Interview of Professor Quentin Skinner - part 1

they pleasure and honor to have a stalker in Skinner Quentin when and where were you born I was born in Chariton which is a suburb of Manchester on the 26th of November 1940 so Sagittarian and it's the year of the dragon that's the answer okay tell me you can go back as far as you like I had one respondent who went back to Charles Darwin his great-grandfather but you don't need to go that far but your grandparents or your parents or anyone who's significant in your ancestry would be nice to hear about yes well although I was born in England and have lived most of my life in England my family on both sides comes from the northeast of Scotland my mother's father was a wine and spirit merchant in Aberdeen and my father's father was rather more prosperous merchant in Aberdeen he was so little grocer he also ran a chain restaurants if I we still have some of the cutlery and my father was educated in England in the sense that he was trained for the Navy he was a comrade boy that comrade was a common way aboard the Conway along with Dartmouth and others that time trained gave a special training that puts you into the Navy as a junior officer as a midshipman and in fact my father joined the Royal Navy in the First World War straight out of his training and was torpedoed on the Arctic Convoys so he was in the Navy but he always told me he hated it and he came out and took the civil service examinations and joined the colonial service and then spent the whole of his career in West Africa my mother went to the University of Aberdeen as did most of my family on both sides all three of her brothers and two of her sisters also went to university at Dean they all read medicine but my mother graduated in English literature and she became a schoolteacher she was an exact contemporary of one of my father's sisters at university and I think that must be her marriage they never asked them no because this sister was not at all night by my mother but I always said I also noticed that they both died quite young he's quite a long time ago yes quite a long time ago although not so much young because I am the second child and of quite old parents my father must have been in his late 30s when he married and he died in his early eighties but my mother have faded away she had Alzheimer's disease from in retrospect from sees from her early seventies and died in her late 70s and the strangeness to me is that each of my parents died while my wife Suzy was pregnant with one or other of our children my father died when she's pregnant with our daughter who's now twenty-eight so that wasn't all time good and my mother died when she was only two years younger so they did die long time ago yes tell me something about their character and if it affected your life or their interests oh yes that's very interesting mine is a very common story of the time that's to say a father who's employed in the funeral service and who lives abroad and in the case of the African colonies he worked it in Nigeria the British Foreign Office very strongly discouraged children from going out there I've never set foot in Africa although my parents spent much of their lives there but of course it was endemic malarial then and so I had only saw my parents when they came on leave from that age I mean my only beginning right from the beginning I didn't see my father who was stuck in Africa of course by the outbreak of war for several years and then they went back after 1945 and so I then saw them only at intervals of about 18 months I was really brought up by my mother's eldest sister who was a doctor in Manchester maiden lady um but with as it were strong maternal instincts who was a wonderful Guardian a very educated woman a doctor but also passionate about literature but I got to know my parents after my father retired in those days she retired from the Imperial service at 55 and you know he malarial a long time and we'll sort of ready to retire and so at that point at the school which I was a 10 of course I've been a boarder I was at Bedford school where I went as a senior though by then my parents were back in Africa then I attended as a boarder until they retired but then I became a dead boy they retired to Medford and so I lived with them for the first time in my life slightly prematurely because prep school I got tuberculosis and very nearly died and my mother came back in a mighty rush and very prematurely from Africa to look after me and then set up house so then I had my adolescence living with them in Bedford my father I was very fond of both of them but he was a very quiet and retiring person but my mother was very important in my teenage years she was someone who had retained a great passion for English literature and because they've been partly in the diplomatic and the language of diplomatic was French she also spoke extremely good French and she gave me a passion for that language which is still the only other language than English in which I can lecture and teach so she was important to me my father I really got to know better in his very early age when he was looking after my mother when she was so faded out and I conceived a great admiration for his courage and his stoicism he was a very fine you said this was quite a normal story part of the normal story and in my case is that being abandoned by people who were in the Empire yes has quite a dramatic effect on a very small child yes other people have parents and you don't have parents and especially when you first go to your first boarding school which may have been begged at school do you remember the loneliness and crying on a pillow at night stuff or a black sheep yes somehow it was her life was and children accept that it is true that I went to boarding school even before I went to benefit which had its own prep school so I went there at the age of seven it was just her life was I don't think I questioned it but I will say that when my own son came to be the age of seven and I looked at him and thought this was the age at which I was sent away to