Quentin Skinner is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London. His latest book is Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Quentin Skinner discuss the “republican” conception of liberty, whether it can found a real political alternative to the status quo, and what that tells us about the liberal tradition.
This transcript has been edited and lightly condensed for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Thank you very much. It’s a particular honor to me, both because I admire your work and because, when I was an undergraduate studying history in Cambridge, you were the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. I’ve been familiar with your work for a very long time and attended your lectures and so on. So it’s very interesting to be able to have this conversation.
You have a new book which picks up on one of the central themes in your work, and really is, I think, the magisterial statement of it—which is that there is a neglected tradition of how to think about liberty that you think could really help us make sense of a political world, but that has gotten somewhat lost over the course not just of the last years or decades, but of the last centuries.
Perhaps we can start with: what is the dominant conception of liberty which takes over, particularly over the course of the 18th century?
Quentin Skinner: Yes. Well, that does seem to me an excellent place to start. I think that, from the period that you’re talking about—and I would even date it rather specifically from the end of the 18th century—there is a kind of change around from what had been a hegemonic ideology in thinking about liberty to a different one. Now, the different one, which I think is still dominant, did not emerge at that time, but it emerged as dominant at that time. That is the view that, when we talk about personal freedom, or indeed civil or political liberty, what we are talking about is absence of constraint.
That’s why, in the traditions that we’ve inherited, people are always very anxious to talk about negative liberty. The presence of liberty is marked by an absence. You are free if you are not restrained or not prevented from acting according to your will.
Now, it’s not quite as simple as that, because that tradition has always been divided into two. Most have thought that this restraint can either be physical—that’s to say, someone stops you from doing something, prevents you from acting according to your will—or it can take the form of coercion of the will, when you threaten someone with bad consequences.
Mounk: So perhaps because I think the physical element of this now seems very radical to us and quite unaccustomed—it’s the position held, for example, by Thomas Hobbes in the Leviathan, who says: if there are laws against being able to criticize the king, you are free to criticize him until the moment somebody comes and physically restrains you.
Explain a little bit what that view is and how it contrasts with a view that then becomes more influential—where threats also count as a threat to liberty.
Skinner: That is the other strand of this first view. The classic statement of it, as you rightly say, is Thomas Hobbes. Of course, he’s writing Leviathan in 1651, which is why I was careful to say that this doesn’t emerge in the late 18th century. It’s always been there. Hobbes takes the view—an ingenious one—that the effect of coercion is not to frustrate your will, but rather to change it. That is to say, coercive threats have the effect of motivating you to act in a different way. Hobbes says that’s an expression of your will—it’s not a denial of your will. That does not take away your freedom. He says, in a typical moment of humor, that when a man throws his goods into the sea for fear that his ship should sink, he not only does it willingly—he does it very willingly. So that is the action of a man who was free. There’s no coercion. The only thing that takes away freedom of action, as you say in your very interesting point there, is someone actually coming along and shutting your mouth or stopping you from doing something.
But that, of course, is not the usual view. The usual view is the one that I think we associate in the Anglophone tradition with the rise of utilitarianism—Bentham, John Stuart Mill—and which was continued in the high liberal tradition in the United States as well as in this country right up to the present generation. In this country, the famous work of Isaiah Berlin on theories of freedom, and of course John Rawls’s great masterpiece of 1971 on the idea of justice and the place of liberty in that theory of justice, is that liberty is absence of constraint.
Mounk: There’s something intuitive about this—at least to us—perhaps in part because we’re the inheritors of this tradition, right? The idea here is sometimes called, in a more analytical philosophical context, freedom as non-interference. The notion is: I am free to the extent that nobody is interfering with my actions. In this strand of the tradition, that doesn’t mean someone is already physically restraining me. It can mean a law that is restraining me. It can be the threat of punishment that is restraining me. But what it really signifies is: I am free insofar as I can do what I’m able to do without some human agent coming along and saying, no, I’m going to bar your entry into this building, or, I’m going to throw you in jail if you do this.
There is something straightforward and intuitive about it. Tell us about how that conception came to be, why at one point there was another way of thinking about liberty, and why you worry about its dominance in our political discourse today.
Skinner: Well, thank you, yes. That would lead me to begin to talk about the rival tradition, which has come to be called—unfortunately, I think, and we could talk about that if you like—the republican view of liberty. It comes from a classical era in which it was a republican view, but it was embraced by many people who would have been horrified to be called republicans.
Mounk: Just to be clear here about why you’re concerned about this: obviously, in the American context, “republican” might mean the Republican political party. But you also mean that there could be people who believe it is appropriate to have a constitutional monarch—like in the United Kingdom—and nevertheless embrace this view. So “republican” isn’t just a troubling term to you because of its contemporary political resonance in the United States, but also because it gets bound up with this rather different debate about whether you can have a constitutional monarch and still be free.
Skinner: That’s why I want to avoid it altogether. I don’t want to talk about republican liberty. Some distinguished work has been done under that heading, especially by Philip Pettit and his many followers. But for reasons that you’ve just articulated, we want to keep away from that, I think.
