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̽��ֱ��Political Studies Association have named Professor Skinner recipient of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize for his Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies.

It is the second such award the influential scholar, who is Regius Professor of Modern History at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has received in the space of the last few months. In September he won a prestigious Balzan Prize for his contribution to the study of political thought.

̽��ֱ��judges for the Political Studies Association said Professor Skinner’s work had been “hugely significant and pioneering” across several decades of writing. They added that “Quentin Skinner’s ability to critically interpret the arguments of contemporaries such as Rawls and Geertz in addition to ‘classical’ thinkers from Machiavelli to Max Weber marks him out as a uniquely talented theorist.”

Quentin Skinner was born in Oldham in 1940. He studied history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and on graduating in 1962 took up a teaching fellowship at Christ’s College where he has been based ever since. He was appointed to the chair of Political Science at Cambridge in 1978 and has been Regius Professor of Modern History since 1996.

Professor Skinner’s work focuses on the history of moral and political philosophy. When he began researching, he was frustrated by the prevailing style of writing on the history of political thought, which he felt stripped classic political works of any context and presented them as if they had been composed in a vacuum.

As part of the “Cambridge School”, his seminal work [on the history of political thought] has sought to articulate the original intentions of authors such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, often using the works of lesser-known writers of a period to substantiate his argument that “most major thinkers in the western tradition have been motivated by a desire to engage in some kind of dialogue within their own society and culture”. His research has focused on the republican politics of the Renaissance, the emergence of the concept of representative government in 17th Century England, the history of the modern state and the history [of] and meaning of liberty.

Professor Skinner has been a prolific as well as an influential writer, and his scholarship is currently available in over twenty languages. His work has been widely recognised, and he is the holder of honorary degrees from Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and other leading Universities. Among his key books are his recent three-volume study, Visions of Politics and his two volumes on ̽��ֱ��Foundations of Modern Political Thought, both published by the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press. ̽��ֱ��latter work, originally published in 1978, won the Wolfson Prize, the Lippincott Prize of the American Political Science Association, and was named by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books of the past 50 years.