Factory of the Revolution

Blair Worden

• Liberty before Liberalism by Quentin Skinner
  Cambridge, 137 pp, £19.99, November 1997, ISBN 0 521 63206 4

Quentin Skinner’s short book is an extended version of his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. There cannot have been a less contentious succession to that chair. In his field, the history of political thought, Skinner has earned an authority and distinction unrivalled anywhere in the world among scholars now below retirement age. His writings, above all his studies of the Italian and Humanist political ideas of the Renaissance, his work on Hobbes, and his two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought, are landmarks of modern historical interpretation and, in their lucidity and elegance, of historical prose. He has begun his reign by doing what the deliverer of an Inaugural Lecture has a special opportunity to do: raise fundamental questions about the character and purpose of his subject.