Quentin Skinner Lectureship: 'The Spirit of the Constitution'

About the Speaker: Dr Max Skjönsberg is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education. He is the author of The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and the editor of Catharine Macaulay’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Before joining the Hamilton School, Dr Skjönsberg was a Leverhulme EC Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a College Research Associate at Emmanuel College. Having lectured in Politics and History at the University of York and the University of St Andrews, he has also been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool, and a David Hume Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

The British constitution in the eighteenth century was often referred to as one of limited government. But what made it limited? Far from being stable, the meaning of the British constitution in the eighteenth century was changing and contested. But this lecture will show that one common interpretation was that the constitution had a spirit. This language has become associated with Montesquieu, but in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world, the language of spirit was first made popular by the man who instructed Montesquieu about British politics, namely Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. In the Bolingbrokean idiom, the spirit of the constitution, which could be deduced from its logic and its history, was meant to promote freedom. But what precisely did this involve, and what were the consequences of this broadly held idea? This lecture engages with these questions by looking at political debate about reforming parliament between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries.

By focusing on oppositional political discourse in the so-called long eighteenth century, roughly between the Glorious Revolution in 1688-89 and the First Reform Act in 1832, this lecture will show that there was a powerful political tradition in this period that placed less emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of parliament and statute, and instead insisted on the idea that there were fundamental laws and principles that limited political power, even when exercised by parliament. This was at the heart of the idea that England (and Britain after 1707) had a constitution, perhaps even an ancient one.

For the eighteenth-century reformers, the corruption of the constitution and especially parliament necessitated restoration and reform, which were invariably distinguished from innovation. The crucial Machiavellian argument in eighteenth-century political discourse was the idea that constitutions and governments decay over time, necessitating a return to its first principles as a way to escape Polybian cyclicality. This meant that nearly all calls for reform had a strong historical and traditional component. This lecture will illuminate a tradition of British political writers and reformers who wanted great alteration without desiring anything new.

More details and register at the CRASSH website.