A Conversation with Prof Quentin Skinner

Interviewed by Prem Ansh Sinha (Editor-in-Chief)

Edited by Alankrita Singh (Associate Editor)

As published in the Volume 2(2) of Ramjas Political Review

Prof Quentin Skinner, Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, and former Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, is a founding figure of the Cambridge School of political thought. He is the author of various critically acclaimed books like Liberty as Independence (2025), The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), and Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (1995), amongst others.

The interview, as taken on April 1, 2025, is as follows.

In your latest book, Liberty as Independence, you shed light on the history of the political ideal of liberty in terms of your seminal creation, which is, the Third Concept of Liberty, where you propose independence as a form of liberty. Can the anti-colonial and nationalist movements in South and Southeast Asia be a manifestation of this sentiment of liberty as independence? Additionally, can it be said that the historical quest for independence by marginalised groups across the globe to get rid of systemic injustices is an extrapolation of your book?

Firstly, the view in which I am interested is not that independence is a form of liberty; it is the more radical claim that what liberty means is independence. The claim is—liberty is not just a matter of being able to act without restraint. It consists of independence from the possibility of restraint. Those who espouse this view are not denying that if there is someone who restrains or prevents you from acting at will, then in case you have lost some of your liberty of action. Though those who espouse my view of liberty, do not think that that is the question one needs to focus on if they wish to understand the concept of civil or political liberty, and that is because there is a logically prior question to be answered which is, “Is there anyone who could prevent you from acting according to your autonomous will, if they chose?” Then, “Are you living in subjection to and hence, in dependence on, the will and power of somebody else?” If you are, you are not a free person, as you do not have an autonomous will. You are never able to act entirely according to your own will, because everything that you do, is done with the implicit or explicit permission of the person who could prevent you from acting if they chose. If that is your predicament, you are never able to act freely. The earliest exponents of this view like to say, if you are in that predicament, you have a master, whereas freedom consists of being your own master. Freedom is self-government; freedom is not living in subjection to the arbitrary will of anyone else.

Now, considering this concept in the context of anti-colonial movements in South Asia—including India and Southeast Asia, I can certainly say that the first great example in my lifetime of rejecting colonial rule and describing that move as that of gaining independence, was that of India. What came into force in August 1947 was the Independence Act, and it was that Act by which the British agreed to transfer sovereignty to the Indian National Assembly. The other similar anti-colonial and post-colonial instances come from Africa, instead of Asia. The first ten years later in 1957, when the Gold Coast, under Kwame Nkrumah, declared its independence, it did not quite negotiate as India did with Britain; it declared itself independent and renamed itself as Ghana, and three years later, Britain agreed to grant independence to Nigeria, which still celebrates 1 October 1960 as its Independence Day. So, are they taking up the view of liberty that I first talked about? I do not think that they are animated by the view that what liberty is, is not being subject to arbitrary power, but what they are doing is taking up the vocabulary of the very first group of colonies that declared themselves to be independent from British rule, and that was very much earlier than any of these cases. That was the Declaration of Independence that was issued by the thirteen British colonies in North America. When the Continental Congress of these colonies declared independence—and that is still celebrated in the United States as July 4, 1776. Now, all of these writers are fervently of the view that liberty is independence, and when they speak of breaking from the British rule, they all speak of independence from submission to the arbitrary power of the British state, and they see that as an arbitrary power because, although the colonies are taxed, they are not represented in the Parliament that has imposed the taxes on them. That means that the law of Britain faces them not as something to which they have consented so freely; instead, it confronts them as an arbitrary power. That is exactly the argument laid out in the earliest of all the tracts against the British government. As soon as taxation of the colonies was declared in 1764, James Otis—the first in the field attacking the alleged rights of the British colonists—was followed by Daniel Dulany and especially John Dickinson, in his famous Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania. The colonies, he says, are being taxed without consent. But to be taxed without consent is to live under arbitrary power. We are living under arbitrary power; we are living as slaves—that is what he wants to say. Returning to the case of Asia, unquestionably one country in Southeast Asia, which, like India, declared its independence in the 1940s—but in which the people do not certainly enjoy independence but are still living in subjection to arbitrary power—is Myanmar, which became a military dictatorship in 1962. When the army seized power again in 2020, there were constant protests from the United Nations that this involved the suppression of human rights. This is the power in the states that confronts its citizens as an arbitrary power to which they are wholly subjected, and on my account, this is unfreedom.

Prof Skinner, thinking more into it, several commentators and I believe that the modern threat to liberty arises from surveillance capitalism and algorithmic governance, where the individuals are not necessarily under direct state control but are increasingly dominated by opaque corporate algorithms. Do you think your politico-legal framework provides an adequate response to this, or is there a limit to it when it comes to the digital age or the later half of the 21st century?