boarding school I was filled with a great rage which must have been there this was an extraordinary thing to do to such very small children and leave them really absolutely to fend for themselves hmm were you bullied or not at all the school isn't know anything the school was quite tough but this is a Bedford school this was it Bedford and I went as they go it's only prep school and then I went into the middle school and then into the other school so I went at the age of seven and I emerged at the age of 18 he was tough in the way that those boarding schools were and I don't think I've ever really quite come to terms with that I have to say but I got an excellent education and in retrospect I feel I didn't realize at the time was a very good education I was getting it stood in extreme good stead I think I could have got a very good education in the sciences because my elder brother who's a very brilliant boy did do the sciences at Bedford and won the top scholarship to Cambridge in medicine so he must have been very well taught but I had a very traditional education in that I studied the classics of course at prep school as well did intensively from a very early stage and then mostly my education was in history and in English literature as well as in the plastics and so those were the subjects that I carried right through to university entrance and I was excellently taught in all of those subjects do you remember any particular teachers who influenced you or where is just a large gang of them there there were good teachers and I should say also it was a remarkable peer group if I think of the boys who were together with me in the lower 6-4 before we all spread out into our special yourselves they were in a group including people who became very consequential in the world of business and in a khadeem one of my closest friends was the founding professor of mathematics of UVA and politics Paddy Ashdown was in my form so if I think back on that group with several of whom and stood in contact I think it was at least as impressive a peer group as I encountered at Cambridge but you asked about teachers of that group there was one who absolutely stood out and was I think a truly remarkable person and I never lost that sense because I always remained in touch with him and I last saw him within months of his death which was only two years ago and quite remarkably I think for a school teacher his eventually took up a full-page independent and I was one of a number of people who wrote little pieces in that picture and some of the other people who would really would have heard of including of course Paddy Ashdown this was a man called John Eyre a y ey are e know very boss class figure who I think felt he should have been teaching to someone grander school and it certainly beam as a grounded school but he was recognised being retrospect a kind of 30s leftist intellectual who'd served as a young guard E in the Second World War and he was our history teacher and he knew how to get you a scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge he was an Oxford man but he was also a man passionate about especially poetry but literature more generally and theater above all the theater and that influenced me tremendously I was never able to act although I aspired to and I remember auditioning actually even from an early age additional Achaia my first audition was a spoof Elia I subsequently auditioned for hamlet I never got these parts it was just as well but it gave me a passion for the theater and especially for poetry he taught us all the way through the school in English literature as well as in history and he marked me very much and as I say I remained in touch with him and never failed to find him a very brilliant and challenging person apart from the theatre which you didn't manage to succeed in whether other activities your tuberculosis presumably precluded you from too much party games painted it all well no I was completely cured the reason I'm sitting here of course is Alexander Fleming I was simply pumped full of innocent men those you were left who died on your back for most of a year which I did I was greatly educated through the BBC which I listened to all the time and he turned me into a bookish boy and that there for a year and I read and I listened to music that was very formative it happens that because I started my schooling in Scotland I was very well ahead of the boys in the English prep school and I was in a class which was boys who a year older than me as well as being top class and I was really struggling so my school days were very much adjusted by my having that year out because when I returned I returned to the class in which everyone was my age and then I had a much greater academic success but it never stopped me no I was a sort of all-rounder I was captain with gymnastics and I led the school fencing team I've talked about any of this for many years but I suppose in that kind of school you were in force to be an all-rounder my guardian my aunt the doctor absolutely refused the Thai Food Box don't would have been expected of me but she right - of course recognised that was not a good idea for anybody but I played all the games no one played and I was quite a good off break bowler although I was never very good batsman so that was an important aspect of course because capacity games was very important to many schools as I hardly remind you the other thing which mattered a lot to me and always had was music and from an early age I played the violin not well I was not gifted but I was good enough to be in the school orchestra and of course I liked the fact of that together with the fact that I was a choir boy that was cool taught me to read music and gave me an interest in classical music and in the Kuril tradition which is actually remain of extraordinary importance to me all through my life and although I did play and I want to stress I was never a good fair but it matters to me tremendously a wide range of music or particular I have a very conservative aesthetic the heroes vary in fact there was a