Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner (born 26 November 1940) is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University 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 at Queen Mary University of London.

Biography

Quentin Skinner was born 26 November 1940 in Oldham, near Manchester, England, 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. He was educated at Bedford School from the age of seven. Like his elder brother, he won an entrance scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a double-starred first in history in 1962. Skinner was elected to a fellowship of his college on his examination results, but moved later in 1962 to a teaching fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he remained until moving to the University of London in 2008. He is an Honorary Fellow of both Christ's College and Gonville and Caius College.

Skinner has held a number of visiting appointments. He has been Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Social Science at the Australian National University (1970, 1994, 2006); visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis (1982); Directeur d’Etudes Associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (1987); Professeur Associé at Université Paris X (1991); visiting professor at the University of Leuven (1992); visiting professor at Northwestern University (1995, 2011); Professeur invité at the Collège de France (1997); Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2003–04); Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (2008); Laurence Rockefeller Visiting Professor at Princeton University (2013–14); Spinoza Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam (2014); visiting professor in the Global Fellowship programme at Peking University, Beijing (2017); and visiting professor at the University of Chicago (2017).

Awards and honors

Skinner has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1981, the American Philosophical Society (1997), the Royal Irish Academy (1999), Pilkington Teaching Prize by the University of Cambridge (2001)

Academia

Methodology

Skinner is regarded as one of the founders of the 'Cambridge School' of the history of political thought, best known for its attention to what J. G. A. Pocock has described as the 'languages' in which moral and political philosophy has been written. 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.

This emphasis on political writing as a form of action derives from developments in ordinary language philosophy made by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. 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 different language games". Skinner takes Austin to have extended Wittgenstein's argument in isolating the concept of a speech 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". In its earlier versions this added up to a critique of the approach of an older generation, and particularly of Leo Strauss and his followers.

A substantial body of his work is devoted to the recovery and interpretation of Renaissance and early modern republican political theory especially Italian civic humanism and to the historical analysis of the political languages used in debates about authority, citizenship, and constitutional government. He has played role in re establishing the intellectual significance of figures such as Niccolò Machiavelli, and in situating early modern republican thought within its broader linguistic and cultural contexts.

Many of Skinner’s books address how political actors in early modern Europe articulated and contested concepts of freedom and tyranny, demonstrating that the conceptual frameworks of the time were shaped as much by rhetorical practice and legal tradition as by normative theory. For example, in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), Skinner traces the emergence of modern ideas of power, authority and liberty from the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, showing how shifts in political language reflected wider changes in social structures and statecraft., and full developed it in Liberty as independence (2025).

He has also written extensively on the history of rhetoric and its role in political argument, and on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. These interests gave rise to a sequence of works mainly focused on Hobbes, including Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes (1996),  Hobbes and republican liberty (2008) and From Humanism to Hobbes (2018).

Across his books and essays, Skinner has combined meticulous historical scholarship with a deep concern for how political concepts were used in practice, demonstrating that the languages of early modern politics were themselves instruments of power, persuasion and institutional change., the Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford (1980), the Messenger Lectures at Cornell University (1983), the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University (1984), the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford (2003), the Page–Barbour Lectures at University of Virginia (2003), the Adorno Lectures at University of Frankfurt (2005), the Robert P. Benedict Lectures at Boston University (2005), the Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford (2011), and the Clark Lectures at University of Cambridge (2015).

Miscellany

When Skinner was interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, as part of his series of online conversations with academics, Skinner admitted that he had been a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret debating society at Cambridge University. He also revealed that Amartya Sen was a member at the same time. Sen mentioned their membership of the Apostles in his memoir Home in the World. He commented that they had both been "outed" in a book published about the Apostles sometime before.

On 6 October 1995, Skinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought was included in the list published by The Times Literary Supplement of 'The 100 Most Influential Books since World War II'.

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.

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 the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities for one term of the academic year, which culminates in the Quentin Skinner Lecture and an associated symposium.

Principal publications

Books

1. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume I: The Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1978. (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.

(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. (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.

4. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese.)

5. Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, 1998. (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. (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. (Translated into Chinese, Italian, and Polish.)

8. Visions of Politics: Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

9. L’artiste en philosophie politique (with 8 colour plates), Editions de Seuil, Paris, 2003.

10. Hobbes and Republican Liberty (with 19 illustrations), Cambridge University Press, 2008. (Translated into Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish.)

11. La verité et l’historien, ed. Christopher Hamel, Editions EHESS, Paris, 2011.

12. Die drei Körper des Staates, Wallstein, Göttingen, 2012.

13. Forensic Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 2014. (Translated into Chinese.)

14. From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (with 45 illustrations), Cambridge University Press, 2018.

15. Liberty as independence: the making and unmaking of a political ideal, Cambridge University Press, 2025.

References

Further reading

Books

Articles

● 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.12196 https://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.

  • 2022: ‘Quentin Skinner: Interpréter et expliquer’: Analogia: revue annuelle de philosophie, ed. Florian Laguens, numero 2, Paris. ISBN 979-10-93043-41-8 "Institut de Philosophie Comparée Publications: Introduction by Florian Laguens"
  • 2024: ‘Autour de Quentin Skinner’, Raisons politiques 93, Paris. ISBN 978-2-7246-4227-8 "Presses de Sciences Po: Raisons politiques 93, février 2024"
  • Queen Mary University of London School of History: Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities Professor Quentin Skinner - official page
  • Quentin Skinner, "Belief, Truth, and Interpretation" A lecture delivered at a conference at the Ruhr-University Bochum on 18 November 2014.
  • "The Paradoxes of Political Liberty", The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Harvard University, 1984
  • Philosophy Bites podcasts with interviewer Nigel Warburton and co-host Dave Edmonds
  • 'Three Concepts of Liberty' Video recorded at the Einstein Forum, Potsdam, Germany.
  • Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 10 January 2008 (video)
  • Sins of a Historian. An academic discussion on the problem of anachronism including a large exposition of Skinner's methodological views by Sami Syrjämäki.
  • "Quest for Freedom – A Conversation with Quentin Skinner" , Ideas Roadshow, 2014