SUMMARY:

Instead of offering a definition of freedom, Quentin Skinner in his lecture proceeds genealogically, asking how the concept arose and developed in our culture and what uses it has been put to. He concentrates on the Anglophone tradition of political philosophy, beginning from the liberal concept of freedom in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes thought that freedom consists in an absence of interference, and he offered an analysis of interference. In the Hobbesian account, only bodily interference takes away freedom of action, and if it is only one’s will that is coerced, one obeys freely. This assumption was reconsidered in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690). Locke claimed that coercion of the will − and not just coercion of the body − takes away freedom. Skinner turns to an intellectual genealogy of “coercion,” paying attention not only to Locke’s interpretation but also to Jeremy Bentham’s in the treatise Of Laws in General. Skinner calls this genealogical line the liberal way of thinking about negative freedom that in a way culminates in Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, Two Concepts of Liberty. He then turns to another line of thinking within the liberal tradition, represented by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty of 1859. Mill rejected the interpersonal nature of freedom and asked: could it be the case that the agent who interferes with your own freedom could be yourself? Skinner reviews three major answers to this question: the tradition connecting freedom and reason (from Plato to Kant); the idea of the yoke of public opinion, which feeds an important strand of existentialist moral philosophy that contrasts a genuinely free action with an authentic action; and the concept of the false consciousness (Marx). Skinner then proceeds to the end of the nineteenth century, when no-interference (the negative definition) became a radically incomplete way of thinking about freedom, and when the idea that human nature is normative was inserted into their logic of thinking. To have freedom was reconsidered as to be able to act in accord with the essence of human nature (neo-Hegelian moral and political philosophers). Skinner further scrutinizes this “positive” view of freedom: the Christian version; in Hannah Arendt’s essay Between Past and Future (freedom is politics); in the great Canadian philosopher of freedom Charles Taylor’s, Sources of the Self, and so on. At the end, Skinner reestablishes a tradition that was marginalized by the rise of modern liberal political philosophy − the tradition that thinks of freedom not by contrast with interference but by contrast with slavery. He shows how hidden mechanisms of societal inequality can be made visible with the help of this concept and concludes, that “something of extreme importance has got rubbed out, in Gramscian terms, by the hegemony of liberal ideologies and it would be beneficial to our current discussions about civic freedom if it could be put back.”