicanism, Hobbes is deployed as a foil. See, for

examples, David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Ethics, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 35; Sarah Barber, Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethicsin the English Revolution, 1649–1659 (Edinburgh, 1998), 192; Markku Peltonen, ClassicalHumanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995),12.


first time he has argued in detail for a dynamic process of development, wherebyHobbes’s hostility to republican liberty gathered force during the 1640s and 1650s.Underdeveloped in the manuscript “Elements of Law” and in De Cive (1642),Hobbes refined his own definition of liberty in Leviathan in order to counter theincreasingly assertive efforts of the republicans. Leviathan’s new understanding ofliberty constituted a “powerful attack on a number of new opponents of absolutesovereignty who had risen to fatal prominence in England during the periodsince the publication of De Cive in 1642”. In Skinner’s account, Hobbes’s riposteto republican notions of liberty is the fundamental innovation in Leviathan. Thisclaim, in turn, sustains his argument that such notions of liberty “rose to unparal-leled prominence in English public debate” during the Revolution itself. Skinnerconstrues the dialogue between Hobbes and the republicans as nothing short of“an epoch-making moment in the history of Anglophone political thought”.19

This is, at base, a historical argument. It may be sufficient for a theorist suchas Pettit to isolate Hobbes’s theory of liberty, bundle it together with utilitarianliberalism, and allow the whole to function as a foil for his own advocacy of arepublican theory of liberty as non-domination. Skinner’s historical contextualistmethodology requires more. In a familiar vein, he writes,

I approach Hobbes’s political theory not simply as a general system of ideas, but also as

a polemical intervention in the ideological conflicts of his time. . . I try to bring Hobbes

down from the philosophical heights, to spell out his allusions, to identity his allies and

adversaries, to indicate where he stands on the spectrum of political debate.20

These are the problems, neglected somewhat in Liberty before Liberalism, thatSkinner seeks to address in Hobbes and Republican Liberty. He has certainlyproduced a typically insightful book. Nevertheless, what was often said of Libertybefore Liberalism might be equally well said of its successor. As an analysis ofHobbes’s account of liberty and its incompatibility with the classical republicantradition, the book is compelling. As an attempt to recover Hobbes’s writings asartefacts of the broader English Revolution, it is flawed.

Turning first to the book’s considerable virtues, there can be no doubt thatSkinner has here provided an exceptionally deft analysis of Thomas Hobbes’sdistinctive account of human liberty. The account was most fully argued in thetwenty-first chapter of Leviathan, where Hobbes offered a perversely narrowdefinition of liberty as the mere absence of “external impediments of motion”.Hobbes was an uncompromising materialist and a determinist, and he thusheld that “liberty and necessity” were consistent. Human will, determinedby the motions of appetites and aversions, enjoyed only the liberty that, say,

19 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), 138, 142, 149.20 Ibid., xvi.


free-flowing water did. In either case, only actual physical restraint could hinderliberty. Completing this austere account, Hobbes explicitly affirmed that “fearand liberty are consistent”. Fear would certainly strongly determine human willand would thus direct action, but all human will was determined in any case,and thus it was absurd to claim that fear, uniquely among the passions, deprivedagents of liberty.21 To scholastics, and indeed to the broader intellectual culturethat scholasticism had shaped, this argument conflated liberty with mere physicalspontaneity. But Hobbes’s account of the human will, his ontology of matter inmotion, nullified such traditional distinctions. His insistence that he was merelyrefining the “proper signification” of the word “liberty” was a classic example ofhis notorious rhetorical gamesmanship.

In Skinner’s account, Hobbes deployed his definition of human libertyprimarily on two fronts: to describe the “natural liberty” of bodies in motion,and to characterize the “liberty of subjects” living under sovereignty. In truth,only the former was “properly” called liberty, and Hobbes’s main polemical pointwas to efface the distinction between the liberty of men (as physical bodies) andthe liberty of subjects. “What it means,” summarizes Skinner, “to be deprivedof your liberty, and hence to lose the status of being a free-man, is simplyto be ‘stopped’ by some external impediment from exercising your powers—your ‘strength and wit’—at will.”22 Skinner effectively exposes this as a pieceof rhetorical “effrontery”, repellent to scholastic definitions of free will, andincompatible with political understandings of free-men as agents enjoying somelevel of self-mastery. “No one,” writes Skinner, had

previously offered an explicit definition of what it means to be a free-man in direct

competition with the definition put forward by the writers of republican liberty and their

classical authorities. But Hobbes states as plainly as possible that what it means to be a

free-man is nothing to do with being sui iuris or living independently of the will of others;

what it means is simply to be unopposed by external impediments from acting according

to one’s will and powers.23

Having reduced free subjects to mere free bodies, Hobbes was positioned torecast drastically the traditional definition of “free states”. On the one hand,Hobbes essentially equated free states with sovereign states, acting as artificialpersons in a state of natural liberty. Skinner presents this as a feint on Hobbes’spart, and argues that the real polemical thrust of Hobbes’s redefinition of “freestates” attended to the internal workings of states (rather than their external,

21 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. EdwinCurley (Indianapolis, 1994), 136–7.

22 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 151.23 Ibid., 157.


geopolitical condition). Following from his narrow understanding of libertyitself as physical liberty, Hobbes argued in Leviathan that any actions undertakenfor fear of the law were done willingly, and thus freely. Even under absolutesovereigns, we are not (as a matter of course) physically prevented from acting,“from which it follows that we are always entirely free to obey or disobey as wechoose.” Fear of the law will doubtless often determine our actions, but does notrestrain our freedom.24

There is a great deal to be said for this analysis, and perhaps for Skinner’ssuggestion that it represents the original sin of modern, anglophone politicalthought.25 If the pitiless specifics of Hobbes’s account of human liberty weregenerally abandoned by later liberals, they nonetheless set a template accordingto which liberty was fundamentally cast as non-interference. This was particularlythe case in the utilitarian tradition. Skinner has beautifully explicated Hobbes’scontribution to the tradition of enlightened despotism (a tradition that IsaiahBerlin, infamously, reconciled with liberalism). He caps his discussion ofLeviathan with a subtle account of those rights (more extensive than traditionallyrecognized) that Hobbes deemed inalienable, and those liberties that a well-ordered society would shelter under the “Silences of the Law”. Commentators,from Leo Strauss to Carl Schmitt, who have been interested in casting Hobbes as afounding liberal, have typically “Hobbesified” liberalism in an effort to critique itin various ways. Skinner, though clearly disenchanted with aspects of the modernliberal order, is honest enough to “liberalize” Hobbes.26

