In​ a less frequented corner of YouTube, the late Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen lives on in a few comic skits. Among the funniest of these party pieces are two diatribes on ‘the German idea of freedom’. Cohen adopts the persona of a deranged Teutonic philosopher who claims that ‘no greater freedom can be imagined for a man than absolute blind submission to an unjust law.’ By contrast with the English conception of liberty, which Cohen’s cod-philosopher thinks tantamount to the ‘vertiginous regressivity of choice’, the Germans supposedly see ‘true freedom’ as consisting in an ‘orderly’ attachment to ‘oppression’, ‘tyranny’ and the ‘jackboot itself’. Cohen’s immediate target is the Hegelian infatuation with the rational state as the summit of ethical life, obedience to which constitutes the highest form of freedom, but his monologue also points to a more general problem: the ways we confound words and things, deceived by the multiple meanings and hidden implications of seemingly basic political concepts.

Political theorists have long been aware of the dangers lurking in the superficially innocuous term ‘liberty’. At the height of the Cold War, Cohen’s mentor and friend Isaiah Berlin raised the problem of ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in his inaugural lecture at Oxford. Berlin distinguished between positive liberty – broadly speaking, self-government – and negative liberty: the freedom of the individual from government interference. Berlin, a liberal pluralist, contended that there was no sure connection between democratic self-rule and the liberty of the individual. Positive liberty, a fuzzy concept that encompassed ‘collective self-direction’ as well as ‘self-realisation’, was ripe with potential for illiberal outcomes. The upshot of both the French and the Russian Revolutions (Berlin had experienced the second of these as a boy) was authoritarian state structures restrictive of individual freedoms. Negative liberty from constraints seemed a ‘more humane ideal’ than the otherwise admirable goal of ‘positive self-mastery’, given the risks associated with the latter. Berlin would be dismayed at the ways opponents caricatured these anxieties. He wasn’t, he later insisted, an enemy of democratic self-rule, which he recognised as a ‘fundamental human need’; but he felt that the ‘perversion’ of positive liberty into despotism was an obtrusive historical fact, ‘one of the most familiar and depressing phenomena of our time’.

One prominent early critic, the American philosopher Gerald MacCallum, thought that Berlin had mistakenly reified two aspects of a single category, but a later commentator, the Cambridge historian Quentin Skinner, went in the opposite direction, arguing that Berlin had overlooked a highly distinctive version of liberty, which he labelled ‘neo-Roman’. He set out this position in various venues, but most poignantly when he delivered the Isaiah Berlin Lecture at the British Academy in 2001 on ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’ (a version of this essay appeared in the LRB of 4 April 2002). More precisely, Skinner thought he had identified a second type of negative liberty, of which there were ‘two rival and incommensurable theories’. He found in the Roman historians Livy, Sallust and Tacitus and in their early modern reception an emphasis on free citizenship, conceived as the absence of subjection to the will of another. Negative liberty, Skinner argued, can take the form of the liberal conception of non-interference or the Roman idea of non-dependence on the power of someone else.

In recovering this lost Roman concept of freedom, Skinner had, as he warmly acknowledged, an ally in the political theorist Philip Pettit. But there is a subtle distinction between their positions. Whereas Pettit emphasises non-domination as the leitmotif of a tradition of republican freedom, Skinner thinks that the primary feature of this strain of liberty was the absence of dependence, and that adherence to this way of thinking about liberty wasn’t confined to those with overtly republican political commitments. For Skinner, neo-Roman liberty was a kind of status rather than merely a freedom of action.

Skinner made his name in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of his contextualist transformation of a fundamentally misguided discipline. The unchallenged norm in pre-Skinnerian political thought was the study of a canon of major thinkers who engaged in analysis of a set of perennial concepts. Skinner’s reframing of the history of political thought was underpinned by the philosopher J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts. The central preoccupation of a historian of political thought, Skinner contended, should be not so much what a text said, as what a text did, its function in the debates of its own era. He didn’t think that the central topics of political thought were so robust and self-contained as to be immune to the vagaries of context. In his Berlin lecture Skinner punctured the ‘illusion’ that ‘we can somehow step outside the stream of history and furnish a neutral definition’ of terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ which are ‘so highly indeterminate, and so extensively implicated’ in ‘a long history of ideological debate’.

Skinner’s centre of gravity is the period between the late medieval era and the 17th century, but he also reaches back to classical antiquity, to Roman writers in particular, and forward to 19th and 20th-century philosophers. His interests straddle an array of modern disciplines – philosophy, politics, law, literature and classics as well as history – while in Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996) he displays an exquisite command of early modern rhetorical techniques. His new book shows his formidably detailed knowledge of another outlying zone of his immense hinterland, the political thought of the 18th century – not just the works of canonical figures, but now obscure pamphlets and sermons as well as imaginative literature. Despite the decades I have spent reading 18th-century sources, there were several figures in the book with whom I was unacquainted. For most of us the gradient of the learning curve involved here would demand recourse to a low gear; but Skinner, as ever, races along ambitiously.