period when Beethoven would have mattered most and then heightened matter birds do no bar matters most and for a time handle but that is to speak of a very conservative aesthetic I'm very passionate about some 20th century music especially the Russian tradition and I traced that through the Tchaikovsky now Stravinsky himself did and of course Stravinsky coffee - Shostakovich those are very important figures for me but I can't pretend that I have kept up with music in anything like the same way do you when you mention these different musicians I was the same there was some of my books are written to box and move start some to handle now and well there's my great passion but I actually write I mean I listen to them and then I go and write and I noticed later that this is what make them did that he was a great father and he called his daughter doctor Bhavana character but lost his writing has been analyzed as having musical over terms and a film editors do the same thing they edit films to music yes do you think it influences your writing we are thinking directly or is it just a relaxation comment that's very interesting and I haven't thought about it I did at one point have a big change in my life which is that as a student I always listen to music working at a 7-point silence became extremely important to me and I'm a bit neurotic about having good silent conditions in which to write and I cannot listen to music while I'm writing sometimes try if I'm just doing emails at the end of the day I might put on a piece of music but I almost always find that what's happened is I've stopped writing the email because I'm listening to the music and I can't do the two things hmm I like to think that this is because I'm taking the music seriously so the answer is I can't I can't either and I don't think since there weren't such devices in those days I doubt whether making them did either but they're basically you I listen to music and then a couple of hours later or the next day I write and I noticed the music is going on in the back of my mind and yes the phrasing and the sentence stops and so on sometimes reflecting that's more what I was meaning rather than listening to a lecture writing yes there's so much such a point well I certainly find since I listen to music a lot in the evenings there's almost always something in my head it's one of the super triggers as it happens at the moment I can't get it out of my head there's always something that I think becomes a nuisance you can't stop it eventually it goes away and then it's going to be replaced by something else so that is a continuous haunting that is nothing can be a nuisance sometimes and the Schubert since it's so melancholy and it's so tragic okay well um let's now you did obviously well it bit but and people said what do they say you should try for Oxford or what do they say yes well yes I want an estate scholarship as they record in those days of my a levels and then of course the idea in those days was you went in for the Cambridge scholarship but I was interviewed before the scholarship by a wonderful man called Ian MacFarlane who was the senior tutor a problem yes good I felt the same way I felt the same way no not MC but he gave me admission to the College I was from Guerlain we can expose this was a novel and keys and he gave me admission there on strength that might make that also found an interview which was splendid when I came to take the scholarship examination because I didn't absolutely have to get a scholarship although John has teaching in that final term where everyone was Bruno scholarships it was very elitist because of course there had to be a third year six but John introduced us then to more general legends about historical interpretation and we read Croce and we read the Hollywood this was permanently marked me and very important to me I won a scholarship and so I went to keys but the reason I went to keys was that my elder brother had been there and it was a celebrated college then and now for midsummer and I remember persuading my father to write to the Senior Tutor saying his elder son had gone to college because he was thought to be the best the medicine but his younger son was hoping to meet history and would keys be a good college he was I can see an impertinent letter but we were very impressed with the truline answer from the Senior Tutor which is a dear mr. Skinner Carnegie's college is the best college in all searches for us and I went to keys and I was extremely fortunate to go to keys which was already a powerhouse in teaching like who taught you well I was given my admission by Philip Grayson who was a senior scholar who only died a year or two ago in his ninety's well became a lifelong friend but he was a remote figure except that he was passionate about most of the same music which I was passionate about and he was bachelor Don living in the college and we were encouraged to go and listen to music in his rooms which I did a good deal and indeed he was changing from his own seventy-eights to LPS at that time them gave me a huge number of very classic 70s including although Fritz approached recordings from the 30s he was benign but remote presence but the important presence was the person just appointed new Mackendrick who had a celebrated career as a teacher in the college and spent all his life in the cottage and eventually became the master he was our director of studies he didn't particularly press us at the level of what we should be writing in our essays but remember that he did that but he gave you a very strong sense that these questions really mattered and it mattered to think about them and of course it matter to do well in the examinations he was very keen on that also he was someone who didn't use the old Cambridge system of teaching within the college he had the revolution around here but you should be taught by people who knew about this country in whichever college they happen to be lurking and I already knew that I wanted to work in intellectual history I wanted to be and I came to university well I was encouraged