But these aspects of Skinner’s interpretation, if more fully presented in hislatest book, are not new. The fresh contribution of Hobbes and Republican Libertyis its historical case for a process of evolution in Hobbes’s account of liberty,an engagement with the republican tradition of the Revolutionary era that issupposedly revealing and significant because of its dynamism. Such a claim—for the contextual primacy (not just the analytic interest) of Hobbes’s anti-republicanism—implicates a larger interpretation of the English Revolution itself.The Revolution is cast as an episode in a metanarrative that is deeply engrainedin our modern political imaginary, according to which the rival discourses ofproto-liberalism and republicanism war for the soul of the modern state.

24 Ibid., 157–61.25 Although Charles Larmore, among others, has cogently criticized the Pettit–Skinner

“republican” school for overstating the differences between republicanism and non-utilitarian liberalism. Liberals from Locke to Rawls have worried about reliance onthe arbitrary will of sovereignty, and even a figure such as Constant (who formativelydistinguished ancient from modern liberty) voiced such concerns. See Charles Larmore,“A Critique of Philip Pettit’s Republicanism”, Nous 35 (Oct. 2001), 229–43.

26 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 166–9.


The historical claims of Hobbes and Republican Liberty, however, are onlyimperfectly sustained. Partly this may be blamed on the brevity of the volume.Quentin Skinner is one of the great historical essayists of our time, but it isregrettable that his books on the republican tradition of liberty have been largelyessayistic in scale. Such compression forces him to sustain large arguments withimpressionistic evidence. This is particularly true when he is documenting thebroad “discourses” of the Revolutionary era, but even his discussion of Hobbeshimself is at times surprisingly thin. For instance, Skinner makes very littleuse of Hobbes’s correspondence or his minor writings, some of which containhighly relevant evidence. Nor does Skinner discuss Hobbes’s biography, or sayvery much about the reception of his work. In this volume, at least, Skinner’scontextual method has produced a juxtaposition of Hobbes’s main works againstthe productions of canonical writers such as Henry Parker, James Harrington,and John Milton. The political narrative against which all of these texts emerged isscarcely discussed at all (Oliver Cromwell is mentioned once in passing). Skinner’sapproach does not allow for a full reconstruction of the “ideological conflictsof Hobbes’s time”, and it leaves him vulnerable to the charge of interpretiveselectivity. This is not to suggest that his historical case is completely faulty,merely that it relies on some disputable generalities and elisions.

Hobbes and Republican Liberty makes two large and necessarily interlockingclaims for historical change: first, that Hobbes dramatically revolutionized hisunderstanding of liberty during the 1640s; and second, that Hobbes was drivento these conceptual innovations by a rising republican tradition that he wishedto counter. These claims may be evaluated in turn.

“Hobbes’s analysis of liberty in Leviathan”, Skinner writes, “represents not arevision but a repudiation of what he had earlier argued, and this developmentreflects a substantial change in the character of his moral thought.”27 Throughexceptionally close and typically shrewd readings, he certainly demonstrates someshifts. “The Elements of Law” had offered Hobbes’s basic view (intrinsic to hismaterialist determinism) that the determined will (resulting from deliberation)was indeed free. But the manuscript had not specifically discussed whetheracting under duress—though clearly wilful—should be characterized as “free”.Discussing free subjects, the “Elements” had flatly denied that a sovereign’ssubjects could preserve meaningful liberty. De Cive reiterated these points, butin the work’s ninth chapter Hobbes devised a more generic definition of libertyas the “absence of impediments to motion”. Crucially, according to Skinner, DeCive offered two categories of such impediments: external impediments (actualblockages), and arbitrary impediments (our passions, particularly fear). Both

27 Ibid., xvi.


constrain liberty, and in the latter case they seem to explain why terror ofthe law or of God might constitute restraints on liberty. Leviathan is moreexpansive than Hobbes’s other writings on the question of human liberty.There Hobbes innovated still further, by more reductively defining restraintson liberty as “the absence of external impediments to motion”. Such a refinementrendered it impossible for Hobbes to continue categorizing an emotion such asfear as a constraint upon liberty. This, according to Skinner, was the crucial,“epoch-making” innovation in Hobbes’s account, “one of the most remarkabledevelopments in his civil philosophy”.28 It enabled him to expand still further hiscounterintuitive notion of what it meant to be a “free subject”, and thus to offera theory of liberty that fixated on interference (rather than domination) in anextremely reductive, physical sense.

Skinner claims that these changes were more than mere refinements, butthis is far from obvious.29 The distinctiveness of the account of liberty in “TheElements” is largely attributable to its brevity. De Cive’s more general account ofliberty (in all senses of the term) is not inconsistent with the earlier text, exceptperhaps for its consideration of so-called “arbitrary impediments” to liberty. ButHobbes’s discussion of arbitrary impediments, Skinner concedes, is confused, andseems to contradict his overall desire to reduce both wilful and free actions toappetites and aversions. It may also be correct that, when discussing civil liberty,“The Elements” had “somberly” emphasized the loss of natural liberty undersovereignty, while De Cive more optimistically foregrounded the civil libertyenjoyed by virtue of the silence of the law. But these are compatible propositionsdistinguished by relatively minor differences in tone.

