This volume is the result of collaboration between professors and researchers from two Latin American universities (the University of Buenos Aires and the University of São Paulo) interested in Skinner's work. An active member of the so-called "Cambridge School," Skinner has been developing for decades a teaching that can be summarized in two basic ideas. One is that texts of political philosophy must be read in relation to the contexts in which they were written. The other is that these contexts are not simply a set of immediate social determinants, but must be considered as intellectual contexts. As contexts made up of debates, readings, and debates with those readings. As contexts, in short, made up of words. Hence the importance, for Skinner, of the problem of the meaning of these words (which "is their use," as Wittgenstein said) and of the changes that these meanings undergo. That is what this is about: the changes in the meaning of the word "state" from the time of Machiavelli to that of Hobbes, and the importance of these changes in their thinking. A scholar of that period and of Skinner's work, the Brazilian philosopher Eunice Ostrensky presents the book and the author.