So let me just say about this other tradition that most interests me: they do not wish to deny that if someone restrains or prevents you from acting at will, then for that moment or that time, you lose your liberty of action. If you are put in jail, you have for the time being lost your liberty of action. However, here’s the crucial point. The writers I’m interested in do not think that that is what you need to focus on if you wish to understand the concept of civil or political liberty. Because they think there is a logically prior question to ask, and that is not, is anyone restraining you from acting, but could anyone restrain or prevent you from acting according to your autonomous will if they chose? That is to say, are you at the moment living in subjection to or dependence upon the will and the power of anyone else? Now, why is that instead held to be the question to ask about freedom and unfreedom? Here’s the point. If there’s any such arbitrary power over your life, then you never act freely. There’s no such thing as freedom of action.
Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you don’t miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app.
If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk’s Substack, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
And if you are having a problem setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email our podcast team at leonora.barclay@persuasion.community
We shouldn’t have started with that, because this takes over the whole field. It says: even if there’s no interference, nevertheless, if you’re subject to somebody else’s will, your actions never express your autonomous will. They express your will, but they also reflect the permission of those who have the power to intervene—and could intervene with impunity at any point if they should choose.
So what it means to possess your liberty is to be a free person—as in the Roman tradition, in the Roman law, a liber homo, a free man or woman—and thus not to be subject to, and hence dependent on, the arbitrary will and power of anyone else. Then you can act according to your autonomous will, and that is what it means to be a free person.
One thing to be added here is: these writers are not saying that if you are dependent on someone else, that inevitably means that you have forfeited your liberty. All of us, for example, are dependent on the goodwill of our friends. That doesn’t make us unfree. The unfreedom comes only if you are subject to an arbitrary power—the will of someone else which has power to control you. If you ask, well, what do they mean by arbitrary? This is just echoing arbitrium in the Roman law tradition and thus in Latin. It just means they can act according to their will. It’s uncontrolled. It’s unregulated. It’s outside the law. It’s just their will. The main point they want to make—and now they’ve articulated a fundamental distinction crucial to the ancient world—is: we’ve now shown you what it is to be a slave. Because a free person acts autonomously. To be a slave is to be someone who has a master.
Mounk: There’s a lot of very interesting things in this, including this crucial distinction between being in some ways subject to the will of other people, but not being subject to the arbitrary will of other people. I want to return to that later.
But first, perhaps you can just elucidate this a little bit by giving some concrete examples. This view acknowledges that interference generally will count as a diminishment of your liberty—that if somebody is interfering with what you want to do, then that is reducing your liberty. But it is saying, well, we also need to be worried about these forms of domination. We also need to be worried about these forms of arbitrary interference.
Why do these two things come apart? Why is it that if nobody’s interfering with me, I may nevertheless be subject to this arbitrary will? What are some concrete examples of where that might be the case?
Skinner: Their point is: it may never happen—the bad thing that takes away all of it. It could happen at any moment. The model for the Republicans in the English Republican tradition—which, of course, flourished in the brief period when Great Britain was a republic, that is to say, in the mid-17th century—they’re very keen on the point that you’ve just made. The answer that they would give to you, which I shall now give to you, is that the great example—James Harrington in The Oceana, or John Milton—is the Sultan.
There is no law. The Sultan is the law. His will is the law. That may be fine, but as Harrington says, in a republic, your rights are clear because they’re enshrined in the law. Under the Sultan, you have no rights. Anything could happen to you, and that would still be within the bounds of what is allowed the Sultan, because he is the master. As Harrington memorably puts it, you are only the tenant—not just of your lands, which can be taken from you with impunity at any point—but of your head, which can also be taken from you with impunity at any point.
That is called despotism. Despotism is very common. They see it all over Europe. They dread it under the Stuart regime. That is what you really have to fear: what could happen to you. It may not, but it could at any time.
Mounk: I think two other ways of trying to make sense of this in my mind—you can tell me if I’m somehow mischaracterizing this in concrete terms today or within the relatively recent past—are:
One, to cite somebody who you might put down as a liberal you’re concerned about. I think John Stuart Mill’s writing in The Subjection of Women really speaks to this. This was a time when he married his longtime friend and collaborator, Harriet Taylor. He acquired, by the act of marriage, a lot of rights over her and her property. In a very moving statement, he disavowed those rights because he believed that the only truly meaningful relationship is one of equals, in which he doesn’t have those kinds of rights over his wife. Of course, he also acknowledges that this is ultimately an empty legal act. He wishes it would have legal efficacy, but because of the background conditions, he still holds certain rights over his wife. Even if he never intends to exercise those rights, and even if he publicly pronounces that he will never exercise those rights, the legal framework of that time still makes it impossible for man and wife to be truly equal. The man holds in reserve these legal rights over his wife that, even by an act of will, he cannot abnegate.
To give a very different kind of example: it always struck me that a lot of the power of the television show The Office, particularly in the rather less sweet—and therefore, I think, ultimately more compelling—British version, comes from an illustration of arbitrary power.
David Brent, the boss in that show, played by Ricky Gervais, is in some ways a well-meaning man. He’s somebody who at least claims to care a lot about his employees, who sometimes bends over backwards to do whatever they want rather than following company policy. He’s also somebody who holds arbitrary power over them and acts in unpredictable and inconsistent ways, which make him quite tyrannical to them—even when he isn’t aware of that himself, even when he doesn’t mean to act badly necessarily, even when he doesn’t always exercise that power. That, to me, always seemed like one kind of illustration of what it means to suffer the arbitrary will of another—even when they might not exercise it.
