Scholars organizing conferences—and subsequently seeking to publish the ensuing conference volume—are notoriously presented with a task akin to the proverbial herding of cats: getting all their contributors to maintain some kind of focus on the conference theme(s). These two excellent collections avoid this problem in distinct ways. One way to ensure a unified focus is to build the conference around a single book; better yet, put the author's colleagues and former students on the roster and let the author himself have the last word. This amounts to an enlarged and friendly “author meets critics” panel or a narrowly drawn festschrift. While this certainly provides for a tightly focused and unified collection, it places a lot of weight on a single reed. But when the book is the two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), the author Quentin Skinner, and the list of contributors this distinguished, the results are interesting and insightful as well as tightly focused.

A second approach to the challenge of thematic focus is to center the book on heterogeneity; if the point of the work is to explore the differing approaches to and aspects of a broadly defined topic, then any resulting dissimilarities are simply a matter of the scholarly diversity being celebrated. As David Armitage notes in his editor's Introduction to British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory, the volume's essays “offer an array of models and methods for the future history of British political thought” (p. 3). This might seem to be merely making a virtue of the unavoidable, but the very point of the preceding conference was to explore, on the twentieth anniversary of the Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where this scholarly field has been and where it is heading. It turns out, happily, that the field is headed in all sorts of interesting directions.

Those directions are explored in three parts as historians, literary scholars, and political theorists take up, respectively, the questions, where, what, and why. First the where: Ever since some of John Pocock's early essays challenged a British history that was really just separate national histories of the Three Kingdoms, the “new British History” has sought to demonstrate how a consolidated history should be written, and the historians here address this challenge. The discussion results in the general view that historians should avoid a teleological definition of the subject and attend instead to how the historical actors saw the “matter of Britain” at the time, using whatever context is dictated by the evidence. And so, Nicholas Canny demonstrates that we cannot make much sense of seventeenth-century Irish thought unless we look beyond the British archipelago to a more pan-European context, while Tim Harris's study of the 1680s explains why sometimes an integrated Three Kingdoms approach works well—and sometimes it does not.

The literary scholars take up the question of what should be studied, each making the case that early modern British political thought will be misunderstood unless historians and political theorists attend to genres more given to aesthetics than direct argumentation. As Andrew Hadfield puts it, “the study of political thought is too important to be left to political science and history alone” (p. 111). He goes on to show that republican theory in this time period was as much about the narratives of republican Rome as it was about arguments over virtue. Similarly, the depths of Shakespeare and the radical potential of poetry are explored and praised.

Though it does entail the “risk of inducing intellectual vertigo” (p. 7), the book then turns to political theorists wrestling with the question, Why should we attend to the history of political thought, British or otherwise? For Duncan Ivison, sometimes historical study can provide us a new—or rather, old—vantage point on concepts we have come to take for granted, as when he reveals how the Lockean theory of individual rights was applied beyond national borders to justify national self-defense and imperial conquest. But sometimes the old is not quite so foreign, as we see when Joanne H. Wright demonstrates the insights we can gain from Margaret Cavendish's prescient seventeenth-century investigations of the public/private divide. Richard E. Flathman closes this section with a “primarily taxonomic chapter” (p. 277), drawing out the distinctions among contextualist historians of political thought, students of the canon, and political theorists who have no interest in history as such. Borrowing from Wittgenstein, Flathman praises the fact that we are often “between the games” set out by these various idealized approaches, and that could well be said of the whole book's interdisciplinary mission. The result is often as intriguing as it is insightful.

Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought also began at a conference, this one organized to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Skinner's monumental two-volume work. Foundations of Modern Political Thought packed a one-two punch: Skinner sought to reorient both the substance and the methodology of the study of early modern Western political thought, and he largely succeeded. Substantively, he showed that the emergence of the ideas that became the modern concept of sovereignty started as early as the thirteenth century, much earlier and with different sources than had previously been thought. His evidence challenged the work of Hans Baron, Michael Walzer, Leo Strauss, and many others. Secondly, Skinner sought to demonstrate by example the contextualist method he had espoused in a series of influential articles, an approach to the history of political thought that goes beyond an idealized canon to a more historically accurate analysis of political ideologies. Two introductory chapters in Rethinking survey these dual themes and respond to some of the criticism Skinner received on each count. And his own reassessment at the conclusion has a few minor mea culpas about the anachronistic teleology of the frame of the book and about its “grand narrative” quality, as well as a number of nuanced adjustments in light of the contributors' suggestions.

The substantive contributions are erudite and intriguing, even when they are misguided. Richard Tuck's chapter, for example, makes a provocative case for Thomas Hobbes as a pivotal figure in democratic theory due to his characterization of democracy as the paradigmatic form of government. This seems a stretch, both at first blush and after careful scrutiny of the details, as Kinch Hoekstra ably demonstrates in his thorough chapter. Other chapters raise insightful questions about Skinner's various characterizations of Hobbes, Thomas More, and scholasticism, among much else. As wide-ranging and nuanced as the original work they rethink, the essays here have something for just about any scholar of early modern political thought.

The most promising new direction proposed by these two new books may well be one that reaches beyond Skinner's approach to follow on the work of John Pocock, another leading scholar of the “contextualist school” and a contributor to both volumes. As Pocock notes in his partly autobiographical chapter in Rethinking, whereas Skinner has focused on authorial intentions in writing a particular text, Pocock's method has been to follow the “redeployment” of a political language in a new context, at a later date (p. 40). These are complementary methodologies, to be sure, but often the most illuminating thing we can learn about a text—and sometimes the only thing we can learn—will involve not the author's intentions but those of various subsequent readers, especially translators, excerpters, anthologists, editors, and publishers.

Proceeding along these lines, Kirstie M. McClure's fascinating chapter in British Political Thought draws on literary theory (a field that has long addressed readers' receptions of texts) to explore the “life of political languages or, alternatively, the political life of books” (p. 238). Using the pseudonymous Stephanus Junius Brutus's Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579), Locke's Second Treatise, and Burke's anonymous and satiric (but sometimes knowingly presented as literal) Vindication of Natural Society (1756), McClure shows us the various and often contradictory uses to which a text may be put by its subsequent excerpters, compilers, translators, annotators, printers, and even subscribers. Similarly, Warren Boutcher, in Rethinking, takes up an even more difficult case for Skinner's approach, the humanist Étienne de la Boétie's discourse De la servitude volontaire. The text was passed from hand to hand and copied after 1570, but La Boétie died in 1563, and so we are at a loss to know exactly when or why he wrote it. (Indeed, we have competing stories of the context of composition.) What we do know is that Montaigne planned to publish it in the first edition of the Essais (1580), where he would have used prophylactic commentary to avoid any radical readings (much as he would later use the French privilège system of reissued editions to control the reception of his own works). Unfortunately for Montaigne (and for La Boétie?), radical Huguenot revolutionaries published De la servitude volontaire starting in 1574, giving it precisely the reading Montaigne sought to avoid.

Unfortunately for us, Skinner says little in either volume about how these thought-provoking chapters point us in new directions and beyond his own methodology and questions. But perhaps that is asking too much; it is enough that these two excellent collections get us thinking in new ways about early modern political thought, and with the help of such carefully wrought exemplars of erudition and insight.