by my scholarship which I did and I went to school for the boys and girls character in the classes that was a very powerful experience for me and I came to university thinking probably I wanted to become a school teacher but certainly a teacher but I did and the opportunity was very open in those days you got a start person was it a part 1 and part 2 at that time it was yes so you were the first to part one and then start first and then something very extraordinary happened to me which is that Keys College had the possibility of electing to a fellowship on try cos results it done that for some time but it did that in my case and so I moved from being an undergraduate to being the fellow in one week at the age of 21 which was a very strange thing to happen but a yet stranger thing happened to me in that summer and I 162 which stems from the fact that the Robbins report on Higher Education which was about to lift the level of the cohort being educated in the tertiary sector from 4% to 13% had been enacted and the new universities were being set up and as perhaps you remember there was a big clean act of people from us in Cambridge in mid-career who went to start departments in others verses and Christ's College lost his official fellow in history and I was appointed to that position in fact it's the position I've felt ever since and that happened when I was still 21 in 1962 that's a very pretty modern story to tell about our educational system it's the same story of my teachers Keith Thomas and James Campbell both yes all cells yes fellowship amendment or teaching fellowship yes my difficulty was that I went to the age of 21 into a Teaching Fellowship and that was one reason why I made a slow start on my research I had very nice responsibilities at that age I had a lot of teaching responsibilities if I was directing studies I was doing the admissions we still have the scholarship examination for which I was in examiner all of this struck me immediately and it did mean on the other hand just returning to your undergraduate days a little more weathera need lectures you mentioned near Mackendrick as a supervisor but whether either people who he farmed route to or that because he went to which you particularly recall of him influential and yeah the general standard of lecturing I remember is rather dismal and the course was uncongenial to me to a large degree because it consisted in those days of very large powerplant courses and a great deal of British politics a constant on high politics but there were two incandescent lecturers and one was walk for man and the other was versus finding I was actually studying medieval intellectual history and I couldn't always follow what Walter all I was saying but he gave off an incandescent sense that this mattered and they were routine lectures to him mercifully was simply a remarkable lecturer I was studying ancient history from part one and he would go through very technical discussions for example about how you might estimate the science of a slave population the whole thing was done entirely without notes and was a great effective bravura about it and he was a very handsome and spectacular presence on the platform as well but more than that it was he who showed me that what you could say is an historian simply depends entirely on what the end was is and of course he was talking about an era in which the evidence was fragmentary and conflicting and gave on a wonderful sense of what the sources were what they enabled you to say where they conflicted how you would interpret them I found out quite tonic that it wasn't really otherwise but the other lecturer who is very important to me was Duncan fourth the internet with historian and in my final year I did a course which we still have as a course in the active history called special subject which was two papers and was really about half the whole course and he was giving one on what he called the Scottish enlightenment everyone calls it the Scottish enlightenment now but it's centered they largely on the philosophy of human and I was entranced by the course and I thought of Hume and it tremendously cemented by sense that I wanted to go on to do work in intellectual history I must also mention although he was not a lecturer at the time the person who supervised my work in political theory and intellectual history John Barrett he was then a research brother of Christ's he ended his career as professor of modern check for history Oxford and I'm still very much in touch with him and he was a wonderful telogen to be in touch with very skeptical very witty very challenging and not at all my kind of temperament but it was very memorable to be talked about and my still this wasn't the time when you first met Peter loved it he wasn't teaching political philosophy at that time later wasn't well Peter did give a course of lectures he rarely remember to turn out the call on his day he was a wonderful lecturer but he was Chauncey hmm sometimes he wasn't very interested in what he was lecturing about because he did a very wide applying course but when he was then he was a very formidable and very original person Peter I never met when I was an undergraduate but I would like to say that of all the pieces of secondary literature that I read when I was an undergraduate in the subjects that really were beginning to entranced me probably the one that most struck me was his introduction to his edition of Locke I remember going to be supervised by John Barrow in my second year and John saying because we for an essay or not he said well there's only one addition to use now because it's at last been published Peter Natalie it's long on its definitive edition so I went out and I bought it it had just appeared and I read it and it was genuine epiphany to me and I can still recall the astonishment with which I read a text in which a major work of political theory was shown to be part of an ongoing political debate now Peter when I subsequently talked to him about what he achieved in that remarkable edition so it in a way that seemed to me very