Skinner: Absolutely. Let me take up both of those cases. Let’s take the second first, because the workplace is an important instance of how important it is that we should be thinking of liberty in relation to dependence and subjection rather than restraint. You don’t get restrained in the office, but there is someone who has power over you—and that includes, in the worst case, power to dismiss you simply at will. Marx correctly described this as wage slavery, and it’s a very important feature of Marx’s theory that he’s not a Marxist about liberty. He is a Republican about liberty. That is to say, he believes that the kind of dependency that you suffer if you are in a de-unionized or non-unionized workforce is slavery. He calls it wage slavery, and he’s taking us right back to the classical tradition there.
On your first point, this is very important. John Stuart Mill changes his mind. In the Essay on Liberty of 1859, Mill articulates an absolutely classic statement of what we talked about much earlier when I was laying out the distinction between these two traditions. He wants to say that liberty is an absence of either physical or coercive restraint. That’s the definition of liberty that underlies the discussion. Now, in The Subjection of Women, he has, quite frankly, changed his mind. It’s very interesting that he does so exactly at the time when the question of the exclusion of women from certain very important legal rights held by men is actually under debate. Until the legislation of 1871, women were not able to make a will.
There was one extraordinarily important point where they had no autonomous will—which was that they couldn’t make a will, they couldn’t dispose of their own property if they were married women. Of course, that is, as Mill says in his title, a case of subjection. These are not equal rights under the law. There is some power which does not apply to men, which does apply to women. The law should apply equally to everyone. So yes, Harriet Taylor, I think, is visibly present in that great text. The chapter picks up a long-standing 18th-century argument in early feminism, which comes out very early on in Mary Astell, in Reflections on Marriage of 1705, when she says that the difficulty about men seeing themselves under the law and women under the law is that women are not just under the law—they’re under the men. She says, we are slaves. That is her reflection on marriage. Women are enslaved to their husbands because they do not have anything except the goodwill to rely upon.
Mounk: Another context in which that distinction then becomes relevant is in the importance that different traditions ascribe to political institutions—because that relates to whether or not the will to which one is subject is arbitrary. At least to the purest defenders of the earlier view, who makes the laws isn’t that important. What’s important is the nature of the laws. If restriction of your liberty is simply that you’re being interfered with, then who made the law that interferes with you is, to some extent, much less important than the extent to which it interferes with you.
Perhaps the starkest and most interesting formulation of this comes from Thomas Hobbes, who says that the word libertas—liberty—is written in large letters on the turrets of the city of Lucca to this day. But this doesn’t imply that individual men there have more liberty, or more immunity from service to the Commonwealth, than men do in Constantinople—one of the images of unfreedom at the time. Whether a Commonwealth is monarchic or democratic, the freedom is still the same. Hobbes’s idea was: there are laws that you have to follow in many republics. Benjamin Constant made this point very powerfully in a speech in the 19th century: that actually, back in ancient Athens, where people were very involved in making laws in a way that we’re not today in modern democracies, nevertheless, the extent of the laws was very, very far-reaching. You couldn’t change or add a string to your lyre without offending the ethos, the census, in a way that would really radically restrict. So we should really focus on what the laws are.
Whereas the Republican tradition would say: no, it matters whether we co-authored those laws collectively as citizens of a self-governing entity, or whether those laws were imposed on us without any input.
Tell us a little bit about, when we scale up from private relations—as we’re talking about in the case of Mill—to the workplace, as in the slightly surprising analogy to The Office—to a political level, what would the difference between these traditions be in thinking about the importance of liberty?
Skinner: That quotation from Hobbes is, in fact, exactly the passage to which Harrington so devastatingly replies when he says it’s completely ridiculous to say that the citizens of Lucca are not more free than the citizens of Constantinople. Because in Constantinople, the will of the Sultan is the law. There is no other law. It’s simply his arbitrary will. So you are subjected to his arbitrary will. That is the definition of a slave. Slavery is the antonym of liberty. So what the hell is Hobbes talking about?
Hobbes is trying to get away from the fact that he perfectly well understands that, in a republican tradition, what is crucial is not how many laws are made—which is Hobbes’ point—but who makes the law. Because if the law is made in such a way that you have not consented to it, then it confronts you as an arbitrary power.
We’re now talking about the entire ideological framework of the American Revolution, because this was exactly the analysis that the American colonists produced in the face of the British. It will be a very good illustration of the distinction that you want me to draw if I take that example.
In 1763, when the British finally managed to end the Seven Years’ War, they had run the national debt up to some absolutely hair-raising level. The country was effectively bankrupt and had to raise a lot of new taxes. The decision that was made in 1764 was that they would directly tax the American colonies—which they had never done before. There had been tariffs, of course, between both countries, but there had never been direct taxation simply for the purpose of raising money from the mother country, as they liked to call themselves in Britain. The immediate response—I’m talking of 1764—from John Otis in the Massachusetts General Assembly is to cite this and say: we are being taxed without having any representation in the decision. There is nobody who is representing us in Parliament. So the law confronts us as a purely arbitrary power. The British are reducing the colonies to slavery.
