Liberty before Liberalism (Canto Classics)

Slim but packed with first rate scholarship, Skinner mines conceptions of Liberty pre-Enlightenment. What is freedom really? Is a slave free if his master is lenient and gives him license to roam? Drawing on authors such as Hobbes, Milton, Locke, Thomas More Skinner explores what he calls a neo-Roman theory of liberty. A core of a sphere of freedom for the individual apart from the intrusive perogatives of kings and masters. Highly recommended for the intelligent political thinker who wants to explore ideas of liberty as they stretch back before the modern era.

What do you need to be free? Is it enough that no one, as a matter of fact, stops you from doing what you want to do? Or is it also essential that no one ever could, because the actual power of anyone to stop you, even if it is not exercised, already enslaves you or at least significantly diminishes your freedom? In this little book - an expanded version of an important lecture - Quentin Skinner examines the conflict between these two ideas of freedom in the context of the English Civil War in the 17th century. He does not lift the argument at issue out of history, with its particular actors' motivations and desires, to consign it to the eternal realm of political thought. But he still considers the relevance of that debate to our contemporary conceptions of liberty, and proposes to judge them as more historically assorted than we might otherwise suppose.The present-day lesson of the book is that the issue of individual freedom should not be seen as prior to and independent of the kind of liberty we might attribute to political communities, even if we in turn find it difficult not to imagine them metaphorically in terms of composite human individuals. The book's virtue as a model of intellectual history consists in showing, through practical scholarship of the highest order, that in order to engage in dialogue with past thinkers, we need not enter any fiction of timelessness: either by treating them straightforwardly as our contemporaries or by pretending to converse with them in some realm of thought that is neither theirs nor ours. They speak to us most truly out of their own station in history.

This is very interesting work. The classical republican, or as the author calla it the "neo-roman" thread of thought is dealt with extensively and profoundly within this slim volume. To be honest, I picked this book up primarily because of the text pertaining to Algernon Sidney, which is relatively rare. But, there is also very much of interest in his comments on other authors such as John Milton.