Quentin Skinner on Liberty

I think myself that it would be well worth going back to this tradition to think about rights as well as to thinking about liberty, because 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. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. How do us moderns, as people shaped by the political developments of the last two or three hundred years, think about freedom? And is the way we think about freedom a mistake?

Are there other ways of thinking about freedom that perhaps would allow us to envisage a very different politics? Those are the questions that throughout much of his career one of the most distinguished historians, perhaps the most distinguished intellectual historian alive today has been thinking about. Quentin Skinner was, among other distinguished positions the Regis Professor of History at Cambridge University, and he has a new book out called Liberty as Independence, The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal. In this conversation, Quentin and I talk about why

He claims it would be more productive to think of freedom not as an absence of interference in the way we tend to today, but rather as an absence of domination, to think about freedom as being marked by the fact that you're not subject to the arbitrary will of another. We talk about the ways in which that might be Change our thinking about why we might be unfree if one spouse is given more rights than the other due to their gender, if in the workplace you are subject to the arbitrary will of your boss, if in a political context you are living in a relatively liberal autocracy, in a place where you can't make the laws, even if the laws themselves are relatively permissive. And I also challenge Quentin a little bit about whether the distinction between those two different traditions of how to think about liberty is really as significant as he says.

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