In Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Idea, renowned historian Quentin Skinner traces how a republican vision of liberty, one all but forgotten today, was eclipsed by its modern, liberal counterpart. This is not his first foray into the idea of liberty. In 1998, he published Liberty before Liberalism; in 2008, he followed with Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Both books confined their examination of liberty’s meaning to mid-seventeenth-century England. Liberty as Independence, the culminating work in his unofficial trilogy on liberty, builds off those two previous works and provides a more comprehensive and longer chronological timeframe.

Skinner contends that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Englishmen, taking their cues from figures like Henri de Bracton, John Fortescue, and Thomas Smith, defined liberty as freedom from arbitrary power. Skinner connects this understanding of liberty as independence to the dichotomy in Roman law and classical republicanism between freeman and slave. Free individuals acted with autonomous will and lived as they pleased. Slaves, however, lacked any self-will and were subservient to the whims of a master. Hence, in Roman law, freedom represented and emphasized status more than it did condition. Although “it cannot be denied” that the long history of republican liberty confined the status of freemen to a social and political hierarchy in which only “small male elite” exercised any degree of self-will, Skinner believes “there is nothing inherently conservative or elitist about the ideal itself.” As he points out, radical thinkers like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Karl Marx embraced the idea of liberty as independence even as they railed against its historical elitism.

Standing in stark contrast to the idea of liberty as independence was the “liberal” view, which defined liberty as simply the absence of physical or coercive barriers. To put it another way, liberty was predicated exclusively on the ability to act. English liberals such as Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Somerville, and Jeremy Bentham admitted that while self-government might be preferable, liberty could “in principle be enjoyed under any system of government.” This liberal stress on action rejected the Roman bifurcation of free versus slave. Instead, liberty hinges solely upon condition—either you are free to choose or restrained from making that choice in some form or fashion.

Skinner admits that these definitions contain a degree of overlap. Both agreed that physical restraint equated to a loss of liberty of action. The distinction between the two, however, rests on status. As he puts it, those lacking the status of a free person “will never be in a position to choose and act freely.” All their actions are subjected to “the permission and hence the will of those to whom you are subject, whether that permission is silently or explicitly granted.” A free person, however, retains their basic ability to exercise their own will.

Central to Skinner’s general methodology and present in this work is his a priori belief that conflict and crisis forge political ideas. He endorses the Nietzschean notion that concepts do not have settled definitions, only a history or genealogy. Skinner’s genealogy begins in the seventeenth century when the idea of liberty as independence, while present in English legal and political thought for centuries, received a direct threat from the perceived arbitrary rule of the Stuart Dynasty. As he explains early in the book, this fear of arbitrary power shaped the response to the early Stuart monarchs and led Englishmen to behead Charles I’s due to his “wicked design to erect and uphold himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people.” The conflict with Charles I, while upholding liberty as independence, also provided Englishmen with a “distinctive vocabulary.” Englishmen again called upon that vocabulary in 1688 to resist James II’s seeming desire to place England under his dominion. The subsequent Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights reaffirmed Englishmen’s status as freemen. 

Although the century-long conflict with the Stuarts provided some consensus on the definition of liberty as independence, Skinner notes that not all agreed on how best to preserve that independence. Hence, a new branch in his genealogy was created when English republican thinkers such as Marchmont Needham and John Milton advocated the radical notion of a monarchy-free republic rooted in popular sovereignty as the only real protector from arbitrariness. Others, however, branched out by advancing the idea that a mixed constitution “embodying the supremacy of the law” as the ideal method. The dismal failure of the English republican government tipped the scales in favor of a mixed government under the law as the preferred method.

