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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DANGEROUS CHIMERA  
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Colin Kidd
May 8, 2025
London Review of Books
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_ Reviewer Kidd considers a new history of the idea of liberty by one
of the UK's most esteemed political philosophers. _

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_Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political
Ideal_
Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge
ISBN: 978 1 107 02773 2

In​ a less frequented corner of YouTube, the late Marxist
philosopher G.A. Cohen lives on in a few comic skits. Among the
funniest of these party pieces are two diatribes on ‘the German idea
of freedom’. Cohen adopts the persona of a deranged Teutonic
philosopher who claims that ‘no greater freedom can be imagined for
a man than absolute blind submission to an unjust law.’ By contrast
with the English conception of liberty, which Cohen’s
cod-philosopher thinks tantamount to the ‘vertiginous regressivity
of choice’, the Germans supposedly see ‘true freedom’ as
consisting in an ‘orderly’ attachment to ‘oppression’,
‘tyranny’ and the ‘jackboot itself’. Cohen’s immediate
target is the Hegelian infatuation with the rational state as the
summit of ethical life, obedience to which constitutes the highest
form of freedom, but his monologue also points to a more general
problem: the ways we confound words and things, deceived by the
multiple meanings and hidden implications of seemingly basic political
concepts.

Political theorists have long been aware of the dangers lurking in the
superficially innocuous term ‘liberty’. At the height of the Cold
War, Cohen’s mentor and friend Isaiah Berlin raised the problem of
‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in his inaugural lecture at Oxford.
Berlin distinguished between positive liberty – broadly speaking,
self-government – and negative liberty: the freedom of the
individual from government interference. Berlin, a liberal pluralist,
contended that there was no sure connection between democratic
self-rule and the liberty of the individual. Positive liberty, a fuzzy
concept that encompassed ‘collective self-direction’ as well as
‘self-realisation’, was ripe with potential for illiberal
outcomes. The upshot of both the French and the Russian Revolutions
(Berlin had experienced the second of these as a boy) was
authoritarian state structures restrictive of individual freedoms.
Negative liberty from constraints seemed a ‘more humane ideal’
than the otherwise admirable goal of ‘positive self-mastery’,
given the risks associated with the latter. Berlin would be dismayed
at the ways opponents caricatured these anxieties. He wasn’t, he
later insisted, an enemy of democratic self-rule, which he recognised
as a ‘fundamental human need’; but he felt that the
‘perversion’ of positive liberty into despotism was an obtrusive
historical fact, ‘one of the most familiar and depressing phenomena
of our time’.

One prominent early critic, the American philosopher Gerald MacCallum,
thought that Berlin had mistakenly reified two aspects of a single
category, but a later commentator, the Cambridge historian Quentin
Skinner, went in the opposite direction, arguing that Berlin had
overlooked a highly distinctive version of liberty, which he labelled
‘neo-Roman’. He set out this position in various venues, but most
poignantly when he delivered the Isaiah Berlin Lecture at the British
Academy in 2001 on ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’ (a version of this
essay appeared in the _LRB_ of 4 April 2002
[[link removed]]).
More precisely, Skinner thought he had identified a second type of
negative liberty, of which there were ‘two rival and incommensurable
theories’. He found in the Roman historians Livy, Sallust and
Tacitus and in their early modern reception an emphasis on free
citizenship, conceived as the absence of subjection to the will of
another. Negative liberty, Skinner argued, can take the form of the
liberal conception of non-interference or the Roman idea of
non-dependence on the power of someone else.

In recovering this lost Roman concept of freedom, Skinner had, as he
warmly acknowledged, an ally in the political theorist Philip Pettit.
But there is a subtle distinction between their positions. Whereas
Pettit emphasises non-domination as the leitmotif of a tradition of
republican freedom, Skinner thinks that the primary feature of this
strain of liberty was the absence of dependence, and that adherence to
this way of thinking about liberty wasn’t confined to those with
overtly republican political commitments. For Skinner, neo-Roman
liberty was a kind of status rather than merely a freedom of action.

