Search Results

“... has had some very distinguished supporters. By his own account, it was the book that inspired Quentin Skinner at the start of his own historical career – and Skinner of course went on to give his own distinctive spin to Collingwood’s slogan about all history being a ‘history of the mind’. And, if only in ...”

“... essay by Julian and Zelda Boyd on ‘Shall and Will’; a polite but penetrating inquiry by Quentin Skinner into the method of Raymond Williams’s Key Words; Michael Tanner on modern philosophical language; and at least half a dozen more. The editors refrain from pretending that this is an orderly collection; I doubt if anybody could say it ...”

“... copies. Paine’s bestseller changed the terms of debate over monarchy. Following the lead of Quentin Skinner, Nelson notes that early modern English republicanism was a ‘neo-Roman’ type which focused on the discretionary powers of monarchy, not on the office itself. Enslavement was a matter of finding oneself subordinated to the will of ...”

“... Wilson is by no means wholly allergic to communal ideas of liberty. In fact, he follows Quentin Skinner in claiming that negative freedom will remain precarious unless citizens have the power to hold rulers to account, which requires some more positive notion of political rights. He also sees the Civil War period as an invaluable infusion of ...”

“... modern Cambridge (though Stedman Jones acknowledges a debt to French structuralists rather than to Quentin Skinner). It is new, however, when applied to labour history and to English popular culture. Moreover, Stedman Jones argues that, if one takes the language of Chartism seriously, one is conveyed into a world in which the categories of ...”

“... technique of paradiastole, or the misdescription of ethical behaviour, a preoccupation with which, Quentin Skinner has recently argued, lies at the heart of Hobbes’s mature moral and political philosophy, and which we can imagine found a central place in the education of his pupil. But internal evidence alone is sufficient to identify these essays as ...”

“... of liberalism. Negri’s rediscovery of republican thought in the early 1980s paralleled that of Quentin Skinner in Britain, and the retrieval of Anti-Federalism by libertarians in the United States. In no case did this involve repudiation of the idea of negative liberty, just a renewed emphasis on the point that people can be free only if they also ...”

“... rather than elected grandees to give voice to the popular will. McCormick arraigns Pocock and Quentin Skinner for scanting Machiavelli’s radicalism and modelling his thought on a patrician republicanism closer to that of his friend Francesco Guicciardini, who was born of old Florentine oligarchic stock. Whatever else the American revolution aimed ...”

“... that he would straddle the divide between analytical philosophers and historians. He edits with Quentin Skinner the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. The blue-jacketed volumes present historical texts as dispatches from the front line, be it Quattrocento Florence or post-Jacobite Edinburgh. As these examples suggest, the ...”

“... avowed aim could be construed only as the overthrow of everything established in the church’. Quentin Skinner has written well on how the ‘set’ of the observer influences the historian’s approach to his documents. I began reading Prynne through Haller’s eyes (and, before him, Gardiner’s). Seeming contradictions were effortlessly resolved ...”

“... for our meeting – were not necessarily about Raymond Williams at all. With the exception of Quentin Skinner, with whom, by his own account, Inglis seems to be in more or less continuous converse, the interviews are almost all one-off affairs, a procedure increasingly unacceptable to the oral historian, and almost guaranteed to provide stereotyped ...”

“... has traditionally been neglected in England. Between the time of Leslie Stephen and, say, Quentin Skinner, that was certainly true. Even today, this branch of studies has far less elbow-room in English than in American universities. Since the Seventies, however, the situation has been changing, and the rise of a new kind of intellectual ...”

“... among historians who have written principally on British topics – nothing from Linda Colley or Quentin Skinner, for example – and some of the best-known contemporary exponents of biography have not contributed: there is no Peter Ackroyd, no Hermione Lee, no Victoria Glendinning, though there are three entries by Claire Tomalin, including Katherine ...”

“... us to discover it. Attention (of the sort fostered by intellectual historians like Thomas Kuhn and Quentin Skinner) to the vocabularies in which sentences are formulated, rather than to individual sentences, makes us realise, for example, that the fact that Newton’s vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle’s does not mean that ...”

“... familiarity with the structures of argument prescribed by legal rhetoricians is the subject of Quentin Skinner’s meticulously documented Forensic Shakespeare.* Skinner describes his book as ‘a supplement’ to Burrow’s; but its approach to Shakespeare is of a confessedly un-literary character. Indeed Forensic ...”