The tradition of philosophical essayism beginning with Montaigne takes experience as its starting point, adopting a sceptical attitude towards grand philosophical systems and a priori truth. It was the favoured form of British empiricists, who looked to experience as the source of philosophical truth, and early analytic philosophers, who saw themselves as inheritors of the empiricist tradition and sought to avoid the perceived philosophical and rhetorical excesses of ‘continental’ idealism. Their adoption of the essay was accompanied by a view of writing, continued in present-day analytic philosophy, that stresses clarity, economy, and simplicity – virtues borrowed from the realm of mathematics and logic. But a tension, evident in Bertrand Russell’s work, emerges between fidelity to experience and fidelity to a mathematical model of clarity. This chapter argues that the notion of experience grounding the essay loses its philosophical richness in the analytic project.

Chapter 1 analyzes the shift from the history of ideas to the history of political languages, connected with the so-called linguistic turn. Beginning with Lovejoy’s proposal of a history of ideas, which served to establish it as a scholarly discipline, it aims to unravel its fundamental tenets, as well as the rationale behind the focus on “unit-ideas,” derived from the awareness of the problems to categorize different currents of thought in history. It then observes Namier’s critical perspective of that tradition and Skinner’s proposal to stand intellectual history on a new basis. By incorporating the analysis of the performative dimension of language, it overcomes the impasse generated by the shortcomings in the history of ideas and its ahistorical perspective of ideas, thus highlighting the fundamental consequences and its contribution to the control of conceptual anachronisms. This “linguistic turn” allows Skinner to perceive the fallacies or “mythologies” of the history of ideas and recover the notion of the “text” as a meaningful whole. Finally, it analyzes the subsequent “rhetorical turn” in the search to find in the very texts the discursive tracks of their contexts of utterance, and why it meant the dislocation of the antinomy between “texts”–“contexts” and “ideas”–“reality.”

This chapter outlines the relationship between Johann Georg Hamann and Jacobi, demonstrating its significance for their respective reception within the history of ideas. Despite Jacobi and Hamann’s affinity in friendship, there were significant differences in the very foundation of their post-enlightenment thought.

The main purpose of this chapter is to provide a summary of the main intellectual contributions that the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas has made to contemporary social theory. To this end, the chapter provides an overview of his life and career; principal areas of research; conception of critical theory; interpretation of relevant intellectual traditions; and his plea for a paradigm shift, commonly known as the “linguistic turn.” The final section grapples with the main limitations and shortcomings of Habermas’s oeuvre, notably with regard to his theory of communicative action.

Simon Susen is Professor of Sociology at City, University of London. He is an Associate Member of the Bauman Institute and, together with Bryan S. Turner, editor of the Journal of Classical Sociology.

The Conclusion draws together the most important arguments arising from the preceding chapters and offers a commentary on the methodological and historiographical implications of the book for our understanding of popular Conservatism, and popular politics more broadly, in twentieth-century Britain. It highlights three phenomena that shaped the character of inter-war Conservatism. The first is the fact that party activists saw the task of cultivating the new electorate in resolutely local terms, reflecting their abiding commitment to pre-war conceptions of popular Conservatism and how it operated. The second is the role that voters’ material interests played in shaping activists’ understanding of representative politics; the methodological point here being that the agency of local activists, hitherto emphasized in the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’, was circumscribed by existing and inescapable agendas defined by trade, employment, economic prosperity, living standards and amenities. The third phenomenon is the growing significance of modern central government to the enterprise of popular politics between the wars: electoral strategies in the constituencies rested on the assumption that living standards could be successfully managed by government initiative. The chapter concludes by exploring how the Conservatism of the 1930s therefore fostered a programmatic, activist culture of government that did much to foreshadow the statist turn of British politics in the 1940s and 1950s.