Liberty as Independence

Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History, and the recipient of many awards including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. Previous publications include the two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and, most recently, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018).

• Acknowledgments; Conventions; Introduction; Part I. Liberty and the Revolution of 1688: 1. The Ideal of Liberty as Independence; 2. The Legitimacy of the Revolution Debated; Part II. Liberty as Independence: The Ideal Entrenched; 3. Towards the Whig Idea of a Free State; 4. The Whig Vision of a Free Society; Part III. Liberty as Independence: The Ideal Betrayed; 5. The Persistence of Dependence; 6. The Continuing Use of Arbitrary Power; Part IV. A New View of Liberty: 7. The New View and its Provenance; 8. The New View Affirmed; Part V. The Rival Views in Contestation; 9. Liberty as Independence Reaffirmed; 10. The New View Entrenched; Conclusion: A Reckoning; Bibliography; Index.

'The ideal of liberty as independence from arbitrary power was hegemonic from the Roman Republic to the Age of Revolutions until it was rapidly, and seemingly irreversibly, replaced by the reigning notion of liberty as the absence of restraint. No one has done more to excavate the genealogies of these two concepts of liberty than Quentin Skinner. Liberty as Independence draws on decades of research and reflection to present a magisterial account of the anti-democratic and counter-revolutionary displacement of liberty as self-rule and of the prospects for recovering independence as a critical political value.' David Armitage, Harvard University