From Humanism to Hobbes

Quentin Skinner is Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academia Europaea, and a foreign member of the American Academy, the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei and many other learned societies. He has been awarded honorary degrees by numerous major Universities, including the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the University of Oxford. His scholarship, which is available in more than two dozen languages, has won him many awards, including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. His two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), was listed by The Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books since World War II. His other books include Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), Machiavelli (2000), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), Forensic Shakespeare (2014) and a three-volume collection of essays, Visions of Politics (Cambridge, 2002).

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations and conventions; 1. Introduction; 2. Classical rhetoric and the personation of the state; 3. Machiavelli on misunderstanding princely virtù; 4. Judicial rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice; 5. Rhetorical redescription and its uses in Shakespeare; 6. The generation of John Milton at Cambridge; 7. Rethinking liberty in the English revolution; 8. Hobbes on civil conversation; 9. Hobbes on political representation; 10. Hobbes and the humanist frontispiece; 11. Hobbes on hereditary right; 12. Hobbes and the concept of the state; Bibliographies; Manuscript sources; Primary printed sources; Secondary sources; Index.

'In these beautifully crafted essays Skinner shows how Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Hobbes use the plenitude of rhetorical techniques of the humanist curriculum to craft persuasively the features of their different yet equally famous texts. Moreover, each confronts differently the chaos that ensues when these radically redescriptive techniques enter into the world they strive to characterise. A masterpiece.' James Tully, University of Victoria, British Columbia