¹ Dunn, John, ‘The identity of the history of ideas’, Philosophy, 43 (1968), pp. 85–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Quentin Skinner, Visions of politics (3 vols., Cambridge, 2001), i: Regarding method; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The history of political thought: a methodological enquiry’, in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, politics and society: second series (Oxford, 1964), pp. 183–202.

² John Dunn, ‘From applied theology to social analysis: the break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and virtue: the shaping of political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 119–35. Pocock has referred to a ‘Laslettian moment’, in his ‘Foundations and moments’, in Annabel Brett and James Tully, eds., Rethinking the foundations of modern political thought (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 37–49, at p. 38. On the intellectual contribution of Forbes's Special Subject in the Cambridge undergraduate History degree, see John Robertson, ‘The Scottish contribution to the Enlightenment’, in Paul Wood, ed., The Scottish Enlightenment: essays in reinterpretation (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 37–62, at p. 37.

³ J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), p. 424.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 435–7, 450–1, 456–7, 463–4, 549.

⁵ Pocock, ‘Afterword’ to Machiavellian moment (2nd edn, Princeton, N. J., 2003), pp. 553–83, at pp. 568, 574–81. Pocock's contribution to Wealth and virtue has similar interpretative issues at its heart: ‘Cambridge paradigms and Scotch philosophers: a study of the relations between the civic humanist and the civil jurisprudential interpretation of eighteenth-century social thought’, in Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and virtue, pp. 235–52.

⁶ Pocock, ‘The myth of John Locke and the obsession with liberalism’, in John Locke: papers read at a Clark Library seminar, 10 December 1977 (Los Angeles, CA, 1980), pp. 1–24, at p. 21.

⁷ Pocock, ‘A discourse of sovereignty’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds., Political discourse in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 377–428, at p. 381.

⁸ John Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture: religious intolerance and arguments for religious toleration in early modern and ‘early Enlightenment’ Europe (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 1, 2 n 2.

⁹ Ibid., John Locke, p. 14.

¹⁰ Mark Goldie, ‘The theory of religious intolerance in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds., From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 331–68; Marshall, John Locke, pp. 202–4, 209.

¹¹ Marshall, John Locke, p. 254.

¹² Ibid., pp. 331, 497–8.

¹³ On an Erasmian tradition – sceptical, tolerant, ‘Socinian’ – in seventeenth-century England and Holland, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: seventeenth-century essays (London, 1987), pp. 42–6, 51–2, 61, 94–5, 137, 189, 193–5, 197, 200, 204, 210, 222, 227. Erasmus, however, had thought that Anabaptists ought not to be tolerated: Marshall, John Locke, pp. 234–5.

¹⁴ Marshall, John Locke, pp. 21, 175, 186, 419, 426, 429.

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 126 n. 126, 253, 303, 319; Pocock, Barbarism and religion (Cambridge, 1999–), i: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, passim; and ii: Narratives of civil government, 11, 19, 94–5, 142–3, 150–1, 271, 312; Trevor-Roper, ‘The religious origins of the Enlightenment’, in Religion, the Reformation and social change: the crisis of the seventeenth century (London, 1967), pp. 179–218. See also Knud Haaksonssen, ed., Enlightenment and religion: rational dissent in eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1996).

¹⁶ Burnet was notably dismissive of Catholicism, as is appreciated by John Robertson, who notes of Burnet's 1686 account of a 1685 journey through Naples that it was thoroughly condescending in its evocation of superstition, idolatry, fecklessness, and an intrinsic Neapolitan inability to engage in commerce: Burnet thereby spurned the opportunity for intellectual exchange: John Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 139–41. It is worth reflecting how much was lost to Protestant thought in the era of Enlightenment through its all too ready dismissal of Catholicism; Gibbon, as ever, proves a partial exception to this regret.

¹⁷ For particularly valuable discussion of Latitudinarianism in this context, see Isabel Rivers, Reason, grace, and sentiment: a study of the language of religion and ethics in England, 1660–1780 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1991–2000), i: Whichcote to Wesley, ch. 2.

¹⁸ Marshall, John Locke, pp. 510, 517. Marshall's account acts in a salutary and complementary manner to that offered by Anne Goldgar, Impolite learning: conduct and community in the republic of letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT, 1995).

¹⁹ Marshall, John Locke, pp. 470–1, 480, 484, 518.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 604.

²¹ Ibid., pp. 618–19, 627.

²² Ibid., pp. 13, 131, 176, 431, 497-8, 699, 704; Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 14, 15, 31, 129–30, 140, 142, 201–2, 216–25, 235–50, 276, 317, 380, 384.

²³ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 8, 128–30, 145.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 44, and ch. 2; Marc Bloch, ‘Pour une histoire compare des sociétés européennes’, in Mélanges historiques (2 vols., Paris, 1963), i, pp. 16–40.

²⁵ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, p. 21.

²⁶ Ibid., pp. 9, 371.

²⁷ Ibid., pp. 28, 29, 405.

