The name of Quentin Skinner really ought to be more well-known and resonant than it presently is. Offered a teaching fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge upon his graduation based solely on his examination results (a starred first), Professor Skinner’s career has been long, productive and eminent. Praising Oxford’s multidisciplinarity, Skinner casually states that “in some ways I admire Oxford more”. Astonishingly, one of Cambridge’s premier historians could have easily come to Oxford: “I did in fact apply to Oxford and was accepted by Balliol, but in those days there were scholarship examinations … and the one at Cambridge came up first and I took that.” His taste for multidisciplinarity has led him to make brilliant contributions to history, philosophy, politics and even English literature. As an academic, he has anxieties about the rise in tuition fees: he worries about the socially regressive effects, and thinks that the future of universities outside Oxbridge and London is gloomy. Speaking of the universities of this country, he thinks that we “ought to be thinking about ourselves more as a community, but our political masters have told us all to compete with one another.”
Despite the seemingly public relevance of Skinner’s work, he is wary about becoming a public intellectual: “I think there’s a tremendous danger to be avoided there, which is simply that of becoming a pundit, that you have some particular expertise but then you start talking about everything. Very soon you will start talking about things you know nothing about.” I bring up the examples of Dawkins and Hitchens, and while Skinner is careful not to skewer either of them directly and distinguishes between the two, he thinks that someone like Hitchens is the type of intellectual who might “simply end up as someone with opinions.” Being an “opinion machine is … going to lead you to say things which are quite likely to be silly … or which are ignorant.” Dawkins’s polemics tend to “be a little simple-minded or … don’t do justice to some of the questions that might be raised.” There is, he thinks, another kind of atheist, counter to Dawkins and Bertrand Russell, and these are nonetheless interested in religion as “a binding force of societies which might be important irrespective of its truth”: he cites Hobbes, Spinoza and Feuerbach as examples.
Many political acts seem unideological to us, or perhaps pseudo-ideological, but Skinner is adamant that there is a general link between political principles and actions, and “the linkage operates through the key concept of legitimation … in democratic political societies, what you can do in politics depends on what you can legitimise.” Skinner therefore contends that “politicians are condemned to operate within the normative boundaries set up by the existing values of their society.” There is “a unity of theory and practice, always.” Politicians can affect the range of reference of the terms we use to express our principles: he cites, for example, child abuse legislation: “the range of social behaviour which would now be brought under the heading of child abuse and therefore condemned is much wider than it was a generation ago.” But he thinks that “we don’t look to our politicians to be innovators at the level of principle. What we want in politicians is people who are good at running the apparatus of government within the parameters set by values of democracy.”
Since Skinner says, in response to theorists attempting to fix the definitions of terms such as ‘liberty’ and ‘state’, that the battle is all there is, I ask him if the same does not apply to his own work. His reply here is characteristically humble: he is a man who wears his learning lightly. He prefers to see his work, in a rather charming metaphor, as “interventions in some existing conversation.” “The debate is a conversation, it goes on endlessly, it doesn’t have a conclusion.” When I worry that historical writing often ages quite ungracefully, Skinner is quick to point out that “if anything ages less gracefully than history, it is science. Scientific theories as they stand may all be false.” There is, he hypothesises, a “spectrum of decay of cultural objects, where the most open to decay might turn out to be scientific theories and the least open to decay might turn out to be very great lyric poetry.” Here he betrays his literary sympathies and remarks, in wonder, that “it is however astounding to reflect that Shakespeare still holds the stage in the twenty-first century.” He is, however, stoic about his own work, about becoming “footnotes in a history of our subject.”
He does expresse a couple of professional regrets: one of them is not making a more substantial and coherent statement on historical explanation and interpretation. Yet it is heartening to know that for a man nearing seventy, Skinner is exploring new directions: as Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, London, Skinner happily states that “I don’t have to call myself a historian or philosopher, and I find it very liberating. I feel a certain liberation from the professional straitjacket of intellectual history and political theory.”
He is giving the prestigious Clarendon lectures (which makes him the latest in a list of luminaries with names such as Frank Kermode and Margaret Atwood) this academic year at Oxford on “classical theories of rhetoric and their revival and development in the Renaissance.” Skinner’s career, it seems, is going through its own renaissance.
