Quentin Skinner | |
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 Skinner byDavid Cobley (2011) | |
| Born | Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner (1940-11-26)26 November 1940 (age 85) Oldham, England |
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| Alma mater | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |
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| School or tradition | Cambridge School |
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| Notable ideas | Cambridge School (intellectual history) |
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Quentin Robert Duthie SkinnerFBA (born 26 November 1940) is a Britishintellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of theCambridge School of thehistory of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including theWolfson History Prize in 1979 and theBalzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he wasRegius Professor of History at theUniversity of Cambridge. He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought atQueen Mary University of London.[1][2]
Quentin Skinner was born near Manchester, the second son of Alexander Skinner (died 1979) and Winifred Skinner, née Duthie (died 1982). Though his family background is Scottish, and his father spent his career in the civil service in West Africa, he was raised and educated in England.[3] He was educated atBedford School from the age of seven. Like his elder brother, he won an entrance scholarship toGonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with adouble-starred first inhistory in 1962.[4] Skinner was elected to a fellowship of his college on his examination results, but moved later in 1962 to a teaching fellowship atChrist's College, Cambridge, where he remained until moving to theUniversity of London in 2008. He is anHonorary Fellow of both Christ's College and Gonville and Caius College.[4]
Skinner was appointed to a lectureship in the Faculty of History at theUniversity of Cambridge in 1965.[4] He spent a sabbatical year at theInstitute for Advanced Study inPrinceton in 1974–1975, where he was invited to stay, and where he remained until 1979 when he returned to Cambridge as Professor of Political Science.[4] He was appointed to the post ofRegius Professor of History in 1996, and in 1999 as pro-vice-chancellor of the university.[4]
In 1979 he marriedSusan James, Professor Emerita of Philosophy atBirkbeck College London.[5] They have two children and four grandchildren. He was previously married to Patricia Law Skinner, who was later married to the philosopherBernard Williams.[6]
Skinner has held a number of visiting appointments. He has been Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Social Science at theAustralian National University (1970, 1994, 2006); visiting professor atWashington University in St. Louis (1982); Directeur d’Etudes Associé at theEcole des Hautes Etudes (1987); Professeur Associé atUniversité Paris X (1991); visiting professor at the University of Leuven (1992); visiting professor atNorthwestern University (1995, 2011); Professeur invité at theCollège de France (1997); Fellow atWissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2003–04); Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies atHarvard University (2008); Laurence Rockefeller Visiting Professor atPrinceton University (2013–14); Spinoza Visiting Professor at theUniversity of Amsterdam (2014); visiting professor in the Global Fellowship programme atPeking University, Beijing (2017); and visiting professor at theUniversity of Chicago (2017).
Skinner has delivered a number of named lecture series, including the Gauss Seminars at Princeton (1980), The Carlyle Lectures at Oxford (1980), TheMessenger Lectures at Cornell (1983), The Tanner Lectures at Harvard (1984), theFord Lectures at Oxford (2003), the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford (2011), the Clark Lectures at Cambridge (2012) and the Academia Sinica Lectures in Taiwan (2013).[7]
Skinner has been aFellow of the British Academy since 1981,[7] and is also a foreign member of a number of national academies, including theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986),[7] theAcademia Europaea (1989),[8] theAmerican Philosophical Society (1997),[9] theRoyal Irish Academy (1999),[10] theAccademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2007),[9] the Österreichische Academie der Wissenschaften (2009), and the Royal Danish Academy (2015).[7] He has been the recipient of Honorary Degrees from theUniversity of Aberdeen,University of Athens,University of Chicago,University of Copenhagen,University of East Anglia,Harvard University,University of Helsinki,Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,University of Kent,University of Oslo,University of Oxford,Adolfo Ibáñez University (Santiago),University of St Andrews andUppsala University.[9] He was awarded theWolfson History Prize in 1979, the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize of the British Political Studies Association in 2006, the Benjamin Lippincott Award (2001), the David Easton Award (2007) of the American Political Science Association, theBielefeld Science Award [de] (2008) and aBalzan Prize (2006).[9] From 2009 until 2020, he was a member of the Balzan Prize Committee.[11][12]
Skinner is regarded as one of the founders of the 'Cambridge School' of thehistory of political thought, best known for its attention to whatJ. G. A. Pocock has described as the 'languages' in which moral and political philosophy has been written.[13] Skinner's contribution has been to articulate a theory of interpretation in which leading texts in the history of political theory are treated essentially as interventions in on-going political debates, and in which the main focus is on what individual writers may be said to have been doing in what they wrote.[14]
This emphasis on political writing as a form of action derives from developments inordinary language philosophy made byLudwig Wittgenstein andJ. L. Austin.[15][16] Wittgenstein's insight was (in Skinner’s words) "that we should stop asking about the 'meanings' of words and focus instead on the various functions they are capable of performing in differentlanguage games".[17] Skinner takes Austin to have extended Wittgenstein's argument in isolating the concept of aspeech act, which is described by Skinner as the notion that "whenever we use language for purposes of communication, we are always doing something as well as saying something".[17] According to Skinner, that means that any analysis is incomplete if it restricts itself to studying what a past thinker said on a given issue. Historians must also recover what a thinker hoped to achieve in saying it.[15]