strange he thought that he had dethroned Locke from being a political theorist and had shown that he was only at that for tear I had the a priori view although it wasn't really a priority because I've come to Cambridge armed with Collinwood that probably what he said about Locke could be said for any work of philosophy but if you could recapture it there would always be an immediate context that made sense of the themes of the text and we should not be thinking of these texts in isolation from those contexts and Hollywood's idea of a logical question and answer clearly underpins that and probably underpinned lassard's thinking I subsequently decided but in any case what Hollywood's idea left with me in even when I was an undergraduate and there it was reinforced in that of its work which has been a thought that remained was made and very important to me ever since is think of these texts as answers to questions and the questions are going to be said by the society in which and for which the text is being written so that part of the hermeneutic part of the active interpretation of the text and I've come to feel the nahji part is the recovery by what text says although of course it says things that can be ended debated but what the text is doing what kind of an intervention does this text constitute in ongoing debate I now say to my students over for example hamsa didn't ask them how much I'm getting the course at the moment think of it as a speech in Parliament it would be a very long but it's not inherently different from a speech in Parliament that's to say all of these great works of political philosophy are also recognizably to be placed on particular position on a political spectrum there are recognisably contributions to a debate interpreting them is uncovering what that contribution was that's what I thought that it did brilliantly for knock but it seemed to me strange that he thought that that was a demotion that showed he was still thinking in partly traditional terms and I wanted to say I think we could do this even for harms which of course have been laughs it's contrast you couldn't do this for Hobbes that's obviously an architectonic work which stands outside time and we appraise it as simply as a masterwork some of my earliest historical research was on Hobbes whom I treated as a serious to propagation and I wanted to show that that theory and the reason that pops4 ground additional info was because he was making particular contribution to a debate about physical obligation at the time that Leviathan was being composed had Peter already discovered the library by this time I remember him telling him the detective story of discovering blocks library yes I don't know whether that was after his addition or before it or whether it's having the effect on the addition if he had already discovered the librarian already discovered the library and it was important to him for example one thing that was important to him was that the library did not contain a copy of promises the Madison of course it's difficult was like this because we all have books but that was important to Peter's interpretation because he wanted us to think of lockers are applied to film oh he's not a follower from that but it couldn't be reply to that of course is a non sequitur move but it was important to him what the contents of Locke's library were and that was important in the addition subsequently he did with Harrison an addition yes so you're still very young 21 22 and teaching very large numbers of students other I don't usually ask this but are there any of your students so you would particularly recall and remember the went on in interesting way or oh yeah it wasn't a lot from indeed some of the students I taught in the 1960s were surpassingly brilliant and that remain in touch with some of them since that hasn't been so since then because I don't think I was gifted as a supervisor and I didn't very much enjoy it I always found that my mood is a supervisor depended entirely on the mood of a student so the student was depressed with the course or it it's very interesting I immediately felt well maybe that's true but some good at lifting people's spirits only counts best of teaching the really gifted of my students from that period the two who became most famous and who might remain in touch with never since well first of all right Porter whom I taught all the way through and also admitted to the college who was at all times an extraordinary form double scholar unbelievably hardworking and unbelievably wide-ranging and died very young the other from that period am I also admitted to the College and taught all the way through is now the most famous historian in the world Simon trauma no and he had remained in touch with it's get difficult to be in touch with Simon that because he's usually in airplane who but we email each other and I've remained in touch with him and nowadays one has to defend Simon sometimes against one's professional colleagues but he's genius in his way and he is adored of language he's also a lovely person but I cannot continue the list in the nature of things that list will hardly contain a large number of really celebrated historians but I stopped supervising quite early in my career at Cambridge because in 1974 I went on sabbatical leave to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and while I was there they conceived the idea that I should remain there and gave me a five-year contract and in the course of that time yes they me to stay forever now I didn't stay forever but I did accept the five-year contract so I was actually in Princeton from 1974 through to 1979 and only returned to Cambridge somewhat short of the end of my contract with the Institute because I was elected to the chair of political science here in Cambridge and at the same time my wife was elected to a research fellowship at Curtin and at the same time they were starting a family so everything gets back to bring us back home and you say your wife you may not want to be pregnant to this but you'd be married before yes I married