Leviathan’s account of liberty is more internally consistent than Hobbes’sprevious treatments, and it is more expansive. Skinner makes a great deal of thefact that “the concept of liberty” receives its own chapter in Leviathan but notin De Cive, but it is worth noting that the former text has forty-seven chapters,and the latter only eighteen. Leviathan expanded on a great many Hobbesiantopics. It is surely interesting that Hobbes streamlined his definition of libertyin Leviathan, shedding the concept of “arbitrary” impediments and casting allrestraints on liberty as “external impediments”. But little of significance in De Civehad depended on the notion of arbitrary impediments, and Skinner concedesthat Hobbes’s abandonment of the idea may have been merely an effort to resolvecertain inconsistencies in his systematic discussion of liberty.30 It is importantto note that in all of Hobbes’s main writings, he expressly denies that covenants

28 Ibid., 127.29 Philip Pettit has also dissented from this claim of dramatic evolution in Hobbes’s account

of liberty. See his Republicanism, 168, n. 15.30 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 138.


motivated by fear are unfree. Silently dropping the confused category of arbitraryimpediments removed a contradiction. Likewise, Hobbes may only have flatlyequated free actions and wilful actions in his Latin Leviathan of 1668, but in thishe was only more clearly stating what was an obvious implication of his previouswork.

Skinner’s most compelling observation is that Hobbes’s brutally reductivedefinition of liberty in Leviathan permitted him more effectively to rile certaindefenders of civil freedom by defining a “free-man” as any subject capable ofwilfully acting when unconstrained physically. The perverse suggestion that thosewilling to act in the face of terrifying law were “free” paralleled Hobbes’s mordantremark that, even under heathen despots, Christians enjoyed a perfect freedomto martyr themselves.31 By 1651, Hobbes was no longer willing to concede thatthe freedom of subjects was the just wage demanded by sovereignty. By morenarrowly defining what counted as a restraint upon civil freedom, he permittedhimself a more radical formulation: civil liberty and political subjugation werecompatible. No trade-off was required. This paradox was only expressed inits most bracing form in Leviathan, and Skinner is surely right to flag it asa significant rhetorical feature of Hobbes’s masterpiece. In particular, Hobbes’scrabbed definition of liberty would prove consequential later as part of the doxa ofutilitarian liberalism. That said, Skinner overstates the extent to which Leviathanrepresented a “repudiation” of Hobbes’s earlier theories of civil liberty. Thoseearlier discussions had been rather rudimentary and self-contradictory, and onemight well read their gestures towards a more traditional understanding of civilliberty as a vestigial use of conventional terminology. The more forceful discussionof civil liberty in Leviathan, after all, was an all but inescapable consequence ofHobbes’s long-standing account of both the determined natural will, on the onehand, and the nature of original political covenants, on the other. In both cases,Hobbes had already exploded the traditional opposition between necessity andfreedom.

Thus, on the topic of civil liberty, Leviathan perhaps offered not a theoreticaldeparture, but rather a sharpened argumentative strategy. To present these shiftsas a “revolution” in Hobbes’s thinking about liberty is implausible. And if thisis the case, some of the cogency of Skinner’s efforts to synchronize Hobbes’sconceptual “revolution” with the actual English Revolution is lost.

This raises the second of Skinner’s historical claims. Leviathan may well havefurther distilled Hobbes’s account of liberty (albeit in arguably minor ways), butthe role of republicanism in forcing this conceptual development is unclear. AsSkinner himself concedes, Hobbes’s final version of the “proper signification

31 Hobbes, Leviathan, 410.


of liberty” did not first appear in Leviathan, but was instead developed inthe mid-1640s during Hobbes’s famed dispute with Bishop Bramhall over freewill. Bramhall was a staunch throne-and-altar man, and was, needless to say,not a notable advocate of the “non-domination” theory of civil liberty.32 ThatHobbes clearly and forcefully expressed his most reductive definition of libertyin the context of his dispute with Bramhall strongly suggests that naturalphilosophical considerations first forced the change.33 Skinner tries to massagethis implication by noting that Hobbes first published his new account of libertyin Leviathan, but this does nothing to diminish the import of the Bramhalldispute as evidence of a context for Hobbes’s discussion of liberty that hadnothing to do with republicanism. In this sense it is crucial to recognize that,while Hobbes could and did deploy his innovative understanding of libertyagainst “democraticall” gentlemen, he also deployed it against scholastic notionsof free will, defenders of the liberties of Parliament and the common law courts,advocates of a robust right to free conscience, and defenders of the ecclesialliberty of the corporate church. Indeed, as we will see, these latter targetsgreatly outranked the readers of ancient political texts on his roll of intellectualenemies.

It is also true that, where Hobbes assailed constitutional positions that wemight characterize as broadly republican, he was not always targeting the non-dependency account of liberty that Skinner believes most clearly delineatedthat republican tradition. Skinner’s account seems to claim, in essence, thatnon-domination accounts of liberty begin to attach themselves by degrees to“republican” constitutional positions during the unfolding of the Revolution.Before this, the “paramount distinction in civil associations” between “thosewho enjoy the status of liberi homines or ‘free-men’ and those who live inservitude” is found in a spectacular array of sites: among the ancients, in theDigest of Justinian, in Henry de Bracton, in Magna Carta and the common-lawtradition, in Cardinal Contarini, in Machiavelli, in late Tudor parliamentarians,in early Stuart constitutional royalists, in Henry Parker, in William Prynne, inthe Levellers, and elsewhere. The rhetoric of liberi homines and enslavement was

32 Indeed, and somewhat ironically, Skinner elsewhere (at 156) quote’s Bramhall’s The SerpentSalve (1643) for evidence of a broader discourse denying the foundational claim of thenon-domination republicans (i.e. that “living independently of others” was the definitionof “freedom”.)

