Quentin Skinner is a scholar who needs no introduction. For over fifty years, his work has offered original contributions to many fields of thought: from the history of political thought to political philosophy, as well as to the methodology for the study of the history of ideas. For his wide-ranging research work, he has been granted honorary degrees from numerous universities in different continents, and the Balzan Prize, awarded in November 2006, is one among the many forms of recognition he has earned. With the Balzan Prize funds, Skinner devised a challenging research project on the various ways of understanding individual and collective freedom in the different traditions of European political thought. He involved in this project young scholars from many European countries and the results of it were published in the two volumes Freedom and the Construction of Europe, printed by Cambridge University Press in 2013. In the following interview, some attempt will be made to take stock of the intellectual path Skinner has followed over the past twenty years: from his theorizing a third concept of freedom, which implies the rejection of every form of dependence on the arbitrary power of others, to his genealogical reconstruction of the concept of the State and his defence of the use of such a concept in our normative discourse against the oversimplifying theorizers of the «death of the State».
