With this collection of essays written over the past twenty years, Mark Philp delivers what so many have come to expect of his work: a lucid history of ideas and political languages for one of the most vibrant and contested periods in European history. The title deftly captures Philp's larger aims. Characterized by its numerous movements and figures committed to reforming the political system, the French revolutionary era in Britain was also one where ideas were reforming across the political spectrum, evolving in response to contemporary intellectual struggles and events. Philp wants us to understand the turbulence, dynamism, and ongoing change between 1789 and 1815, and in this he succeeds admirably.

Although many of the chapters in Reforming Ideas will be familiar to readers, the introduction and chapters 5, 10, and 11 represent important new material. Philp's varied essays broadly address a series of overarching and interconnected themes. Several reconsider the well-trodden argument that Britain in the 1790s witnessed a “debate” on the French Revolution, pitting Thomas Paine against Edmund Burke, radical against conservative, reformist against loyalist. For Philp, describing this decade as one with two clearly delineated sides, is inaccurate and misleading, especially considering that neither reformism, radicalism, nor loyalism were consistent modes of political thought. He also challenges scholarship that has tended to read “the steady progress of the democratic movement for political reform” (71), proposing instead that ideological commitments were forged and reforged throughout the struggles of this period. Moreover, despite his own work on political languages, Philp worries that recent interest in political language as a “primary driver of human actions” has resulted in “discursive determinism” (9). While Philp acknowledges that languages of popular sovereignty, the nation, and liberty became more widely used during the revolutionary period and that they played a determining role on occasion, he insists that these languages were perpetually shifting rather than monolithic. The volume as a whole reminds us that we risk obscuring the period's complexity and contingency if we view reformism as ideologically consistent or assume that loyalists were a uniform group.

The essays themselves can be loosely organized into three different categories: those that focus on social movements, those that analyze individual actors, and those that engage wider debates in political theory relating to republicanism or collective self-determination. The opening chapters focus largely on the reforming and loyalist movements. For Philp, ideological disagreements and factions among reformers, which have typically been used to explain their ultimate failure, also signal a rich process of experimentation in the 1790s. Indeed, chapter 1 reveals that political rhetoric, far from being fixed, “served to explore and reinterpret . . . the boundaries of the politically possible” (37). Chapter 2 examines John Reeves's Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers in order to underline loyalism's shifting strategies. In drawing men and women away from reformist organizations like the Society for Constitutional Information or the London Corresponding Society, loyalists began to appeal to the “lower orders” from whom they had often tried to distance themselves, ultimately mirroring radicalism's “transgression of the traditional boundaries between the elite and common people” (44) and actively participating in the dramatically changing character of British political culture. Although chapter 3 explores the ideas that reformers tended to share, it further develops the argument that there was no coherent ideology that bound them. Chapter 9 might also be considered with this group since it surveys loyalist songs that flourished around the invasion threats of 1797–98 and 1803–05 and reveals loyalism's increasing willingness to embrace a form typically associated with those who criticized war.

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 provide persuasive analyses of prominent figures whose ideas evolved significantly over the course of the revolutionary period. Chapter 6 relies on Paine's neglected scientific writings to underline the complex and fractured character of his knowledge and intellectual commitments. Chapter 7, while focusing on Paine, reveals some of the shifts that occurred in both Paine's and Thomas Jefferson's thinking and language in response to their experiences in Paris. Philp proposes that these changes were driven less by coherent conceptual shifts and more by a “chaotic and complex process in which language was as much at the mercy of change as driving it” (208). Finally, Chapter 8 uses the writings of William Godwin, who distanced himself in the mid-1790s from both the reform societies and the government's repressive tactics, to demonstrate the myriad ways that individual careers moved between reforming and loyalist positions.

Chapters 4, 5, and 10 ask readers to consider whether political ideologies and political languages are ever really coherent. Chapter 4 argues that even as the opposing figures of Burke and Paine each relied on a language that echoed the republican tradition, republicanism as a mode of political thought underwent significant change in the 1790s and ceased to be recognizable as a basic language of political debate. Similarly, Chapter 5 evaluates changing conceptions of republican virtue to suggest that republicanism was not a stable, conceptual framework or language, but rather one of several resources from which contemporaries drew loosely in interpreting and responding to events. Chapter 10 proposes that instead of identifying a doctrine of collective self-determination in the eighteenth century, it is most fruitful to trace the ideas and questions associated with the concept—many thinkers seemed to be engaging questions of how far it was possible to express the will of the collective through the political order even if the term “collective self-determination” did not surface. As Chapter 11 then makes clear, however, trying to ascribe order and uniformity to people's ideas and commitments inevitably results in an underestimating their essentially protean nature.

Philp humbly acknowledges that this volume reflects his ongoing engagement with a community of scholars working on the 1790s and the nuancing and strengthening of his own ideas relating to the evolution and fragmentation of political languages. A more extended introduction, however, might have positioned this book not only as an essential collection of Philp's oeuvre but also as crucial for understanding the historical and historiographical significance of the revolutionary period in Britain. A section about the range of contemporary responses to the French Revolution, a clarified outline of the “revolutionary controversy” in Britain, and an overview of arguments made by scholars tending towards “discursive determinism,” which are currently distributed across the individual chapters, would have further framed the volume for an even broader readership. There was also a rich and unresolved tension between coherence and incoherence across this wonderfully diverse book. Philp is persuasive about the lack of uniform ideology or clearly delineated sides in the 1790s, but there are moments when he speaks of a “fundamental shift” in the language of political debate (106) or a “major transitional point in the history of political thought” (285), suggesting that perhaps ideas were becoming more stable—or at least more recognizable. Then again, perhaps this is exactly the dynamic of the period that is so essential: that just as the lines between movements, thinkers, and ideas seemed to be crystallizing, they were then reformed.