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The History of British Political Thought: The Creation of a Center

A Center for the History of British Political Thought has been established at the Folger Shakespeare Library and will be conducting a series of seminars aimed at covering what is conventionally demarcated as the early modern period: the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. No comprehensive history of British political thought in this period has to our knowledge been written, and it is an open question of what it should consist and what its organizing themes should be. The purpose of this article is to present a speculative inquiry into its conceptual scope. The scope and meaning of the word “British” is fundamental to our inquiry. The core component is surely England, and both the weight of literature and the tradition of study render it inescapable that English will be the language and the dominant culture with which most of our program will be concerned. It will be necessary nonetheless to recognize the autonomy of Scottish political culture and its literature and of the cultures formed by English hegemony, whose political thought must be studied both before and after their assertions of independence. We must further examine what is to be meant by the term “political thought.” A considerable methodological literature has marked the rise in the last two decades of what has been called the “new history” of political thought. This inquiry has become less an adjunct to the practice of political theory and more a history of the terms of discourse in which debate about politics has been carried on.