I absolutely think that the view of freedom you need in order to talk about the problem that you have raised is exactly the one that I have laid out. I do not think that the view I have put forward to you of liberty as independence would need any adaptations to meet the present conditions you talk about. The whole point in my book is that this is the view we now ought to adopt, and that is because it gets to the root of what it means to be a free person. Far more effective than the tendency of most current political theories—certainly in the Anglophone tradition—to argue that liberty is simply not being restrained from acting according to your will, that is to say, by some physical or coercive force. They are talking about somebody having the power over you to exercise that force. Now, that silent power, which may or may not be exercised, is everywhere with us in the relationship between the richest parts of the world and the poorer parts of the world. A rich country that wishes to invest in a poor country will always be in a position to extract special conditions—not because it demands them, but because both sides know that it could demand them. So, there is going to be an almost slavish reaction, which will be absolutely impossible to get away from, because you find yourself in the poorer country confronting an arbitrary power, which has the power to act as it wills, or not to act.

Prof Skinner, in recent times, we have seen the rise of populism across the globe, which in turn has reignited the debate on the ideas of republicanism as espoused by Machiavelli and Rousseau. Do you believe that this trend indicates a positive slope of political participation, or is it the other way around? Furthermore, should this trend be taken as a contemporary political occurrence or a reinvention of the past?

The way I am thinking about liberty, (it) entails democracy. This is very important because the traditional Anglophophone views of liberty—as not being hindered or interfered with by the exercises of power—take no position on what form of government best secures civil liberty. You could be equally free in various different forms of government, and, as Isaiah Berlin said in a famous passage in his Two Concepts of Liberty, that you might be freer or less interfered with in enlightened despotism as in a democracy. So, there is no connection in that liberal tradition between liberty and forms of government. In the account that I want to give, there is a very strong connection between liberty and democracy. If you agree that to have liberty in a state is to have an independent will, then you are committing yourself to a democratic form of government. This is because you are agreeing that if the state faces you as an arbitrary will—as it does in Myanmar—then you do not have any civil liberty. The only way by which you could be free in a state is if the laws that govern you can be seen as an expression of your will, so that you remain free in obeying them because you have consented to them. The only way you could have consented to the laws is if you live in a democracy, where the actions of the government are controlled by the will of the people. This is so that the laws reflect, at the very least, the represented will of the people, or the majority. The nearest that a state can get to meeting the requirement of liberty that I am setting out, is to be itself a representative democracy. It would be even better if it could be a direct democracy like the republican city-states in Europe during the Renaissance period, but these are single cities. Once you try to rule a state consisting of a billion people, then all of those ways are thrown out the window, and what you are left with is some kind of representation. Now, it is not ideal for my view of freedom, because if I am saying that you are free only if the law reflects your will—that is to say, you have consented to it—then the minorities have not consented, so the law does not actually express their will. So, what is the answer to that? That is the really hard question that is left for anyone like me. The person who thought that he had answered that was Rousseau, because he wanted to say, well, there is just not your will and there is not just everyone’s will—there is the possibility of a general will. I have never quite understood what that means. It might mean that, in coming to understand the majority will, what you come to understand is what is best—and that might make you think, well, I consent to that.

Eurocentrism can be put forth as a widely accepted critique for any theory, thesis, or domain in history and social sciences, Prof Skinner. Many scholars such as the likes of Samir Amin and Amitav Acharya have written at length about the need to diversify perspectives of all the disciplines within the social sciences. Is this a valid criticism, in your opinion?

I can answer this specifically from the fact that if a theory was articulated in a particular part of the world, in one particular language, it does not immediately follow that it cannot be translated to other languages. It can certainly be understood as a way of thinking that may be considered by a community whose values are very different from those of the person who has articulated the view. I have had the personal experience of giving lectures on this subject in China. The audience I was speaking to in China were hearing me in my language, but the discussions showed that they had no difficulty in following what I wanted to say about this very abstract question, and they had no difficulty in assessing it. What I think I want to say about the centrism of the major languages—or eurocentrism in relation to postcolonialism—is that that is a story which, as far as what I am talking about, is over. In the case of some of the most abstract concepts that are used across different cultures, you can have cross-cultural conversations, or at least that has been my very good experience of lecturing in China. It would not be so easy now, but I have lectured about this material during the period of détente in Russia, and there was no difficulty. It was not thought to be Eurocentric; it was thought to come from a common culture. The origins, which are contingent and, in this case, come from an English language source, of any of these abstract questions that we use to articulate or organise our political life, such as justice, fairness, freedom, and rights, do not matter, so long as you sufficiently make it evident what you have in mind when you use these terms; then you can have a dialogue.

