Visions of Politics

by Quentin Skinner

• ISBN13: 9780521589260
• ISBN10: 0521589266
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The first of three volumes of essays by Quentin Skinner, one of the world's leading intellectual historians. This collection includes some of his most important philosophical and methodological statements written over the past four decades, each carefully revised for publication in this form. In a series of seminal essays Professor Skinner sets forth the intellectual principles that inform his work. Writing as a practising historian, he considers the theoretical difficulties inherent in the pursuit of knowledge and interpretation, and elucidates the methodology which finds its expression in his two successive volumes. All of Professor Skinner's work is characterised by philosophical power, limpid clarity, and elegance of exposition; these essays, many of which are now recognised classics, provide a fascinating and convenient digest of the development of his thought. Professor Skinner has been awarded the Balzan Prize Life Time Achievement Award for Political Thought, History and Theory. Full details of this award can be found at http://www.balzan.it/News_eng.aspx?ID=2474

Table of Contents

Regarding Method
Introduction: Seeing things their way	1	(7)
The practice of history and the cult of the fact	8	(19)
Interpretation, rationality and truth	27	(30)
Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas	57	(33)
Motives, intentions and interpretation	90	(13)
Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts	103	(25)
`Social meaning' and the explanation of social action	128	(17)
Moral principles and social change	145	(13)
The idea of a cultural lexicon	158	(17)
Retrospect: Studying rhetoric and conceptual change	175
Renaissance Virtues
Introduction: The reality of the Renaissance	1	(9)
The rediscovery of republican values	10	(29)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government	39	(54)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics	93	(25)
Republican virtues in an age of princes	118	(42)
Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance of liberty	160	(26)
The idea of negative liberty: Machiavellian and modern perspectives	186	(27)
Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility	213	(32)
Humanism, scholasticism and popular sovereignty	245	(19)
Moral ambiguity and the Renaissance art of eloquence	264	(22)
John Milton and the politics of slavery	286	(22)
Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war	308	(36)
Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought	344	(24)
From the state of princes to the person of the state	368
Hobbes and Civil Science
Introduction: Hobbes's life in philosophy	1	(37)
Hobbes and the studia humanitatis	38	(28)
Hobbes's changing conception of a civil science	66	(21)
Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality	87	(55)
Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter	142	(35)
Hobbes on the purely artificial person of the state	177	(32)
Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty	209	(29)
History and ideology in the English revolution	238	(26)
The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation	264	(23)
Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy	287	(21)
Hobbes and his disciples in France and England	308	(16)
Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society	324