Introduction

Summary

In 1989, J. G. A. Pocock underlined the profound transformation undergone in the field of politico-intellectual history, which he defined as “a movement away from emphasizing history of thought (and even more sharply, ‘of ideas’) toward emphasizing something rather different, for which ‘history of speech’ or ‘history of discourse,’ if not unproblematic or irreproachable, may be the best terminology found so far.” He referred to a series of theories elaborated in the 1970s and 1980s conveying the transit from the older tradition of “history of ideas,” whose main representative was Arthur Lovejoy, to what would be known as the “new intellectual history” (hereafter, NIH). The key figures that initiated this transformation, in the Anglo-Saxon world, were Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and Pocock himself, authors normally grouped together under the collective name of the “Cambridge School.”