Thinking about the World Podcast – Quentin Skinner

This week on the Thinking Global podcast, Professor Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary, University of London – @QMHistoire) speaks with the team about contextualism, Machiavelli, Hobbes and much more. Professor Skinner chats with Kieran (⁠⁠⁠@kieranjomeara⁠⁠⁠) and Touchharika (⁠@Tusharika24⁠) on what contextualism is as a methodological approach to political thought, how he applies it to Machiavelli and Hobbes, and how it relates to what it means to think about world politics.

Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London (@QMHistoire). Professor Skinner has published on a number of philosophical themes, including the nature of historical interpretation and explanation, as well as on several issues in contemporary political theory, including the concept of political freedom and the character of State. He wrote extensively on issues of historical method and historical explanation, being a key figure in the ‘Cambridge’ school of contextualist political thought (@cambridge_cpt). Many of these essays have been collected in the volume, edited by James Tully, Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics (1988).

His historical research focuses on early modern Europe and one of his main interests lies in the Italian Renaissance. He has published books on Machiavelli, on early Renaissance political painting, on the ideals of civic virtue, and has edited Machiavelli’s work. The prince. These include Machiavelli: a very brief introduction (2000), Machiavelli (1981) and more. The other main focus of his research is on 17th-century England, writing on the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, including a book on Shakespeare’s use of classical rhetoric – Forensic Shakespeare (2014) – and on the debates over political freedom in the English Revolution – Freedom before liberalism (1998). He also published three works on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes – Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008), Reason and Rhetoric in Hobbes’ Philosophy (2010), From humanism to Hobbes (2018) and more. His best-known multi-volume works, The foundations of modern political thought (1978) and Visions of politics (2002), attempt to extend his vision to the entire modern period. This is without counting a host of influential articles, such as his famous ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (1969).

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