Quentin Skinner: Liberty, Liberalism and Surveillance: a historic overview
One of Britain's most distinguished political theorists on republicanism, freedom, Machiavelli, Hobbes, the Reformation, Shakespeare, Milton and much more. Has modern society lost touch with Roman conceptions of freedom, and at what cost?
One of England's most distinguished scholars, Quentin Skinner is a leading historian of political thought and an outstanding advocate of a contemporary republican viewpoint. This interview with Richard Marshall of 3:AM sets out an accessible overview of a lifetime of work... Skinner's answer with respect to surveillance is a strong, clear statement of how it is a threat to liberty. This is especially relevant to current affairs given the superficiality of official and in particular British media responses to the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald about the programmes of total surveillance being attempted by US and UK secret services.
3:AM: You are known as a leading historian of political history and in particular the formation of ideas around human liberty. One of the key ideas you’ve written about is what you label ‘neo-Roman’ liberty.‘ This began back in Ancient Rome didn’t it, where freedom was contrasted with slavery, wasn’t it? Can you tell us what its distinctive traits are?
Quentin Skinner: The vision of personal freedom that interests me is articulated most clearly in the Digest of Roman Law, which is why I have wanted to describe its later manifestations as examples of ‘neo-Roman’ liberty. The fundamental distinction drawn at the outset of the Digest is between theliber homo, the free person, and the servus or slave. The law needed to begin with this contrast because law applies only to free persons, not to slaves. So one crucial question was: what makes a slave? The answer given in the legal texts is that a slave is someone who is in potestate, in the power of a master. The contrast is with someone who is sui iuris, able to act in their own right. Long before these argument were summarised in the legal texts, they had been elaborated by a number of Roman moralists and historians, above all Sallust, Livy and Tacitus. These writers were interested in the broader question of what it means to say of individuals – or even of whole bodies of people – that they have been made to live in the manner of slaves. The answer they give is that, if you are subject to the arbitrary will of anyone else, such that you are dependent on their mere goodwill, then you may be said to be living in servitude, however elevated may be your position in society. So, for example, Tacitus speaks of the servitude of the entire senatorial class under the Emperor Tiberius, so wholly subject were they to his lethal caprice.
It developed into a formidable political idea during the Italian Renaissance, didn’t it? Was Machiavelli influenced by it, either negatively or positively?
Yes, this vision of freedom is the one that underlies Renaissance Italian discussions about the vivere libero, that is, the sort of constitution that is needed to uphold a free way of life. Machiavelli was undoubtedly deeply influenced by these ideas. You ask if this influence was positive. If by that you mean to ask if he agreed with the neo-Roman analysis, I would say that he emphatically endorsed it.
Machiavelli’s main engagement with the neo-Roman view of freedom can be found in his Discorsi, completed around 1520. These ‘discourses’ take the form of a commentary on the opening ten books of Livy’s history of Rome.In his opening two book Livy had contrasted the lack of freedom suffered by Rome under her early kings with the civitas libera, the free state, that the people were able to set up with elected consuls in place of hereditary kings after the expulsion of the Tarquins. Machiavelli fully endorses Livy’s assumption that the fundamental question to ask, when thinking about political liberty, is about the distinction between freedom and servitude, and he further agrees that the arbitrary power wielded by the early kings of Rome left the citizen body living as slaves. The term servitù is always the one he uses when speaking of how an individual or a whole people living subject to the discretionary power of someone else will suffer loss of liberty, whether the power be internal to the polity (in the form of a prince or ruling oligarchy wielding arbitrary control) or external (in the form of a colonising power).
Was it influential in the development out of Lutheran and Calvinist and other religious groups of that time of the right to protest, resist and revolt?
The right of resistance developed in the course of Reformation struggles was chiefly based on classical ideas, but mainly on the Roman law maxim that vim vi licet repellere, that it is always lawful to resist unjust force with force. The contrast between freedom and servitude is certainly important to the leading Reformation thinkers, including both Luther and Calvin. But this is mainly because they were predestinarians, and rejected the very idea of human freedom in the name of the claim that we are all slaves to sin, and are freed only by divine grace...
