Quentin Skinner interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 10th January 2008 0:09:07 Born Chadderton, near Manchester in 1940; family on both sides comes from the North East of Scotland; mother's father was a wines and spirits merchant in Aberdeen and my father's father was a rather more prosperous grocer in the same town and also ran a chain of restaurants; father was educated in England, a Conway boy, trained as a junior officer in the British Navy; he joined the Royal Navy in the First World War straight out of his training and was torpedoed while working on the Arctic convoys; he always told me he hated the Navy and left, took the Civil Service examinations and joined the Colonial Service; he then spent the whole of his career in West Africa; my mother went to the University of Aberdeen as did most of my family on both sides; mother's three brothers and two of her sisters all read medicine but mother graduated in English literature and became a schoolteacher; she was a contemporary of one of my father's sisters at Aberdeen and I think that must be how my parents met; I am the second child of quite old parents; my father must have been in his late 30's when he married and he died in his early 80's; my mother faded away having Alzheimer’s disease from her early 70's; strange that each parent died while my wife Susie was pregnant with one of our two children 4:12:20 Mine is a common story of the time with a father who lives abroad; he worked in Nigeria where the British Foreign Office strongly discouraged children from going; I have never set foot in Africa though my parents spent much of their lives there; malaria was endemic; I only saw my parents when they came on leave; I did not see my father who was stuck in Africa due to the outbreak of war for several years from birth; then they went back in 1945 and I only saw them at intervals of about eighteen months; I was really brought up by my mother's eldest sister who was a doctor in Manchester; a maiden lady but with strong maternal instincts who was a wonderful guardian; a very educated lady, passionate about literature and drama, and the world of the mind generally; I got to know my parents after my father retired; in those days you retired from the Imperial Service at fifty-five; at that point I was a boarder at Bedford School where I had gone aged seven; at their return I became a day boy as they settled in Bedford; at prep school I had got tuberculosis and very nearly died and my mother came back in a mighty rush from Africa to look after me and set up house; my father retired a couple of years after that so I had my adolescence living with them; I was very fond of both of them; my father was a very quiet and retiring person; my mother was very important in my teenage years; she had retained a great passion for English literature and partly because they had been in the diplomatic service where the language was French she gave me a passion for that language; I got to know my father in his very old age when he was looking after my mother and I conceived a great admiration for his courage and stoicism; he was a very fine person 7:52:00 Having to manage without parents as a young child at that time was how life was; I went to boarding school even before going to Bedford School so I was a hardened boarder by seven; I accepted it but when my own son reached seven and I looked at him I was filled with a great rage which must have been there; this was an extraordinary thing to do to such very small children leaving them absolutely to fend for themselves; I was not bullied though the school was tough as such boarding schools were; don't think I have ever come to terms with that but I got an excellent education; I think I could have got a very good education in the sciences which my elder brother did at Bedford, and won the top scholarship to Cambridge in medicine; I had a very traditional education studying classics from prep school, then history and English literature; excellently taught in all those subjects; my peers in the lower sixth form were a remarkable group who became consequential in the world of business and academe, and in politics; of teachers, there was one who was truly remarkable and I kept in touch with him until his death two years ago; his obituary took up a page in 'The Independent', a man called John Eyre, our history teacher; a man also passionate about poetry and literature and, above all, theatre; that influenced me tremendously although I was never able to act although I aspired to 13:21:19 I was completely cured of tuberculosis though the treatment meant that recovery took a year of inaction when I listened to the BBC and read; it turned me into a bookish boy; I had started my schooling in Scotland and was well ahead of the boys in my English prep school and was put in a class with boys who were a year older than me and was struggling; when I returned I was put in a class where everyone was my age and then I had much more academic success; the illness did not stop my being captain of gymnastics and led the school fencing team; in that sort of school you were forced to be an all-rounder although my guardian absolutely refused that I should box; another thing that has always mattered a lot to me is music and from an early age I