Quentin Skinner is surely the most prominent living historian of political thought. In a career spanning over sixty years, Skinner has written about the history of political thought from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. His oeuvre includes landmark studies on Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and ideas of the state and liberty, as well as pathbreaking works on historical methodology and hermeneutics.

Skinner’s new book, Liberty as Independence, represents his fullest historical investigation into the concept of freedom to date. In the book, Skinner challenges what he takes to be the dominant conception of freedom in the modern world: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty, understood as freedom from external constraints. As an alternative to this “liberal” view of freedom, Skinner proposes his preferred version of liberty understood as independence, and more precisely, self-government.

The historical ambition of the book is stunning, spanning from the Roman histories of Livy and Tacitus to John Austin in the nineteenth century. But the main part treats Anglophone political thought between the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and the French Revolution a century later. Skinner argues that the ideal of liberty as independence became dominant in the period of Whig Supremacy in Britain in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, but was later attacked and eclipsed in the age of the Atlantic revolutions. In their wake, we are told that panic over democracy dislodged the ideal of liberty as independence.

Skinner’s new book is an exercise in intellectual history at its best. What makes it a particularly exciting read is its dialectic nature, and Skinner’s ability to take the arguments of both sides seriously. In the process, he recovers a host of lesser-known political writers, including a number of “liberal theorists” in the 1790s, who anticipated Austin’s appreciation for Thomas Hobbes. Skinner describes his intention as casting his net widely, and his source material contains novels, sermons, newspapers, parliamentary debates, and, first and foremost, a treasure trove of pamphlet literature.

According to Skinner’s understanding of liberty as independence, unfreedom implies being subjected to someone else’s arbitrary will. As explained by Tacitus and other Roman moralists, this entails not merely a lack of control, but also, as Skinner puts it, “a sense of continual anxiety that stems from not knowing what may be about to happen to them.”

In his previous writings, Skinner identified this way of thinking of freedom as a “third concept of liberty”—once dubbed neo-Roman, though this label is dropped here—distinct from Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty. The contrast is with Thomas Hobbes’s abstract definition of freedom as the absence of restraints. But Skinner’s concept is not identical to Berlin’s positive liberty, as it is more limited in scope. Rather than liberty to flourish in some normatively dependent way, it simply consists in the absence of arbitrary rule. More positively, this implies self-government, and the antonym of freedom is slavery.

The Whig Supremacy and Its Discontents

Skinner illustrates how influential John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was in the eighteenth century, in opposition to J. G. A. Pocock’s thesis that decentered Locke’s political theory and instead emphasized the impact of Machiavelli and James Harrington. Part of Skinner’s intention is to show that it makes little sense to distinguish Locke from seventeenth-century republicans such as John Milton and Algernon Sidney, as he argues that Locke’s views on liberty and arbitrary power were similar to theirs.

Skinner is not pleased with the alleged victory of liberalism, as his book is not only a history but also a normative defense of his understanding of liberty as independence.

Skinner goes on to show that many thinkers after the Glorious Revolution tended to think of liberty in his terms. In one of the texts from Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, “Of the Liberty of the Press” (1741), David Hume points out that the two extremes in government are liberty and slavery. And in “Of National Characters” (1748), he suggests that Englishmen are free to act as they please and “display the manners which are peculiar to [them].” 

One quibble is that Skinner presents Hume as a rather straightforward pro-government Whig, and we are told that “Of the Original Contract” (1748) and “Of Public Credit” (1752), and to a lesser extent “Of Civil Liberty” (1741), were the main exceptions. But an even more evident and earlier expression of a more non-partisan bent is surely Hume’s essay “A Character of Sir Robert Walpole” (1742), in which Hume writes of the Whig prime minister:

He would have been esteemed more worthy of his high station had he never possessed it; and is better qualified for the second than for the first place in any government. His ministry has been more advantageous to his family than to the public, better for this age than for posterity, and more pernicious by bad precedents than by real grievances. During his time trade has flourished, liberty declined, and learning gone to ruin. As I am a man, I love him; as I am a scholar, I hate him; as I am a Briton, I calmly wish his fall.