The book advances a remarkable explanation of how and when our liberal notion of freedom displaced the neo-Roman version, recovering an overlooked history of the formulation of liberty in 18th-century English political culture. Although there were various early justifications of the Glorious Revolution – historical, biblical, providential and de facto – an argument came to prominence that emphasised the natural rights of the people to remove a tyrant who would reduce them to servitude. John Locke, whose work was not immediately influential but had by the 1740s become a vital prop of the Whig regime, upheld the classical definition of liberty as independence. The work of Algernon Sidney, another Whig icon, who was executed by Charles II in 1683, gave a similar neo-Roman reading of liberty. In Sidney’s posthumously published Discourses Concerning Government (1698), slavery was identified with dependence on the will of another, regardless of that person’s actions. The thrust of Sidney’s argument was anti-monarchical, though he accepted that if a king were controlled by laws, then a kingdom might still resemble a free state. Cato’s Letters, a highly influential series of articles published in the London Journal by the Whig writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and which first appeared as a collection in 1724, took a similar line.

By the 1740s, neo-Roman arguments were being used to underpin Britain’s claims to be a free state. However, several major novelists – Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett – interrogated what Skinner calls ‘Whig complacencies’. Britons did not groan under the yoke of absolute monarchy, but many of them lived at the whim of others, whether as servants, marriageable young ladies or the clients of patrons. In Tom Jones, Fielding shows that, when acting as a justice of the peace, even the benign Squire Allworthy is capable of as much caprice as his volcanically vituperative neighbour Squire Western. But literary exposure of the sham and hypocrisy behind Whiggish boasts about English freedom did little to dislodge the prevailing conception of liberty.

Despite this, its commanding position in English political culture crumbled with extraordinary rapidity between the 1770s and 1790s. Skinner has identified what must constitute a major turning point in modern history, yet one that has gone largely unnoticed. How can we have failed to spot something of this magnitude? The embarrassing nakedness of the historiography here is disturbing in itself. But then comes a further shock. The reader casually assumes that the displacement of neo-Roman categories by a liberal understanding of freedom must have had something to do with the emergence of the market as the dominant trope in modern political language. But while Skinner thinks it plausible that the ‘new view of liberty’ held some attraction for champions of the market, he traces its provenance back before the 18th-century emergence of commercial society. What’s more, he identifies specific and immediate factors that caused liberty as non-interference to ‘ascend so suddenly to a position of ideological dominance’ from the late 1770s.

At the heart of Skinner’s story is a defamiliarised version of the American Revolution, which brings into focus its transformative effect on the political idioms of the motherland. In the late 1770s, a conservative clerisy – jurists, clergymen, political pamphleteers – adopted the liberal idea of freedom as a way of ‘fending off the republican and democratic potential’ that was becoming apparent in the older tradition of liberty. The threat came particularly from an ideological fifth column in Britain that openly supported the American cause. In February 1776, Richard Price, the minister of a dissenting Presbyterian chapel at Newington Green, then a village outside London, published Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, which was in its fifth edition by March. Not only did Price align himself with the colonists’ claim that they were being taxed without their consent, but he made a more general argument that called into question whether Britain under its unreformed constitution was genuinely a free state. Since self-government was the defining attribute of liberty, even being ‘guided by the will of another’ implied a form of ‘servitude’. Therefore, Price contended, when the laws were ‘made by one man, or by a junto of men in a state, and not by common consent, a government by them does not differ from slavery’. Despite his outspokenness, Price insisted he was a good Whig, and that his arguments aligned with ‘those taught by Mr Locke and all the writers on civil liberty who have been hitherto most admired in this country’.

In response to Price, pro-imperial pamphleteers used the arguments of a 17th-century strain of Continental – but reliably Protestant – natural jurisprudence which stressed the distinction between the natural liberty enjoyed in the intolerably stressful conditions of a state of nature, where there is no safety or security from the depredations of others, and the very different kind of civil liberty enjoyed as a subject of government. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) emphasised the contrast between the anarchic horrors of life in primitive circumstances and the security that came of submission to the sovereign state, which guaranteed peace and basic security for its subjects. In this new environment, liberty was redefined as the space where the silence of the law left the subject unimpeded. Although Hobbes was a bogeyman to his contemporaries and succeeding generations, not least because of his materialism and heterodox religious views, similar views percolated into English culture by way of a succession of less controversial natural jurists – Samuel Pufendorf, Jean Barbeyrac, Johann Heineccius, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui – whose works appeared in translation between the late 17th and the mid-18th centuries. Independence was indeed, they agreed, an attribute of humankind in the wretched condition of natural liberty; but civil life implied – and depended on – its renunciation. In the more fortunate and vastly different condition of life under civil government, the ideal of independence had become a dangerous chimera.