Skinner consequently proposes a form of linguistic contextualization that involves situating a text in relation to other texts and discourses. In that perspective, the text is aresponse to other thinkers, texts or cultural discourses. Skinner believes that ideas, arguments and texts should be placed in their original context. One consequence of this view is an emphasis on the necessity of studying less well-known political writers as a means of shedding light on the contemporary debates these classic texts contributed to. In that way, it becomes possible to decipher the original purpose of a text. To Skinner, texts are then seen as weapons or tools that can, for example, be used tosupport,discredit, orlegitimize specific social and political arrangements.[18] In its earlier versions this added up to a critique of the approach of an older generation, and particularly ofLeo Strauss and his followers.[14]
Skinner's historical work has mainly focused on political thinking in early-modern Europe. He has written a book onNiccolò Machiavelli, three books onThomas Hobbes, and hisFoundations of Modern Political Thought covers the whole period. He has specifically been concerned with the emergence of modern theories about the nature of the state, and with debates about the nature of political liberty.[9]
When Skinner was interviewed byAlan Macfarlane, as part of his series of online conversations with academics, Skinner admitted that he had been a member of theCambridge Apostles, a secret debating society at Cambridge University. He also revealed thatAmartya Sen was a member at the same time. Sen mentioned their membership of the Apostles in his memoirHome in the World.[19] He commented that they had both been "outed" in a book published about the Apostles sometime before.[20]
On 6 October 1995, Skinner'sFoundations of Modern Political Thought was included in the list published byThe Times Literary Supplement of 'The 100 Most Influential Books since World War II'.[21]
On 14 May 2009,Times Higher Education, in an article about Skinner's move from Cambridge to the University of London, spoke of Skinner's republicanism, reporting that this led him to refuse a knighthood he was offered when he became Regius Professor of History at Cambridge.[22]
The Balzan-Skinner Lectureship, renamed the "Quentin Skinner Fellowship in Intellectual History since 1500", was established in 2009 at the University of Cambridge. The Quentin Skinner fellow holds a visiting fellowship at theCentre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities for one term of theacademic year, which culminates in the Quentin Skinner Lecture and an associated symposium.[23]
1.The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume I: The Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1978.ISBN 978-0-521-29337-2 (Translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese,Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish.)
2.The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume II: The Age of Reformation, Cambridge University Press, 1978.ISBN 978-0-521-29435-5(Translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.)
3(a).Machiavelli, Oxford University Press, 1981.
3(b).Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction [A revised version of 3(a)], Oxford University Press, 2000.ISBN 978-0-19-285407-0 (Translated into Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Malay, Polish, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.)
3(c).Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction [a new and updated edition of 3(b)], Oxford University Press, 2019.ISBN 978-0-19-883757-2
4.Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge University Press, 1996.ISBN 978-0-521-59645-9 (Translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese.)
5.Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, 1998.ISBN 978-1-107-68953-4 (Translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.)
6.Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method, Cambridge University Press, 2002.ISBN 978-0-521-58926-0 (Translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish.)
7.Visions of Politics: Volume II: Renaissance Virtues (with 12 colour plates), Cambridge University Press, 2002.ISBN 978-0-521-58926-0 (Translated into Chinese, Italian, and Polish.)
8.Visions of Politics: Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002.ISBN 978-0-521-89060-1
9.L’artiste en philosophie politique (with 8 colour plates), Editions de Seuil, Paris, 2003.ISBN 978-2-912107-15-2
10.Hobbes and Republican Liberty (with 19 illustrations), Cambridge University Press, 2008.ISBN 978-2-912107-15-2 (Translated into Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish.)
11.La verité et l’historien, ed. Christopher Hamel, Editions EHESS, Paris, 2011.ISBN 978-2-7132-2368-6
12.Die drei Körper des Staates, Wallstein, Göttingen, 2012.ISBN 978-3-8353-1157-2
13.Forensic Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 2014.ISBN 978-0-19-955824-7 (Translated into Chinese.)
14.From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (with 45 illustrations), Cambridge University Press, 2018.ISBN 978-1-107-56936-2
15.Liberty as independence: the making and unmaking of a political ideal, Cambridge University Press, 2025.ISBN 978-1-107-02773-2
● 2018: Beaumont, Tim. "A Perennial Illusion? Wittgenstein, Quentin Skinner's Contextualism and the Possibility of Refuting Past Philosophers".Philosophical Investigations. 41 (3): 304–28. doi:doi.org/10.1111/phin.12196https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/phin.12196
Note: the following are two special issues of Francophone journals containing a number of articles (written in French) concerning the life and work of Quentin Skinner, the full contents of each issue can be found in the subsequent links.
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| Preceded by | Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge 1996–2008 | Succeeded by |
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| Preceded by | Wolfson History Prize 1979 With:Richard Cobb and the Lady Soames | Succeeded by |
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| Preceded by | Balzan Prize 2006 With:Paolo de Bernardis [arz;de;fr;it;pt;ru], Ludwig Finscher,Andrew E. Lange, Elliot Meyerowitz, andChris R. Somerville | Succeeded by |
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| Preceded by | Bielefeld Science Award [de] 2008 | Succeeded by |
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