33 It is also interesting that Hobbes did not reformulate the discussion of “arbitraryimpediments” in the 1647 edition of De Cive, despite this intervening discussion withBramhall and despite many other textual additions. This suggests either that Hobbeswas vacillating on the question of liberty (unlikely), or that Skinner is overstating thesignificance of De Cive’s mention of “arbitrary impediments”.


spectacularly promiscuous.34 Within England, it was only after the regicide ofCharles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649 that writers were“cautiously” willing to “draw the explicitly republican inference that, if we wishto evade such servitude, we must be sure to establish a free state” by “abolishingthe office of king.”35

Hobbes’s final account of liberty, however, had set by 1645 (if not earlier). Thus,if it is to be construed primarily as a response to the constitutional implicationsof a “non-dependency” account of liberty, it must have been targeted primarily atmixed constitutionalism. The difficulty is that mixed constitutionalism, withinEngland, was primarily a discourse of common-law traditionalism, and not arepublican discourse. Quite naturally, given the limited nature of the Englishparliament as a representative body, mixed constitutionalism was not primarilybuilt on accounts of liberty that valorized non-dependency for all free subjects.Nor did Hobbes’s hostility to mixed constitutions typically foreground any debateabout the liberty of freemen in this sense. Hobbes’s constitutional theorizingtended to fixate on the question of stability, and the impossibility of establishing asingle sovereign will in conditions of institutional plurality. In fact, democracy wastheoretically acceptable in Hobbes’s terms. Likewise, English constitutionalistscould look to shelter the liberties of liberi homines under the wing of goodlordship, and could thus accommodate both a robust notion of royal prerogativeand a fundamentally “negative” understanding of their own freedoms. Theircomplaints about monarchical incursion were often, perhaps usually, concernsabout “interference” with either individual liberty or the liberty of institutionssuch as parliament and the common-law courts.

Thus not every invocation of the liberties of freemen and the evils of slaverywill suit Skinner’s purposes. He is naturally aware of this, and he does, valuably,recover some evidence that the mere existence of arbitrary monarchical powerwas at times a concern in the early years of the Civil War. Such concerns do,for instance, seem to have fuelled opposition to the royal veto. But just asoften, Skinner’s evidence begs the question. It proves very difficult to distinguishbetween opposition to the “mere existence of arbitrary power” and its ill exercise.For instance, he places great weight on the struggle against Ship Money. Itis certainly true that opposition to this hated levy, both inside and outsideParliament, deployed the distinction of free-men and slaves. But most opponentsof Ship Money accepted the prerogative rights of the monarch to collect it.The outrage was that Charles I had abused this prerogative by collecting ShipMoney in peacetime, or on inland counties that were traditionally exempt. The

34 For a similar criticism see J. G. A. Pocock, “Foundations and Moments”, in Brett and Tully,Rethinking the Foundations, 46–7.

35 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 143.


king’s tyranny lay in the ill exercise of his prerogative, not in its mere existence.Even Henry Parker, who went further than most in condemning the “absolutediscretion” of kings, accepted the exercise of prerogative powers when theywere “good and profitable for the people”. English royal prerogative neededto be “balanced” so as not to “oppresse the people in unjust things” or to “disablethe King in just things.”36 The test, even for one as radical as Parker, was often thejustice of the exercise of prerogative power, not its mere existence.

Indeed, the same could be said for much of the opposition to Charles I. TheMilitia Ordinance, for instance, whereby Parliament asserted control over thekingdom’s militias, was perhaps the most polarizing political act of the fraughtyear of 1642. Skinner interprets this ordinance as an example of rising concernabout the mere existence of arbitrary power. In fact, most parliamentariansunderstood the Ordinance as a temporary measure forced by necessity. Indeed,in later negotiations with Charles, Parliament typically demanded control ofthe militias for a ten- or twenty-year period. The problem was thus not thetraditional royal control of the militia, but the failures of a particular king inexercising that control (most flagrantly by threatening Parliament itself, it wasalleged by Charles’s enemies).37 Likewise, the heavy reliance of parliamentarianson the theme of evil counsellors implied a critique of misdirected powerand of a failure of good lordship, not a crusade against arbitrary powerper se.

Skinner asserts that the case against arbitrary power (as such) found its“clearest summary” in John Goodwin’s Anti-Cavalierisme of 1642. Here Goodwinsupposedly condemned discretionary powers and defined liberty as the disposalof self and property at one’s “own will”. But this is at best a very partial readingof Goodwin’s text, which in fact dwelt chiefly (and with near hysteria) on the“Jesuitical and Cavalierish” conspirators who had, “through some black art orother gotten the chiefe treasure of the Land, the King, into their possession, settinghim still in front of all their desperate designs”. Royal prerogative per se was not thechief concern of Goodwin, indeed he affirmed the legitimacy of any constitutionalform (including unmixed monarchy) that ruled in accord with justice andGodliness. Divine providence, showing its face against Antichrist, sanctionedresistance to the Cavaliers. Goodwin’s infatuation with a providentially activedivine law is hard to reconcile with republican notions of self-mastery. Thebulwarks of freedom were not self-governing, republican free-men, but the

36 Henry Parker, The Case of Ship-Money Briefly Discoursed. . . (London, 1640), 6–9, emphasesadded.

37 Quentin Skinner, “Classic Liberty and the English Civil War”, in Martin van Gelderen andQuentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge,2002), 2: 9–29.


“purity of religion”, and the parliamentary “worthies of the land”, to whose“zeale and expense. . . you and your whole Nation owe your lives and liberties,both spiritual and temporall”.38 This is not a language of “non-dependence”.Goodwin’s text does not recall Livy and Sallust so much as Godly reform, Englishconstitutionalism and the feudal resistance theory of the sixteenth century.

Skinner has not sustained the view that the English Revolution was triggeredby a coherent tradition of thinking about liberty as non-dependency, rather thannon-interference. He cannot compellingly construe the constitutional cause ofParliament, the common lawyers, and the “hot protestants” in this way, nor doeshe convincingly supplant those actors as the primary foils of Hobbes’s politicaltheory.39

Skinner finds more hospitable terrain when he attends to those textual passagesin which Hobbes specifically flays the democratical writers of antiquity and theirmodern devots. But here again, not every piece of evidence will advance hiscase. Hobbes condemned the ancient historians and moralists for any numberof sins. He rejected the mixed constitutionalism of authorities such as Polybiusand Aristotle. He feared the capacity of ancient literature to conjure grandiosedelusions in the imaginations of political actors. His preference for single-manrule made him contemptuous of “democraticall gentlemen”. But none of thesepositions necessarily depended upon a “non-domination” account of liberty.Skinner’s argument thus requires more specific evidence than a mere Hobbesiancontempt for the readers of the “Greek and Latin authors”. To be sure, he does findsome evidence in chapter 21 of Leviathan. There, Hobbes rejected the notion thatthe moralists and historians of antiquity upheld the “liberty of particular men”,and instead he construed “free-states” as merely sovereign states. In this respecta republic such as Lucca and a despotism such as Constantinople were equallyfree. In this passage Hobbes seemed to be redeeming, rather than repudiating,the teachings of the ancients (in that he accuses contemporaries of misreadingthem). But Hobbes also heaped contempt on the ancients for falsely teaching thatall who “lived under monarchy were slaves”.40 Hobbes reinforced this critique ina few passages of his history of the Civil War, Behemoth.