Between the late 1770s and the 1790s the arguments of natural jurists were recycled by a host of English propagandists who restated the idea of liberty in terms of a lack of restraint on actions. The pamphleteer John Gray, an upholder of parliamentary authority over the colonies, contended that, although entry into civil society necessarily involved a loss of natural liberty, ‘the most perfect degree of civil liberty’ was nevertheless possible when personal freedom was least constrained by law. Interestingly, some pamphleteers employed everyday usage as a way of determining the meaning of liberty. The jurist Richard Hey wondered ‘what idea is conveyed by the word in common conversation’, and decided that it was an ‘absence of restraint’. An influential subset of these writers was associated with a utilitarian turn in English political thought – not only Jeremy Bentham, but also his friend John Lind and the clergyman William Paley, whose Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) had gone through fifteen editions by the time of his death in 1805. The natural jurists’ arguments were soon interwoven with a more traditional political theology that emphasised Christian obedience to temporal powers. In 1793, Skinner notes, the Reverend John Fawel of Wigan published a political sermon under the arresting title Due Subordination True Freedom. Cohen’s mock-Hegelian philosopher no longer seems so outlandish.

How​ far did the discomfiting proximity of liberty and slavery in contemporary polemics blunt the appeal of the older idiom of independent freedom, especially given that this period saw the first major stirrings of abolitionism among evangelicals? The multiple connotations of the word ‘slavery’ certainly provide one of the central preoccupations of Skinner’s protagonists. Price’s broad definition of slavery as dependence drew the ire of conservative opponents. In Some Observations on Liberty (1776), the Methodist leader John Wesley bristled with outrage at Price’s obtuse failure to recognise the difference between the ‘chained’ chattel slave and men of property in the colonies who, because they were taxed without their consent, Price deemed enslaved. Henry Goodricke scoffed at the way Price collapsed the meaning of slavery into mere dependence on the will of another: this, he wrote, ‘will be found to introduce slavery almost everywhere, and to make it absolutely necessary to the happiness of mankind’. The charge stung, and Price introduced distinctions between different types of slavery in his subsequent contributions to the debate. Nevertheless, he could not resist a tart response when the archbishop of York, William Markham, redefined civil liberty as ‘a freedom from all restraints except such as established law imposes for the good of a community’: the archbishop, Price replied, ‘has given a definition of liberty which might as well have been given of slavery’.

While Skinner punctiliously observes historical proprieties and writes with precision, clarity and accessibility about all the writers he discusses, there is a note of plangency in his central arguments, a sense, too, of deep passions coolly suppressed. The stunted liberalism we live with today, Skinner argues, is the consequence of an urgent conservative strategy in the age of revolutions to redescribe the contours of liberty. The older understanding of liberty as independence did not entirely disappear, but was confined to the socialist margins of 19th-century political culture. Recovered, this notion has the potential to inspire a more empathetic way of thinking about today’s precariat of zero-hours employees, casualised workers and deunionised staff dependent on the whims of employers. It also offers, Skinner suggests, a connection that might prevent the untethered ideals of liberty and democratic self-government from drifting dangerously further apart. Whereas Berlin saw no necessary connection between liberty and democracy, Skinner argues that representative democracy is the only form of governance that can guarantee liberty as independence: ‘No democracy, no liberty.’

The most unsettling of this book’s surprises lurks in its unadvertised implications. If Skinner’s is a story of loss – the submersion of a concept of liberty which for all its flaws in practice was pregnant with greater democratic potential than the liberalism that replaced it – where does that leave our grand narratives of democratisation? The history of franchise extension seems less buoyant in the light of Skinner’s arguments about the entrenchment of an anti-democratic liberalism in the decades before the first Reform Act of 1832. Or do these divergent narratives rather serve to highlight the gulf that separates the realm of political thought – no matter how contextualist the aspirations of its interpreters – from the mundane world of political practice?

Alone among the brilliant triumvirate who most reshaped the practice of history in Britain over the last sixty years – Skinner himself; the historical demographer Tony Wrigley; and the historian of popular belief Keith Thomas – Skinner recognised the continuing primacy of the political. But his wasn’t political history as it had been practised. He managed to avoid reductive approaches to context of the sort envisaged by Marx (ideas as a reflection of economic structures) or, more significantly, by Namier (ideas as a rhetorical smokescreen for high political manoeuvres), but Skinnerian political thought did not quite become a non-canonical, ultra-contextualist history of political argument – though Liberty as Independence comes closer to this than other works by Skinner and his pupils. Rather, given Skinner’s philosophical interests, the revamped discipline was orientated towards political philosophy and away from the mechanics of political action. What makes the disconnection from political practice a problem is the sheer scale of Skinner’s achievements. He has been if anything too successful, his influence disturbing the ecological balance in several of the best history departments. The brightest students are disproportionately attracted to intellectual history and political thought, while political history – without the same conceptual plushness – dwindles in popularity. Yet, ultimately, it is the more prosaic study of personnel and institutions which provides the grist of political explanation.

Colin Kidd is a professor of modern history at St Andrews. He co-edited Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914, which was published in May. His books include British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600-1800, Unions and Unionism: Political Thought in Scotland 1500-2000 and The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography 1700-1870.