This mid-century debate also illuminated a rising belief that certain rights are so fundamental they must remain beyond governmental reach. Though initially a subtle undercurrent, by 1688, this idea had blossomed into a significant and robust discourse. Yet, disagreement persisted. Some tied these fundamental rights to England’s customary constitution, viewing them as liberties created within and by the state. Others saw them as natural rights—universal entitlements existing outside political society, which every state must protect. These natural rights were the core liberties essential to maintaining free status, and the law’s chief duty was to secure them. Under natural rights thinking, rulers and subjects contractually agreed to uphold and protect those rights. Entrusting only the monarch with the task of protecting these rights risked reducing free people to slaves. While Roman law hinted at natural rights and early radicals like Henry Parker embraced the concept, it gained traction in England only after the Glorious Revolution when John Locke and others articulated it to justify the new regime.

By the early eighteenth century, natural rights philosophy, emphasizing the protection of life, liberty, and property, had woven itself into the fabric of liberty as independence. Disputes between Robert Walpole and his Country Opposition critics—like the authors of Cato’s Letters and Viscount Bolingbroke—centered not on liberty’s meaning but on its preservation. Critics accused Walpole of using patronage and pensions to buy loyalty, arguing this corruption eroded the priority of public good over self-interest, reducing free Englishmen to servile drones. Whig defenders, such as Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, retorted that notions like civic virtue were obsolete, thanks to the post-1688 constitution’s safeguarding of freedoms. By the 1750s, the Country Opposition faded, and the Whigs appeared victorious.

Even as Whigs penned triumphant odes to the British constitution, cracks emerged by mid-century. Novelists like Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Samuel Richardson, alongside commentators like Mary Axtell and Sarah Chapone, painted a stark counter portrait to the Whigs’ vaunted civil society. Their incisive critiques “ruthlessly and effectively” exposed Whig hypocrisy, revealing a society riddled with dependence—wives, servants, and thousands of African slaves trapped in a precarious situation. Instead of a land of free persons exercising their will, these writers demonstrated how “whole of British society” was “little more than a teetering ladder of dependence.”

Another warning sign was England’s ballooning national debt. As foreign bondholders grew and direct taxation surged, fears mounted that parliamentary elections would fall under foreign sway, with a corrupted Parliament wielding despotic power to crush English incomes. These anxieties resonated more acutely in the North American colonies than in Britain itself. Though Skinner allocates only 22 pages to the American Revolution, his argument is clear: colonists viewed Parliament’s taxation without consent as a quintessential definition of arbitrary rule. So intolerable was this oppression that they declared independence. Although they echoed England’s long-standing legal and political tradition of linking liberty as freedom from arbitrariness to natural rights demanding protection, Skinner notes that, in doing so, Americans embraced the radical republican position of being free of monarchy.

The blistering critiques from social observers and the American colonies’ secession shook liberty as independence to its core. It never fully recovered. In the final third of Liberty as Independence, Skinner traces the rise of a rival view—liberty as the absence of restraint—rooted in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). Though initially ignored in England, this idea flourished in Europe through writers like Samuel Pufendorf and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, who applied Hobbes’ definition to legal and political theory. By the early eighteenth century, translations of Pufendorf brought this Hobbesian liberty into British debates. As Americans wielded the old understanding of liberty to resist Britain under George III, English writers like John Wesley and Jeremy Bentham championed liberty as non-interference. Despite stalwart defenders of the old view, like Richard Price and Edmund Burke, by 1800, liberty as the absence of restraint was gaining ground. When John Austin echoed and appealed to Hobbes in 1832 by declaring the law as the sovereign’s command, it signified the final banishment of the older idea of liberty as the status of a freeperson. All that mattered under this “new view” was if you were free to act. The question of subjugation and dependence no longer mattered. As Skinner puts it, Austin “simply assures his readers that liberty ‘can mean nothing else but the exemption from restraint.’” The liberal definition of liberty had not only supplanted the republican understanding, it was and remains the dominant view.

