Those interested in the generation-long dispute over how to write the history of political thought and how this history bears on doing political philosophy might well consider Iain Hampsher-Monk's Concepts and Reasons in Political Theory. The notes alone constitute a sure-footed survey of these fields. The author, who is the long-time coeditor of History of Political Thought, introduces these previously published articles, dating from 1980 to 2013 (including one unpublished piece on Rawls) with a mini-biography that links each essay to a personal development which leaves the impression of reading a book called the Education of an Historian of Political Thought.

Concepts and Reason ranges broadly in subject matter but always circles back to the methodological concerns that defined this generation, which began with the context-bound character of language use set out in the reception of the later Wittgenstein and John Austin. Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, John Dunn, and the Cambridge School are well treated. The German debate over Reinhardt Koselleck and Begriffsgeschichte is discussed as well. Weaving in and out of these essays is a kind of intellectual border patrol worried about two kinds of threat to the professional identity of the historian. The first worry is that we may not adequately distinguish between writing the history of political thought and doing political philosophy. Hampsher-Monk shows us the argument that it took to reach the current mantra of procedure, which is the following: By asking how the immediate political situation and broader historical contexts constrained what it would have been possible for a historical figure to conceptualize, we can focus on what was or was not innovative. Nearly everyone now begins with this procedure, albeit with the proviso that what “context” means is often uncertain. But this is not nowadays always how the story ends.

Another anxiety about borders is addressed in the last three chapters. How can we distinguish good and bad explanations? More particularly, how should explanations in political theory differ from explanations in the social sciences? Explanations in political theory evidently require “giving reasons” in particular contexts. The social sciences—neoclassical economics and rational choice theory are the specific targets —go in the other direction and too often, the author thinks, explanations there go wrong when they are claimed as deduction from universal axioms of rationality. Such axioms are always imperfectly universal because they are historically situated, limited in time and place: particular, not universal.

There is now a new mix-and-match sensibility that would conclude, for instance, that giving particular reasons for particular contexts and searching for an integrative rationality need not be antithetical. In addition, the history of political thought and political philosophy are again entangled. Hampsher-Monk disagrees with this: “the academy can uncover a more or less authentic version of Rousseau's… thought, [but] the more ‘authentic’ it is the less plausible it is” to contemporary sensibilities (13) and the less well suited it is to doing political philosophy today. However, that is not the bet that Richard Tuck has recently made in Sleeping Sovereign (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Tuck's Rousseau is not only a democratic model for the ancien-régime imagination but a model a generation later for the Girondins of the French Revolution and a template for democratic plebiscites and ratification elections in early American history two generations forward. This Rousseau, as “authentic” as Tuck's historical scholarship can make it, apparently has a promising future as well in contemporary Europe and North America.

The contextual cat is now out of the historical bag. When Istvan Hont wrote that “the globalization debate of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century lacks conceptual novelty” compared to the “continuing freshness of eighteenth century controversies in political economy” (Jealousy of Trade [Belknap, 2005], 155–56), he was making just such a context jump from eighteenth-century history to the present. It may have been evident from the very beginning that the very interest of authors of early modern “republicanism” who are allied with the Cambridge School served the half-concealed purpose of comparing a more democratic model to the less egalitarian and participatory features of twentieth- or twenty-first-century “liberalism.” It is nevertheless possible that the models these authors have extracted from the past may not work for just the sorts of reasons insisted upon by Hampsher-Monk.

There is a philosophical puzzle in the very title Concepts and Reason. The ordinary meaning of its terms offers the promise of universal synthesis; of “concepts” pulling meaning out of the web of spatially unrelated things; of “reason” pushing against the destructive effects of time to forge cross-generational integration. Of course, all that is deliberately missing from a project that is historicist all the way down, where doing “political philosophy” in the chords of universality is always slightly off-key by being in every instance historically situated. Without gainsaying the arguments either of Hampsher-Monk or of historicism, let us consider three alternative formulations—from Hegel, Kuhn, and Furet—that might conciliate history and reason.

Hegel is mentioned sparingly, but Hampsher-Monk is obviously well attuned to this figure. When he deflates the hoary notion of “essential contestability,” saying that it is a mere “technical term” pointing to the “exhaustion” of something that now lacks coherent meaning (xviii), the comeuppance reminds one of Hegel, for whom it was the fate of every historical concept to degenerate into contested meanings which are either dead ends or resurrected by the kernel of philosophical reason at work in them. At one point the author seems to regret he cannot deploy Hegel's conciliation of history and philosophy. Alas, the way forward is always blocked by the philosopher's untenable commitment to “absolute knowledge” (6), which of course will not do if knowledge comes packaged with a “buy by” date. For what it is worth, end-of-history arguments are not the only way to read Hegel. The last page of the Phenomenology hints at an ironical conclusion, namely, that that absolute knowledge dissipates into time or into the contingencies of action. We then start over in search of new conceptual conciliations. Absolute knowledge becomes a Derek Parfit–like account of identities which are separate but nevertheless closely enough related to keep a story and its cognitive content alive until it fades away, which is about all that contextualists claim for, say, the life cycle of republicanism.

