Chapter 1 analyzes the shift from the history of ideas to the history of political languages, connected with the so-called linguistic turn. Beginning with Lovejoy’s proposal of a history of ideas, which served to establish it as a scholarly discipline, it aims to unravel its fundamental tenets, as well as the rationale behind the focus on “unit-ideas,” derived from the awareness of the problems to categorize different currents of thought in history. It then observes Namier’s critical perspective of that tradition and Skinner’s proposal to stand intellectual history on a new basis. By incorporating the analysis of the performative dimension of language, it overcomes the impasse generated by the shortcomings in the history of ideas and its ahistorical perspective of ideas, thus highlighting the fundamental consequences and its contribution to the control of conceptual anachronisms. This “linguistic turn” allows Skinner to perceive the fallacies or “mythologies” of the history of ideas and recover the notion of the “text” as a meaningful whole. Finally, it analyzes the subsequent “rhetorical turn” in the search to find in the very texts the discursive tracks of their contexts of utterance, and why it meant the dislocation of the antinomy between “texts”–“contexts” and “ideas”–“reality.”

Chapter 1 sets out the main questions and contentions in the book. It explores the concept of freedom and identifies it as a central concept in Athenian democratic ideology in both the private and public spheres. Scholarly debates on the concept of freedom are outlined, with an especial emphasis on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom and its application to Athens in subsequent scholarship. Distinguishing democratic freedom from negative and republican versions, I argue that Athenians understood freedom as the ability to do “whatever one wished,” which I classify as a modified version of positive freedom. The focus on citizen agency in accomplishing his will differentiates Athenian democracy from other constitution types and affects its institutional features. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of the chapters.

In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke seems to support what Quentin Skinner identified as the neo-Roman theory of liberty. That is to say, according to Locke, in order to be free, it is not sufficient to be free from constraint or coercion. It also necessary for you to be free of dependency on the will of another person. The sheer fact of absolute monarchy, of ruling by will rather than law, constitutes an act of war, and the people have the right to take up arms against it. However – and here his story becomes strange – Locke also defends prerogative power. That is, he defends the right of the magistrate to exercise their will over and above the rule of law. This chapter will explore this apparent contradiction and try to make sense of it in Locke’s terms. It will conclude that Locke points to an irresolvable tension between the will and the good, and that while the languages of political thought cannot be historically disentangled, they can have distinct and rich philosophical lives.

This introduction provides an overview of the historiography of freedom and of republicanism, placing Skinner’s work on neo-Roman freedom in that context.

This chapter explores the usefulness of neo-Roman liberty – to live free from subjection, deference, and vulnerability to the arbitrary will of others – for our contemporary philosophical debates about human rights. For eighteenth-century republicans such as Wollstonecraft and Price, liberty understood in this way was conceptually linked to rights of humanity, but that link has been severed. Starting from a sense of perplexity about the disengagement between 'republican' liberty and human rights and the curious inability of mainstream human rights philosophy to deal with major political challenges, neo-Roman liberty is used here to push human rights philosophy onto more radically egalitarian terrain. The critique focuses on the naturalistic bias in human rights thinking, a misunderstanding of international human rights law, a tendency to focus on event-based 'local' principles of justice, and a reluctance to challenge structural causes of injustice. The contention is that Skinner’s neo-Roman liberty serves to establish two important normative premises for a human rights philosophy with more bite: human rights should offer the strongest protection for those who are most vulnerable to socio-economic and political marginalisation, and that objects of human rights should be conceptualised in terms of open-ended goals of justice, predicated on a commitment to structural equality.

This chapter explores the moral and psychological dimensions of the neo-Roman concept of freedom, dimensions that have often been overlooked in favour of a political (and, still more narrowly, republican) analysis of non-domination. Through the example of Montaigne, the late sixteenth-century moral essayist, I argue that neo-Roman freedom is neither exclusively nor intrinsically republican in orientation, that it is best understood as a claim about the status of persons, and that this approach provides a firmer basis for establishing its distinctiveness and value than those accounts, including Quentin Skinner’s, which cast it as a robust variant of non-interference.

Quentin Skinner's neo-Romanism has proved a hugely rich resource for understanding the thought of women philosophers. So why do they not form part of his discussion in Liberty before Liberalism? I argue that this is partly a consequence of Skinner's focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when women political philosophers were apparently fewer. When we look at the eighteenth century, particularly at its second half, with the sort of attention to contextual detail Skinner recommends, we find a number of women philosophers embracing and developing a republicanism which emphasizes liberty as non-domination. These women aligned themselves with the tradition of neo-Roman political thought and therefore ought to be studied with equal care. Moreover, a study of their works reveals neo-Roman republicanism in a different light from that of their predecessors, one which takes their position as women in society – as mothers, but also as potential citizens and policy makers - as central. I focus on two authors in particular:Olympe de Gouges and Manon Roland.

This chapter examines Milton’s discourses of liberty, slavery, and hierarchy in order to test Quentin Skinner’s claim that the theory of neo-Roman liberty is positively and intrinsically connected with equality. Neo-Roman liberty was an important element in Milton’s political arguments, as was the terminology of slavery which was used to encapsulate the absence of that freedom from domination. However, neo-Roman liberty for Milton is less aptly defined as freedom from the will of another than as freedom from arbitrary domination. Milton’s commitment to the existence of rightful hierarchies, and to the Aristotelian principle that the superior should rule the inferior, meant that many (whether wives, servants, actual slaves, or inferior or wicked citizens) could not appeal to the principle of neo-Roman liberty to free them from subjection to another, as that subjection was rightful rather than arbitrary. Milton’s emphasis on free will and virtue meant that expected hierarchies might be disrupted by exceptional virtue or vice, but these exceptions caused a certain dissonance in Milton’s texts, and his use of the language of slavery and subjection was not entirely consistent.

This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.

It is now a cliché to observe that, despite innumerable efforts to define terrorism, scholars are no nearer to arriving at a consensus. One approach has been to assemble the multitude of definitions produced by academics, commentators, governments and international organisations, in an attempt to identify common ground. There is much to admire in this ethos of catholicity – though the final product can feel more like a catalogue of component parts than a cohesive and workable definition. How, then, should historians approach the debate over how to define terrorism? To explore this question, this chapter begins by reflecting on the ‘genealogical turn’ in historical method – a development closely associated with the ‘Cambridge school’ of intellectual history. It will then attempt to construct a genealogy for ‘terrorism’, as reflected in existing historical narratives of this subject. And finally, it will consider what key themes emerge from such a genealogical examination.

This introductory chapter clarifies the methodological approach that will be applied in the intellectual history that follows. It differentiates between conceptual history and history of ideas and explains why the method adopted lies between them. On the one hand, a conceptual history is impossible, because the word “recognition” is rarely used in the different cultures under investigation, which employ different words to describe the same relation between two subjects, for instance “amour propre” in French and “sympathy” in English. On the other hand, this book is more than a simple history of ideas, because it compares the different cultures in order to reconstruct one and the same concern, namely how to understand the relations between subjects after the decline of the feudal order, in which these relations were taken as stable and unchangeable.