That is the language they begin to use. If you look at the very earliest of the major pamphleteers of the American Revolution, they all invoke it. Stephen Hopkins, governor of Rhode Island, in The Rights of Colonies, makes the point. But most of all, John Dickinson in his Letters from a Farmer—one of the great texts of the Revolution—says: taxation without representation is a wholly arbitrary power. Then in letter seven he says, I say it with indignation, and I say it with grief: you have made us slaves, because you have taxed us without our consent. You have taken away our property arbitrarily. That is how you behave towards slaves. You simply dominate them. You make them subject to your arbitrary power. You give them no right of appeal.
When Adams and Jefferson really begin to heat up the rhetoric in the early 1770s, that’s the point they make. Jefferson says, again, these are mere acts of power. They reduce us systematically to the condition of slaves. That is the answer that animates the Revolution. What’s very important about this alternative way of thinking about rights is the claim that there can be no lawful form of government in which the law is passed other than by the consent of the people. That, I have to say, is a problem for this view of freedom, and it’s one that hasn’t, I think, perhaps been properly faced. Just to make sure I’m not just an advocate but someone who’s trying to think about this theory, I’d like to add that point.
First, we have to say: there must be a represented will. Nobody thinks that the entire population of the colonies can be shipped over to England in order to say whether they agree to taxation. So they will have to be represented by someone whom they trust. But that’s already not their will. That’s a represented will, and it embodies an element of trust.
The further problem is—as we all know—democracies operate, even at their best, by majoritarianism. You are always, that is, liable to be in a minority. So there’s always going to be someone whose will has not been represented in the law, because they would have voted against that law if they had been properly represented. That would be their view. That is the dilemma this view is left with.
Rousseau’s great aspiration was to solve the dilemma by distinguishing the will of all from the general will. Much hangs on whether you think we can make good sense of that distinction. I can’t myself make very good sense out of that alleged distinction or see what the volonté générale is. If there were such a thing and we could make sense of it, then that would solve the problem. Otherwise, the problem remains.
But the claim of the American colonists remains: you have enslaved us. That is contrary to the law of nature. Slavery is contrary to the law of nature on all these accounts, because we are all born free. They love to cite Locke in this connection. All men are born free. They must voluntarily enter into a state. The state must be a reflection of their consent. Ultimately, they are judges of the state, and they can depose at will if there is tyranny or if there is despotism. So what happens if you think, well, there is tyranny and despotism? You declare your freedom. What would the act of declaration of freedom be? It would be a declaration of independence. That is the theory of freedom we are and must be talking about. It is the founding ideal of the American Republic—liberty as independence. And it is they who say so.
Mounk: Right. You see that from the fact that the first famous document is the Declaration of Independence, with the famous slogan: no taxation without representation, and so on. I find the importance of that—historically, at that moment—as you describe it, very compelling in your new book.
Skinner: Well, it’s important to me because it is a declaration of independence, and I’m trying to talk about the apogee, as it were, of that view of freedom—which very quickly then comes under tremendous fire.
Mounk: I want to stay for a moment on this interesting side point about the problem being normative. I think that is a persistent problem just in our conception of democracy—not just in a particular conception of liberty, but in the way that we tend to think about democracy in general, right? If the justification for the laws to which I’m subject is in part that we don’t believe Hobbes, that we think it does make a difference whether I am part of a people that has signed off on the laws that constrain me through some form of legitimate democratic process, then there is a fundamental puzzle about why that should still bind me if I’m in the minority. If I didn’t vote for this law, why is it that nevertheless I should be bound by it?
One response to that is the one that you ascribe to Rousseau, who certainly has formulated it in the most stark way, but that is actually still very present in the Federalist Papers and other founding documents of the United States, and in our conception of democracy more broadly. When you look at Federalist 10, for example, there’s a lot of talk about the idea that representatives aren’t just meant to carry the individual views of different citizens or different districts to Congress, but that they will refine and enlarge the public view by deliberating about what is truly in the public interest. That conception of a public interest is some perhaps softer version of something like the Volonté Générale.
There is a real challenge in our democratic theory to this idea, particularly at a time when it doesn’t always feel like parliaments are particularly deliberative. It doesn’t always feel as though what truly goes on in the United States Congress today is hundreds of people earnestly deliberating about what is in the public good. That feels like a rather naive description of what actual day-to-day politics looks like. If we give up on that idea, then this dilemma returns with quite a lot of force. What do we make of that?