Skinner made his name in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of his
contextualist transformation of a fundamentally misguided discipline.
The unchallenged norm in pre-Skinnerian political thought was the
study of a canon of major thinkers who engaged in analysis of a set of
perennial concepts. Skinner’s reframing of the history of political
thought was underpinned by the philosopher J.L. Austin’s theory of
speech acts. The central preoccupation of a historian of political
thought, Skinner contended, should be not so much what a text said, as
what a text did, its function in the debates of its own era. He
didn’t think that the central topics of political thought were so
robust and self-contained as to be immune to the vagaries of context.
In his Berlin lecture Skinner punctured the ‘illusion’ that ‘we
can somehow step outside the stream of history and furnish a neutral
definition’ of terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ which
are ‘so highly indeterminate, and so extensively implicated’ in
‘a long history of ideological debate’.

Skinner’s centre of gravity is the period between the late medieval
era and the 17th century, but he also reaches back to classical
antiquity, to Roman writers in particular, and forward to 19th and
20th-century philosophers. His interests straddle an array of modern
disciplines – philosophy, politics, law, literature and classics as
well as history – while in _Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of
Hobbes_ (1996) he displays an exquisite command of early modern
rhetorical techniques. His new book shows his formidably detailed
knowledge of another outlying zone of his immense hinterland, the
political thought of the 18th century – not just the works of
canonical figures, but now obscure pamphlets and sermons as well as
imaginative literature. Despite the decades I have spent reading
18th-century sources, there were several figures in the book with whom
I was unacquainted. For most of us the gradient of the learning curve
involved here would demand recourse to a low gear; but Skinner, as
ever, races along ambitiously.

The book advances a remarkable explanation of how and when our liberal
notion of freedom displaced the neo-Roman version, recovering an
overlooked history of the formulation of liberty in 18th-century
English political culture. Although there were various early
justifications of the Glorious Revolution – historical, biblical,
providential and de facto – an argument came to prominence that
emphasised the natural rights of the people to remove a tyrant who
would reduce them to servitude. John Locke, whose work was not
immediately influential but had by the 1740s become a vital prop of
the Whig regime, upheld the classical definition of liberty as
independence. The work of Algernon Sidney, another Whig icon, who was
executed by Charles II in 1683, gave a similar neo-Roman reading of
liberty. In Sidney’s posthumously published _Discourses Concerning
Government_ (1698), slavery was identified with dependence on the will
of another, regardless of that person’s actions. The thrust of
Sidney’s argument was anti-monarchical, though he accepted that if a
king were controlled by laws, then a kingdom might still resemble a
free state. _Cato’s Letters_, a highly influential series of
articles published in the _London Journal_ by the Whig writers John
Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and which first appeared as a collection
in 1724, took a similar line.

By the 1740s, neo-Roman arguments were being used to underpin
Britain’s claims to be a free state. However, several major
novelists – Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett
– interrogated what Skinner calls ‘Whig complacencies’. Britons
did not groan under the yoke of absolute monarchy, but many of them
lived at the whim of others, whether as servants, marriageable young
ladies or the clients of patrons. In _Tom Jones_, Fielding shows that,
when acting as a justice of the peace, even the benign Squire
Allworthy is capable of as much caprice as his volcanically
vituperative neighbour Squire Western. But literary exposure of the
sham and hypocrisy behind Whiggish boasts about English freedom did
little to dislodge the prevailing conception of liberty.

Despite this, its commanding position in English political culture
crumbled with extraordinary rapidity between the 1770s and 1790s.
Skinner has identified what must constitute a major turning point in
modern history, yet one that has gone largely unnoticed. How can we
have failed to spot something of this magnitude? The embarrassing
nakedness of the historiography here is disturbing in itself. But then
comes a further shock. The reader casually assumes that the
displacement of neo-Roman categories by a liberal understanding of
freedom must have had something to do with the emergence of the market
as the dominant trope in modern political language. But while Skinner
thinks it plausible that the ‘new view of liberty’ held some
attraction for champions of the market, he traces its provenance back
before the 18th-century emergence of commercial society. What’s
more, he identifies specific and immediate factors that caused liberty
as non-interference to ‘ascend so suddenly to a position of
ideological dominance’ from the late 1770s.

