I think myself that it would be well worth going back to this tradition to think about rights

as well as to thinking about liberty.

Because there's something strange about having a metaphysics of rights in which, as in the

United Nations Declaration, there are 29 human rights which are held to be self-evident.

And what's happening here is that the idea of a right is ballooning

into what it would be nice to have or what would make a nice society.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

How do us moderns, as people shaped by the political developments of the last two or three hundred years, think about freedom?

And is the way we think about freedom a mistake?

Are there other ways of thinking about freedom that perhaps would allow us to envisage a very different politics? Those are the questions

that throughout much of his career, one of the most distinguished historians, perhaps the most

distinguished intellectual historian, alive today has been thinking about. Quentin Skinner was,

among other distinguished positions, the Regis Professor of History at Cambridge University,

and he has a new book out called Liberty as Independence, The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ide ideal. In this conversation, Quentin and I

talk about why he claims it would be more productive to think of freedom not as an absence of

interference in the way we tend to today, but rather as an absence of domination, to think about freedom

as being marked by the fact that you're not subject to the arbitrary will of another.

We talk about the ways in which that might change our thinking about why we might be unfree

if one spouse is given more rights than the other due to their

gender. If in the workplace you are subject to the arbitrary will of your boss, if in a political

context you are living in a relatively liberal autocracy, in a place where you can't make the

laws, even if the laws themselves are relatively permissive.

...