Skinner: Well, I think it is a dilemma for democracies. I don’t think that, as I’ve been saying, there’s an easily attained solution to it. The alternative—the Hobbesian alternative—is one that I would want to rule out immediately, because it has to depend on an analysis of the nature of man. It’s very ingeniously presented by Hobbes, and the view is that we have to consider what life would be like without law. Of course, everyone in the contractarian tradition liked that thought experiment: what would it be like to live without law? Locke is famous for saying, well, we’re endowed by reason, and reason is the law of nature. We’d be able to intuit some fundamental laws of nature, which need to be laws of our state. There’s the optimistic picture of how we can at least get this going. Hobbes, of course, says no—the state of nature would be a state of war because of the nature of man being so competitive. What we have to do is to alienate our natural rights. That form of absolutism combats various forms of something near to republicanism or even democracy throughout the recent centuries of the Western tradition. Hobbes is the absolutist who says: there may be rights of nature, but in setting up a civil association, in setting up a state, those have to be given up into the hands of a sovereign power. That sovereign power must then operate them for the common good. The more you move in that direction, the more the form that will be taken by that state cannot be a democratic form. Hobbes, of course, eagerly embraces that. He’s not a royalist—he doesn’t defend the Stuarts—but he is a monarchist. He does think that the government must be unitary.
All of that is a protest against the tradition that you and I have been talking about. I’m not pretending that it would be easy to implement a perfect form of the idea of 1776, but that is the project. It’s perfectly true that when it came to the ratification of the Constitution of the United States fifteen years later—when finally all the states did agree to ratify—the Constitution is a much less radical document than the Declaration. They had seen that there were going to be big difficulties about getting people in an enormous landmass, with different interests in different states, to come to some kind of agreement about what the laws shall be. It turns out to be a presidential system. That’s what you’ve left yourselves with. It’s more what the exponents of the view that we’ve been talking about would call presidential rather than republican. Republics don’t have presidents, except as ornaments. They don’t start a constitution—as the United States does—by asking, well, what are the executive powers? Executive powers in the radical version of this view are in the hands of the people.
That brings up a further very big issue. We’re not solving these problems, but I’m just giving you a way of thinking about them. The people who are sent to represent me—are they there in order to give the more tutored views that I would not myself give, which is one vision in England and one vision in the United States as well? Or are they delegates? If you send someone to a conference in your name, then notice that they’ve got to act in your name. That is to say, they say what you would have said. That’s a very different way of thinking about representation. That would have to carry us into that very large debate: are these representatives delegates, or do they have their own autonomy?
Mounk: Two thoughts here. One is that I think the problem you outline exists on either of the views about the nature of representation, I think. If what you’re really concerned about is not being dominated by an outside force, and if you recognize that any laws potentially are arbitrary if they don’t take your views and interests into account in the appropriate ways, then you sort of have a dilemma.
If on one end you say you have delegates that are bound to carry your view to Westminster in London or to Washington, D.C.—in that case, if you’re in the numerical minority, it would feel like the law is coercing you. You don’t have any meaningful influence over it, since you’re in the minority. There’s something very problematic about this.
Part of the solution to this is to say, well, instead of having a delegate, you have a representative, and they actually deliberate. What’s meaningful about the deliberation is that it’s not just the sum of the majority view that is then imposed on you. It’s that they actually do track something like the true public interest or the public good.
But if we then don’t feel that either such a public good exists, or that empirically it’s very unrealistic to think that the House of Parliament today or the House of Congress today actually are doing anything like tracking that kind of public good, then again, from the perspective of this conception of liberty, you should be very troubled about where we are—shouldn’t you? Am I getting something wrong?
Skinner: They never, in the tradition I’m talking about, take the view that delegacy can possibly be the answer. They don’t fully face the difficulty which that leaves them with, which is that if it’s not delegacy, then it’s majoritarianism, and then the minority will feel that the law is not a reflection of their will. The answer that would have to be given to that is that although it may only be a majority, a majority is as good as we can do, and the question is whether that majority has acted arbitrarily—whether it is now acting in such a way that some fundamental rights are being overturned.
Of course, the war was fought from 1775 in the colonies—on the grounds that what had happened in Great Britain was not an expression of the Constitution. It was an expression of arbitrary power. Everybody in the tradition I’m talking about agrees that if a power can be shown to be arbitrary—that is to say, that the people who are subject to that power have been enslaved—then there is a natural right to resist slavery. That’s what they see themselves as doing. That gives you the best that you can do. It’s very hard to see how there can be a better best than that when we’re talking about very large communities.
As John Locke says at the end—and they love to quote this—you ask me, in the case of an arbitrarily imposed power, who shall be judge? He says, well, in that case, the people shall be judge. The people must rise up and remove that power.
Ultimately, the doctrine solves its problems, to answer your question, by being potentially revolutionary. The people shall be judge. It goes back to the people, and they get rid of this and start again. Or they get rid of it entirely, as happened in 1776 or the 1780s after they defeat the British, and you say, okay, we’re out of here. We’re starting all over again with a completely different story, and we’re calling it the United States.
Mounk: I want to suggest to you another possible solution to the underlying moral dilemma that we’re facing here, I think. That is what I would call the philosophically liberal answer to this, which I think would go something like this.
The right concern is twofold. It is, first of all, that you want to be able to live your life freely and in a self-determined manner—live your life in such a way that people aren’t telling you what to do, aren’t impeding in particular with the things that are most central to a human life, like your own choice about what to say and not say, how to worship and whether to worship at all, and so on and so forth.
Secondly, we then obviously need some political guarantees to make sure that we maintain that freedom over time. The problem with having a dictator who promises us those things is that even though we might have that for a minute or two, it might be gone next week or next month, and that’s not good enough. We recognize that some of the laws by which we will be bound are going to be made by shifting political majorities, and that it may sometimes be rather uncomfortable to be in one of those minorities. We can lessen the feeling of that—we can ensure that that doesn’t fundamentally impede our freedom—by writing a bill of rights, by saying there are a certain set of basic liberal freedoms that we are always guaranteed, irrespective of who is in the majority.
