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Rosenblatt questions whether Pocock's Barbarism and Religion, though enormously learned and rich, in fact accomplishes Pocock's stated aims. In other words, does the context presented help to explain the intended meaning and significance of Gibbon's Decline and Fall? She asks whether Pocock's methodology, indebted to the Cambridge School, is consistent and serviceable and challenges his claim that Gibbon should be seen as a member of the "Protestant Enlightenment."

C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire.Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920.These two volumes, among only a scattered handful of others in the Ideas in Context series, examine the responses of varied thinkers to the moral and political issues posed by the existence of empire and the growth of modern imperialism. Bayly's, indeed, is the very first among the one hundred published volumes in the series to move beyond European reflections on empire and give pride of place instead to intellectuals from the colonized world. Together liberal ideals and imperial practice incontestably exist at the heart of the modern world. Why, then, have the writings of Indian and other non-Western intellectuals, not to mention European theorists and critics of empire, received such cursory treatment in such an influential set of volumes? It is not possible to answer that question here, but fortunately the rapid rise of scholarly interest in imperialism over the last few years has spurred much new and exciting work on the ideology of empire. This outpouring of studies has even generated a subfield called "the new imperial history" devoted to exploring the links joining colony and metropole.The works under consideration here are at once complementary-the one focused on Indian political thought, the other on British-and comprehensive. Both volumes range very widely across time, and engage with an array of thinkers. Both authors also fulfill the mandate of the larger series by placing ideas firmly in the context in which they took shape, and ask how they participated in the intellectual discourse of their times. Bayly, in his first sentence, describes his task as examining "the ideas, projects and sensibilities of those Indian intellectuals . . . who broadly subscribed to the international liberal consensus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."1 Claeys, for his part, proposes to assess ". . . explanations of the origin of the British empire; justifications for its continuation; and criticisms of its consequences."2Sir Christopher Bayly-the first historian of the British Empire, it might be noted, to be knighted since Sir John Seeley over one hundred years ago-has had a distinguished career as Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge. Though he was never affiliated with any of the major historiographical schools of the last decades-the socalled Cambridge school of the 1970s, the Subaltern Studies Collective of the 1980s, or the postcolonial cultural "turn" of the 1990s-Bayly's wideranging publications across Indian and Imperial history have stimulated scholarship throughout the discipline and beyond, most notably among those many postgraduate students he has trained. So it is appropriate that Bayly should now add his own definitive account to the on-going scholarly discussion of the political theory of empire.Indian liberals have been maligned ever since they came into existence as a visible group of English-educated young men in the 1840s and '50s. During the high colonial era of the late nineteenth century they were disparaged by the British as mere talkers, as self-interested job seekers, and as a minuscule coterie who sought to speak for a non-existent Indian "nation," but in fact represented no one but themselves. Nationalist writers and political leaders, from the 1890s onward, dismissed their liberal predecessors (and contemporaries) as ineffectual mendicants and bourgeois hangers-on of the Raj. By the Gandhian era, with two or three notable exceptions, among them Dadabhai Naoroji and G. K. Gokhale, India's Victorian liberals had disappeared altogether from the canon of the nation's heroes. Finally, in the postcolonial era, scholars such as Homi Bhabha derided them as inauthentic "mimic men" who tried to be, but could never truly be, English.3 Indian liberalism, unlike its British counterpart, was thus, as Bayly correctly argues, "embattled from the beginning by powerful ideologies that largely rejected it. …

The Ideas in Context series has served the Enlightenment well. Roughly a quarter of the first hundred books in the series deal (at least in part) with the period, including studies of Locke (Tully, Carey, Dawson), Rousseau (Rosenblatt), Smith (Forman-Barzilai), Mandeville (Goldsmith and Hundert), Thomasius (Hunter), the reception of Hobbes (Parkin), and a nowclassic account of the ideological origins of the French Revolution (Baker).1 Of no less significance are broader-gauged examinations of the "common good" (Miller), "luxury" (Berry), and "empire" (Brown, Armitage), as well as explorations of the Enlightenment's relationship to Rational Dissenters (Haakonssen) and Judaism (Sutcliffe) and its debts to theories of natural law (Hochstrasser and Hunter).2 The nexus of commerce, politics, and history has also been a major concern of the series (Pocock, Tribe, Winch, Force, Robertson).3 But a tally of this sort only begins to register the significance of Ideas in Context for studies of the Enlightenment. As might be expected from a series ably shepherded by Quentin Skinner, significant methodological questions have also come to the fore.According to the statement that stands at the front of each volume, the goal of the series is to trace "the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines" by setting the "procedures, aims, and vocabularies" generated by these traditions and disciplines in the context of the "ideas and institutions" in which they developed. If the way in which this setting of ideas in contexts was to be effected might not have been entirely clear from the programmatic essay in the inaugural volume (though jointly signed by Skinner, Jerome Schneewind, and Richard Rorty, it was, as Richard Fisher has recently explained, "largely written" by Rorty and "tonally rather different to much of what has followed"),4 such matters would be clarified considerably by the second volume in the series, J. G. A. Pocock's Virtue, Commerce, and History. Reviewing recent developments in the history of political thought, Pocock observed that the "history of thought (and even more sharply 'of ideas')" was being supplanted by a "history of speech" or a "history of discourse."5 An overview of what such a history might look like quickly followed: The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, a volume tracing the various discourses in which political thought had been conducted from the Renaissance to the dawn of the nineteenth century.6 In his contribution to the volume, Pocock observed that the ability to say anything presupposed "a language to say it in," which suggested that the relationship of ideas to contexts might be conceived along the lines of that between parole and langue.7 While the volumes that followed were not limited to products of what came to be called the "Cambridge School" (and while not all of those associated with the "Cambridge School" embraced the analogy Pocock was proposing), a concern with the discursive context in which arguments were conducted has implications for accounts of the Enlightenment."Enlightenment" can be used both to designate a particular historical period (i.e., "the Enlightenment") and to refer to a process (i.e., "enlightenment") that, though associated with certain historical periods, is captive to none of them. Drawing out the implications of the "history of discourse" that Pocock, Skinner, and their colleagues were developing, "the Enlightenment"-as a discursive context in which things could be said (and, hence, done)-might be seen as a sort of langue, while "enlightenment" might be understood as encompassing a variety of activities, the bulk of them presumably occurring within the discursive context known as "the Enlightenment." Thinking about the Enlightenment in this way stands in sharp contrast both to Ernst Cassirer's attempt to grasp "its conceptual origins" and "underlying principle" and to Peter Gay's identification of it with the "little flock of philo sop he s'''' who, though adhering to no single party line, nevertheless constituted the "party of humanity. …

