Chapter 2 critically approaches Skinner’s historical oeuvre and its problematic connection with his own theoretical perspective. It begins by analyzing his major work, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, and his perspective regarding the origins of the modern concept of State. In it, we can observe the tension between his theory and the teleological perspective underlying that project. This problem indeed became more noticeable in his recent works addressed to trace the remote roots of “classical republicanism,” as associated to a “third idea of liberty”: the concept of “liberty as non-domination.” It then continues by analyzing the differences between Skinner’s and Pocock’s views of classical republicanism, and its connection with their different definitions of political languages. Lastly, we observe here how the normative temptation that fuels both Skinner’s and Pocock’s proposals of recovering classical republicanism entails an instrumental use of intellectual history aimed at making it play into the present, which inevitably leads to relapse into conceptual anachronisms.

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.