played the violin although not well; I was good enough for the school orchestra which together with the fact that I was a choirboy, taught me to read music and gave me an interest in classical music and the choral tradition; my heroes vary and now Bach matters most; I am passionate about some twentieth century music, especially Russian; as a student always listened to music while working but at a certain point silence became important and I am a bit neurotic about having good silent conditions in which to write; I sometimes try to listen when doing e-mails but find that I start listening and stop writing; I like to think that I am taking the music seriously; can have music going on in my head which can be a nuisance 19:14:06 I won a State Scholarship on my 'A' levels but was interviewed at Cambridge before by Ian McFarlane, the senior tutor of Gonville and Caius who gave me a place; the scholarship year, the third year sixth, John Eyre introduced us to more general questions about historical interpretation and we read Croce and Collingwood which has permanently marked me and was very important to me; I won a scholarship to Caius but the reason I went there was that my elder brother had been there; it was a fortunate choice as it was already a power house in the teaching of history; Philip Grierson was a benign if remote presence with whom I shared a love of music; Neil McKendrick had just been appointed and was our Director of Studies; I already knew I wanted to work in intellectual history and to be a teacher; I had been encouraged by John Eyre to leave school immediately after the scholarship exam and went to teach in a secondary modern school, where children went who had failed 11+, in Maidstone; tough, as immediately introduced to a world that I knew nothing about, huge mixed classes and a wide spectrum of ability; powerful experience so I came to university thinking I wanted to become a teacher; I did well and the opportunity arose to become a university teacher; got a starred first in both Part 1 and Part 2; Caius had the possibility of election to a fellowship on Tripos results so I moved from being an undergraduate to a fellow in one week at the age of twenty-one; in that summer of 1962, the enactment of the Robbins Report on university education recommending that the level of tertiary education should be raised from 4% to 13% of the cohort meant that new universities were being set up and there was a big exodus to them from Oxford and Cambridge, and Christ's College lost its official fellow in history and I was appointed to that position, which I have held ever since; my difficulty was that I went immediately into a teaching fellowship which was one reason that I made a slow start on my research; on the other hand I had a tenured position 26:59:01 As an undergraduate the general standard of lecturing was rather dismal and the course was uncongenial to me as in those days it consisted of very large outline courses and a great deal of British politics concentrating on high politics; there were two incandescent lecturers, Walter Ullmann and Moses Finley; I was studying Medieval intellectual history and although I couldn't always understand what Ullmann was saying he gave the sense that this mattered and they were riveting lectures; Moses Finley was a remarkable lecturer; I was studying Ancient History for Part 1 and he would go through very technical discussions without notes and with great bravura; he taught me that what you can say as an historian simply depends on what the evidence is; the other lecturer who was very important to me was Duncan Forbes, the intellectual historian, and in my final year I did a course, which we still have, called special subject which was two papers and he was lecturing on the Scottish Enlightenment which centred largely on the philosophy of Hume; I was entranced by the course and it cemented my ideas that I wanted to go on to do work in intellectual history in the history of philosophy; John Burrow supervised my work in political theory and intellectual history and was then a research fellow at Christ's, he ended his career as Professor at Oxford and I am still in touch with him; he was very sceptical, witty, challenging, not at all my kind of temperament but memorable to be taught by; Peter Laslett did give a course of lectures though he sometimes forgot to turn up; on his day he was a wonderful lecturer but sometimes he wasn't very interested in what he was lecturing about because he did a very wide outline course; I never met him as an undergraduate but of all the pieces of secondary literature that I read, probably the one that most struck me was his introduction to his edition of Locke; I remember a supervision by John Burrow in my second year when he announced the appearance of the edition and I bought it; it was genuine epiphany to me and I can still recall the astonishment with which I read a text in which a major work of political theory was shown to be part of an ongoing political debate; when I subsequently talked to him about what he had achieved in that remarkable edition seemed strange; he thought he had dethroned Locke from being a political theorist and was only a pamphleteer; I thought that what he said about Locke could have been said for any work of philosophy, that