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Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

There are, it seems, two Quentin Skinners. On the one hand, the Cambridge historian of early modern political thought writes the meticulous history of concepts in their political contexts. For Skinner, ideas do not "cause" political events because political actors are noble individuals who stick to their principles; in his more subtle account of causality, concepts are used to legitimise and defend conduct, frequently after the event. But when politicians and parties use ideas to justify their conduct they trap themselves into having to act in accordance with them later on -- or at least, when new circumstances arise which require a change of policy -- they have to come up with a convincing explanation. To take a modern example: "Peace, Bread and Land" might have just been the slogan which a group of Russian Marxists used merely to gain popular support; but the Bolshevik Revolution wouldn't have got very far if Lenin and comrades hadn't at least looked like they were acting according to it.

Skinner the intellectual historian can certainly be faulted for not paying too much attention to the broader institutional contexts from which his political actors speak. He has very little to say about the form in which political texts are published; he has remained silent on the relationship between political thought and what began to be called "public opinion" sometime in the eighteenth century. As such, Skinner's works sometimes make the history of political thought look like a parlour game in which the same set of elite political actors tirelessly try to outwit their opponents with elaborate rhetoric strategies, only interrupted by maids and butlers bringing in more tea or occasionally demanding a pay-rise. But Skinner's parlour game is important, interesting, and complicated nonetheless, as a perusal of the best sections of his two volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978) or the excellent article on "Bolingbroke and Walpole" easily makes clear (in Historical Perspectives: Essays in Honour of J.H. Plumb, ed. N. McKendrick, London, 1974).

The other Skinner, Quentin Skinner the political theorist, is less meticulous Rather than placing ideas in their immediate intellectual contexts or locating concepts in the cut and thrust of immediate political debate, he charts broadly schematised ideas very much out of context. This is the import of the extended version of his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, published as Liberty before Liberalism. Skinner's point is to describe a "neo-Roman" concept of liberty which, he argues, predated modern "liberalism". The focus is on the English civil war: a "neo-Roman" notion of liberty was central to the propaganda commissioned to defend the Commonwealth. But other than a brief nod in the direction of this instrumental connection, Skinner has very little to say about how the concept (or concepts) was used by politicians in the 1640s and '50s.

What Skinner calls "neo-Roman" liberty -- and what others have termed "Republicanism" -- consists in the belief that one can only be truly free in a free state. Both liberals and neo-Romans believe that liberty is simply the condition in which an individual is not constrained from acting as they choose; to use Isaiah Berlin's terminology, both are "negative" theories of liberty. But liberals also argue that force -- or the threat of coercion -- is the only form of constraint which can interfere with individual liberty. In the liberal scheme of things our liberty is only dependent on our living under a regime which is able to protect us from others (including the government itself) who attempt to force us to do things we do not wish to do. Liberalism does not require us to govern ourselves; liberty is perfectly compatible with our being subject to a benign dictator. As Hobbes (Skinner's first liberal) put it, "whether a Common-wealth be Monarchial or Popular, the Freedome is still the same".

Neo-Romans are, on the other hand, less agnostic about the type of polity they inhabit. Whilst they also believe liberty is the absence of constraint, men like Harrington, Milton and Sidney argue that merely being dependent on someone else is itself a form of constraint. The subjects of an absolute monarch -- the usual figure was the Turkish sultan, but France's absolute Kings often sufficed -- were not free because their life, liberty and property depended on the wishes of the prince. Like Blackadder, subjects needed to flatter the sovereign to keep their heads, and that necessity is itself a form of constraint.

Skinner's typology -- his chasm between Republicans and Liberals -- is wide and well demarcated. As a political theorist, such clarity is an advantage. Academics pontificating about ideal political systems we know what we think unless we can think clearly. And certainly, the reader cannot doubt that Skinner has constructed a clear, defensible ideal polity. In the interstices between his reconstruction of neo-Roman political thought Skinner counters a number of objections to the belief that dependence is itself a form of constraint. But, one wonders if such clarity was a reality for many of Skinner's early modern politicians, many of whom were writing as the seventeenth century version of New Labour's (sadly now defunct) rapid response unit, composing tracts with the printer hovering above their desk waiting to snatch away their manuscript. Surely in such a context categories like "neo-Roman" and "liberal" theories of liberty were a little less clear ?