Even if the majority wants to make laws prohibiting us from worshipping in a particular way, prohibiting us from criticizing the powerful in particular ways, prohibiting us from engaging in forms of artistic expression that may be offensive to the great majority of our neighbors, we will always retain those rights because they are enshrined in our fundamental political documents. We have enough democratic self-governance to assure its persistence. If that, to me, is a formulation of our mainstream political tradition—right? That seems to me like one way of talking about how people today would describe the American political system, and how they would describe our way of thinking about freedom. What is it that’s missing? Why is it that we need to recover the conception of freedom that you talk about with such clarity and eloquence in your book and in your work in order to make those points? Why is it that that’s not enough?
Skinner: The liberal view of liberty is ultimately uninterested in forms of government. As you say, it asks that there should be an individuation, and that people should be able to pursue their goals as they wish. It can move to a minimalist and anarchistic form, as it does in mid-19th-century America: he governs best who governs least. That says, look, we’re not so interested in who is making the laws—we just don’t want there to be very many laws. We want to be absolutely left alone. It moves in a kind of anarchistic direction, which was revived by people like Robert Nozick in response to Rawls’s form of liberalism. One danger with it is that it is actually dangerous to public order and is potentially anti-democratic.
The response that is given ex ante by the tradition that I’m interested in is—well, there are two responses, and they are interestingly different—but they come down to the idea that at the absolute basis of your society, there must be some rights that are absolute and are not subject to majoritarian discussion at all, and they’ve been put beyond the reach of any legislation to change them. That is crucial in the British case with the Bill of Rights. The British like to think they don’t have a constitution, but there is a Bill of Rights in 1689, which reiterates a view of what I was interested in your calling fundamental rights. The modern terminology would be to talk about human rights or natural rights. It’s a very interesting—and, I think, important—question to ask: what view of rights do we want to go with our view about liberty?
The view of rights that is enshrined in the declaration in the British Constitution—and they are still beyond the power of statute to change them—are what are held to be rights so fundamental, as the 1689 constitution says, that they cannot by any means be changed. They include habeas corpus—that is to say, the right not to be imprisoned without cause and trial—the right of self-defense, which even Hobbes allows, of course, and the right to hold property. These rights are held to be fundamental. They’re not natural rights. They are rights that are inherited liberties. They’ve stood the test of time. They’ve been shown to be essential to being a free state. This is as near to guaranteeing that you are a free state as can be given, in addition to the view that the freedom of people must be freedom from dependence.
Against that, there stands a very different tradition, which we also know from the radical English story—of Milton, Sidney, Locke, Wollstonecraft—all through the 17th and 18th century. This is the idea of a human right: that there are God-given rights, which are universal moral demands that everyone can make upon everyone else. We make a lot of that nowadays. It’s a metaphysical idea. The alternative idea of fundamental rights has something to be said for it, although we don’t use that vocabulary anymore in trying to think about these intricacies about liberty in the state. I think that it would be well worth going back to this tradition to think about rights as well as to think about liberty. There’s something strange about having a metaphysics of rights in which, as in the United Nations Declaration, there are 29 human rights which are held to be self-evident. What’s happening here is that the idea of a right is ballooning into what it would be nice to have or what would make a nice society. To say that these are human rights doesn’t seem to me to say anything.
The idea of a fundamental right is one where you can say, well, look, this has always worked in our society. It continues to work. People want it. We should therefore continue it. If we think of better ones, we’ll add them. But they are fundamental in the sense that they’ve stood the test of time. This sounds rather like Edmund Burke’s view of rights, but it is the traditional common law view in the English tradition. I think it deals with some of these questions that you’re asking about.
Mounk: That’s a very interesting distinction, and I sort of stumbled upon the term fundamental rights without thinking about it in the moment. I think you’re right to point to the fact that there are important verbal distinctions between whether we talk about human rights, natural rights, and, of course, fundamental rights.
Skinner: Yes. What I’m saying is that the distinction is between thinking of rights historically—fundamental rights, which are intrinsic to the history of the polity—so Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights in this country—by contrast with the metaphysical view of rights, which is that they’re universal moral demands that somehow everyone has an obligation to acknowledge.
Now, amazingly, the claim is—in the United Nations Declaration—we can actually list them. Some of them would look very strange in other societies, which nevertheless feel that they are considering the rights of their people.
Mounk: That speaks to a deeper concern that you have, and a lot of intellectual historians have, about trying to justify things that are quite historically contingent by claiming that they’re somehow derived from a very abstract reflection. Often, what happens is that you start with your society and try to defend some of the things that you believe—often rightly—to be valuable about it. You sort of pretend that they’re derived in some very complicated way from first principles, in order to then loop back to saying, and therefore things should be as they are right now. There’s something quite strange and concerning about that.
