Hobbes and Republican Liberty Quentin Skinner Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 268.

摘要

In the case of early modern England, fewer scholars have done more to reassess thenhistory of the language of liberty than Quentin Skinner. In his recent book, Hobbesnand Republican Liberty, Skinner argues two points. The first is that Hobbes’s politi-ncal theory is a sustained refutation of the increasingly influential republican concep-ntion of liberty. The second is that Hobbes’s conceptualization of liberty undergoes ansubstantive change between the publication of De Cive in 1642 and Leviathan inn1651 to the point where “Hobbes’s analysis of liberty in Leviathan represents not anrevision but a repudiation of what he had earlier argued” ~xv!. These two points arenrelated insofar as the conception of liberty articulated in Leviathan is a direct responsento the increasing popularity of neo-Roman or republican conceptions of liberty artic-nulated within the context of the civil war and revolution.