²⁸ On Melon's vital presence in Enlightenment thought, see ibid., esp. pp. 340–7, and Robertson, , ‘The Enlightenment above national context: political economy in eighteenth-century Scotland and Naples’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 667–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, p. 50.

³⁰ Ibid., ch. 5. His reference to Vico's ‘civil theology of divine providence’ (p. 252) is particularly stimulating.

³¹ Ibid., The case for the Enlightenment, ch. 6.

³² Pocock had also used the term ‘pre-Enlightenment’ to characterize much of the activity anlalysed in his ‘Post-Puritan England and the problem of the Enlightenment’, in Perez Zagorin, ed., Culture and politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA, 1980), pp. 91–111.

³³ For a particular instance of which, see Goldie, Mark, ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 20–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ See B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century England: theological debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998).

³⁵ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 280–3; Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce: the conservative Enlightenment in England’, in Lester G. Crocker, ed., L'etá dei lumi: studi storici sul settecento Europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (2 vols., Naples, 1985), i, pp. 523–62, at pp. 554–5; Young, Religion and Enlightenment, ch. 5. For Robertson's reading of Gibbon's relations with the Neapolitan Enlightenment, see ‘Gibbon and Giannone’, in David Womersley, ed., Edward Gibbon: bicentenary essays (Oxford, 1997), pp. 3–19. Robertson considers Gibbon the ‘one Englishman whose Enlightenment interests led to a major work’: The case for the Enlightenment, p. 42.

³⁶ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 6, 8–9, 15, 31, 214, 378; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001). Israel has extended the argument somewhat in Enlightenment contested: philosophy, modernity, and the emancipation of man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006).

³⁷ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 1–28. For consideration of a very particular element of the nature of the Enlightenment he describes, see Robertson, ‘Women and Enlightenment: a historiographical conclusion’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, eds., Women, gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 692–704.

³⁸ See further, Robertson, ‘Franco Venturi's Enlightenment’, Past and Present, 137 (1992), pp. 183–206. Pocock dedicated the first and second volumes of Barbarism and religion respectively to Franco Venturi and Arnaldo Momigliano.

³⁹ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, p. 374.

⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 350–60.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 362.

⁴² Ibid., pp. 375–6.

⁴³ Ibid., pp. 381–405.

⁴⁴ As a graduate pupil of Trevor-Roper, Robertson enjoyed the guidance of one of the two British historians (the other being Forbes) who originally drew scholarly attention to the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1960s, on which see Robertson, ‘The Scottish contribution to the Enlightenment', pp. 37–8, and The case for the Enlightenment, p. 25. See especially Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 68 (1967), 1635–58, and Duncan Forbes, Hume's philosophical politics (Cambridge, 1975).

⁴⁵ Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, in Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and virtue, pp. 137–78.

⁴⁶ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 161–200.

⁴⁷ Robertson, ‘Universal monarchy and the liberties of Europe: David Hume's critique of an English Whig doctrine’, in Phillipson and Skinner, eds., Political discourse, pp. 349–73.

⁴⁸ Istvan Hont, Jealousy of trade: international competition and the nation-state in historical perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. ix–x.

⁴⁹ Koselleck is an importance presence in notes to Hont, Jealousy of trade, pp. 263, 473, 474, 491–2, 501, 525. An eighteenth-century parallel is made in Sir James Steuart's indebtedness to the Polizeiwissenchaft which he encountered during his exile in Tübingen: Jealousy of trade, p. 410.

⁵⁰ Schmidt, James, ‘Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the Oxford English Dictionary’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), pp. 421–43Google Scholar; cited, approvingly, in Hont, Jealousy of trade, p. 135, and, critically, by Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, p. 10 n. 24. Hont uses the term replete with the definite article, in discussion of post-modern critiques of ‘the Enlightenment Project’, and in reference to Smith's differences from ‘the European Enlightenment camp’, but rather more tellingly to Herder's satire of Enlightenment and the same thinker's conception of something like a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’: Jealousy of trade, pp. 108–98, 406, 503–6.

⁵¹ Hont, Jealousy of trade, p. 2.

⁵² Ibid., ch. 4. Both this and Robertson's essay, cited in n. 47 above, originally appeared in Phillipson and Skinner, eds., Political discourse. On the theme of universal monarchy, see Jealousy of trade, pp. 22, 25, 28, 32, 36, 59, 85–6, 204–7, 210, 214, 262, 299, 329, 337, 348, 352, 510, 526, a multiplicity of references testifying to its importance for Hont's overall argument.

⁵³ For representative work by these scholars, see John Dunn, ed., The economic limits to modern politics (Cambridge, 1990); Gareth Stedman Jones, An end to poverty? A historical debate (London, 2004); Emma Rothschild, Economic sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Michael Sonenscher, Before the deluge: public debt, inequality, and the intellectual origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2007). On the political economy of republicanism, another staple of the Cambridge School, see Hont, ‘Correcting Europe's political economy: the virtuous eclecticism of Georg Ludwig Schmid’, and Sonenscher, ‘French economists and Bernese agrarians: the marquis de Mirabeau and the economic society of Berne’, History of European Ideas, 33 (2007), pp. 390–410, 411–26.