Liberty as Independence is a stellar achievement in intellectual history, though not flawless. Scant attention is given to other intellectual currents in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglophone world. For example, defenders of Monarchical and patriarchal authority like Robert Filmer are nowhere to be found. Readers are left wondering if their understanding of liberty better resembles the classical or liberal tradition. Or perhaps it is an amalgamation of both views, or perhaps something entirely different? While religion receives some attention, this is mostly in terms of Anglican support of the Whig regime. There is little discussion on the role of growing appreciation and relationship in religious consciousness and liberty. On this front, the absence of the Quakers is particularly surprising given that William Penn and William Mead faced imprisonment because of the violation of the Conventicle Act, which forbade dissenting religious gatherings of five or more. Additionally, both men were also nearly imprisoned because they refused to remove their hats, although their religious beliefs said otherwise. Their trial touched directly upon whether these freemen could be coerced by the state to violate religious beliefs not sanctioned by the state. That case, in turn, led to Bushel’s Case and an important English legal development. The jury members in Penn and Mead’s trial were imprisoned by the judge because they ruled in favor of the two Quakers. Eventually, the Court of Common Pleas ruled in favor of the jury, thereby establishing the jury as an independent body in judicial proceedings. In each of these examples, it remains unclear what branch of liberty’s genealogy was at play or if another definition operated.

The other glaring omission from Skinner’s work is the role of republican virtue in sustaining liberty. Virtue appears only fleetingly, mentioned in a quick paragraph on Bolingbroke’s considerations on the idea and then Hume’s rejection Yet, as scholars like Caroline Robbins, J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon Wood, and Lance Banning show, virtue proved far more central to the thought of English republicans, commonwealthmen, Country Opposition figures, and their American counterparts—all pivotal figures in Skinner’s story—than what Skinner alludes. Republican thought, from antiquity to the American founding, stressed virtue as the moral backbone regulating liberty’s independence, warning that without it, liberty devolved into licentiousness, enslaving people to their passions. This fear of license fueled concerns about England’s commercial growth, with luxury seen as a virtue’s corroding foe. As wealth (and debt) flooded the empire, writers dreaded its impact on the virtue needed to uphold liberty, a concern as pressing as liberty’s direct threats. While Skinner notes the debt’s danger to liberty, he skims over license and omits the intertwined dynamic where virtue’s loss spells liberty’s ruin.

Skinner’s conclusion, “A Reckoning,” also merits some remarks. Here, he shifts from historian to moralist, decrying how deunionized workers face employers’ unchecked power to fire at will and lamenting women’s widespread economic reliance. He views both as instances of arbitrary domination, ill-addressed by liberty as non-interference. However, deunionization does not automatically rob workers of agency. Freedom to negotiate contracts or seek better jobs counters employer overreach, and right-to-work laws bolster individual choice by rejecting mandatory union fees. Skinner’s claim of women’s “widespread” dependence clashes with recent Western trends—55.4 percent of women aged 25–60 were employed in 2022, compared to 67 percent of men, hardly a chasm signaling mass reliance. Skinner never explains how liberty as independence better resolves these issues. He shines brighter as a historian than as a social critic.

Nevertheless, reclaiming the idea of liberty as a status and not just a condition has real merit for our contemporary world. It demonstrates in stark contrast just how far from our republican heritage we have strayed. Applying this republican tradition can clarify the threats posed by judicial supremacy, executive power, and the administrative state. Relying exclusively upon five unelected justices to decree the meaning the Constitution, not knowing or lacking any real ability to control how, if, or when a president will launch military strikes, conduct foreign relations, or raise and lower tariffs all the while waiting with bated breath upon his social media posts, and having an unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucracy that makes labyrinthine rules that control most aspects of daily life is, by this older tradition, the very essence of arbitrariness. The ability to act may or may not be restricted, but it seems undeniable that each of these examples equates to a persistent dependence upon the will of someone else. Perhaps a return to the emphasis on the idea between free and slave can help revive a dying constitutional order.

Liberty as Independence is deeply engaging, excellently sourced, and, in many places, brilliant. It is a powerful reminder of the old adage that “no cause is ever lost because no cause is ever really won.” If nothing else, Skinner prompts us to remember that conflict, even over the meaning of cherished words, remains a constant in human affairs. Although forcing anyone to read Liberty as Independence would clash with its core ethos, I urge readers to embrace their freedom and snag a copy for themselves.