There is thus no doubt that at times in Leviathan Hobbes’s account of libertywas a useful weapon against the “democratical” ancients and the notion of

38 John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme. . . (London, 1642), 2–7, 40–41. Emphasis added.39 His effort to construe the absolutism of the “Elements of Law” as primarily a rejoinder

to Contarini, rather than English constitutionalists, is impressionistic and inconclusive.He concedes that De Cive was more concerned with English constitutionalism. Skinner,Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 62–4, 105–6.

40 Hobbes, Leviathan, 140. With this last remark, Hobbes put his boot on the neck of a strawman. No one among the ancients or moderns condemned monarchy this hyperbolically.


freedom that they had spawned. By 1651 the Revolution had outstripped theconstitutional formulae of the common law. The English state had been abruptlyrendered kingless, and its defenders necessarily moved beyond traditionalconstitutionalism. In this context, Skinner finds more evidence of a classicallyinflected discourse against dependency within English radicalism. Here we findJohn Hall, for instance, speaking of “advancement” wrung from monarchs as“but a more splendid and dangerous slavery”, and John Milton excoriating thosewhose liberties depend on “the gift and favour of a single person”. Skinner findssome useful evidence in the writings of the Levellers as well. Not all republicans,however, were equally dedicated to notions of non-dependence. This was not,for instance, a consistent theme for Marchamont Nedham, who alloyed hisrepublicanism with a hard-nosed de-factoism and an expansive accommodationof interest. And while Skinner finds some compelling evidence in the writings ofJohn Milton, Milton’s fulminations against enslavement to kings often targetedmonarchs’ lack of wisdom in exercising power, and he occasionally conceded atleast the theoretical possibility of a virtuous king. Even in his most republicantract, his preferred constitution was a perpetual senate of the “gravest authorities”,who would acts as “keepers of our libertie”.41 Milton, and Skinner, might rejointhat “non-domination” need not imply broad political participation. But thisbegs the neo-republican question. If rights and liberties can be secured by apermanent committee of the wise, why not equally by an enlightened king? Toconstrue such closed regimes as “non-arbitrary” implies not a politics of activeself-government, but an older understanding of “arbitrary” power as wilful,irrational and self-interested, no matter what its constitution or the extentof its prerogatives. Hostility to the latter sort of “arbitrary power” could havecommanded the agreement of King James I.

This is not to deny that Skinner has found evidence for his more robustunderstanding of “non-domination” in the writings of men such as Goodwinand Milton, but merely to observe that the commitment of these men to theindependence of free-men often seems subordinate to their highly specificunderstanding of civic virtue. Even the most zealous of English republicans wascapable of suggesting that it was the duty of subjects to emulate just government,rather than participate in its direction.

Nevertheless, Hobbes and Republican Liberty finds its surest footing in the yearsbetween 1649 and 1651, when Hobbes did at times deploy his understanding ofliberty against what might be construed as a rival non-domination account. But

41 John Milton, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. . . (1660),45–50, 55–6, 72, emphasis added. On these aspects of Milton’s republicanism see Paul A.Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic(Cambridge, 2008).


Skinner’s case for the vast significance of this finding requires that it be not adetail of Leviathan, but a central thematic component, driving a “revolution” inHobbes’s previous account of liberty and explaining the timing and structure ofHobbes’s masterpiece. This considerably overstates the case. Arguably, Hobbes’saccount of liberty did not significantly evolve after 1640, and it certainly did notafter 1645, long before republican accounts of liberty had a major public presencein England. Leviathan, furthermore, pre-dated the major theoretical works thatmight be read as contributing to a tradition of republican “non-domination”.

There are, in sum, three rotating parts to Skinner’s thesis in Hobbes andRepublican Liberty: evolving “republican” constitutional theories during the 1640sand 1650s (moving from mixed constitutional to anti-monarchical), Hobbes’svaried complaints about the intellectual authority of the ancients, and competingaccounts of civil liberty as either non-dependency or non-interference. Makinghis argument work requires that Skinner synchronize these three gears, but thealignment is imperfect and the gears slip. Hobbes’s blasts at the ancients weretoo scattershot. The constitutional positions that concerned him were oftennot derived from the republican tradition. Neither the parliamentarians of the1640s nor the republicans of the 1650s reliably espoused liberty’s “third way” ofnon-domination. The former often laboured to hedge liberties that we wouldunderstand as fundamentally “negative”. The latter deployed definitions of virtueand of human flourishing that were often decidedly “positive”. For his part,Hobbes’s own account of liberty found polemical uses in such diverse contextsthat it is reductive to classify it simply (or even primarily) as “anti-republican”.Hobbes and Republican Liberty certainly enriches our understanding of one ofthe many contextual resonances of Hobbes’s account of liberty, but the strongerclaims of the book, its broader reading of the Revolution and of Hobbes’s reactionto it, rely on a reductive account of radical thought in the 1640s and 1650s, and on areading of Hobbes’s own thought that exaggerates the dynamism and prominenceof his account of the “liberty of subjects”.

