This volume, the fifth and latest in the Cambridge History of Political Thought series, largely lives up to its distinguished lineage. It is a comprehensive study of the major British, European, and North American theorists, offering a sweeping survey of the main trends in political thought from the age of John Locke to the aftermath of the French Revolution. All of the principal features of the terrain are adequately treated, ranging from the deep-rooted philosophical foundations of the natural law tradition and the Graeco-Roman inheritance to the topical debates between competing modern controversialists over the death penalty and over parliamentary reform.

The volume as a whole certainly has the appropriate internal shape—which is to say that the period is evenly covered. There are forty early pages specifically devoted to the formative influence of English thought. There are large intervening sections on the flowering of rationalist methodologies, constitutional theory, and political economy. There are then a hundred more pages at the end given over to the ideas and debates associated with the American and French revolutionaries. It should also be said that some of the sections along the way, such as those on skepticism by the late Richard Popkin, on the American Revolution by Gordon Wood, and on the encyclopaedias by Daniel Roche, could not have found more authoritative contributors.

Particularly meritorious in a work that sets out to provide a definitive overview of such a large and complex field is the obvious determination not to let the understandably dominant presence of the Enlightenment crowd out other aspects of contemporary political thought. Due weight is, of course, given to the leading progressive figures whose ideas demarcated the enlightened mainstream—Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Voltaire, Cesare Beccaria, and so forth. But the critiques of Enlightenment values variously developed by writers like Johann Georg Hamann, David Hume, and Edmund Burke are also properly explored. All in all, the chosen subjects provide a rounded and judicious overview of how eighteenth-century theorists understood politics and how they generally set about discussing them.

If the coverage overall is therefore properly encyclopedic, then many of the individual sections can also be read as short surveys in their own right, particularly where they handle topics that are not often brought into the scholarly mainstream. Dale Van Kley's section on piety, for example, touching on subjects such as Jansenism and Lutheranism, is a revealing essay in the continuing importance of religious vocabularies in eighteenth-century political argument. Similarly, Patrick Riley's piece on social contract theory is a thirty-page tour de force, as useful as anything else yet written in explaining why contracts had come to matter so much to the political theorists of the Enlightenment.

The volume is not, however, without its faults. There are some slips, such as the litany of Scottish writers running “William Seton, the earl of Cromartie, and Viscount Tarbat” (59): in fact, there are just two authors in there, Cromartie and Tarbat being the same individual, George Mackenzie, under different aristocratic monikers (compounding the oversight, they are then indexed as though separate persons [905, 917]). Typographical errors also periodically spring out at the reader, such as “the undiluted and (at this stage somewhat eccentric) claim” (666) and (this of Burke) “His early produced …” (722).

The laconic style encouraged by the encyclopedic approach also raises problems all of its own, especially when combined with the obtrusive referencing system that the contributors have been obliged to follow. Thus, taking at random the chapter on British radicalism and the anti-Jacobins (though there are many similar instances elsewhere), we are advised at one stage that, “Thomas Paine invoked that patriarchalist trump card, the book of Genesis, in his startling claim that each generation had the same right as the first to order government as it saw fit (Paine 1989, pp. 76–7), natural rights were deployed to defend the status quo (Plowden, 1792, pp. 19–28), a seemingly radical utilitarianism was used to urge political quietism (Paley 1837, pp. 132, 168), and ancient constitutionalism was brought to the defence of aristocratic and propertied privilege (Lee 1982)” (661). But in order to render just this single sentence useful to the genuinely uninitiated it would be necessary to have to hand no fewer than four other texts in order to begin decoding the terminology. Neither this expectation nor the dense concentrations of specialist vocabulary that several contributors often favor seems wholly consistent with the volume's general claim to be “accessible” to an audience including “beginning undergraduate level.”

Another feature worth highlighting, but this time one that certainly does reflect the desire to make this volume accessible to nonspecialists, is the provision of an apparatus for the reader new to this subject. This includes short pen portraits of significant political theorists, not all of them likely to be widely known, from early feminists like Mary Astell and Abigail Adams to James Rutledge and the Marquis de Sade (“From his name,” the biography informs us, “is derived ‘sadism’” [772]).

If there is a broader criticism of this volume's general conception it is that it is not always able to explore the wider implications of the specific theories and arguments that it considers. In particular, insufficient attention is often given to the public reception of texts and to the impact of political thought upon political practice. Thus there is an excellent anatomization of Scottish political economy by Donald Winch. No serious attempt is made, however, to assess its consequences among statesmen like Henry Dundas and George Grenville (though the influence of classical political economy upon public policy has been the subject of a growing number of studies in recent years). Equally, the British response to the French Revolution is covered by means of an analysis of the writings of a familiar series of authors—Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Paine, William Godwin, and Thomas Spence. But precious little coverage, apart from some fleeting references to popular associations, is given to the immense impact that some of these writers—Paine's Rights of Man was said to have sold 200,000 copies in the first year alone—actually achieved among a large and diverse reading public.

This should remind us that the subject of this volume remains in many ways a contested one—in dispute not only between those who continue to disagree over what the Enlightenment was and what its political legacy for our own times might be but also between those who would question the meaning of the term “political thought” itself. Is it merely convenient shorthand for the ideas about society and its organization that come to be embedded in a formal literature of enduring significance? Should it also encompass the languages and idioms employed by those who are actively involved in political endeavors and, therefore, amount to something rather more like “political discourse”? And is it about effects as well as causes, impact as much as intention, and thus to be considered a central component in the social history of ideas?

The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, in wanting, as its editors remark, “to fill in the valleys from which the peaks arose” (1), ventures further than most in widening the focus beyond the great texts. It succeeds triumphantly in mapping the contributions of many of the less-familiar writers. It also suggests, however, that the history of political thought may indeed require an appreciation of how that large majority of readers who are not themselves authors actually appropriated the ideas and arguments of their times.