Table of Contents

Foreword; Part I. Political Thought as History: 1. The history of political thought: a methodological enquiry; 2. Working on ideas in time; 3. Verbalizing a political act: towards a politics of speech; 4. Political ideas as historical events; political philosophers as historical actors; 5. The reconstruction of discourse: towards the historiography of political thought; 6. The concept of a language and the metier d'historien: some considerations on practice; 7. Texts as events: reflections on the history of political thought; 8. Quentin Skinner: the history of politics and the politics of history; Part II. History as Political Thought: 9. The origins of study of the past: a comparative approach; 10. Time, institutions and action: an essay on traditions and their understanding; 11. The historian as political actor in polity, society and academy; 12. The politics of history: the subaltern and the subversive; 13. The politics of historiography.

Promotional Information

Selected essays of arguably the greatest and most influential historian of ideas of modern times.

About the Author

Professor John Pocock, Honorary Fellow of St John's Cambridge, is the Harry C. Black Emeritus Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. His many seminal works on intellectual history include The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957, second edition 1987), Politics, Language and Time (1971), The Machiavellian Moment (1975), and Virtue, Commerce and History (1985). He has edited The Political Works of James Harrington (1977) and Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1987), as well as the collaborative study The Varieties of British Political Thought (1995). Professor Pocock is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Reviews

'Although his writing demands a great deal of concentration … nowhere is it other than fresh, cogent and provocative. … is usefully illustrative, and offers insights that all who aspire to the study of intellectual history (in its broadest sense) can heed.' English Historical Review