In the final analysis, it is this lack of proportion in Skinner’s account that ismost problematic. Even if we grant (as many will not) that the discussion of civilliberty in Leviathan marks an innovation in Hobbes’s thinking on that matter, hisdirect exploration of “the liberty of subjects” consumes approximately six pagesin modern editions that run to nearly five hundred pages in length. Hobbesianinvective against the ancient democrats and their modern students is likewiselimited to a few passages.42 When Hobbes began composing Leviathan (likely in

42 This is also the case in Hobbes’s history of the Civil War, Behemoth, which Skinner minesfor anti-republican sentiment. He cites two passages, both of which rail against “readersof ancient texts” who prefer democracy to monarchy. The theme is certainly there to befound in Behemoth. See Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth: or, the Long Parliament (Chicago,


1649), he was returning to his civil science for the third time, thereby interruptingwork on the already much delayed natural-philosophical aspects of his system.This was the first time that he had framed his political thinking for an Englishaudience, and Leviathan was his first philosophical production to be published(in authorized form) in London. Leviathan was more than twice the length of DeCive, was full of new material, and had radically different political overtones thanHobbes’s earlier work. Hobbes knew before its publication that it would anger hisroyalist associates. It immediately did so, and ensured his banishment from theexiled royalist court. A compelling contextualization of Leviathan must plausiblyaccount for these basic historical features of its production. An explanation whichforegrounds the text’s relatively brief discussion of civil liberty will not do thetrick. The royalists clearly did not take this to be the point of the book, nor didHobbes expect them to do so. And if Hobbes had intended Leviathan primarilyas a rebuke to the republicans, he presumably would have lingered on this themeat more length, and signalled its importance with more vigour.

Indeed, one of the striking features of Hobbes and Republican Liberty isits failure to account for what Thomas Hobbes himself actually said aboutLeviathan’s political significance. “The cause of my writing that book”, Hobbeswould recall of Leviathan, “was the consideration of what the Ministers before,and in the beginning of the Civill War, by their preaching and writing didcontribute thereunto.” In the Latin translation of Leviathan (1668) he reiteratedthat the book had been animated by the belief that “the civil war which was beingwaged then throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, had no other cause thanthe disagreement, first between the Roman church and the Anglican, and thenin the Anglican church between the Episcopal pastors and the Presbyteriansconcerning theological matters”.43

As any reader of either Leviathan or Behemoth will immediately see, Hobbesunderstood the English Revolution as a religious war. A great deal could be saidon this topic, but suffice it to say that Hobbes loathed both the supposedlydestabilizing otherworldliness of orthodox Christian theology, and what hetook to be the seditious designs of Christian clergy to erect dualist structuresof temporal and spiritual power. In all of his major works, and in privatecorrespondence, he held that “the dispute for precedence between the spiritualand the civil power, has of late more than any other thing in the world, been the

1990), 26, 204. The work as a whole, however, is structured as a scathing attack on clericalusurpation and religious dualism. Behemoth must be primarily understood within thisvastly more important context of religious polemic.

43 See Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques. . . (London, 1656), 56; idem,Leviathan, 538–9.


cause of civil wars in all places of Christendom.”44It is not an exaggeration tosay that defusing the political threat of Christian theology and ecclesiology wasan obsessive theme in Hobbes’s writing. It was also a dynamic theme, rising inprominence as the English Revolution unfolded, until in Leviathan the effort toresolve the problem of religious sedition consumed literally hundreds of pages.Hobbes was always perfectly clear that these religious sections constituted themost innovatory and unsettling aspects of his masterpiece.45 They were themesthat he clearly and persistently linked to the context of the Revolution itself, andthey dwarf Hobbes’s sporadic comments on the republicans. No contextualizationof Leviathan that fails to account for its religious dimensions can be fullyconvincing.46

The point of this criticism is not to chide Quentin Skinner pedantically forignoring a subject that the present reviewer finds interesting. The point is, rather,that due attention to the religious context of Hobbes’s theoretical productionsdirectly implicates, and in some measure undercuts, Skinner’s reading of Hobbesas an “anti-republican” first and foremost.47 This is true in two respects.

To begin with, Hobbes’s doctrines on politics and religion very muchcomplicated republican reactions to Leviathan. Though they disliked his“addiction to monarchy” and his condescension toward the ancients, virtuallyall of the major republicans of the 1650s, with the notable exception of Milton,eagerly endorsed Hobbes’s anti-clerical and staunchly Erastian teachings. JamesHarrington, Marchamont Nedham, John Hall, Francis Osborne, William Petty,William Rand, Henry Stubbe: all of these important republicans reacted toHobbes in this schizophrenic manner. Furthermore, it is by no means evident that,in contextual terms, their admiration for his ecclesiology was less significant thantheir distaste for his absolutism. And as historians such as Justin Champion andNoel Malcolm have demonstrated, the positive appeal of Hobbes’s ecclesiological

44 Hobbes to Devonshire, 23 July 1641, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. NoelMalcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994), 120. See also Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, trans.Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998), 81; also Hobbes, Leviathan,228.

45 Resistance to this fact can be remarkably dogged, particularly among political theorists.For one recent and particularly unconvincing attempt to explain it away see DeborahBaumgold, “The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation”, Political Theory 36 (2008), 839,844–7.

46 Revealingly, Skinner’s work has always been difficult to reconcile with the best generalinterpretations of the English Revolution, most of which heavily emphasize its religiousdimensions. See, most pertinently, the work of his Cambridge colleague, John Morrill,particularly “The Religious Context of the English Civil War”, Transactions of the RoyalHistorical Society, 5th series, 34 (1984), 155–78.

47 Here and below I borrow from my own The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005),chap. 5 and conclusion.


doctrines remained a major influence within later, Enlightenment republicanism.Indeed, the former has argued that the fundamentally Hobbesian projectof disabling Christianity eventually trumped the anti-monarchism of Englishrepublicans.48

But even in the 1650s, the major republicans and Hobbes agreed that England’sreligious wars should be resolved by abolishing clerical power, providing someroom for a passive religious liberty, and subordinating public religious power tothe purposes of the state. A common dedication to the tradition of civil religionwent some way towards reconciling both Hobbes and the republicans to the ruleof Oliver Cromwell. No discussion of either Hobbesian or republican notions ofliberty can overlook these dimensions of the question. On matters of individualreligious liberty, the pernicious institutional liberty of the corporate church, andthe liberty of sovereignty to act independently of religious strictures, Hobbes andthe republicans were in broad accord. And for Hobbes in particular, these wereissues of all-engrossing concern.

