Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner FBA (born 26 November 1940) is a British intellectual historian.

He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.

Though his family background is Scottish, and his father spent his career in the civil service in West Africa, he was raised and educated in England.

Like his elder brother, he won an entrance scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a double-starred first in history in 1962.

[4] He spent a sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1974–1975, where he was invited to stay, and where he remained until 1979 when he returned to Cambridge as Professor of Political Science.

[14] This emphasis on political writing as a form of action derives from developments in ordinary language philosophy made by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L.

One consequence of this view is an emphasis on the necessity of studying less well-known political writers as a means of shedding light on the contemporary debates these classic texts contributed to.

To Skinner, texts are then seen as weapons or tools that can, for example, be used to support, discredit, or legitimize specific social and political arrangements.

[20] In its earlier versions this added up to a critique of the approach of an older generation, and particularly of Leo Strauss and his followers.

[22] On 6 October 1995, Skinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought was included in the list published by The Times Literary Supplement of 'The 100 Most Influential Books since World War II'.

[24] The Balzan-Skinner Lectureship, renamed the "Quentin Skinner Fellowship in Intellectual History since 1500", was established in 2009 at the University of Cambridge.

ISBN 978-0-521-29337-2 (Translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish.)

The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume II: The Age of Reformation, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

ISBN 978-0-521-29435-5 (Translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.)

ISBN 978-0-19-285407-0 (Translated into Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Malay, Polish, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.)

ISBN 978-1-107-68953-4 (Translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.)

ISBN 978-0-521-58926-0 (Translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish.)

Visions of Politics: Volume II: Renaissance Virtues (with 12 colour plates), Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Visions of Politics: Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

L’artiste en philosophie politique (with 8 colour plates), Editions de Seuil, Paris, 2003.