








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.1 (2009) 115–121] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.115 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

In and Out of Context

NIchoLAS PoPPEr

California Institute of Technology  
popper.nick@gmail.com

Quentin Skinner.  Hobbes and Republican Liberty. cambridge: cambridge 
University Press, 2008. 245pp, hB $70.00 ISBN 9780521886765;  
PB $22.99, ISBN 9780521714167.

Quentin Skinner indisputably numbers amongst the past half-cen-
tury’s most important historians of political thought. his investiga-
tions of the inextricable bond between political discourse and political  
behavior helped restore intellectual history as a critical component of 
the study of politics. Perhaps the clearest sign of his impact is the ubiq-
uity of his formerly controversial foundational premises. Most histo-
rians now assume that a sincere, if vexed, relationship exists between 
political thought and action, often without reflecting on the exertions 
of Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock to counter Lewis Namier’s and G.r.  
Elton’s revisionist insistence that political thought merely amounted to 
retrospective justification for political business.    

Skinner’s contributions extend far beyond this assault on revisionism, 
and his work engages with that of Berlin, Strauss, oakeshott and other 
luminaries of modern political philosophy. his innovation within both 
the historical and political philosophical traditions lies in his empha-
sis on notions of discourse and context as critical to the formation of  
political ideas, as displayed in his stunning 1978 analysis of the ori-
gins of the modern state, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.  
Skinner drew on collingwood and the later Wittgenstein to define 
context as the totality of political utterances available to motivate his-
torical actors, while discourses were constituted by statements shar-
ing ideological continuity. he brought antiquarianism to philosophy 
and politics to erudition. Not all historians of political philosophy  
embraced his recalibration of their methods. Many were loath to exam-

mailto:popper.nick@gmail.com


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ine forgotten pamphlets as well as acknowledged classics, the context 
in which ideas were shaped as well as their formal characteristics, and 
the past on its own terms as well as its relationship to the present. Nor 
were all early modern historians convinced by his effort to integrate 
their canon—Kristeller, Baron, Garin, Pocock, to name a few—into a 
teleological narrative of the emergence of the modern state.  

This methodology has become far less controversial as Skinner’s 
students and inheritors have populated academia. his students have 
earned considerable influence in the disciplines of history, philosophy 
and political science for their application of his vision to figures from 
Marsiglio of Padua to John Locke. cambridge remains the site of new 
and vibrant Skinnerite scholarship, with important outposts in Bos-
ton, helsinki, Sydney and beyond. Meanwhile, Foundations has been 
the subject of two collections of essays and a cottage industry of schol-
arly examination.  

Skinner’s insistence that scholarship be useful perhaps best accounts 
for his continuing impact. When one surveys his work—and that of 
his students cum colleagues—the charge of bloodless antiquarianism 
sometimes levied against him appears wholly unconvincing. his work 
has focused adamantly on questions of vital contemporary significance.  
While Foundations traced the development of modern notions of state 
and sovereignty from late medieval Italy to the French Wars of religion, 
his more recent works have elaborated the late seventeenth-century 
eclipse of republican conceptions of freedom by a modern understand-
ing of liberty. The republican species—which Skinner has grudgingly 
ceased to call “Neo-roman”—derived from a particular reading of  
roman authorities, and it defined freedom as a condition in which men 
exercised their will in a free state unimpeded by any arbitrary power. 
Modern liberty is, to Skinner, far more troubling, for it is defined by 
humanity’s freedom to abrogate certain rights to receive, in return, the 
covenanted promise of protection from one’s state. This state is the ab-
solute and legitimate seat of all sovereignty in any government, whether 
despotic or democratic. And though the state might impede individual 
action, its obstruction cannot be considered arbitrary because of this 
covenant.  The decision to submit to the state’s authority always consti-
tutes the covenant’s renewal in an act of free will.