if you could recapture it there would always be an immediate context which made sense and that we should not be thinking of the texts in isolation from the contexts; Collingwood's idea of a logic of question and answer clearly underpins that and probably underpinned Laslett's thinking I subsequently decided; Collingwood's idea was that we should think of these texts as answers to questions and the questions are going to be set by the society in which and for which the texts are being written; part of the interpretation is not what the text says but what it is doing, what kind of an intervention does this text constitute in ongoing debate; I now say to my students on Hobbes's 'Leviathan' on which I am giving a course at the moment, think of it as a speech in Parliament; all of these great works of political philosophy are recognizably contributions to a debate; interpreting them is uncovering what that contribution was; some of my earliest historical research was on Hobbes where I wanted to show that that theory and the reason that Hobbes foregrounded it in 'Leviathan' was because he was making a particular contribution to a debate about political obligation at the time that 'Leviathan' was being composed; Laslett had already discovered Locke's library and it was important to him; one thing that was important was that the library did not contain a copy of 'Leviathan'; important because he wanted us to think of Locke as a reply to Filmer; subsequently he did with Harrison a catalogue of the library 36:10:03 Some of the students that I taught in the 1960's were brilliant and I have remained in touch with some of them; hasn't been so since as I don't think I was gifted as a supervisor and I didn't enjoy it; I always found that my mood depended entirely on the mood of the student so if the student was depressed with the course I immediately thought that maybe that was true; I was not good at lifting peoples spirits so I think I was best at teaching the really gifted; of my students from that period the two that became most famous were Roy Porter and Simon Schama; in 1974 I went on sabbatical leave to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and while I was there they conceived the idea that I should remain there and gave me a five-year contract; in the course of that five years they invited me to stay forever, but I did not accept; was there until 1979 when I was elected to the Chair of Political Science at Cambridge; at the same time my wife was elected to a research fellowship at Girton and we were starting a family; I had first married very young but it didn't work; later I met my present wife, Susan James, now Professor of Philosophy at the University of London, and we have been together for about thirty-five years or more 40:57:21 Started in History at Princeton when I was invited by John Elliott to be a candidate for 1974-75; during that year I came to know the three astonishing figures who were running the Social Theory group: Thomas Kuhn, Albert Hirschman and Clifford Geertz; Geertz was perhaps the most important for me for his work on cultural theory; Cliff and I were both greatly influenced by Wittgenstein as a theorist of language and culture; what mattered to me most in my Princeton years was that with the level of trust which shows that we are speaking of a more innocent and better world I was simply left to get on with whatever I was doing; in fact I was trying to catch up with the earlier ideas I had had about political theory and when I returned to Cambridge in 1979 I had written 'The Foundations of Modern Political Thought' published in 1978, which had probably got me the Chair 47:32:16 John Pocock was very important to my work from an early stage as he was writing interesting methodological pieces from the early 1960's which were very Collingwoodian though couched in a different way; he talked about texts having different levels of abstraction which made me think on the underlying purposes of texts; in the late 60's or early 70's he sent me the draft of his great text 'The Machiavellian Moment' which was published in 1975; it was a privilege to be sent this but he was attracted to the two bodies of work that I had published, my essays on Hobbes and essays on meaning and speech acts; very important for me as a scholarly statement of how to think about the development of Renaissance political theory; the first volume of my 'Foundations of Modern Political Thought' was called 'The Renaissance' and I trampled over much of the same ground; John and I have remained in touch ever since and he is a formidable intellectual historian and a very generous one too; when I worked first on Renaissance political theory there were two orthodoxies that I was interested in contesting; one was the view that there had been a tremendous shift, especially in the history of philosophy and therefore in the history of political philosophy at the time of the revival of Aristotelianism in the late thirteenth century; the other orthodoxy stated that there was another climacteric moment which placed the crucial date a century later, Hans Baron's fundamental thought in his classic text 'The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance' where he saw what he called a civic humanism; I came to think that both of those