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“... After the appearance of Poems of Mr John Milton in 1645, Milton published no further works of poetry until Paradise Lost in 1667. During the intervening decades he devoted almost the whole of his literary energies to attacking the Stuart monarchy and defending the creation of the English commonwealth and, later, the Cromwellian Protectorate. As he repeatedly made clear, moreover, he took these commitments to be equivalent to furthering the ideal of a free way of life ...”

“... My starting point is one of the claims most widely accepted in current discussions about the theory of liberty. There is one overarching formula, we are told, under which all intelligible locutions about freedom can be subsumed. The prevalence of this belief appears to be due in large part to the influence of a single classic article, Gerald MacCallum’s ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’ (1967 ...”

“... Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century, ‘has been insensitive to the range of conditions that can limit our freedom of action’? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin’s influential defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism ...”

“... obvious disagreements, Hobbes and Harrington shared. Hobbes is the subject of two strong essays. Quentin Skinner follows the erratic development of his attitude to the Classical tradition which regarded a training in rhetoric and eloquence as essential to the advancement of both civic virtue and truth. In his works of the 1640s Hobbes’s mistrust of ...”

“... Quentin Skinner’s short book is an extended version of his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. There cannot have been a less contentious succession to that chair. In his field, the history of political thought, Skinner has earned an authority and distinction unrivalled anywhere in the world among scholars now below retirement age ...”

“... surge of interest in Hobbes owes its impetus to the writings of three men: Howard Warrender, Quentin Skinner and Michael Oakeshott; of these, it is Warrender’s book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1957) that has produced the greatest quantity of subsequent discussion and development. This book had the merit of taking Hobbes seriously as a ...”

“... scarcely more than a long essay, on a subject vastly investigated and written about. Professor Skinner’s powers of compression and command of the evidence provide as good an introduction to Machiavelli’s thought as could be asked for. As in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought, he is determined to place Machiavelli’s theorising in its ...”

“... in large part shaped by the communities to which we belong (here his thought connects with that of Quentin Skinner, whose lecture in this series tries to recover some of the insights in the tradition of Roman civic republicanism and its late Renaisance revivals). We need, so to speak, to be liberated from our own compulsive individualism. Philosophy, in ...”

“... be not powerful Eloquence, which procureth attention, the effect of Reason will be little.’ Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes is a monumental work which has joined his earlier two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) as a massive contribution to our understanding of late medieval and early modern ...”

“... of content which no serious academic author could possibly want to be charged with. Professor Skinner begins his Introduction by quoting from a celebrated attack on Talcott Parsons by C. Wright Mills, for whom Grand Theory was the most absurd but also the most serious impediment in the way of a sensible, informed and humane understanding of human ...”

“... context have been the central preoccupations of the Cambridge School and its leading proponent, Quentin Skinner, whose recent retirement from the Regius chair at Cambridge signals just how far from the margins of history the history of political thought has travelled since the middle of the 20th century. John Pocock is often associated with the ...”

“... is a less obvious and more complex backstory.In the course of a long and distinguished career, Quentin Skinner, the general editor of the Cambridge series, has revolutionised the history of political thought. What was previously an all too canonical discipline – in which a phalanx of political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Mill ...”

“... the subsequent development and uses of the term, the book adopts the position recommended by Quentin Skinner, that words may be ‘engines’ as well as mere ‘reflections’ of social change. Indeed, it aims to go further than Skinner, by arguing that words in themselves may actively remould the concepts to ...”

“... a republic’ etc. The phrase is echoed by Hythloday near the end of the book. Was More serious? Quentin Skinner, in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1979), contended that in saying this More ‘meant exactly what he said’. It’s a curiously flat-footed reading for a scholar so alive to textual nuance. For one thing, More doesn’t say ...”

“... has had some very distinguished supporters. By his own account, it was the book that inspired Quentin Skinner at the start of his own historical career – and Skinner of course went on to give his own distinctive spin to Collingwood’s slogan about all history being a ‘history of the mind’. And, if only in ...”