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Thomas hobbes is the central figure in this narrative, and Hobbes 
and Republican Liberty builds on Skinner’s 1996 intellectual biography 
Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, as well as his 1998 
essay Liberty Before Liberalism to offer focused readings of the altera-
tion in hobbes’ definitions of liberty from his service as secretary to 
the cavendishes to his 1651 Leviathan. Meticulous interrogation, 
Skinner argues, enables recognition of two features of hobbes’ career  
denied or underappreciated by existing scholarship: hobbes’ definition 
of liberty did not remain static throughout his career, and these shifts 
were driven by hobbes’ desire to respond to the outpouring of works 
propounding the republican theory of liberty. Such works, hobbes  
believed, divided England before the civil War, hardened Parliamen-
tarian resistance, and supplied the grounds for charles I’s decapitation 
in 1649. Skinner traces subtle alterations in hobbes’ theories of free-
dom, liberty, impediment, and will with admirable verve and technical 
rigor, while succinctly encapsulating the opposing polemical literature.  
A vibrant hobbes emerges, one whose untangling or circumven-
tion of philosophical knots derived from his unfailing compulsion to  
ignore, overcome, or appropriate criticism.  Still locked in combat with 
those who wish to empty the history of philosophy of the diachronic 
and biographical, Skinner injects hobbes’ work with a dynamism that 
renders the crusty old philosopher human, with ideas subject to all the 
deficiencies that entails.  

An unsympathetic reader might suggest that there are few new ideas 
in this work, but they should nonetheless concede that such close read-
ings strengthen Skinner’s account of hobbes’ philosophical positions, 
even if grounds for dispute still remain. Skinner also compares hobbes’ 
positions with those of antagonists such as Algernon Sidney and John 
Milton more directly than he had previously. Though the book intro-
duces few conclusions that will surprise those familiar with Skinner’s 
work, it nonetheless paints with masterful detail the formal character-
istics of his notion of modern liberty.

If the work is one of retrenchment, its methodological decisions re-
veal Skinner capable of arraying in different ways to fight recurring 
battles.  Most noticeable is the influence of herbert Butterfield, whose 
insistence that polemical debates be viewed as the factory of ideas here 



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resonates from title to last word.  Much of the work hints at another 
Butterfieldian investigation of hobbes—Steven Shapin and Simon 
Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985); in fact, their last line 
is evoked in Skinner’s final word.  Shapin and Schaffer conclude with 
a paradoxical “hobbes was right” to argue that hobbes was defeat-
ed in debate for reasons more sociological than evidentiary—that is,  
because the dispute was adjudicated according to the human grounds 
that hobbes argued were determinative of truth, rather than judged on 
logical merit.  Skinner’s conclusion is, however, devoid of irony: “We 
can hardly fail to acknowledge that [hobbes] won the battle. But it is 
still worth asking if he won the argument” (216).  

Such a conclusion might suggest that Skinner should be understood 
as a paragon of humanistic scholarship, for this would resolve the  
apparent contradiction that he prizes study of the past on its own terms 
and for the profit it bestows upon the present. But that would overlook 
Skinner’s explicitly political stance. In fact, he does not value contex-
tual analysis for its own sake, as a transferable skill applicable to any 
social, political, and intellectual problems and capable of countenanc-
ing merits in all ideas.  rather, he believes that directing his method at 
a canonical question of political theory should yield a specific answer 
infused with singular truth—in this case, the superior nature of repub-
lican liberty.  his contextualism is a social scientific tool, rather than a 
humanistic one.  And the result is a teleology that reinforces or, worse, 
determines his perceptions of the past.  

This point is significant, for if contextualist methods have lost  
authority in the social sciences, they continue to exert tremendous 
impact among historians precisely because of their ability to decipher 
enigmatic ideas. A generation of early modern European historians 
reared on carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis and robert Darnton 
analyze their seemingly inscrutable subjects to show that they synthe-
sized disparate traditions and adhered to a foreign, though explica-
ble, set of motives.  Despite Skinner’s advocacy of contextualism, his  
polemicists never seem to possess alien motives.  rather, they all op-
erate with unflinching rationality, never inspired by prophecy or pa-
tronage, always dogged in pursuit of convenient truths. For example, 
Skinner ends with hobbes’— pragmatically accepting the legitimacy 



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of the Protectorate in 1651 while revising Leviathan.  At no point does 
one receive the impression that hobbes suffered from the recognition 
that his enemies had triumphed, nor does hobbes appear attentive 
to France’s absolutist regime in which he lived. rather, in Skinner’s 
account, the aging philosopher calmly and monastically adapted his 
theory of legitimate sovereignty to include the Protectorate once it as-
sumed responsibility to protect the subjects charles I had failed. cer-
tainly the Protectorate fit hobbes’ definition of the state, but one won-
ders whether there was quite so little intellectual violence or so much 
solipsism as Skinner describes.