Quentin Skinner's commitment to “studies of the development of new ‘procedures, aims and vocabularies’ within the then existing intellectual context” (21) could be taken as describing the intentions of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To lay my cards on the table, Skinner once explained to me that Kuhn had been very important to him (which was true for me, too). In this light, the title that Hampsher-Monk found “provocative,” Skinner's “The Unimportance of the Great Texts” (36), becomes less puzzling insofar as it evidently gestures to Kuhn's intention to deconstruct the Newton, Einstein, genius-centered history of science. This is significant because it suggests that like Kuhn, Skinner was committed to both a historical account of science and the retention of a still-persisting integrative “reason” within it. Of course, this is not the only reading of Kuhn. For philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, Kuhn's Structure represented science as “mob rule.” It recklessly made scientific innovation willy-nilly dependent on any cultural value whatsoever and severed science from the claim that it was integrated by rational principle. However, the professional community that Kuhn identified was informed not by fantasies, whether of the mob or any other group external to a given community of scientists, but by concepts and principles that internally structured that community's environment of possibility, albeit with the historian's proviso that such principles were subject to revision.

In the generation just now past, there was also a turn to François Furet for deeply contextual accounts of the explanatory primacy of language and culture in the making of the French Revolution. However, if Samuel Moyn is right (Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History [Oxford University Press, 2013], 120–21), this Anglophone reception of Furet got it wrong. Furet belonged to the camp of Claude Lefort for whom—to repeat the lesson from Kuhn—it was not any cultural value but specific concepts and principles that structured the environment of possibility for any given political community. Lakatos was thus even wrong about “mob rule.” Furet's revolutionary societies were in the grip of a concept, a presupposition, which when teased out offered insight into the “reason” or “reasons” of a revolutionary generation. “When I discovered my principles,” Montesquieu wrote in the preface to Spirit of the Laws, “everything I sought came to me.”

Hampsher-Monk deserves a say in what may seem like a hijacking of the title of his book. He is more impressed by the counterclaim that “any philosophy draws on and presupposes a particular historical configuration of meaningfulness” (6). This may be rebuttal, but it could be a first step in another conciliation of philosophy and history

The concept of toleration plays an outsize role in these essays. Hampshire-Monk sketches out two national styles of toleration—paradigms, if you will—that endured beyond the moment of their crystallization. In England, toleration was backed into and required more outward social conformity but expressed indifference to personal eccentricities. In America, toleration was positively affirmed, which resulted in outward diversity of behavior but which also meant more authoritarian conformity within each particular community (66).

Significantly, toleration also shapes contemporary philosophical arguments for justice. In John Rawls's words, the aim of Theory of Justice is to “generalize the principle of religious toleration to a social form” (206). When Hampsher-Monk argues that this “could be read as that historical evolution [from the formative period of the modern state] which has most structured our present” (66), he makes a synthesizing claim for principles and structures very much like that suggested above in the references to Lefort, Furet, and Kuhn.

The very idea that it is in Theory of Justice that one finds the identification of justice with toleration is surprising in that such a premise seems more at home in the even more capacious pluralism of Political Liberalism which, on behalf of toleration, rejects the claim that a society may be united behind any public, comprehensive conception of the good. Does the difference principle (make the least well off the best well off they can be), which provides Theory of Justice with its redistributionist sting, presuppose a public good? Is it in play in Political Liberalism? Hampsher-Monk is uncertain. In the introduction he claims that Rawls “did not retreat from his defense of the difference principle” (xxvii n38), a view of the coherence of Rawls's overall project. The essay on Rawls takes the opposite view: “in Rawls’ later works, the salience of equality—and the operation of the difference principle—fade into insignificance” (126).

One could argue that different conceptions of justice track the paths of divergent views of toleration. Accordingly, English tolerance requires a larger measure of public conformity which is consistent with a shared public good and therefore with social democracy; or for that matter with any other shared public good. The American conception of toleration makes a bigger public splash, which washes out both public conformity and any conception of a public good to which citizens might adhere (although American-style toleration is apparently indifferent to potentially authoritarian demands within associations).

Hampsher-Monk also kindly takes up my claim that libertarians and communitarians share a demand for hard borders that protect what is unique about either particular persons or particular communities (70, 102n20). We may differ, however, over the implications of the alternative, namely, the softer borders that open up to influences from elsewhere. For Hampsher-Monk, soft borders lead to the conformity of “impersonal philosophical arguments” (linked apparently to “depersonalizing social and economic forces,” 70) that sacrifice communal and individual identities. There is truth but also paradox in this anxiety, for what other than “impersonal philosophical arguments” or impersonal reasons could also establish what we share in common, which is what justice needs in order to have any traction on our lives?

We have moved in this engaging set of essays from the disciplinary question of how to write the history of political thought to a substantive issue of contemporary political philosophy, which raises another disciplinary question. What do toleration and justice presuppose? There is much pleasure in the reading of Concepts and Reason and much to grapple with in Hampsher-Monk's reconsideration of his intellectual development.