British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory, 1500–1800 and Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought

Extract

British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory, 1500–1800. Edited by David Armitage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 338p. $90.00.

Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Edited by Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 308p. $90.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

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.