As he so often did, Hume tried to strike a balance between provocation and moderation, but his was hardly a ringing endorsement of Walpole or, by extension, the longstanding Whig ministry. Another exception is the essay “Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic” (1741), in which Hume argued that though there was a danger from either side, “we have reason to be more jealous of monarchy.” This could be perceived as an attack on the “Court Whigs,” and was reprinted in the oppositional Craftsman, where Lord Bolingbroke had published his scathing criticisms of Walpolean Whiggism. Yet another one is the conclusion to “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science” (1741), which is seeking to teach moderation to the Whig government and the Country party opposition alike.

A more fundamental problem is that Hume—as Elena Yi-Jia Zeng has recently reiterated—viewed civil liberty as centering on the security of persons and properties. This meant that Hume thought that civil liberty could in principle be achieved under a monarchical government as long as it upheld the rule of law (rather than men), and thereby respected and protected the life and private property of individuals.

When turning to the critique of the Whig Supremacy, Skinner looks not primarily to the Bolingbrokean opposition, which he treated in a seminal essay from 1974, but instead to the sharp satirical pens of novelists such as Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias Smollett. Skinner shows Fielding in his novels hitting out at the “notoriously draconian game laws” and sympathizing with “the plight of servants.” But the same Fielding, it could be added, had himself become a pro-government Whig after the fall of Walpole in 1742. In the late 1740s, he became a magistrate and wrote a series of social pamphlets that argued that the state must become more forceful in dealing with crime committed by a less disciplined commonalty.

The Hobbesian Turn

A slightly different way to frame this book than Skinner’s would be to say that there was a big gap between the ideology justifying the Whig regime, based on Lockean popular sovereignty, and reality, as not even all propertied men had the vote in Britain’s highly irregular system of representation. The proportion of adult males allowed to vote declined from about 20 percent to 15 percent of the population between 1689 and 1832. The contradiction between ideology and reality became apparent in the wake of the American Revolution, when reformers on both sides of the Atlantic argued that the English constitution was meant to grant political representation to taxpayers. This meant that as Locke remained fashionable in America, a new ideology was needed to justify the status quo in Britain.

According to Skinner, the new ideology was bolstered by selective arguments from natural jurists such as Hugo Grotius, Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf, who held that we must relinquish our natural freedom and submit to the absolute sovereign power of the state. Skinner expertly shows how several of the arguments of the modern natural law school were adopted by pro-government writers in Britain in the 1760s and 1770s, notably Hobbes’s view that liberty simply means the absence of impediments or restraints.

This shift had critical implications. Thomas Mortimer wrote in 1772: “Whatever the law does not forbid is permitted, and on this permission are founded the rights of individuals in any state.” According to John Lind, Richard Price’s conflation of civil liberty and self-government resulted in the mistaken assumption that liberty was “anything positive,” an insight that had been suggested to Lind by his brilliant friend, the young Jeremy Bentham.

This Hobbesian revival became even more conspicuous after the outbreak of the French Revolution. According to Skinner, there was a conservative and a liberal response to the French Revolution in Britain. The conservative response consisted of clerical defenses of non-resistance and passive obedience based on motley passages in scripture. These were not ultimately as successful as Skinner’s “liberals,” who rejected the French Revolution while committing themselves to piecemeal social reform.

Skinner comes close to suggesting that there was a self-conscious liberal movement in the 1790s, decades earlier than most scholars would date the historical emergence of liberalism. Skinner’s “liberals” were Hobbesian: they argued that there could be no happiness without security, and no security in the absence of government. The “liberal theorists” further followed Hobbes in arguing that liberty depends on the silence of the laws. In the process, they introduced an unprecedented secular tone in political debate.

Liberalism and Its Discontents

It is clear that Skinner is not pleased with the alleged victory of liberalism, as his book is not only a history but also a normative defense of his understanding of liberty as independence. One of Skinner’s main points is that his approach to liberty links up with democracy. In this way, he presents his case in opposition to Berlin, who argued that “there is no necessary connection between individual liberty and democratic rule.”

