Books by Quentin Skinner
“not only is Quentin Skinner one of the foremost historians of political thought living today—and in particular of Renaissance political thought—but he is also one of the foremost Hobbes scholars. It’s a wonderful book because it exemplifies something that Quentin Skinner is very well known for and is sometimes called the Cambridge School and sometimes the ‘Skinnerian’ method. It’s a methodology of thinking about how to read texts in the history of political thought that seeks to place them in their historical context. This book is exemplary in this way because it’s focused partly on Hobbes’s evolution from the Elements of Law and De Cive to Leviathan. And it’s focused, in particular, on Hobbes’s view about the relationship of rhetoric to science and philosophy.” Read more...
Arash Abizadeh, Philosopher
Interviews where books by Quentin Skinner were recommended
The Best Thomas Hobbes Books, recommended by Arash Abizadeh
Thomas Hobbes’s master work Leviathan, in which he argued for the need to unite under a powerful sovereign as part of a ‘social contract’, has become a cornerstone of Western political philosophy. Here, the philosopher and political scientist Arash Abizadeh selects five of the best books for understanding Hobbes’s arguments in their historical context.