Skinner would reply by countering that the frequency and rapidity with which forgotten, minor pamphleteers used "neo-Roman" political categories demonstrates how pervasive those categories were. He would have a point which I don't have the early modern historical background to deny, other than to say that if a "neo-Roman" notion of liberty was a powerful rhetorical tools in the seventeenth century, other doctrines were as important in influencing political allegiance and both causing and justifying the English Civil War. Notions of religious reformation, conceptions of an "ancient constitution" in both politics and ecclesiology, and ideas about the "common good" played an important role in the skirmishes of seventeenth century political debate.

What I do want to object to more strenuously however, is Skinner's chronology. Skinner argues that the neo-Roman world of liberty which we have lost was replaced, sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, with the "liberalism" which "we" are so familiar with today. Skinner suggests "neo-Roman" theories "slipped from sight". He idly mentions Chartist political rhetoric, John Stuart Mill's account of the subjection of women and "other pleas on behalf of the dependent and oppressed" places where neo-Roman concepts survived, and adds a footnote devoted to Marx, but merits them no further mention. But it is just not so simple. The assumption that dependence is a form of constraint has remained a vibrant component in the plethora of contradictory political languages we have used to think about our world for the last two-hundred years. Skinner's "neo-Roman" concepts exist side by side with "liberal" theories in the writings of the early twentieth century British left, in a century or more of feminist politics, in the rhetoric of those who formulated the British welfare state, in Thatcherite polemic, in the American Michigan militias and Nation of Islam alike, in countless anti-colonial nationalisms, in the present-day discussion of New Labour's freedom of information bill; in other words, in a multitude of real, complex, contradictory political contexts which I have neither the time nor space to enumbrate.

Where Skinner is correct is to argue that neo-Roman political though has slipped from sight within Anglo-American political philosophy. Since the 1960s until very recently, Liberalism has held court in political theory departments with few rivals. But, to argue that a general change over time has occurred in how people think about politics by comparing the rhetorical warfare of the English Civil War with present-day academic political theory is to make far too grand a claim. Skinner's argument is akin to the suggestion that, because academic Physicists today believe the theory of relativity, none of us are able to tell the time in day to day life. Skinner takes a conceptual change produced in one institutional context and makes it have significance in a conceptual world in which it makes no sense.

The trouble, I suppose, is with Skinner's attempt to be both a historian and political theorist and to see himself as having a political role in both at the same time. The role of the historian is to chart the minutae of what people did and said in the past. She is concerned to correct our anachronisms and tell us that the things we take for granted are a lot more complicated than at first glance. As such, the political task of the historian (like that of Derridean deconstructionist) is intrinsically anti-foundational. It denies us the delusions and dreams we construct by telling us how contingent and complicated everything is. By doing so it enables us engage in the interminably detailed, minute task of making the real world a better place. The task of the political theorist, on the other hand, is quite the reverse. Political theory constructs utopian or dystopian pictures of possible worlds by thinking in clear, delineable categories, categories such as Skinner's "neo-Roman" liberty. As such it empowers us to think big by limiting the discursive, historical complexity of the real world.

These two roles are in tension, but do not contradict each other. Without the historian we are in danger of imposing our grand designs on a world they fit poorly; without the political theorist we are liable to become lost in a world whose complexity we understand but cannot find a way out of. And, there is no reason why the historian and political theorist cannot be the same person: given the time and money we can (to misquote Marx) write history in the morning, theory in the afternoon and -- if need be -- fish in the evening. But, because history and political theory offer such widely different roles, it isn't possible to do both at the same time. Attempting to using history to create utopias for the present day -- as Skinner does in Liberty Beyond Liberalism -- leave us with narratives which fail to do justice to the complexity of the past.