stories were wrong but John Pocock accepted the second; what I wanted to say about the development of moral and political philosophy in the Renaissance has always been the same thing since the seventies and has been a foundation of much of my research since then is that there was no happening with a bang but there was a kind of Roman culture that had never been completely lost and that by a process of accretion develops in the Italian peninsula with the emergence of universities with rhetoric being studied as a basis for understanding law and law being the fundamental subject studied; this rhetorical and juristic culture which was partially founded on the texts of Roman law but also incorporated all the major texts of Roman history and moral philosophy was the curriculum that came to be known as the studia humanitatis and we can trace that right through from the twelfth century to the period of Machiavelli and Guicciardini and later; that was the book that I tried to write, a very non-Pocockian sort of book; for me that was the beginning of what would be called a research programme as that set of ideas informed all my work for the next twenty-five years, a programme I have only just succeeded in rounding off 54:05:22 We all read Southern's 'Making of the Middle Ages' as undergraduates and in a rather dismal landscape that shone as a beacon of extraordinary imagination and intelligence; but it still had the idea that there was a moment that had to be the Renaissance which is what I have been trying to contest; what interested me is that if you look at some of the great milestones of moral and political philosophy in the Renaissance you can relate them back in different ways to this culture of Romanitas; the texts which were crucial were those of Livy and Sallust amongst the historians, and to a lesser degree, Tacitus, and amongst the philosophers, Cicero and Seneca; when I wrote my book on Machiavelli what I wanted to show was that the understanding of Machiavelli is the understanding of him as a kind of Roman moralist, but also a satirist of some of those qualities that were admired; the whole discussion of the relation of freedom, virtue and glory that you find in Machiavelli is a recognizably Roman story; what is remarkable about him is the satirical turn that he gives; a later moment in my research programme was a book I wrote about political painting in the early Renaissance which had been understood entirely as an expression of scholastic values; I worked particularly on the famous cycle of Lorenzetti in Siena trying to show that the right way to interpret the context into which this was done was that this was a recovery for a city republic of these Roman values about freedom and the common good, and the relation of virtue to them; my interpretation, which has remained controversial, it that these cycles are nothing to do with the recovery of Aristotelianism but all part of this humanist culture which I see developing all the way through; I suppose the last part of that cycle of works that I wrote which stemmed from the work I originally did in the first volume of 'The Foundation of Modern Political Thought' was to become deeply interested in classical theories of freedom; eventually I came to think that those theories differed in a really challenging way from the way in which we nowadays have tended to think about political liberty and wrote a little book on that which emerged out of my inaugural lectures as Regius Professor, 'Liberty Before Liberalism'; I also became interested in the question when did we stop thinking about liberty in this classical and very different way and the book that I have just managed to finish is about that theme; I've come to think that this insight which is not exclusively mine but which I've worked at on the rival ways of thinking about freedom has been the most important of the things that I took from my study of Roman antiquity and its influence in the Renaissance 58:35:08 When at Princeton Lawrence Stone was an extremely powerful presence there; I recall that he was very generous to me and my wife but he thought that the kind of history that I was interested in was just absurd; that there was no study of intellectual history that was going to be of any autonomous interest; he seemed to think it was epiphenomenal to some kind of real history that we should be studying; he was not merely uninterested in what I was doing but was actively hostile to it; that was the tone in the department of history at Princeton at that time; it likes to think of itself in retrospect as having been concerned with cultural history in that period in a Geertzian way but that was not my experience of it; I kept out of their way, which has always been my instinct as I've never much enjoyed talking about my work until I have done it; I never once went to the Davis Center seminars in all the years I was at Princeton; I could just sense when I looked at what was going to be talked about that it would make me miserable as I would find them of very little interest and they would take a similar view of me; just got on with my writing on my own Second Part 00:09:07 Both C.B. Macpherson and Christopher Hill were very generous to me; Hill read some of my early work on Hobbes which I was publishing through the 