At the heart of Skinner’s story is a defamiliarised version of the
American Revolution, which brings into focus its transformative effect
on the political idioms of the motherland. In the late 1770s, a
conservative clerisy – jurists, clergymen, political pamphleteers
– adopted the liberal idea of freedom as a way of ‘fending off the
republican and democratic potential’ that was becoming apparent in
the older tradition of liberty. The threat came particularly from an
ideological fifth column in Britain that openly supported the American
cause. In February 1776, Richard Price, the minister of a dissenting
Presbyterian chapel at Newington Green, then a village outside London,
published _Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty_, which was in
its fifth edition by March. Not only did Price align himself with the
colonists’ claim that they were being taxed without their consent,
but he made a more general argument that called into question whether
Britain under its unreformed constitution was genuinely a free state.
Since self-government was the defining attribute of liberty, even
being ‘guided by the will of another’ implied a form of
‘servitude’. Therefore, Price contended, when the laws were
‘made by one man, or by a junto of men in a state, and not by common
consent, a government by them does not differ from slavery’. Despite
his outspokenness, Price insisted he was a good Whig, and that his
arguments aligned with ‘those taught by Mr Locke and all the writers
on civil liberty who have been hitherto most admired in this
country’.

In response to Price, pro-imperial pamphleteers used the arguments of
a 17th-century strain of Continental – but reliably Protestant –
natural jurisprudence which stressed the distinction between the
natural liberty enjoyed in the intolerably stressful conditions of a
state of nature, where there is no safety or security from the
depredations of others, and the very different kind of civil liberty
enjoyed as a subject of government. Thomas Hobbes in _Leviathan_
(1651) emphasised the contrast between the anarchic horrors of life in
primitive circumstances and the security that came of submission to
the sovereign state, which guaranteed peace and basic security for its
subjects. In this new environment, liberty was redefined as the space
where the silence of the law left the subject unimpeded. Although
Hobbes was a bogeyman to his contemporaries and succeeding
generations, not least because of his materialism and heterodox
religious views, similar views percolated into English culture by way
of a succession of less controversial natural jurists – Samuel
Pufendorf, Jean Barbeyrac, Johann Heineccius, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui
– whose works appeared in translation between the late 17th and the
mid-18th centuries. Independence was indeed, they agreed, an attribute
of humankind in the wretched condition of natural liberty; but civil
life implied – and depended on – its renunciation. In the more
fortunate and vastly different condition of life under civil
government, the ideal of independence had become a dangerous chimera.

Between the late 1770s and the 1790s the arguments of natural jurists
were recycled by a host of English propagandists who restated the idea
of liberty in terms of a lack of restraint on actions. The pamphleteer
John Gray, an upholder of parliamentary authority over the colonies,
contended that, although entry into civil society necessarily involved
a loss of natural liberty, ‘the most perfect degree of civil
liberty’ was nevertheless possible when personal freedom was least
constrained by law. Interestingly, some pamphleteers employed everyday
usage as a way of determining the meaning of liberty. The jurist
Richard Hey wondered ‘what idea is conveyed by the word in common
conversation’, and decided that it was an ‘absence of
restraint’. An influential subset of these writers was associated
with a utilitarian turn in English political thought – not only
Jeremy Bentham, but also his friend John Lind and the clergyman
William Paley, whose _Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy_
(1785) had gone through fifteen editions by the time of his death in
1805. The natural jurists’ arguments were soon interwoven with a
more traditional political theology that emphasised Christian
obedience to temporal powers. In 1793, Skinner notes, the Reverend
John Fawel of Wigan published a political sermon under the arresting
title _Due Subordination True Freedom_. Cohen’s mock-Hegelian
philosopher no longer seems so outlandish.

