Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Part I Introduction
- Part II Rethinking the foundations
- 3 Foundations and moments
- 4 Skinner, pre-humanist rhetorical culture and Machiavelli
- 5 Unoriginal authors: how to do things with texts in the Renaissance
- 6 ‘The Best State of the Commonwealth’: Thomas More and Quentin Skinner
- 7 Scholasticism in Quentin Skinner's Foundations
- 8 Scholastic political thought and the modern concept of the state
- 9 ‘So meerly humane’: theories of resistance in early-modern Europe
- 10 Hobbes and democracy
- 11 A lion in the house: Hobbes and democracy
- 12 Hobbes and the foundations of modern international thought
- 13 Surveying The Foundations: a retrospect and reassessment
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - ‘The Best State of the Commonwealth’: Thomas More and Quentin Skinner
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Part I Introduction
- Part II Rethinking the foundations
- 3 Foundations and moments
- 4 Skinner, pre-humanist rhetorical culture and Machiavelli
- 5 Unoriginal authors: how to do things with texts in the Renaissance
- 6 ‘The Best State of the Commonwealth’: Thomas More and Quentin Skinner
- 7 Scholasticism in Quentin Skinner's Foundations
- 8 Scholastic political thought and the modern concept of the state
- 9 ‘So meerly humane’: theories of resistance in early-modern Europe
- 10 Hobbes and democracy
- 11 A lion in the house: Hobbes and democracy
- 12 Hobbes and the foundations of modern international thought
- 13 Surveying The Foundations: a retrospect and reassessment
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As many commentators and critics have acknowledged and vigorously applauded, Quentin Skinner has continuously rethought and revised his methodology, and the fundamental categories and descriptions in his scholarship. His very recent and magisterial three-volume collection of new and revised essays, entitled Visions of Politics, brings into focus this development over the twenty-five years since the publication of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Exemplifying the contextualist approach which is now associated with the Cambridge school of history, Foundations concerned itself with the process by which the modern conception of the state – ‘its nature, powers, and right to command obedience’ –came to be formed from the late thirteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century. The political theory of the northern Renaissance was shown to be ‘an extension and consolidation’ of a range of arguments which arose in quattrocento Italy, although subject to a critical re-evaluation. Early-modern England received particular attention in this respect. The impact of Foundations has been profound; through the close and meticulous textual analysis of a myriad of well-known and lesser-known writers in their intellectual context, Skinner drew a typology which has guided countless scholars and students of the period.
A decade after Foundations a fresh emphasis had emerged in Skinner's 1988 essay, ‘Political philosophy’. One of Thomas More's chief preoccupations in Utopia, it was said, was to restate a crucial tenet of classical republicanism: ‘that the noblest way of life is one of virtuous public service’.
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- Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought , pp. 93 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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