Skinner’s inattention to religious questions raises a second problem for hisgeneral interpretation of Hobbes’s revolutionary importance. If we step back andtake the broadest view of Skinner’s project, what emerges as its clearest themeis his discomfort with the absolutizing tendencies of modern sovereignty. Hedislikes the atomization and privatization implicit in liberal theories of the state.He finds its notions of freedom and its account of civil society impoverished.He seeks a political model that will preserve individual rights and interests,but will sustain more robust notions of participatory obligations and of theconditions required to maintain liberty. In the neo-republican project, Skinnerbelieves that he has found a tradition capable of nudging liberalism in thesedirections, without moving unacceptably close to more traditionally mindedcommunitarians. He writes: “The Aristotelian or Thomist assumption that ahealthy public life must be founded on a conception of eudaimonia is by no meansthe only alternative to contemporary liberalism.” We need not, he elaborates, tryto “slip back into the womb of the polis”.49 Here is the promise of liberty’s “thirdway”.

Skinner’s historical interest in republicanism has been increasingly animatedby this contemporary political engagement. It is fair to wonder, however, whetherthe model of liberalism and republicanism in endless struggle—whatever themerits of the latter as an ideology for the European Union—is an appropriate

48 Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes and the Republic of Letters”, in idem, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford,2002), 514–17; Justin Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and ItsEnemies (Cambridge, 1992), 134–5; idem, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisisof Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), 111 et passim.

49 Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty”, 66–7.


interpretive device for understanding the political theory of the seventeenthcentury. Such a model, placing Hobbes at one axial end and a Machiavellianrepublicanism at the other, entails a false polarization on critical issues. It missesessential commonalities, and ignores the broader struggle against the dualiststructures of Christendom that united a “proto-liberal” such as Hobbes anda republican such as Harrington. For contemporary critics who defended anAugustinian or Thomistic (or Laudian) religious corporatism, Hobbes and theInterregnum republicans spoke the common language of sovereignty. Alike theysought to disable what had for centuries been the primarily institutional checkon unfettered statecraft. This struggle, for Hobbes certainly, became definitiveas the English Revolution progressed. And if, a century later, a republicansuch as Rousseau could condemn Hobbes’s philosophy of right as a theory ofenslavement, he was also capable of honouring him as the first thinker “whodared to propose the reunification of the two heads of the eagle”.50

Skinner’s neglect of Hobbes’s religious context, in other words, does notjust sacrifice historical comprehensiveness. In fact, it veils the real context inwhich developed exactly those aspects of modern sovereignty that he dislikes.Nor will it do to acknowledge this point for its antiquarian accuracy, but thensideline the religious context of early modern political thought as an “arcane”question, dead to us post-religious moderns. Geopolitically, the struggle betweenmodern liberal sovereignty and traditional religious doctrines retains the power toswing elections and inflame wars. In the West, to be sure, religious and politicalauthorities long ago made their peace, but the status of religion in the publicsphere remains a bitterly contested matter. Jurisprudence, in the United Statesparticularly, continues to haggle over the fine points of church–state separation.51

Much recent political theory has obsessively disputed the moral foundations ofliberalism, the implications of its lineage in traditional Judaeo-Christian thinking,and whether its latter-day notions of “neutrality” and “public reason” constitutea sectarian secularism.52 If liberalism’s modern critics were once provoked chieflyby its political economy, they are now more prone to engaging with the ethicalassumptions embedded within liberalism. Of course, it is inaccurate and unjust

50 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in idem, The Basic Political Writings, trans.Donald Cress (Indianapolis, 1987), 222.

51 For one example among many, see Hein v. the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the 2007

Supreme Court case that unsuccessfully challenged funding for “faith-based initiatives”initiated by President George W. Bush and strongly supported in principle by PresidentBarack Obama.

52 For one version of the debate, conducted civilly by iconic figures, see Jurgen Habermasand Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularism: On Reason and Religion (NY, 2007);also Habermas’s “Religion in the Public Square”, European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2006),1–25.


to characterize such modern debates as a reignition of early modern Europe’s“theologico-political” problem.53 They do, however, echo that original context,and cannot be fully understood if that context is forgotten or veiled. By contrast,and despite the erudite reconstructive efforts of Skinner, Pettit and others, it isthe republican tradition that appears like a museum piece these days. Indeed,those who deploy the term “republican” to characterize their dissent from themore soulless aspects of liberalism seem to come in two camps: communitarianssympathetic to traditional religion (Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel) and thosewho are effectively socially democratic liberals (Philip Pettit, Maurizio Viroli).One thus wonders if the apparatus of neo-republicanism has advanced us veryfar beyond familiar intellectual struggles.

It is a further question whether Quentin Skinner’s interest in neo-republicanism has led him, a touch ironically, into the construction of a “usefulhistory”. He is, these days, less prone than he once was to methodologicalbroadsides against all who dare impose a coherence of continuity on the past.He now seeks more than mere incommensurability in history. “I have become,”Skinner has recently written, “more interested of late in the contrasts betweenour past and present systems of thought, and have even come to believe that thiskind of history can have a practical significance.”54 Many will appreciate this turntowards engaged history. But if the old “perennial debates” and “transhistoricalthemes” of yesteryear’s intellectual history were prone to mythologizing, so toois a contextualism that is overly selective and partial. That is particularly the caseif the historian’s partiality mirrors his or her current political engagement.

It is striking that a great deal of Quentin Skinner’s writing in the latter stagesof his career has been informed by his strongly held philosophical and politicalcommitments. His attempts to trace the prehistory of neo-republicanism areobvious examples of this. So too, one might argue, was Reason and Rhetoric inthe Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, where his effort to establish Hobbes’s “mannerof writing philosophy” as one of his “enduring legacies” not only exemplifiedSkinner’s historical methodology, but also sought to establish the prehistory ofthe twentieth-century language philosophy that undergirded that methodology.55

In and of itself, engagement of this kind is inevitable in most historical work and isoften unproblematic, even valuable (although in the present context it might raisea wry grin from those venerable historians of ideas who were flayed by a more

53 On which see Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski(Princeton, 1995), chap. 1.

54 Quentin Skinner, “Surveying the Foundations: a retrospect and reassessment”, in Brett andTully, Rethinking the Foundations, 237.

