The Independent Scholar

The Independent Scholar - May 16, 2026

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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.

    ...more
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    The Independent ScholarBy Julia Murphy