A defence of the skinnerian method against Matthew Kramer’s critic under the concept of “Liberty” on Thomas Hobbes’s thought

Abstract

We lean over Matthew Kramer’s critic about Quentin Skinner’s interpretation of the concept of “liberty” in Hobbes that accounts in his article “On the Unavoidability of Actions: Quentin Skinner, Thomas Hobbes, and the Modern Doctrine of Negative Liberty” (2001). Here, Kramer discusses the growing interest of Skinner’s intellectual project at that time about hobbesian thought, something already evidenced since the publication of his book Liberty before liberalism (1998). Kramer takes as central reference of his response Skinner’s article entitled “Thomas Hobbes on the proper signification of Liberty”, criticizing his position and contrasting with some of his own ideas about “freedom” and “unfreedom”. Through these considerations, Kramer revalues the notion of “liberty” in Hobbes, taking it as a liberal prototype of negative freedom for excellence, envicing thus the supposed misconception that Skinner’s interpretation carries about it. We look to defend here, however, that Kramer’s interpretative proposal lacks the due methodological fundamentals that relates Skinner’s neo-republicanism in the field of political philosophy with certain principles from his historiography that are not properly considered by the first. His criticism would be, thereby, compromised by an approach disconnected from the thought and intentions of Hobbes as a political agent inserted in a determined  linguistic and social context, a framework that would be after rescued in an exquisite manner by Skinner in his study Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008).