I want to go back, just so that listeners keep track of what the political import of this is—of this ongoing conversation, of the competition between these two different views. As I take it to be—please correct me if I’m misrepresenting in some way—one of the concerns you have about the hegemonic view, the liberal view, the view of freedom as interference, is that it is insufficiently concerned with things like political liberty. It is insufficiently concerned with the different kinds of ways in which our ability to act freely in the world can be constrained by things like social arrangements within the family, by things like work relations within your company or place of work, and by things like the fact that you might live in a place—let us say, like Singapore—where you don’t have true political rights of participation, even though day to day you might be given quite a lot of liberty as non-interference.
I want to push you on this one more time—less with some of the debate that has existed about how conceptually distinct they are, and there’s an interesting philosophical debate about that—than about whether the actual political traditions in which we live really are that different. Which is to say: is it actually true that most people who think about freedom today are completely unconcerned about the political arrangements under which we live? Is it true that they would say, if a president came in and wanted to concentrate power in his or her own hands, but would lead people to continue to worship as they want and do all kinds of things—would people not be concerned about that? Are people who are very much part of a liberal tradition—whether that is John Stuart Mill or John Rawls or Benjamin Constant—really as unconcerned about those kinds of ideas as is implied?
If that’s not the case, then hasn’t the importance of ensuring the longevity of your enjoyment of freedom as non-interference—and the fact that, in order to have any security about your long-term enjoyment of these values, you obviously also have to make sure that somebody can’t just change their mind tomorrow—aren’t those ultimately different ways of speaking about the same thing, which would explain why these ideas are ultimately widely held today, even though people might formulate, philosophically, freedom as being focused on non-interference?
To go one more point: one way that you distinguish those things is to say that if you believe in the importance of freedom as non-interference, you might end up with a very minimalist, libertarian view of government. You might simply see government as a threat to your freedom, because all that government might do is interfere. If you’re worried about interference, then that is necessarily bad. I would put to you that you could have a libertarian tradition that takes up your concept of freedom just as easily. In fact, many libertarians complain about the government precisely for reasons that come directly out of the political tradition you prefer—what we would call that freedom is non-domination, or, in some formulations, Republican liberty.
What do libertarians say? They say, I want to be able to do with my property and my life as I want. I want to be able to decide whether to mow my lawn or not. What happens? There’s a housing association that makes incredibly minute rules about how I have to upkeep my home. The moment I break them in some really small way, they impose these arbitrary fines on me. What happens? I want to attach a new part to my home so that a family member can move in. But there are regulations that the local town council has passed, which make it impossible for me to do that. What happens? I want to open a restaurant that serves alcohol, but because there are ridiculous liquor licensing laws, I’m not able to go about that business and do those things. All of those are quite centrally concerned with the arbitrary decision-making powers of members of my housing association, of members of the city council, of all kinds of things. What they’re concerned about is precisely the exercise of arbitrary power in ways that make us unfree.
It’s not clear to me that this distinction between the different political traditions is either as stark as you make it out to be, or that it allows us to distinguish as clearly as you want to between political traditions for which you have more sympathy, and ones like libertarianism, for which you have less sympathy.
Skinner: Well, I don’t agree with much of that. There are two things I would want to say about that. One is that the superiority of the image of liberty as independence is extremely important in two ways that the current hegemonic way of thinking about freedom as absence of restraint just doesn’t get to. In the case you’ve taken, someone who agreed with me would want to say to your rather anarchistic-sounding imagined figure: what makes you say that these claims are arbitrary? The town council has been voted upon. Everyone there is a representative. We’ve agreed that they should make the rules that run our local society. We’re all in these local democracies. I vote for people in my own part of London who constitute a local town council, and they organise a very great deal of my life. They’re not an arbitrary power. They’re a power which has been voted in by a very large majority of people, and they’re constantly under pressure from a minority, and they are under some obligation both to consider that and to put it to us for things that are like referendums. It is absolutely not the picture that your anarchistic person wants. It is a picture in which there are no arbitrary powers, and he will just have to recognise that that is what it is to live in a democracy.
One of the problems with the current view is that it is not very interested in forms of government. He governs best who governs least—and your man sounds like an anarchist. He sounds awfully like someone like Sumner, who wants to say that there’s something we have to call democratic despotism. Leave us alone. Let’s not have these laws. That was the extreme to which the opposing view that I’m wanting to defend was put in the United States—as it was in England by Herbert Spencer in attacking John Stuart Mill—saying, this is all arbitrary. We want all of these laws to be abandoned. We want he governs best who governs least. That is not, in what I find a large city like London, at all a good recipe. What you have to have is democratic consent for everything. You can’t have it all together. You must do your best. The point that I want to make in response to you is: the liberalism you described is indifferent to forms of government. The view of liberty that I described requires democracy. So I’m a democrat. I’m not an anarchist.
I want to make a second point, which is that the view of liberty which I’m espousing here contrasts very strongly with the prevailing one in the fact that the prevailing one is just very bad at identifying silent power. Silent power is an extremely important feature of modern lives, which the view of liberty that I’m interested in is very keen on. The reformed figure of John Stuart Mill was keen on it in one respect, which is that he points out in The Subjection of Women that you can be unfree even if you’re not coerced, because you can live in subjection owing to the bounds of the law. That’s to say, there’s an economic dependence of women. There are other forms of dependence as well. I’ve mentioned this in talking about workforces which have been de-unionised. They confront the silent power of the owner, or of the capitalist, or of whoever else is running the operation. This silent power may not be exercised, but it’s there, and it may not be coercive, but it has an effect on you.