55 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996),6–16, 437.


youthful and polemical Quentin Skinner for trying to “trace the morphologyof some given doctrine”.56) What may be problematic, however, is how such anengaged historian reconciles him- or herself to the interpretive methodologiesof Cambridge School contextualism. It may be that “context” as defined by thatschool is too fluid to ground impartial historical reconstruction.

Following its master practitioners—J. G. A. Pocock and Skinner himself,above all—Cambridge School intellectual historians have insistently definedcontext linguistically. They seek to account for ideas as “speech acts” and printed“utterances”, variously deploying or manipulating traditions of “discourse”.57

Their histories seek to establish whatever language context “enables us toappreciate the nature of the intervention constituted” by such “utterances”.Such histories are thus “heavily textual”, and “essentially linguistic”.58 Skinner,in particular, has cast his historical method as an implication of the languagephilosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin.59

It has been often observed that the sheer textuality of Cambridge Schoolintellectual history has oddly replicated one feature of the old “history of ideas”that served as its original foil, namely a fixation with self-reflective, printed worksof theorization. We need not indulge the complaint of “elitism” levelled by socialhistorians such as Robert Darnton to see how such a focus may pose difficultiesfor a compelling contextualization of any given text.60 Linguistic context—discourse traditions—can become remarkably expansive both chronologicallyand geographically, and can crowd out attention to more immediate and materialfeatures of context, such as authorial biography, immediate textual reception, thesocial and political situation of given texts, their history as circulating materialobjects. But it is precisely in these latter dimensions of context that the historianfinds fixity, a stable body of evidence permitting a relatively neutral reconstructionof past meanings and textual situations. Linguistic contextualization, by contrast,can become easily unmoored. The universe of “discourses” available to an authorsuch as Hobbes is almost infinitely varied. Interpretation thus becomes moreselective, and, too often, with selectivity comes partiality.

56 Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”, in idem, Visionsof Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002) 62.

57 Ibid., 78.58 J. G. A. Pocock, “The Concept of Language”, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Language

of Political Theory in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1987), 28; Quentin Skinner,“Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts”, in idem, Visions of Politics:Regarding Method, 116–20, 125.

59 Quentin Skinner, “Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change”, in Visions ofPolitics, vol. 1, Regarding Method, 175–87.

60 Skinner himself rejected Darnton’s critique in “On Intellectual History and the Historyof Books”, Contributions to the History of Concepts 1 (2005), 29–36.


There is no need to exaggerate the point. The best historical work will availitself of various methods and source materials synthetically. Nor would it be fair toaccuse Quentin Skinner of a free-floating hermeneutic technique, constructingdiscourse traditions with Derridean riot. His methodological reduction of allideas into “ideology” has sometimes been criticized as “postmodern”, andhe has perhaps invited this with gestures towards Nietzsche and Foucault.61

However, Skinner’s understanding of ideology is probably better characterized asWeberian,62 and if this sociological inheritance may partly explain the reflexivesecularity of his work, it also lends it considerable evidentiary rigor. His recentwork, nevertheless, has often sought to trace the origin of some aspect ofmodernity that currently interests him. In doing so, he tends to locate pastthinkers in far-flung contexts, rather than in their own. Thus does Hobbesbecome either a “contributor to a series of debates about the moral sciencesin Renaissance culture”, or a prototype of Benthamite, utilitarian liberalism.63

Skinner’s latest book has attempted to ground this latter reading of Hobbes in ahistorical account of his life and times, but with only partial success. The “anti-republican” reading of Hobbes pits him interestingly against antique republicanthinkers, and reads him, perhaps still more interestingly, in the light of variousmodern theorists of liberty. But this interpretation does not offer what Skinnerpromised it would: a clear account of Hobbes’s “allies and adversaries” and his“position on the spectrum” of contemporary debate.

“If we allow ourselves to approach the past with a less importunate sense of‘relevance’”, Skinner once wrote,

we may find our studies taking on a relevance of a different and more authentic kind. We

may find, in particular, that the acquisition of a historical perspective helps us to stand

back from some of our current assumptions and habits of thought, and perhaps even

to reconsider them. The study of the past need not be any the less instructive when it

uncovers contrasts rather than continuities with the present.64

61 See, for instance, Michael Drolet, “Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on Power andthe State”, History of European Ideas 33 (2007), 234–55. For Skinner on Foucault see his“Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts”, 118; on Nietzsche see his “Surveyingthe Foundations”, 244.

62 Skinner, “Moral Principles and Social Change”, in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, RegardingMethod, 145–57.

63 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 6.64 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 15. Jeremy Waldron recently made a similar point

when he defended the intellectual value of “texts-in-context” for offering a “richerand more interesting source of ideas for modern deployment, or a richer and moreprovocative reproach to modern assumptions”. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality:Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge, 2002), 11.


This is a compelling apology for the value of intellectual history. It is fair towonder, however, whether a reductively linguistic understanding of context isa sufficient methodological tool for the reconstruction of “authentic” historicalcontrasts. Often, the immense reach and flexibility of “discourse” traditions—leaping between countries and centuries in single bounds—seems better suitedto the recovery of continuities and origins (“authentic” or otherwise).65 Andthe “relevance” of any account of origins is a relevance defined by present-dayimperatives.

In this sense, Hobbes and Republican Liberty is a history written at least partiallyin the service of the modern, neo-republican project. Skinner’s commitment tothis project has encouraged him to focus tightly on the small differences betweenthe liberal and the republican accounts of sovereignty as they emerged in theseventeenth century. He thus neglects the epochal shift in religious and moralunderstanding that the notion of sovereignty itself entailed. Given his broaderconcerns about the lordly autonomy of the modern state, this is not a negligencethat his history can afford.

65 Skinner is still prone to deriding such quests for intellectual origins (see, for instance, his“Surveying the Foundations”, 237). But in many respects his most recent book is exactlysuch a history.

Hobbes Quentin Skinner's Hobbes and the Neo-Republican Project[1]

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