How Machiavellian was Machiavelli?

Professor Quentin Skinner to lecture at York

On 12 February 2013 Professor Quentin Skinner will deliver a public lecture at the University of York, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the composition of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Quentin Skinner took his degree in History at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge in 1962. He began his career at Cambridge, moving to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1974 and returning to Cambridge first as Professor of Political Science (1979-1996) and thereafter as Regius Professor of History (1996-2008). He has also held visiting appointments in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany and the United States.  He is currently Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London.

Professor Skinner’s scholarship is available in 24 languages, and has won him numerous prizes, including the Balzan Prize, the Wolfson Prize, the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis, the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize of the British Political Studies Association, and the Benjamin Lippincott and David Easton Awards of the American Political Science Association. He is the holder of Honorary degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen, Athens, Chicago, East Anglia, Harvard, Helsinki, Leuven, Oslo, Oxford, Santiago and St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and the Academia Europea, and a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Irish Academy, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the Österreichische Academie der Wissenschaften

Professor Skinner works on early-modern European intellectual history, with a particular interest in the rhetorical culture of the Renaissance and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. He has also written about a number of philosophical questions, including the nature of interpretation and historical explanation, and about several issues in contemporary political theory, including the concept of political liberty and the character of the State.

The title of Professor Skinner’s lecture is ‘How Machiavellian was Machiavelli?’