Mark Bevir’s book stands as one of the most influential recent interventions into debates central to the history of political thought, intellectual history, and textual interpretation more broadly. The introductory essay to this symposium situates Bevir’s position as not only a “middle way” between Straussian and postmodern deconstructive approaches, but one that distinguishes itself from the leading claimants to that terrain, namely the “Cambridge School” most closely associated with Skinner and Pocock. I conclude by briefly characterizing the four subsequent essays, which both engage Bevir’s work through constructive criticism and extend it to issues of contemporary political theory and practice.

It was my favorite philosopher, R. G. Collingwood, who wrote somewhere that "all history is the history of ideas." I think that he is right, as I shall try to explain, but I should like also to see just how far the converse is also true, that all the history of ideas is history. Why should these apparently tautological notions matter? Because, in a word, some historians practice their craft without much regard for ideas, and some intellectual historians practice their craft without much regard for the methods of ordinary history. In either case I think that that is too bad.Perhaps I should make clear that my target is not so much those who underestimate or dismiss the value of knowing about the past when they write about the present state of things. My target rather is all those who do believe in the value of history in their present pursuits and employ it in their work but who take for granted, or sometimes misconstrue, the nature of the historiography that I believe must underlie their assertions. So I shall overlook for now those sometimes very sophisticated people who mistakenly deny that there is any point or possibility in distinguishing history from fiction, and I shall concentrate instead on a more elusive but more important target, namely, all those who practice intellectual history without much regard for the stringent historiographical conditions which must, I believe, regulate their activities.I have already had a crack at this in a previous essay where I tried to amend the famous manifesto of that distinguished historian of political thought, Quentin Skinner, in his "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."1 Skinner did a wonderful job in pleading for the value of history to the study of political thought and in showing what could go wrong in its misuse, but he neglected, so I thought, just how to put it right. I tried to show how in interpreting and using such texts as Machiavelli's Prince, or Thomas More's Utopia, it was first neeessary to fix them in the situation of their composition, before anything else could be done. Skinner saw only one part of this; he accepted the necessity of recovering what he called their "linguistic" context, but he pretty much overlooked (in his theoretical pronouncements anyway) everything else in the author's situation. I tried to show that before one could fix Thomas More (for example) in intellectual history, one had first to address the problem of what he was up to when he wrote Utopia, and that that could not be done on the evidence of the text alone or even in the context of previous texts that seemed to address the same subject. Was the Utopia a serious program of reform to be taken literally in its pronouncements? Or was it merely a criticism of contemporary life? Or was it perhaps only a humanist entertainment, or joke? All these interpretations have, among others, been offered as interpretative possibilities, so that it looks as though the problem of intention must first be resolved, if we want to discover the correct meaning of the original. And so I indicated how this might be done (using some of the suggestions of J. H. Hexter)2 by recalling the circumstances of More's actual life and the political situation at the time of the composition-by the work that I have called "ordinary history." Skinner read my essay and responded eventually; he thought I had missed the point of his essay; while I, of course, thought he had missed the point of mine.3Skinner has gone on to a most successful career describing the history of early modern political thought, joined by colleagues like J. G. A. Pocock and by students in what has sometimes been called the Cambridge school, arguing, I think correctly, "that political theory and philosophy are to be understood as speech acts performed in history," but insisting, I think too one-sidedly, that that history (the context) must be the language of some "ongoing discourse."4 Skinner believes that the first task of the intellectual historian is to recover that discourse, while I shall argue that establishing the discourse must itself rest on a prior activity: recovering the meaning and intention of each of the many speech acts that constitute the discourse, by first placing each in its own situation-and by conceiving of ideas as the result of a process of thinking, not merely as a set of conclusions. …