Skinner, Kim Il Sung, Literary Agents, and the Orwell Prize

In this week's issue:

Quentin Skinner — the Cambridge historian who reshaped political philosophy — on why Hobbes and Machiavelli mean completely different things by "freedom," and his new Liberty as Independence
How 25 literary agents shaped more than half of 21st-century prizewinning American fiction, and the one woman behind postmodernism
Lisa Robertson's second novel in a lifetime of poetry — built around a buried river in Paris and a protagonist who calls herself a hag
The case that Kim Il Sung didn't borrow from Stalin so much as from the Gospels
The Orwell Prize 2026 fiction shortlist: Susan Choi, Ben Lerner, Douglas Stuart, Tahmima Anam, and four others

Let's get into it.

Quentin Skinner on Liberty: A Half-Century of Work in One Interview

The May 15 issue of Le Grand Continent carries a long interview with Quentin Skinner, conducted at his home in London. Skinner is one of the most influential intellectual historians of the past fifty years — a co-founder of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought, the author of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), and a figure whose work on republicanism has reoriented political philosophy since the 1980s. The interview is a substantial retrospective, touching on his entire trajectory from early work on Hobbes to his current engagement with the republican tradition.

The intellectual center of Skinner's career is a distinction between two radically different conceptions of liberty. Hobbes's "negative liberty" holds that you are free whenever there is no physical impediment to your action — if someone could prevent you but chooses not to, you are already free. Machiavelli's republican liberty operates on entirely different ground: you are not free if you are subject to another's will, even if that will is never exercised against you. For Skinner, the opposite of republican liberty is not constraint but slavery — living at the mercy of another person's discretion. This reframing has had substantial consequences for political philosophy, helping to launch the neo-republican movement and giving contemporary political theory a richer vocabulary for critiquing relationships of dependence. Skinner traces his first public articulation of the republican liberty argument to the Tanner Lectures at Harvard in 1984, later republished as "The Republican Idea of Political Liberty."

The interview also touches on the Cambridge School methodology Skinner helped establish: reading historical texts contextually, asking not what an author "really meant" in some timeless sense but what problem they were trying to solve. This approach derives from R.G. Collingwood's "logic of question and answer" — the idea that any meaningful statement is an answer to some question, and that interpreting it requires recovering the question. Skinner also discusses Locke's surprisingly republican-inflected conception of freedom (despite Locke not being a republican in any strict sense), Bruno Leipold's Citizen Marx on Marx as a republican thinker, and Burke and the French Revolution.

His latest book, Liberty as Independence, develops the republican tradition into a contemporary political vocabulary. Skinner notes an ongoing debate with philosopher Philip Pettit, who prefers the term "non-domination" over "independence" to characterize the republican ideal. The distinction is not merely terminological: where Pettit's "non-domination" focuses on the structural absence of a dominating power, Skinner's "independence" captures something more about the positive standing of the self-governing agent. The interview is in French; no English translation has been announced.

Sources: Comment Quentin Skinner a découvert la liberté — Le Grand Continent

Charleston Festival 2026 — Flagship annual literary festival opens today and runs May 16–25 at Charleston Farmhouse, East Sussex; full programme across literature, art, and ideas.
International Booker Prize 2026 Winner Announcement — May 19 at Tate Modern, London; the £50,000 prize is split equally between the author and translator, awarded from a six-title shortlist.
Hay Festival 2026 — May 21–31 in Hay-on-Wye, Wales; eleven-day programme with hundreds of speakers across literature, science, politics, and the arts.
U.S. Book Show 2026 — June 2–3 in New York City; Publishers Weekly's sixth annual gathering brings approximately 700 publishing professionals together across 19 panels and workshops, opening June 2 at 2 p.m.

Laura McGrath's Middlemen: Who Really Made American Fiction

Laura McGrath — Assistant Professor of English at Temple University, and previously Associate Director of Stanford's Literary Lab — has published Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, April 2026). The book is a data-driven scholarly history of the literary agent's role in American fiction, and its central argument is a direct challenge to how we typically narrate literary history: editors, publishers, and authors get the credit, but agents were the first and most consequential gatekeepers — deciding which manuscripts ever reached an editor's desk in the first place.

The quantitative findings are stark. McGrath's data shows that just 25 agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. The concentration of access to literary prestige flows through an extraordinarily small number of people. The book gives extended treatment to Candida Donadio, the agent McGrath identifies as the organizing force behind American postmodernism. Donadio represented Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, and served as Philip Roth's first agent. The argument is that postmodernism as a literary movement was not simply the product of aesthetic choices by individual writers but was also shaped by the taste and advocacy of a single intermediary who championed these writers before most editors had heard of them.

McGrath was trained as both a literary historian and a data scientist — a combination that gives Middlemen an unusual methodological range. The book draws on archival research alongside quantitative analysis of agent-author networks across the modern period. In a Publishers Weekly interview conducted ahead of her appearance at the U.S. Book Show (June 3), McGrath notes that agents assumed their current position of structural centrality in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the publishing industry consolidated and the role of in-house editors began to shift.

The book arrives at a moment when the infrastructure questions it raises have a particular urgency. If 25 agents shaped the 21st-century fiction canon to date, the question of what replaces or disrupts that bottleneck — whether through AI-assisted manuscript discovery, Substack-based self-publishing, or other platform economics — becomes sharply relevant. McGrath does not weigh in on these contemporary developments directly, but the historical scaffolding she provides makes the stakes of the current moment clearer.

Sources: USBS 2026: PW Talks with Laura McGrath — Publishers Weekly

Random

Justin Murphy argues the Great Books revival produces "virtually zero novel insight." In a high-engagement X thread, the independent thinker contends that most participants are driven by aspirational performance rather than substantive intellectual engagement — a provocation that drew responses from academics and lay readers alike.
Walter Scheidel's case for scrapping Classics as a discipline surfaces in a Bret Devereaux thread. The Stanford historian's argument for absorbing Classics into a broader ancient history field — pulling in adjacent niches like Byzantium studies and Sumerology — is getting fresh attention alongside debate over whether disciplinary consolidation would save or dissolve what makes the field distinctive.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden premieres at Cannes — clocking in at three hours and sixteen minutes. The Japanese director's first French-made feature, adapted with Léa Le Dimna, is the longest film in this year's competition lineup and has been described as a serious, meditative plea for a more hopeful future.
Garrison Keillor's May Substack column meanders through philosophy, literature, and what's coming. "I hear the drumming of somebody coming" unfolds in the signature discursive register of his columns — part memoir, part cultural commentary, circling large questions without quite landing on any.

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Skinner, Kim Il Sung, Literary Agents, and the Orwell Prize

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Quentin Skinner on Liberty: A Half-Century of Work in One Interview

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