Professor, you have written widely on the elements of forensics in the works of William Shakespeare. How would you interpret the relationship between Prospero and Caliban from The Tempest, as a metaphor for the early modern states’ justification for colonial rule? Does the notion of liberty in Renaissance republicanism apply only to the citizens of a polity, or can it be extended to those subjected to rule without consent?

No, it cannot. Caliban is viewed as a slave, and people writing in Shakespeare’s time would have been intimately acquainted with the vocabulary which I am talking about, as it was received from classical sources. These classical sources, have been available certainly in the English language traditions of debate, by someone like Shakespeare or any Renaissance writer for a very long time. They come from classical Rome, and in classical Rome, you will find, in the moralists and especially in the historians, just the view of freedom and enslavement enacted in The Tempest. Caliban is enslaved because he is wholly subject to the power of those on the island. The source of this in Shakespeare is not completely clear, but what is clear is that he would have read some of the Latin texts, given his very good education he received that contain this view. This is the view of liberty articulated in the classical world, for instance, in Livy’s History of Rome, because it centres on the deposition of an authoritarian monarchy and its replacement by a republic in which there are tribunes of the people. That is presented as the great watershed in ancient history by Livy, reflecting on the history of Rome. In the Renaissance, when Machiavelli writes his Discourses on Livy, they are concerned with what in Latin is called civitas libera—a free state. Now, there is freedom at the end of The Tempest, because Prospero is leaving:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

And what strength I have’s mine own,

Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true,

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got

And pardoned the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands.

He is asking for freedom, and that is the classical account we are being given—he wants to be his own master; he wants to return home.

You are widely regarded as one of the founders of contextualisation in modern political thought. As a young student of social sciences, I find it very tempting to draw contemporary interpretations from primary historical texts. How can we avoid this temptation and strike a balance between scholarly rigour and creative exploration of ideas?

I think they are different undertakings, and if you are able to work on the historical texts with sufficient grasp on the culture and the context in which it was written, you would leave yourself with an account that is then open to your appraisal here and now. That is a tricky thing to do, but I am a profound believer, as a historian, in the possibility that what historical excavation can show you is, as it were, a buried treasure: there are things there which you can appropriate, which you can apply. That is what I am saying in relation to the concept of liberty, or the concept of the state, justice, rights, or all of these abstract ideas about which you can get an account from the texts. Of course, there is always something that is going on in these texts, which is not simply what they say; these texts have often made an intervention in the society in which they were written. If you want to say that you have understood any one of these works, then it is not just that you have grasped what they say they mean about a certain concept—it would also be an account of what they thought they were doing in applying the concept in the way that they did. Otherwise, you cannot be said to understand them, but you can certainly make something of what they are doing.

Prof Skinner, our readers would certainly appreciate your experiential wisdom and suggestions to the young students aspiring to take the route to academia.

I think that the most important lesson that I have wanted to pass on to a young student who is embarking on an academic career is: Always make sure that what you are studying is what you really think matters the most. In other words, do not follow fashion. Fashions in academic life come and go, all of them. Sometimes, one particular kind of historical or philosophical study is foremost, and then ten years later, no one is doing it. So you better not get caught up in fashion, you would much rather get caught up in some subject that really interests you, because in that way, you are sure to make the best of what you possibly can of your career.

One thing that I would always say as a historian to someone who is beginning an academic career as a historian is to always ask yourself whether your topic has an archive. When I began my research career working on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, there was indeed an archive—in the home of the family in whose service Hobbes had lived most of his life. It was in their library, but the Hobbes scholars had not noticed it. So there was a correspondence that no one had read, and I found a manuscript by Hobbes about monarchical succession—which nobody knew existed—simply by going to the archive and getting permission to publish it, and that was what set me on my path. Always ask yourself, about whatever the historical topic you are approaching: where is the archive, and what is it saying? And India is phenomenally rich in archives, as we have seen from people writing about the history of anticolonialism.

Something else that I would want to say to everyone who is becoming a scholar, is to not forget that you basically are a teacher. Anyone who earns their living in a university, of course, will be doing a scholarship nowadays, but we are all in universities as teachers. In the traditions I know well, in the countries where I have taught—which have mostly been European countries—but not altogether, I am always amazed by how little instruction younger scholars have had in how to design a lecture or a course, how to give a lecture, or how to present a paper. I really ought to be talking now not to you, but rather you talking to your teachers: Get them to help in this way, or watch them in action—especially the ones that you admire—because at the end, we are teachers, and we ought to learn how to teach.

Ends.

Featured image credit: David Cobley