In practice, however, the few will always govern the many, and this is especially true in modern, large states. Neither Skinner nor the Anglophone theorists he canvases appear to have proposed a neo-Aristotelian system where all citizens rule and are being ruled in turn. Instead, they put their faith in the principle of political representation, which emerged in the Middle Ages. But though political representation comes up occasionally in the book, for Skinner’s normative case to be entirely convincing, a fuller discussion of voting and representation, and especially the relationship between representatives and constituents, would be needed.

It seems somewhat puzzling that he is so eager to present his case as an alternative to liberalism, and, in passing, as closer to socialism.

As it happens, this was a burning question in political debate in the eighteenth century, with Catharine Macaulay’s circle and Edmund Burke taking opposing sides in the 1770s. Macaulay and other reformers argued that Members of Parliament must abide by instructions issued by their voters, while Burke famously told his Bristol constituents that MPs needed to follow their own judgement. In 1781, when Catharine Macaulay’s brother and key ally John Sawbridge told the House of Commons that he acted on the “express instructions of his constituents,” Sir Harry Houghton ironically responded that such an attitude rendered Sawbridge an unfree man. As a representative of the trade hub of London, the radical reformer Sawbridge would later speak against the abolition of the slave trade in parliament, following the will of his constituents rather than his own.

Moreover, in self-governing communities, whether direct or representative, the reality is that minorities are subjected to the will of the majority. This means that, as Skinner acknowledges, republicanism and democracy can be used for deeply illiberal ends. Therefore, nothing is arguably more essential than citizens having legal rights that are protected from the majority. Skinner concludes by giving a nod to the importance of governments securing “our essential rights,” and interestingly, he expresses a preference for legal, indeed ancient constitutional, rights as opposed to natural ones. In short, for people to be free, it is key that they not only have a share in political power, but also that they have rights that political power cannot invade. This comes across in Skinner’s insightful discussion of the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights earlier in the book.

Skinner suggests that the negative view of liberty has “now reached across the world” and has effectively become hegemonic. But the age when we are told that liberty as independence was dominant was emphatically not a democratic one. Instead, the suffrage steadily expanded in Britain, the rest of Europe, and the wider world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though several liberals were skeptical and sometimes fearful of democracy for reasons discussed in recent studies, they eventually came to accept it. But in the face of totalitarianism authorized by popular elections, liberals wisely stressed the importance of constitutional limitations. As F. A. Hayek put it in The Road to Serfdom (1944), “it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.” The emphasis on the limitations of power is one of the reasons why we must distinguish classical liberalism from Hobbesian politics.

Against the backdrop of Skinner’s defense of legal rights, it seems somewhat puzzling that he is so eager to present his case as an alternative to liberalism, and, in passing, as closer to socialism. As he argues with reference to Thomas Spence, Marx and Engels, and the American “labor republicans,” the connection between liberty as independence and socialism was a historical one. And by highlighting the problems with deunionized workforces and the inequalities endemic to global trade, as well as concomitant deregulatory and environmental problems, his alternative to liberalism seems to want to occupy the ground of rather conventional leftwing politics.

However, Skinner’s understanding of liberty seems to share much in common with the liberal heritage broadly understood. As he writes: “If you live in dependence on the will of others, all your actions will have the character of permissions, of allowances from your ruler or master that can be withdrawn without warning at any time. But if you are a free person, and hence your own master, you will be able to act as you choose and go your own way.”

But if people are going to be able to live, as far as possible, as they choose, the serious question then is: how can we have cooperation, which society requires, without arbitrary rule? And it is hard for many of us to escape the conclusion that the best institution we have so far found that can help to secure liberty as independence is the market. As Adam Smith wrote, in agreement with his friend Hume, in the Wealth of Nations (1776):

Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects. Mr. Hume is the only writer who, so far as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.

This is probably not the conclusion Skinner wants us to reach, but it is a testimony to the richness of his book that it is likely to provoke widely different responses from the many who will read it.