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Quentin Skinner
Cambridge University Press , Cambridge, 2008 , 245pp .,
ISBN: 978-0521714167
In this elegant extended essay, Quentin Skinner returns to his familiar concerns with the character of republican liberty (with a rather wistful recognition that his own preference for the label 'neo-Roman' has now been overwhelmed by popular usage) and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Having briefly outlined the core component of the republican conception of liberty as 'non-domination', Skinner turns his attention in the rest of his essay to Hobbes's position as perhaps the single greatest critic of this republican view. He seeks to show how Hobbes's view of liberty changed from the Elements of Law (in 1640) to Leviathan (in 1651), indeed so significantly that the account in the latter could be considered a 'repudiation' of his earlier view. This change must, in its turn, be understood in terms of Hobbes's continuing and passionate engagement with the supporters of constitutional or limited government and his insistence upon the need to resist radical and republican reformers in the name of social peace.
In discussing the nature of liberty in the Elements of Law, Hobbes sets out his own very distinctive (radically anti-Aristotelian and anti-scholastic) account of the passional nature of the will as 'nothing other than the name of the last appetite or fear that brings deliberation to an end' (p. 25). In the state of nature, we are free to act 'at will' but at the same time we have a natural tendency to do that, which will contribute to our self-preservation....