I also think that it’s very important to think about the relationship between states. Liberalism is uninterested in that question quite generally, but the view of freedom that I’m interested in is equally worried about states being subject to the power of other states which dominate them, and which domination they cannot escape. A really poor state, which has got something to offer a rich state—like, for example, what happens in relations between China and Africa at the moment—cannot afford to say no. It is subject, therefore, to the whims of the dominating power, which can ask for all sorts of regulations to be set aside, or requirements of how to preserve the environment or the local climate and everything can all be set aside in the name of what they wish to do. The state that is so needing all of this to be done has no means of doing anything except accepting the silent power as part of the contract.
A further point which ought to affect all of us—but strangely doesn’t—is how bad liberalism, in its current guise, in its way of thinking about freedom, is at thinking about surveillance societies. This is the subject now of a really important literature. We have no control over a great deal of data that is now taken from us and held about us, with surveillance from the state and from corporations. We don’t know what they’re going to do with it. We are subject entirely to their will in what they do to it. We are therefore, in a surveillance society, increasingly living the life of slaves. This is seen in liberalism as a threat to privacy. I am saying it is a threat to liberty. You are subject to the arbitrary power of another force in your society, over which you have no control, and to which you have not given your consent. All of the examples I’ve given are examples that separate the believer in liberty as independence from the believer that liberty is just being left to do what you want to do.
I think that there is no liberty without democracy, and that it’s no good being your anarchist who says, well, this is just the town council issuing arbitrary dictates. None of these are arbitrary. They do not reflect the uncontrollable will of anyone. The will is eminently controllable. We can vote them out any time we want. The will is a reflection of what they hope the people in general want. That’s the picture that goes with my view about liberty.
Mounk: That’s very interesting. Just to clarify the contrast here, firstly, I agree with you that there can be no true liberty without some form of democratic mechanism which justifies the laws by which we’re bound. It just strikes me as rather strange to say that that is absent from the contemporary liberal tradition. I think that’s absolutely the mainstream liberal view in 2025. But also, the absolutely mainstream liberal view when you read John Stuart Mill or Benjamin Constant or many other thinkers is that you need democratic control both for laws to be legitimate because they reflect the democratic will in some significant way, and to preserve that liberty over time to make sure that we don’t end up with dictators who might allow you to have your liberty for a year or two—but the moment the rule is going to be threatened, will obviously revoke those liberties very strongly. So I guess I’m just a little bit puzzled why it should be the case that liberals aren’t able to formulate this point.
The other thing is—I get to push a little bit of the libertarian point because that’s really interesting. A libertarian is a very key figure who demonstrates that this pure view of liberty as non-interference is going to lead you to the political conclusion about which you’re concerned, whereas it seems to me that actually many libertarian concerns come just as strongly out of worries about domination as they do out of worries about non-interference. So, we can have an empirical debate about the nature of housing associations in the United States or co-ops in cities like New York. I think there are very minute details in the regulations they have about what color you can paint your house or how often you have to mow your lawn and whether you’re allowed to have people visit your apartment in New York city and so on. You may not be as familiar with the nature of co-ops in New York or of housing associations in the United States.
But let’s take an example from recent politics that I think is quite instructive about this. Many people had the feeling that the state overreached in some of its regulations about COVID, both in the extent of the lockdowns and in telling citizens that they needed to get vaccinated. Now, you might think that those are the right decisions. I was one of the people writing early on that we needed some social distancing measures. But just sort of phenomenologically, as it were, trying to understand where that concern lies—I think part of it is that people said, but I want to be able to go outside. Part of it is that some people said, but I don’t want to get vaccinated. But a lot of it is that they felt—this very libertarian streak that was unhappy with the response to the pandemic felt—that there was an arbitrary power being exercised over them. That the state, albeit in some complicated way democratically legitimized through elections in which not that many people don’t participate, in which the people who have a majority of the seats in parliament don’t necessarily reflect the majority of people in the country actually having voted for them, and so on. But there’s just in the end a couple of cabinet ministers, a couple of mayors in certain places, whatever, who make those decisions on their own, and they can, from one day to the next, tell you: You can’t leave your house, have to get this vaccine, or you’re going to lose your job. And I think, actually, when you listen—whether you agree with them or not, I disagree with significant parts of what these voices are saying—to what the concern is, the concern often, I think, absolutely about arbitrary power.
So I guess, again, just to restate it: my concern is both that the liberal tradition, I think, is much more concerned about political liberty than you acknowledge, and that the traditions which you think would be kept at bay by adopting a different conception of liberty which emphasizes non-domination more, actually already formulate many of their grievances and their concerns in language that stems partially from their tradition.
Skinner: Well, I’ve stated the contrary view. You’re simply talking about a liberal view of liberty. It’s an interesting case to take a great crisis because that calls on questions which have nothing to do with liberty but have very much to do with having some sense of what will forward the common good under a crisis. But that would be another discussion.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Quentin discuss why intellectual history is so important, and the best way of studying great books. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