1960's and invited me to a seminar in Oxford that he was running and that was how I first encountered him; I very much liked some of what he had written in 'Puritanism and Revolution', especially 'The Norman Yoke' which I thought rather non-Marxist, indeed a rather exemplary attempt to excavate the kind of resources that Leveller thinking and radical thinking more generally was able to draw on, and how that gave you a particular picture of English history and view of human rights; I never felt he had a heavy Marxist agenda; I also liked his book on Milton and the Puritan revolution which I reviewed in 'New York Review of Books' and I got into a nice correspondence with him about that; Macpherson was a bit of a problem for me by contrast; I felt that from quite an early stage I had arrived at two principles which I tried to do justice to in my historical writings, one of which we have talked about that the act of interpretation is trying to see things their way; also wanted to say that when we study works in history and philosophy what we should be doing is just listening; what we must not do is to go to the past with some view about a story that they must be telling or a grand narrative in which they must be figuring, like the rise of modernity or the acquisition of national self-consciousness or any of these completely anachronistic concepts which we can apply to the past; that is what Macpherson did by inventing something called possessive individualism and went in search of its origins; this violated every principle that I held most dear, that we are not listening to them but telling them what they are talking about; worst of all we are making political theory epiphenomenal with respect to something else; in every way I found that book detestable; he was not easy to talk to about this; however it set me off to work on Hobbes; Macpherson's book was published in June 1962 at the moment I graduated; it was one of the first books that set me on what might have been a rather disastrous course which was to start thinking about what is dreadful about this, what's going wrong, how should one be doing this subject; first thing I ever published was a review article called 'Hobbes's Leviathan' which was published in the 'The Historical Journal' early in 1964 in which I tried to set out what I thought was going wrong in this way of thinking and what we should be doing instead; what happened after that was that I complicated my life by trying to write about Hobbes as an example of my view of interpretation but it took me many years to work out what I did believe in 6:33:10 I hardly knew Hugh Trevor-Roper though I talked to his seminar once and met him when he gave the Trevelyan lectures here; didn't find him an approachable person; found his book on Archbishop Laud an example of an attempt to get at a fundamental bedrock of society - in this case religion - while assuming everything else was a shibboleth; never found his work appealing; Keith Thomas is one of my heroes whom I respect deeply; he is a sensational scholar; his essay on Hobbes was in a collection which I was sent to review; when I came to it I was electrified and felt that this was how to do this subject; got in touch with him at that time and have remained so; I find him very formidable and in the area in which I practice he has been as good as it gets 11:08:09 Did not know John Dunn as an undergraduate well although he was famous then as a great speaker in the Union; although we did the special subject together I did not really get to know him until after we graduated; should say that as an undergraduate and teacher I have always found Cambridge a very competitive environment in which to work; as an undergraduate I adopted a response to this which has continued where I tend to crawl away into a corner and do what I am doing on my own; as an undergraduate I didn't want to go to seminars or to really discuss the issues that were set before us as I wanted to work them out for myself; later we got to know each other well and he was a major intellectual influence upon me; he was a picture of commitment and passionate about the subject; he read endlessly and was always wonderful to talk to about what he was reading; most of it he thought was rubbish which was tremendously exhilarating and his scorn for sloppy thinking or self-importance was very great; we used to meet very regularly when first teaching; he also influenced me in some of what I have talked about, historical method; by 1969 he had published what remains an absolutely classical text on the political philosophy of John Locke; that was in many ways a model of how one should do intellectual history; we talked a lot about it and were thinking along similar Collingwoodian and Wittgensteinian lines, but John had his own very original way of laying this out and the preface to the book on Locke stands up absolutely 14:55:00 I have a narrow but passionate interest in a limited number of issues in history; I always felt that Peter Laslett had taken a wrong turning with the work that he did; he sent me to read 'The World We Have Lost' in typescript and I thought it rattling good stuff but it seemed rather impressionistic and I'm not sure that he ever mastered the statistical techniques that were necessary to do the family