Quentin Skinner

Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner (born November 26, 1940 in Oldham , Lancashire ) is a British historian and political scientist who is considered a leading expert on the history of political ideas in the early modern period. He has taught at Queen Mary College in London since 2008 .

Life

Skinner attended Cambridge University ( Gonville and Caius College ), where he is now an honorary fellow . In 1959 he received a research scholarship for history there, obtained a BA in 1962 and in the same year received a position as a "Fellow" of Christ's College (Cambridge) . In the mid-1970s he spent five years at the "Institute for Advanced Study" in Princeton , initially as a historian, later in the social sciences department, where he was a member of the School of Historical Studies and a long-term member of the School of Social Science. In 1978 Skinner received a chair in the history of ideas and political philosophy at Cambridge University, where he still teaches today.

He has given guest lectures at universities in over 20 different countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Romania and the United States.

From 1996 to 2008 Skinner Regius was Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and has since taught as Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary College, London.

Overview of the work

Skinner is considered one of the world's most important historians of political theory and the history of ideas. His main interest lies in the area of ​​the transcultural history of early modern Europe , in which he has specialized in two areas:

1. The culture of the Renaissance , especially early Italian art and the development of the moral and political thought of the humanists .
2. The political philosophy of the 17th century , especially the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes .

However, Skinner has also contributed to contemporary political philosophy. In addition to numerous articles on the character of the state , historical explanations and the nature of interpretation in general, Skinner published an article on political freedom with the title "A Third Concept of Liberty".

In his first major publication, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), the guiding interest is to expose the ideas of the republican writers of the Renaissance. His publications are particularly influenced by the thinking of the Italian Renaissance ( Machiavelli ). In his later work, Liberty before Liberalism (1998), the emphasis is on the ideas of the English Republicans of the mid-17th century, including John Milton , James Harrington and Algernon Sidney . Many of his writings from the 1970s and 1980s focus on the history of the development of the modern conception of the state.

Quentin Skinner is co-founder and one of the two heads of the influential “ Cambridge School ” of the history of political ideas - alongside the historian JGA Pocock , whose work The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) Skinner strongly influenced. Other suggestions came from Peter Laslett, particularly his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1996).

The Cambridge School is known for its focus on the languages of political thought (compare The languages ​​of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe , edited by Anthony Pagden, 1997). Skinner, who has been dealing with the classic authors of political thought such as Machiavelli , Thomas More , Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes and their content for years , made his contribution to the above-mentioned work by developing an approach to interpretation that reflects the points of view that were formed at the time the respective authors should uncover again. For such a historical contextualization, Skinner considers it necessary to also study the writings of lesser-known authors who have so far been in the shadow of the classical authors.

Long-standing interest in the spoken acts of political writing also explains why Skinner turned to the role of rhetoric in early modern political theory in the early 1990s ( Reasons and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes , 1996).

In the past few years, Skinner has turned to the history of freedom. In his publication A Third Concept Of Liberty (2002) Skinner starts from the origin of freedom research, which he locates in Hobbes' Leviathan . In the following, Skinner concentrates on Isaiah Berlin's Zwei Freiheitspekiffe (1959) (a concept that was prepared by Jeremy Bentham in terms of the history of ideas ) and makes Berlin's view of “positive” and “negative” freedom the basis of his argumentation. The third concept of freedom, for Skinner, means "not depending on the will of others".

Initially criticized by him as out of date, Skinner sees the analysis of the history of ideas as an opportunity to positively influence today's political discussion by means of the classical authors' ideas of political life.