How​ far did the discomfiting proximity of liberty and slavery in
contemporary polemics blunt the appeal of the older idiom of
independent freedom, especially given that this period saw the first
major stirrings of abolitionism among evangelicals? The multiple
connotations of the word ‘slavery’ certainly provide one of the
central preoccupations of Skinner’s protagonists. Price’s broad
definition of slavery as dependence drew the ire of conservative
opponents. In _Some Observations on Liberty_ (1776), the Methodist
leader John Wesley bristled with outrage at Price’s obtuse failure
to recognise the difference between the ‘chained’ chattel slave
and men of property in the colonies who, because they were taxed
without their consent, Price deemed enslaved. Henry Goodricke scoffed
at the way Price collapsed the meaning of slavery into mere dependence
on the will of another: this, he wrote, ‘will be found to introduce
slavery almost everywhere, and to make it absolutely necessary to the
happiness of mankind’. The charge stung, and Price introduced
distinctions between different types of slavery in his subsequent
contributions to the debate. Nevertheless, he could not resist a tart
response when the archbishop of York, William Markham, redefined civil
liberty as ‘a freedom from all restraints except such as established
law imposes for the good of a community’: the archbishop, Price
replied, ‘has given a definition of liberty which might as well have
been given of slavery’.

While Skinner punctiliously observes historical proprieties and writes
with precision, clarity and accessibility about all the writers he
discusses, there is a note of plangency in his central arguments, a
sense, too, of deep passions coolly suppressed. The stunted liberalism
we live with today, Skinner argues, is the consequence of an urgent
conservative strategy in the age of revolutions to redescribe the
contours of liberty. The older understanding of liberty as
independence did not entirely disappear, but was confined to the
socialist margins of 19th-century political culture. Recovered, this
notion has the potential to inspire a more empathetic way of thinking
about today’s precariat of zero-hours employees, casualised workers
and deunionised staff dependent on the whims of employers. It also
offers, Skinner suggests, a connection that might prevent the
untethered ideals of liberty and democratic self-government from
drifting dangerously further apart. Whereas Berlin saw no necessary
connection between liberty and democracy, Skinner argues that
representative democracy is the only form of governance that can
guarantee liberty as independence: ‘No democracy, no liberty.’

The most unsettling of this book’s surprises lurks in its
unadvertised implications. If Skinner’s is a story of loss – the
submersion of a concept of liberty which for all its flaws in practice
was pregnant with greater democratic potential than the liberalism
that replaced it – where does that leave our grand narratives of
democratisation? The history of franchise extension seems less buoyant
in the light of Skinner’s arguments about the entrenchment of an
anti-democratic liberalism in the decades before the first Reform Act
of 1832. Or do these divergent narratives rather serve to highlight
the gulf that separates the realm of political thought – no matter
how contextualist the aspirations of its interpreters – from the
mundane world of political practice?

Alone among the brilliant triumvirate who most reshaped the practice
of history in Britain over the last sixty years – Skinner himself;
the historical demographer Tony Wrigley; and the historian of popular
belief Keith Thomas – Skinner recognised the continuing primacy of
the political. But his wasn’t political history as it had been
practised. He managed to avoid reductive approaches to context of the
sort envisaged by Marx (ideas as a reflection of economic structures)
or, more significantly, by Namier (ideas as a rhetorical smokescreen
for high political manoeuvres), but Skinnerian political thought did
not quite become a non-canonical, ultra-contextualist history of
political argument – though _Liberty as Independence_ comes closer
to this than other works by Skinner and his pupils. Rather, given
Skinner’s philosophical interests, the revamped discipline was
orientated towards political philosophy and away from the mechanics of
political action. What makes the disconnection from political practice
a problem is the sheer scale of Skinner’s achievements. He has been
if anything too successful, his influence disturbing the ecological
balance in several of the best history departments. The brightest
students are disproportionately attracted to intellectual history and
political thought, while political history – without the same
conceptual plushness – dwindles in popularity. Yet, ultimately, it
is the more prosaic study of personnel and institutions which provides
the grist of political explanation.

 

Colin Kidd is a professor of modern history at St Andrews. He
co-edited _Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life,
1790-1914_, which was published in May. His books include _British
Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the
Atlantic World 1600-1800_, _Unions and Unionism: Political Thought in
Scotland 1500-2000_ and _The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of
Mythography 1700-1870_.

 

* political philosophy
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* liberty
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* democracy
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* the history of ideas
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