reconstitution that he then got interested in; what was an epiphany for me was his Locke edition which I read as an undergraduate; this, together with Dunn's and Pocock's work on Locke are all remarkable pieces of work 17:12:03 Have been preoccupied with the subject of liberty since the early 1980's; in the book called 'The Renaissance', the first volume of 'The Foundations of Modern Political Thought', I began to talk about a view of freedom that seemed to me classical and connected with notions of virtue in an interesting way; I gave the Tanner lectures at Harvard in 1984 where I tried to develop all this work; I came back to it in the 1990's through someone who has become a very important intellectual associate of mine, Philip Pettit, who teaches in philosophy and politics at Princeton; he and I knew each other at Cambridge from the 1970's and taught together at the Australian National University in 1994 a seminar on the theory of freedom which was the beginning of my more intensive preoccupation with this theme; the essay which I called 'A Third Concept of Liberty' was the inaugural Isaiah Berlin Lecture at the British Academy which I gave in 2000, but before that I had already made this topic the subject of my inaugural lecture as Regius Professor; I was rather keen to inaugurate myself on the theme of liberty because of Acton who was a hero of my youth and his inaugural lecture had been partly on similar questions; I developed that in 'Liberty Before Liberalism'; what I am trying to talk about is a view of freedom which is neither of Isaiah Berlin's two concepts - that freedom embodies some notion of self-mastery which he contrasted with the view that to understand the concept of freedom is to understand that freedom essentially consists in a state of non-interference; I wanted to say that the latter had risen at a particular ideological moment as the enemy of a completely different way of thinking about freedom which we have essentially lost; I wanted to restore this which is why I called it the third concept of liberty in my British Academy lecture; this concept I found in the classical Roman historians but also in their reception in the Renaissance and above all in Machiavelli’s 'Discorsi' which I thought to be a really crucial text from this point of view; this is a view that sees liberty, not as a predicate of action so does not think in terms of freedom of action; Berlin's view that freedom is simply non-interference makes our interest in liberty essentially an interest in freedom of action; the classical view that interested me thinks of freedom as the name of a status and is interested not in freedom of action but what it is to be a free person; the contrast is not with interference but with dependence; this is a distinction that goes back to the foundations of Roman law and is to be found laid out in the beginnings of 'The Digest' that the essential distinction in law of persons is are you a free person or are you a slave; Roman law needs to know that as slaves fall outside the law; to be a free person is essentially to be a citizen, a person not dependent upon the will of anybody else; you might say that they are talking about something else, not freedom of action, but what is subtle about the classical view is that a free person is someone who is going to be able to act freely; a slave's status means that he cannot act freely because of fear of the persons in domination; not unlike the situation of illegal workers in this century who are up against arbitrary and discretional power, so it is a view of freedom that we ought to be thinking about but has largely been lost; feel it important as an intellectual historian to recover lost traditions of thinking and reinspect them; the other thing that I have been trying to do is to locate when this view of freedom about being a free person get replaced by one where freedom is just freedom of action; I returned to Hobbes 'Leviathan' as the text which was written in order to discredit this view of freedom; underlines what I have been saying about interpretation being about what is being done in these texts; in 'Leviathan' a view of freedom is being presented so that all this talk about free persons is discredited as being confused; Hobbes had extraordinary success in that endeavour as classical utilitarianism fundamentally takes up the Hobbesian insight; Berlin's also accepts the tradition of Hobbes in his 'Two Concepts of Liberty'; I have tried to get behind this tradition to see what he tried to supersede; the most recent topic of my teaching in the University has been to give a large course of lectures on Hobbes and the English Revolution to contextualize 'Leviathan' in just this way 27:21:16 I have always wanted to say that we must let texts speak for themselves and not go to the past with the Whig desire to place them within a grand narrative to show they are contributing to some great overarching story; I have also wanted to say something that is mildly relativist which is that although we can get ourselves in touch with these people they are very different from us and hold very different beliefs, and can profit from this; this can sometimes enable one to see that they do hold views that we do not now hold but are nevertheless candidates for belief; that