Visions of Politics (three volumes) by Quentin Skinner

Fred Inglis hails a great historian who treats the ideals of politics as matters of life and death

When the distinguished narrator of the 18th century, Sir Jack Plumb, died, the television historian Simon Schama – once a pupil of Quentin Skinner's – observed thinly in an obituary that thousands more people read Plumb's history than Skinner's. One might just as accurately say that tens of thousands more read Isaiah Berlin than Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Berlin was only a learned and fluent ideologue of Cold War, and Wittgenstein a great philosopher who changed the way we think about the world.

Not that the life of Quentin Skinner, now Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, is without its significance in the public sphere. When this government was looking for impartial reformers of the House of Lords, they took soundings in the ineffable English way and were advised that Skinner was their man. He knew everything about democratic principles and was sea-green incorruptible. Instead the PM selected Lord Wakeham, who had the greater merits of clubbability and anti-democratic reflexes.

So it is more than timely to honour in his own country this historian of ideas who has probably been the
first Englishman since R G Collingwood died (in 1941) to make a difference to political thought across the world. He has been the subject of symposia in journals and research institutes from Canberra to Helsinki, Berlin to Bologna; his recent ruminations on philosophy and laughter command a full page in Le Monde; his intellectual methods have touched the lives of future politicians and those who will oppose them in China and Brazil, let alone in Princeton and Oxford.

He has been intent upon his adventure of the mind with undeviating purpose. It is over 35 years since he gave his paper on "the unimportance of the great texts". He so roused his academic audience from their dogmatic slumbers, by contending that their labours were built over a huge hole, that a number stalked out in a huff and have been obliged, over the years, to return apologetically and admit the boy was right all along.

His homely argument had been that all political philosophers, including the classics, were not trying to answer timeless questions on eternal exam papers, but to win an argument about matters of life and death immediately around them – by reason if possible, rhetoric if not. Skinner's first preoccupation was to return the history of ideas to history: the great texts, like the lesser ones, belonged to contexts. In spite of what some parodists of his method have said, this was not a programme to dissolve text into context, still less to deconstruct the text into forces of which the authors were so wholly unaware that they had no clear sense of what they meant.

Skinner's plain blunt injunction was to assume that his key political thinkers meant what they said. Moreover, he wished to pursue not only what they said, but what they were doing as they said it. Were they persuading, affirming or subverting, when they rehearsed their doctrines to touchy and unpredictable princes? Hobbes's truculence, More's innocence, Machiavelli's moral revisionism, were all intentional devices to win the day for their side.

It sounds easy. It goes deep. For once you radically historicise author and argument in this way, you hit hard against their sheer incommensurability with contemporary certainties. Skinner's 1,000 pages here – richly produced and cheaply priced – are fairly brimming with disconcerting truths about the way, for example, that people in the Italian city-states of the early Renaissance thought about what is right rather than about rights, about the common good rather than private pleasure, about their duty to maintain liberty rather than about their licence to do what they liked.

This is not the tired old reactionary bromide saying that the past is a better place. It is an admonition to notice how we cannot use the past as the materials for self-congratulation in the present. It is also an inquiry into roads then opened up, but not taken. Liberty, before liberalism got hold of it, was extolled by John Milton and James Harrington, during the great, lost opportunity of the English Commonwealth, as only being there to enjoy if the people were their own sovereign. No pussyfooting about "freedoms to" and "freedoms from". A citizen is only free when self-governing.

Reading Skinner's infinitely patient, detailed, strenuously plain-speaking prose in reconstruction of long-dead arguments, one feels a gradual urgency thrilling through them. Finally, one sees that he has brought off the miracle of resurrection that all historians strive to perform. The old words are spoken again in the alien present. The calls to liberty, equality or common good are made by these weird-sounding men, and we shrink to see our own falling-off.

One of my favourite moments is to hear Skinner dealing with those well-paid US academics who persuaded themselves that Thomas More couldn't possibly have been recommending the abolition of private property in his Utopia. In making it absolutely clear that More meant just that, there can be no doubt Skinner intends to stick a sharp point into the bottom of our own complacencies. So, too, with his reminder of just how bleak Machiavelli's vision of human nastiness is, and that our only protection is to tie our grandees down to the will of the people, to contrive so far as possible (this is Skinner's recurrent theme) a conception of the State as our own best moral agent.

Against the self-satisfied realism of old stagers who call moral principles in politics "flapdoodle", and the arid Marxists for whom ideas adorn the engine of economics, Skinner insists on how politicians are obliged to use principle to justify expediency – and therefore move always in the force-field of ethics.

His is the plain style in political thought, though rhetorical and polyglot. At one point – reproaching the famous leftist Raymond Williams for obtuseness – he remarks on the historical redundancy of the gentleman. Yet, while he would have no truck with the cold bloody-mindedness which is one English version of it, Skinner embodies – quite without anachronism – that very character.

Antique values may be recovered to teach the present about the loss of key moral concepts. Quentin Skinner restores life to the great tradition of the scholar-intellectual, radical cosmopolitan, journeyman-gentleman, and free-born Englishman. That, perhaps, is the best legacy for the shreds of empire to confer upon the uncertainties of European vision and American arrogance.

Fred Inglis' book 'People's Witness: the journalist
in modern politics' is published by Yale