X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Quentin Skinner


J. G. A. Pocock

In the 1960s and early '70s, he, (introducing "languages" of political thought) along with Quentin Skinner (focusing on authorial intention), and John Dunn (stressing biography), united informally to undertake this approach as the "Cambridge School" of the history of political thought.

Performative text

The historian Quentin Skinner developed classical and postmodern theories on performative texts into a concrete research method.

Quentin Skinner

Skinner has delivered many prestigious lecture-series, including the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton (1980), the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford (1980), the Messenger Lectures at Cornell (1983), the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard (1984), the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Kent (1995), the Ford Lectures at Oxford (2003), the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford (2011) and the Clark Lectures at Cambridge (2012).

Together with John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock Skinner has been said to have founded the "Cambridge School" of the history of political thought.


Two Treatises of Government

The Cambridge School of political thought, led principally by Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, Richard Ashcraft, and others, developed in opposition to interpretations such as Strauss's and, to a lesser extent, Macpherson's.


see also