is what I think I have discovered in this classical view of freedom; perhaps we should think about these texts again having that in mind; there would be an opposite fallacy from the Whig interpretation which you go to the past specifically with the aim of trying to find these subversions of our own beliefs; I am not asking that that should be your motivation; it should be to listen to people whom you want to hear; I still think we should do our own thinking for ourselves as I don't think the past contains blueprints that we can simply adopt; do not agree with David Cannadine's recent suggestion that historians should advise politicians; fear it would lead to dependency and we should keep ourselves independent from power 32:24:02 Question of the difference between Roman and English common law with regard to status; Bracton distinguishes the free from the servile, and the vassal from both; notion that you might not be a slave but might not be free because you are a copyholder or because you are a tenant at will was very important in common law and brings out that view about freedom that it is the name of a relationship between two persons with respect to dominance and dependence in respect of property rights; general thoughts on servitude; own independence by getting a lectureship so early which gave a freedom to act in a way that those dependent on others for a secure job do not have; never felt pressure in Cambridge to conform as the system protects those it has appointed; I had an equivalent of freehold in English law as a life fellow of Christ's College; Cambridge also has two power bases in the departments and colleges although I have always been a natural ally of the University; in my time the faculties and University have taken over and is a sign of increasing professionalization, and it doesn't matter so much now which college you go to as an undergraduate; when I was an undergraduate it did matter, now the seminars are organized by the faculty and you get the same teachers; the fact that the faculties have taken over has had an equalizing effect and has been beneficial; colleges are very heavily endowed halls of residence and they spend that endowment on research; the major colleges all elect research fellows; the faculty has no role in that and it seems that if faculties got locked into a particular ideology it was very important that there should be colleges that were not; my views on freedom mean I am not keen on there being just one centre of power but that power should be diffused so that we are not dependent on any one source 41:20:02 I like to think my own thoughts so am not tremendously affected by where I am; my reasons for staying in Cambridge would not now be as strong as they used to be but they were numerous; one reason when I came back from Princeton was that Cambridge was a good place to bring up children; the second which was always important to me is the amazing quality of students in this University; I have had a wonderful succession of Ph.D. and Masters students; they don't in general go on to be academics but whom you teach at a graduate level; a third consideration was the excellence of the library; in my work that has been rather overtaken by databases now so I can sit in my room where I have access to early English books on line, and can get almost any book I want without leaving; until this, the extraordinary excellence of the rare books collection here was crucial to me, and I needed a huge range as I was trying to turn political theory into a genuinely historical subject, and I could not have done that in most English universities; interesting why I didn't stay at the Institute; two further things to mention, one was that deciding to have a family made me want to come home; now that salary scales have been changed I doubt that I would be paid more but when I returned from Princeton to a Chair in Cambridge I halved my income, so I must have really wanted to do it; the other consideration was that I have always seen myself as a teacher and have wanted as a lecturer to get things clear to myself in order to do so effectively; at Princeton I had no students and never gave any lectures and I really missed that; I can see that it would have adversely affected my research as in an elite university like this you have the extraordinary privilege of being able to lecture out of your research; the making of it clear enough to yourself to make it clear to others which is the fundamental task means that that has always been the feed for my scholarship 46:06:23 The whole process of working is a mystery to me and I have even tried to write about how I start on a new project; I can't quite see how it evolves; at some point I am reading texts and making notes on them and then I am trying to reorganize those notes and trying to turn those notes into prose; that is as much as I can say about how I do it; for many years I had a vast pile of notes and then settled down one dreadful morning to try to write them out as a piece of prose; now I short-circuit that; I have been using a word processor since the early 1980's which in English academic life was quite early, the first production being published in 1983; since then the pile of notes have been transformed on screen and edited there; since the advent of