Historiography of Neo-Roman Thought: Critical Review of Skinner`s Liberty before Liberalism

Quentin Skinner accompanied by a group of writers and professors of so called Cambridge School have had an undeniable role in critical rereading of history of European thought and reprinting some of the classical texts of modern political thought. Skinner in his enormous hermeneutical researches, linking the contextualist approach to the intentionalist view, shows that the established values of today life style and our thinking about that values reflecting a set of selections that we have made through the different historical times and possibilities. The contentious history of modern concept of liberty is such a case. Skinner puts the theory of civic liberty against the liberalism believing that the ideological triumph of liberalism in nineteen degraded the republican cause of liberty. The republican tradition is one of the Skinner`s fields of archeological rediscovery, and surveying the trajectory of Roman political thought and analyzing historical roots of neo-Roman theory of Liberty is a part of the project of rediscovering the English republican tradition. Then in a reductionary historicism, Skinner`s archeological hermeneutic is an English one, and his research program focused on the modern British history of liberty. His conservative archeology couldn’t go beyond a mere historiography of thought and it`s difficult to find in his project a critical position and also a philosophical examination in the field of politics. Skinner is a conservative Foucauldian.