Wood, Ellen Meiksins. "Why It Matters." LRB September 25, 2008.

Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century, ‘has been insensitive to the range of conditions that can limit our freedom of action’? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin’s influential defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism. Yet Skinner’s own understanding of liberty is not immune to the same awkward question. The contest between republicanism and liberalism has had continuing currency in Anglo-American political theory; and no one has contributed more than Skinner, a hegemonic figure in the study of political thought, to promoting the republican tradition. He has challenged Berlin’s conception of ‘negative’ liberty not by endorsing the ‘positive’ but by counterposing the liberal version of negative liberty to what he has preferred to call the ‘neo-Roman’ idea. Hobbes has long been his principal villain. He is, for Skinner, the philosopher who systematically replaced the ‘neo-Roman’ – or republican – conception of free citizenship with the restricted notion of liberty as nothing more than the absence of external impediments to action. Hobbes effected this theoretical transformation, at a particularly turbulent historical moment, with deliberate polemical intent. In his new book, Skinner traces in scrupulous detail the refinements and changes in Hobbes’s ideas about freedom as the English Civil War proceeded. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n18/wood06_.html.