the word processor I have, like everybody else, written far more; I think in general my colleagues now write books that are far too long; my advice to young scholars now is to write very short books on very large subjects because that really does gain you an audience; can't believe that people read the giant tomes that my colleagues write; think the word processor has been bad for us in that way but for me it really gives a fluency 49:17:21 I am an atheist; think that if we know anything it is that none of that could be true; of course we may not know anything, so atheist is a bold word; I'm a Richard Dawkins kind of atheist; there are two kinds, the Marxists who think that though they are materialists what is interesting about religion in all forms is that it deformed very deep human yearnings and aspirations and that it is a very powerful route into trying to understand human psychology; another kind of atheist - David Hume or Bertrand Russell - who mostly can't understand what these people are claiming, but in so far that I do it is obviously false, and I am that kind of atheist, it just doesn't interest me at all; that has been true since I was a teenager; I can't say that it was even a very great crisis though Bertrand Russell was one of my great heroes then; at University I made a special study of Hume and therefore the 'Dialogues on Natural Religion' and I am inclined to think what Hume says in that text more or less deals with the subject; this is an increasingly unfashionable thing to say; most atheists are of the other sort nowadays; one of the most surprising things in my lifetime is the recrudescence not merely of organized religion as a powerful political force so that the old distinction of religion being part of the private sphere has gone; when I was writing 'The Foundations of Modern Political Thought' my wife who was reading it began to become seriously worried that I would become a convert; I was really seriously trying to understand the point of view of these people and trying to sympathise with it as much as I could; now I am told that students find there is not enough religion in those books; its commonly said by critics of my work that I don't do religion because I am very insensitive to it; I think that is unfair but it is certainly true that it is uncongenial to me as a subject for research and it is rather remarkable that I am a specialist in early modern culture and don't study religion 53:12:12 Susan matters more to me than I can express and its true that she reads everything that I write and I read everything that she writes; we have a pact of honesty which can be very painful; although I don't talk to people about my work I am a very keen sender-out of my work and she is one of a group of natural advisors; I have never understood why scholars don't send out their drafts; of course it is very painful and takes you much longer but in the most recent book that I finished, not only Sue but two others of my readers really caused me to junk the first draft and to rewrite it completely; I was horrified to think that I was going to have to do that at the time, and retrospectively delighted; I suppose the only other thing I might be inclined to reflect on is that I am now 67 and this is my last year in Cambridge; because I started teaching at 21 I am now the longest continuous serving member of this university at this moment; it is fifty years almost to the day since I sat the scholarship examination so it has been the whole of my adult life; so what has changed? It has changed, not always for the best, and in some rather disquieting ways it has not changed; when I look at my lecture audience they seem to be of the same socio-economic class and ethnic group that they always were; there seems to be an extraordinary homogeneity of our students and in a society that really must me more multicultural that I think is indefensible; that is a problem for the colleges as they admit undergraduates which is one reason why I view them with a certain suspicion; the great change since I arrived is in relation to women; when I was and undergraduate there were 43 tenured members of staff and two were women in the history faculty, now there are 54 and 16 are women; the balance is still bad but it is a revolution; the year I graduated, 1962, 8% of graduates in history were women, now it is 50% as it has been for about fifteen years, a huge revolution and very beneficial to the University 57:59:00 Was an active member of The Apostles when I first graduated for about the first two year and it was very important to me at that time; it was a group that was dominated when I was a member by economists but were deeply interested in moral and political theory; I learnt a great deal going to those weekly meetings; it was a violation of my principle that I should keep myself to myself and I found these people deeply formidable; there were only seven or eight of us, two of whom won the Nobel prize; one of these was Amartya Sen who was an amazing person to talk to over a wide range of questions; I know that one shouldn't be a member of secret societies but we were not spies and I doubt that MI5 (or MI6) was interested in any of us, but it was an education, and with apologies for the elitism involved it was a very remarkable group