"All of this steered my own work in a new direction. I decided to write a critical genealogy of another cherished contemporary ideal: freedom. I wanted to examine why the identification of liberty with a minimal state, which seemed so dominant in the 2010s, had come about. In exploring this question, I was able to build both on my own earlier work on French eighteenth and nineteenth-century political thought as well as on a vast literature on early-modern conceptions of freedom produced by Quentin Skinner and other Cambridge School historians. In his seminal Liberty Before Liberalism, Skinner had recovered an older way of thinking about freedom he called republican (or neo-Roman) which equated liberty not with an absence of state interference, but with establishing popular control over state power.[16]"
At The Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum, Annelien de Dijn writes about "How I became an Intellectual Historian."
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