very young I was 25 when although I married someone we've been together some time before that but I think that was my first publisher with Patricia yes she and I were married for a brief time I suppose we were together for five or six years but it was quickly evident to both of us although I don't think that we were able to confess this even to ourselves let alone to each other and well it came to pieces rather messily and I left for Australia and was away from many months I blame myself but there's no more to be said about him except that after some years when I was not attached or was semi-detached my present wife Susan James professor we have been together we haven't been married all this time we got married when we started to have a family but we've been together for about 35 or more years and so of course it feels like a whole lifetime to return to to Princeton yeah who started in history and then moved into political sciences is that right that's correct and your page on whatever it is Wikipedia said this has had a great effect on you and was a very important turning point in your life so what way is that true I'm sure the question no that that's an interesting claim I was invited by John Eliot to be a candidate for the position that I had from 74 to 75 which was in the history department but during that year I came to know very well the three really astonishing figures who were running the little social theory group there and as history has continued to unfold they have all turned out to be as able would say world historical and one was Thomas Kuhn who was in the next office who am I ready new of course through the structure of scientific revolutions a work that had been very influential upon me that kind of anti popular and anti positivist way of thinking about intellectual change one was Albert Hirschman whom I wasn't able to learn from directly he was a development economist but who was a picture to me what it would be like to be a cosmopolitan intelligence I never of course rivaled dad but he was a wonderful linguist wonderful intelligence he knew everything about the history of our children many languages a stupendous figure but perhaps most important to me was different girls who became a lifelong friend and act whose memorial service I spoke last March in Princeton enormously to my sadness and his work on capsule theory was very important indeed to me I should say that cliff and I were both greatly influenced by Vickers time as a theorist of language and culture and so I didn't learn as much as I might have learned from cliff when I arrived at the Institute because when I was an undergraduate we all read finish time and it was genuinely very very important to me and in the work on the philosophy of language which I was publishing in the 1960s and early 70s he was the heroic figure who stood behind much of what I was trying to say about the relation of understanding meaning in the traditional sense to understanding what is meant by what is said that's really the fundamental move that is made in the philosophical investigations and so I suppose what made cliff and I into friends was that we so largely agreed about some philosophical questions not I think because if I was a disciple of his although by the way I think he is one of the most riveting the intelligent persons I have ever encountered over a very wide range of subjects and I was always very influenced by him and I would always think when I came back to England of anything that was going on in American life I wonder what cliff would think about that he was always a touchstone for me but I became very close to him intellectually and personally also so that maybe what this writer you mentioned to me is speaking of but I would say that what mattered to me most in those years that I was in Princeton was something really different which was that with a level of trust which shows that we're speaking more innocent in a better world I was simply left to get on with whatever I was doing nobody particularly asked me what I was doing this unit was probably right in the book but it wasn't as if at the end of the year the director of the Institute said well we've been paying you is fat salary what whatever have you been doing but what in fact I was doing was I was trying to catch up I think I had done a lot of work in the sixties arising out of my philosophical interest but I've come to the University with and that work turned out to be in some cases quite influential one of my essays when I published in 1969 remains much my worst subject piece for the humiliating you and I eventually collected in which observer it was an essay called meaning and understanding in the history of ideas they're not continued nesting no I had actually published all those essays in a book called the guarding method but that stopped me really getting going on historical research along with the responsibilities I heard and although I began to do my research on hopes that I've already spoken about that to only came out in the form of a number of articles eventually I published those in a separate book as well called Thompson civil science but 90 of those were really proper books their connections of papers but I had conceived in the late 60s the idea of writing a really general work in history political theory which we tried to be an illustration of the view was then fundamental to me but interpretation is a matter of recovering what texts are doing and of situating them in the political context which they arose and more fundamentally I wanted to write a book which showed that the problems of political theory are set by politics that we shouldn't make this distinction to think that was very illegal practice political theory is always in meshed in practice so as it's just the theory of that practice so that was quite an ambitious book that I'd conceived when I was first appointed as a lecturer in English which was in 1965 I began to sketch those ideas in my lectures working on quite broad canvas but I couldn't get it all to come together and the opportunity to go to Princeton