⁵⁴ Hont, Jealousy of trade, pp. 45–51, 137–8.

⁵⁵ Ibid., ch. 1.

⁵⁶ Ibid., ch. 2.

⁵⁷ Ibid., ch. 6; E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy reviewed’, in Customs in common (1991; Harmondsworth, 1993), pp. 259–351, at pp. 274–8, 282–3.

⁵⁸ Hont, Jealousy of trade, ch. 3. Biancamaria Fontana, a former research fellow of King's, has elaborated on the close of the story in Rethinking the politics of commercial society: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1832 (Cambridge, 1985).

⁵⁹ Hont, Jealousy of trade, ch. 7, esp. pp. 493–4, 498–9, 503, 507–9; Pocock, The Machiavellian moment (2nd edn, 2003), p. 550 and ‘Afterword’, p. 573.

⁶⁰ Hont, Jealousy of trade, pp. 155–6, 265–6; Skinner, Liberty before liberalism (Cambridge, 1998). Similar intentions are referred to by Rothschild and Sonenscher in the books cited in n. 53 above.

⁶¹ Hont, ‘The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury’, and Sonenscher, ‘Property, community, and citizenship’, in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds., The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 379–418, 465–94; Hont, Jealousy of trade, pp. 25–7, 88, 500 n. 93.

⁶² Mark Goldie, ‘J. N. Figgis and the history of political thought in Cambridge’, in Richard Mason, ed., Cambridge minds (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 177–92; Goldie, ‘The context of The Foundations’, in Brett and Tully, eds., Rethinking the foundations, pp. 3–19.

⁶³ Richard H. Popkin and Mark Goldie, ‘Scepticism, priestcraft, and toleration’; Dale K. Van Kley, ‘Piety and politics in the century of lights’; Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The spirit of nations’; Knud Haakonssen ‘German natural law’; and Derek Beales ‘Philosophical kingship and enlightened despotism’, in Cambridge history, pp. 79–109; 110–43; 9–39 (at p. 31); 251–90; 497–524 (at p. 506).

⁶⁴ Goldie and Wokler ‘Introduction’ to Cambridge history, pp. 1–6, at pp. 1–2.

⁶⁵ Wokler, ‘Ideology and the origins of social science’, in Cambridge history, pp. 688–709, at p. 706.

⁶⁶ Wolfgang Pross, ‘Naturalism, anthropology, and culture’, in Cambridge history, pp. 218–47.

⁶⁷ T. J. Hochstrasser, ‘Physiocracy and the politics of laissez-faire’, in Cambridge history, pp. 419–42.

⁶⁸ On which, in addition to the essays by Hont, Sonenscher, and Hochstrasser, see Donald Winch, ‘Scottish political economy’, and Tribe, Keith, ‘Cameralism and the sciences of the state’, in Cambridge history, pp. 443–64, 525–46Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ James Moore, ‘Natural rights in the Scottish Enlightenment’, David Lieberman, ‘The mixed constitution and the common law’, Frederick Rosen, ‘Utilitarianism and the reform of the criminal law’, in Cambridge history, pp. 291–316, 317–46, 547–72. Both Moore and Lieberman had contributed essays to Wealth and virtue.

⁷⁰ Mark Goldie, ‘The English system of liberty’, and Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘British radicalism and the anti-Jacobins’, in Cambridge history, pp. 40–78, 626–59.

⁷¹ Keith Michael Baker, ‘Political languages of the French Revolution’, in Cambridge history, pp. 626–59, at pp. 656–8.

⁷² Here I differ in one particular from the very perceptive analysis of the volume made by Brooke, Christopher, ‘Light from the Fens?’, New Left Review, 44 (2007), 151–60Google Scholar.

⁷³ Goldie and Wokler ‘Introduction’; Melvin Richter, ‘The comparative study of regimes and societies’; Iring Fetscher, ‘Republicanism and national sovereignty’; Gordon S. Wood, ‘The American Revolution’, in Cambridge history, pp. 6, 147–71, 573–97, 601–25.

⁷⁴ Daniel Roche, ‘Encyclopedias and the diffusion of knowledge’, in Cambridge history, pp. 172–94. The following essay by Haydn Mason, ‘Optimism, progress, and philosophical history’, is strongly literary in flavour, whilst Patrick Riley's early quotation from Oakeshott in his ‘Social contract theory and its critics’ is surely indicative of his methodological approach: Cambridge history, pp. 195–217, 347–75.

⁷⁵ Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, eds., Republicanism: a shared European heritage (2 vols., Cambridge, 2002); Skinner and Bo Stråth, eds., States and citizens: history, theory, prospects (Cambridge, 2003).

⁷⁶ See, for example, John Dunn, Western political theory in the face of the future (Cambridge, 1979).

⁷⁷ This provides the context for an important essay by Skinner, ‘The rise of, challenge to and prospects for a Collingwoodian approach to the history of political thought’, in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk, eds., The history of political thought in national context (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 175–98. This valuable collection of essays can be seen as aiding the process described above.