Nowadays when we speak about the state we generally use the word simply to refer to an apparatus of government; in common parlance, ‘state’ and ‘government’ have become virtually synonymous terms. My first lecture traces the emergence in early-modern political theory of the strongly contrasting view that the state is the name of a distinct person. Hobbes is seen as the major contributor to this way of thinking about public power. The central section of the lecture analyses his claim that the state is a ‘person by fiction’, as well as examining Pufendorf’s rival but closely associated view that the state ought to be conceived as a moral person. My lecture ends by attempting an assessment of the idea of state personality. Has anything of significance been lost as a result of our abandonment of the belief, central to so much early-modern and Enlightenment discourse, that the state is the name of a person distinct from both government and the governed?
Professor Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities, Queen Mary University of London, gave the 2015 Agnes Cuming Lectures in the UCD School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland.
Skinner is the author of numerous books and articles on early modern political thought and is a founder of the ‘Cambridge School’ of the history of political thought. He has broad interests in modern intellectual history and has published on a number of philosophical themes including the nature of interpretation and historical explanation, and on several issues in contemporary political theory including the concept of political liberty and the character of the State.
About the Agnes Cuming Lectures in Philosophy
The UCD School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, has an annual/biannual public lecture series by prominent philosophers made possible by a bequest of Agnes Cuming, one of the first female philosophy graduates of University College Dublin.
Ms Agnes Cuming, daughter of a King’s Counsel, was born on 29 September 1890. She graduated from University College Dublin in the autumn of 1910.
There were two women in the 1909-1910 Degree class of 24. Her professors would have included Professor Magennis, Professor of Metaphysics; Fr. John Shine, Professor of Logic and Psychology, and Dr M. Cronin, Professor of Ethics and Politics, who were all appointed in 1909. She achieved First Class Honours in her BA Examination and shared first place in the class with Robert L. McKernan.
Ms Cuming was awarded the MA in 1911 and the Travelling Studentship in Philosophy in 1912, at the time beating Robert McKernan to the Scholarship. He was awarded a prize of £100. She was the first, and for many years the only woman to have reached Master’s and Travelling Studentship standard in UCD in Philosophy.
She attended St Anne’s College, Oxford, and was awarded the BSc after World War I, in 1920. She went on to become the Librarian of University College Hull.
Ms Cuming willed one-third of the residue of her estate to be divided equally between St Anne’s College, Oxford and University College Dublin. The interest from this share funds the Agnes Cuming Public Lectures in Philosophy.
In recognition of Ms Cuming’s commitment to Philosophy and to University College Dublin, the Philosophy Seminar Room has been renamed the Agnes Cuming Seminar Room.
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