in 1974 was for me the opportunity to write that book and when I returned to Cambridge in 1979 imagine what must have got me the chair was that I had written it and I published it in 1978 in two volumes poured the foundations of modern political thought which was in fact my first book but that was what was important for me about Christian that I was given at the time completely on Paris simply to get on with writing more something that was by an ISTAT that's a very large piece of work you mentioned the people at Princeton who were in various fields but none of them really in political theory or political history but again the Wikipedia person says you are one of the two members of the Cambridge School famous Cambridge School uo1 and JGA pocock is the other so was Pocock around then oh that's interesting John Pokot was very important to my work from an early stage because he was writing in the early sixties very interesting methodological pieces which were very Collingwood Ian is housed in a different way Collingwood talks about how each text we study should be thought of as an answer particular question as I said John talked about different texts having different levels of abstraction but that when I read II also reinforced in my mind the thought that these works that were studying are not all doing the same thing we've got to try and find out what their underlying purposes are I wanted the whole discipline to be more quantities that I wanted to be very normalized about it and watch it the unit of analysis to be a text and the context within forbidded John was already thinking along those lines and what was very important to me was that in the late sixties it may have been or the early 70s he sent me the entire wonder type script whether it was a handwritten document but it was the draft of his great text the Machiavellian moment that was published in 1975 was a great privilege to be sent this and I was sent it because he had been attracted to the two bodies of work that I had by then published my essays on Holmes as a theorist of obligation and my essays on the meaning and speech acts he was interested in both of these and he sent me this text to read and that was very important for me as a wonderful scholarly statement of how to think about development for a national political theory now the first volume of my foundations mantras bethought was called the Renaissance and I travelled over much of the same ground I came back strongly to disagree with John and I could go - why if you like but like well that text was very important and I was very privileged by John's generosity to have been able to internalize it long before it was published in 75 so it became part of my thinking John pure coconut I have remained in touch ever since and my most recent letter from him arrived last week he's now in his 80s but he is undiminished in power and energy and he is a very formidable intellectual historian and a very generous well - he's obviously the generation older than me but he has always been someone who has treated me sort of as a peer but at the same time has been a massive source of encouragement to me but well when I worked first on Nationals political theory there were two orthodoxies that I was really interested in contesting I suppose and one was the view that there had been a tremendous shift especially in history philosophy and therefore in history physical philosophy at the time of the revival as Chilean ISM in the late 13th century the other orthodoxy stated that there was another climacteric moment and noticed this continuous habit of trying to make the Renaissance start with a bang in work party in vain which placed the crucial date a century later this was hunts by Rome's fundamental thought in his classic texts of the crisis of the early Italian Renaissance where he saw the emergence of what he called Pacific humanism which was not Aristotelian but which emerged as I say with a bang around 1,400 a time of of the city-state's and especially the crisis of Republican Florence and endoscope team you know I came to think that both of those stories were wrong but John Pocock I think had bought into the second story very much although in the contribution that he generously made to the volume that was published by Annabel Bretton James Tully in my honor last year he says this is not the case but I must say that surprised me it seemed to me that John's Machiavellian moment took the Hansbrough idea very seriously and began was about in 1400 and with civic humanism what I have wanted to say about the development of moral and political philosophy in the Renaissance has always been the same thing since the 70s and it's been the foundation of much of my research all of the way through since then is that there was no happening was a bad what happened was that there was a kind of Roman culture that was never completely lost and which by a crisis of accretion develops in the Italian peninsula with the emergence of the universities with rhetoric being studied as a basis for understanding law and law fundamental subject that was studied and this rhetorical and heuristic culture which was partially founded of course on the text of Roman law but also incorporated all the major texts of Roman history of moral philosophy was the curriculum that came to be known as the studio permanent artists and that we can trace that right through from the 12th century right through to the period of McEwin Machiavellian Richard Dean II and later that was the book that I tried to write so that was a very non copying sort of book but for me that was the beginning of what would be called the research program that set of views that I arrived at really informed all my work for the next 25 years and it's a program which I've only just succeeded in rounding off were you in front by southern RW a supplement all I mean his 12th century Renault because in a sense he's saying but the Renaissance tops in the 12th century and not on May 14th um yes the revival of universities and so on is a continuation yeah did you come across his work of course