The ‘history of British political thought’ as a field of research has its own history which is now more than half a century old. Two impulses drove its early development. The first, British in origin, arose from the work of scholars active at Cambridge University since about 1950: among them Peter Laslett, J. G. A. Pocock, J. H. M. Salmon, Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, Gordon Schochet and others too numerous to list, to whom the term ‘Cambridge School’ has been applied. The other, American in origin, arose from the work of Caroline Robbins, Douglass Adair, Bernard Bailyn and their associates who explored English and British political thought in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – notably the ‘commonwealth’ critique of the Hanoverian regime – so as to lead towards American rebellion and independence, republicanism and federalism. These two impulses have continued to operate within the history of British political thought and have served largely to shape the problems it has encountered and discovered.

‘The Cambridge method’, as it has become known, consists in the assignment of texts to their contexts. These ‘contexts’ are of many kinds and need to be carefully defined, but if one is the context of historical and political circumstances, another is the context of political language. In early-modern England, Britain and Europe, ‘political thought’ was expressed (a) in Latin and in a number of vernaculars; (b) in a diversity of specialized discourses constructed by distinct if intersecting clerisies, among whom ecclesiastics, jurists and humanists may serve as an initial classification; and (c), in England at least, in an imperfectly controlled print culture, where ‘broadsides’, which are ephemeral and usually directed to the less learned, contributed significantly to the context of political language.