The best contextualist studies adumbrate their contexts as much 
as they do their interlocutors and Skinner’s work does not meet this 
standard. The motivations of those whose bellicosity led to the civil 
War are here reduced to undiluted republicanism. Very little attention 
is devoted to the significance of the common law, and only slightly 
more to the critical role of Puritanism in overturning the Stuart state.  
And if Pym, Milton, and hobbes’ other opponents appear less stimu-
lated by their own contexts than collectively constitutive of hobbes’, 
fellow absolutists receive even less attention. Few readers will emerge 
from this work with a better understanding of charles I, Archbishop 
Laud, or robert Filmer.

To be fair, Skinner’s apparent narrowness derives from the fungibility of 
the term “context.” For those who follow the current historiographical or-
thodoxy and believe that the term refers to the complete nebula of events, 
institutions and ideas available to historical figures, some of hobbes’ in-
vocations of context may seem misplaced. For example, the two chapters 
on The Elements of Law examine the status of liberty in this 1640 tract, 
but the political events contemporaneous with its circulation are not in-
troduced until the subsequent chapter. Skinner here reminds us that his 
notion of context serves primarily as a tool of debate against the formalist 
history of ideas assaulted by his earliest work.  It refers to a discursive field, 
but it excludes material events and exigencies, along with, in this case, 
religion and local legal traditions.  It is for this reason that one never en-
counters the Bourbons during hobbes’ exile in France, just as one never 
encountered the chancery or exchequer in Foundations. Skinner’s context 
is too stridently language-oriented to demand their inclusion.



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of course, such an approach does yield material that might other-
wise fall into obscurity, and it would be ungenerous to overstate Skin-
ner’s narrowness. For example, he reveals hobbes’ indebtedness to early 
modern emblem books. hobbes culled material for visual and rhetori-
cal eloquence and pithy annunciations of political positions from the 
large number of such works available to him. Though they periodically 
disappear from Skinner’s analysis, he uses the emblem books to popu-
late the field of utterances available to hobbes. In this case, the pursuit 
of new discursive contexts brings to the surface a deeply politicized 
genre central to hobbes’ conception of political discourse and crucial 
to his responses to republican ideas. one wishes that Skinner might 
have focused more closely on them; though his analysis of emblem 
books sometimes fits uncomfortably within his text, these moments  
illuminate the intellectual fertility of the expansive search for obfus-
cated contexts. Given the duration of Skinner’s engagement with hob-
bes, it is remarkable that he remains capable of finding fresh material, 
and it illustrates the vitality of Skinner’s project. It also suggests that 
new contexts for hobbes may be unearthed, perhaps in the exchanges 
during his younger years with the cavendishes, perhaps in his lengthy 
experience in France, perhaps in studies of his readership.  

But it also inspires curiosity as to why Skinner so resolutely resists 
including local religious discourses within the formational context of 
modern liberty, and the neatest explanation is simply his pronounced 
secularist presentism. his emphasis on discourse and context, when 
inflected by his own secularism, does not accommodate the special 
potency of religion in early modern Europe. Indeed, the limitations 
of Skinner’s own scholarship are best illuminated by the potency of 
his methodology. For at the heart of his project lies the pursuit of  
neglected sources. his work has helped kindle a scholarly culture of 
erudites eager to recover new sources with which scholars reconceptu-
alize the genesis of ideas. If his own scholarship appears less definitive 
for its narrow conception of context and overdetermined by his pursuit 
of contemporary relevance, he should credit himself.  his insistence on 
the importance of context has nourished the revitalizing entanglement 
of intellectual history and the history of political thought, even as it 
reveals the limitations he imposes on his own work.



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References

Schaffer, Simon, and Steven Shapin

1985 Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental.  Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Skinner, Quentin

1978 The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.  2 vols.  cambridge: cam-
bridge University Press.

1996 Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.  cambridge: cambridge 
University Press.

1998 Liberty before Liberalism.  cambridge: cambridge University Press.