well we all read the making of the Middle Ages when I was an undergraduate and in a frankly as I've said that only a rather dismal landscape of medieval history that shown as a beacon extraordinary imagination intelligence and of course it's also a wonderful piece of prose who extraordinarily lucid but it still had this idea that there has to be a moment which is the Renaissance and really that's what I've been trying to contest that book artyom image has died terribly hard I wanted to go test that all the way through there's no world it's the gradual accretion of humanists culture and what interested me was the way in which if you look at some of the great milestones of moral and political philosophy in the Renaissance you can link them back in different ways to this culture of Rome Anytus the texts that were crucial were the texts of Libyan Sallust amongst the historians and to a lesser degree Tacitus and among the philosophers above all Cicero and Seneca that curriculum as it were more or less did it for you and when I wrote my book on Machiavelli which was the first book I wrote the after of the foundations Martin Heidegger thought what I wanted to show is that the understanding of Machiavelli is the understanding of him as a kind of a Roman artist but he's also a satirist of some of those qualities that were mad but the whole discussion of the relation there to the Fortuna and near to unfortunate to be better that whole discussion of freedom virtue glory that you find in Machiavelli this is a recognizing the Roman story what's remarkable about Lackey that it is the satirical term that he gives to solve that so that was one moment in my research program a later one was the book I wrote about it which had been understood entirely as an expression of Scholastic values and I worked in particular of the famous cycle of longevity in Siena on which his essay eventually wrote a book trying to show that the right way to interpret the context the intellectual context in which this was written was that this was a recovery for a city Republic in the mint treasure trove of these Roman values about freedom and the common good and the relation virtue to the promotion of freedom of the common good and so I offered to reinterpretation which I'm afraid has remained controversial which wanted to say that these cycles and nothing to do with recovery about unionism they're all part of this humanist culture that I was seeing developing all the way through I suppose the last part of that cycle of works that I wrote which stemmed from work I originally did in that first volume of the foundations month which was August I became deeply interested in classical theories of freedom eventually I came to think that those theories differed in a really challenging way from the way in which we nowadays have tended to think about critical liberty and I became interested first of all in that rival way of thinking about you to narrator the book on that which emerged out of my inaugural lecturers lead his professor here which was a book called Liberty before liberalism but I also became interested in the question when did we stop thinking about Liberty in this classical a very different way and start thinking about it in a more familiar way and the book that I just managed to finish is about that theme but I've come to think that this insight which is not exclusively mine but which I've worked away at about these rival ways of thinking about freedom has been the most important of the things that I took from my study of Roman antiquity and its influence well we'll come back to that together is that an range snippet - just to finish off on Princeton it was Lawrence stone that Princeton anyway Gigi was he's running McCallum shall become Davis center or whatever it was called yes absolutely he was an extremely powerful presence their home and I have two responses to the name of Lawrence stone being mentioned and one is to recall that he was very generous to me and my wife they were very hospitable and they were very kind to us but the other was that he was although he would have denied it still in his most Maxie's on phase of thinking I'm not sure he ever shook it off really and he thought that the kind of history that I was interested in was just absurd there was no study of intellectual history that was going to be of any autonomous interest because the cause why I think because Lawrence thought something like you know if you tell me your annual income and your class background I'll tell you your believes he must have thought something like that he thought the whole thing was epiphenomena was respect to some more real kind of history which is what we ought to be studying and he was not merely uninterested in what I was doing he was sort of actively off to it and that was the tone in the Department of History that University Princeton at the time it likes to think of itself in retrospect as having been concerned in that period with cultural history in agar Chien way but that was not my experience of it and I kept out of their way which has always been my instinct in fact I have never really very much enjoyed talking about my work until I've done it and I never once went to the Davis center send us in all the years I was at Princeton I just sensed as soon as I saw the semesters list of what was going to be talked about that it was going to make me miserable because they will all be talking about things that seem to mean frankly or very little interest and they were going to take the view that what I was doing wasn't no interest and the best way of keeping my spirits up and continuing to write this large book was just to sit in my office and write it so just as I was a rather boring undergraduate in that way I think so I've remained rather boring scholar in that way I just like to get on with it

Channel: Prof Alan Macfarlane - Ayabaya

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Keywords: Quentin, Skinner, history, renaissance, political, theory, Cambridge

Id: -0rY78EQ2B4

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 02 2008