Honors

In 1981 he became a Fellow of the British Academy . In 1986 Skinner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1997 to the American Philosophical Society . In 1989 he was accepted as a full member of the Academia Europaea . In 1999 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy . In 2006 he received the Balzan Prize for the History and Theory of Political Thought, and in 2008 he was honored with the Bielefeld Science Prize. The prize was awarded in memory of Niklas Luhmann . The laudation for Skinner was given by the Frankfurt social philosopher Axel Honneth ; The press release states: The jury (...) based its decision on the fundamental importance of Skinner's research. Skinner had "put the history of political ideas on a new basis". He is regarded as a worldwide outstanding expert and interpreter of the political philosophy of the early modern period of classical authors such as Macchiavelli, Bodin and especially his compatriot Thomas Hobbes. With his two-volume work "The Foundations of Modern Political Thought" he became the founder of the Cambridge School of Intellectual History.

Works

• The Foundations of Modern Political Thought , Volume 1: The Renaissance . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1979, ISBN 978-0-521-29337-2 ( table of contents (PDF; 169 kB)).
• The Foundations of Modern Political Thought . Volume 2: The Age of Reformation . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1979, ISBN 978-0-521-29435-5 ( table of contents (PDF; 83 kB)).
• Machiavelli for the introduction (= For the introduction . Volume 250). Translated by Martin Suhr. Junius, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-88506-350-6 (original title: Machiavelli. A Very Short Introduction ; table of contents ).
• Freedom and duty. Thomas Hobbes' political theory (= Adorno lecture. 2005). Published by the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. Translated by Karin Wördemann. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-58498-9 (Original title: Hobbes and Republican Liberty ; table of contents ).
• Visionen des Politischen (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft . Volume 1910). Edited by Marion Heinz and Martin Ruehl. Translated by Robin Celikates and Eva Engels. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-29510-6 (Original: Visions of Politics . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002; table of contents ).
• The three bodies of the state . Translated by Karin Wördemann. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1157-2 ( table of contents ).

literature

• Catón, Matthias: Quentin Skinner. In: Gisela Riescher (Ed.): Political Theory of the Present in Individual Representations. From Adorno to Young (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 343). Kröner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-34301-0 , pp. 453-457.
• Fisher, Richard: How To Do Things With Books. Quentin Skinner and the Dissemination of Ideas. In: History of European Ideas 35 (2009), pp. 276-280.
• Hellmuth, Eckhart / Schmidt, Martin: John GA Pocock (* 1924), Quentin Skinner (* 1940). In: Lutz Raphael (Ed.): Klassiker der Geschichtswwissenschaft, Vol. 2 , CH Beck, Munich 2006, pp. 261–279.
• Mulsow, Martin; Mahler, Andreas (Ed.): The Cambridge School of the History of Political Ideas , Frankfurt am Main 2010. ISBN 978-3-518-29525-0
• Palonen, Kari: Quentin Skinner. History, Politics, Rhetoric , Cambridge 2003.
• Palonen, Kari: The disenchantment of concepts. The rewriting of the political terms in Quentin Skinner and Reinhart Koselleck , Münster 2003.
• Perreau-Saussine, Emile: Quentin Skinner in context , in: Review of Politics 69 (2007), No. 1, pp. 106-122. (PDF document)

Web links

• Quentin Skinner, "Belief, Truth, and Interpretation" Ruhr-Universität Bochum on November 18th, 2014.
• Literature by and about Quentin Skinner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Professor Quentin Skinner. Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities. The Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London, accessed February 17, 2010 . 
• "Ideas in Context: Interview with Quentin Skinner" by Hansong Li, Chicago Journal of History, pp. 119-127, 2016

Individual evidence

1. ^ A regius rumble ; Times Higher Education March 1, 1996; Retrieved April 29, 2016.
2. ^ Member History: Quentin Skinner. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 27, 2018 (with biographical notes). 
3. ^ Membership directory: Quentin Skinner. Academia Europaea, accessed January 9, 2018 . 
4. ↑ Members: Quentin RD Skinner. Royal Irish Academy, accessed May 12, 2019 . 
5. ↑ Torsten Schaletzke: Awarding of the Bielefeld Science Prize to the English historian Quentin Skinner , Science Information Service, January 21, 2009.