Quentin Skinner

“The lack of freedom suffered by those who advise the powerful may of course be due to coercion or force. But the slavish behavior typical of such counselors may equally well be due to their basic condition of dependence and their understanding of what their clientage demands of them. As soon as they begin to ‘slide into a blind dependence upon one who has wealth and power’, they begin to desire ‘only to know his will’, and eventually ‘care not what injustice they do, if they may be rewarded’.”

“One of the present values of the past is as a repository of values we no longer endorse, of questions we no longer ask. One corresponding role for the intellectual historian is that of acting as a kind of archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface, dusting it down and enabling us to consider what we think of it.”

“Many historians make it a principal part of their business to investigate and explain the unfamiliar beliefs we encounter in past societies. But what is the relationship between our provision of such explanations and our assessment of the truth of such beliefs? The question is obviously a highly intractable one, but no practising historian can hope to evade it, as many philosophers have recently and rightly pointed out.”

“Having gestured at the concept of rationality, I ought to stress that I intend nothing very grand or precise by that much abused term. When I speak of agents as having rational beliefs, I mean only that their beliefs (what they hold to be true) should be suitable beliefs for them to hold true in the circumstances in which they find themselves. A rational belief will thus be one that an agent has attained by some accredited process of reasoning.”