As the 1960s saw the publication of the major methodological statements of the Cambridge School of intellectual history, so the 1970s saw the publication of the major substantive studies that those statements had made possible.Footnote ¹ Important works were produced by John Dunn, in The political thought of John Locke (1969); by the still comparatively neglected and idiosyncratic elder statesman of the field, Duncan Forbes, in Hume's philosophical politics (1975); by J. G. A. Pocock, in The Machiavellian moment (1975); and by Quentin Skinner, in The foundations of modern political thought (1978). Consideration of some of the most recent work in the field of modern political thought reveals indebtedness to this pioneering work; the Cambridge School has thus become an intergenerational enterprise, complete with many of the refining complications that necessarily follow.

In assessing the debate that has resulted in the treatment of eighteenth-century political thought in particular, due attention has to be given to a work that began a fruitful conversation between older and younger scholars: Wealth and virtue, a major collection of essays on the Scottish Enlightenment published in 1983 under the editorship of Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff. John Dunn's essay in that collection provides an especially convenient starting-point for an appreciation of the links between his writings and much recent work in the field. Dunn analysed the thoroughly theocentric nature of Locke's political thought, as he had in his original, book-length treatment of this thinker, who was central (through Peter Laslett's revisionist edition of the Two treatises on government) to the original shaping of the Cambridge School; and he pointed no less emphatically to the pronouncedly secular trajectory of post-Lockean Scottish social and political thought, the history of which had likewise influenced the evolution of his own thinking and also that of Skinner, as both had taken the third year undergraduate paper on the Scottish Enlightenment initiated at Cambridge by Duncan Forbes.Footnote ²

This identification of a secularizing moment, which the shibboleth of Enlightenment might be taken to denote, has proved properly influential in assessments of eighteenth-century political thought, when considered both in European and in American terms. As Dunn's intervention in a debate that has greatly intensified of late demonstrates, reflection on the place of Locke in such a narrative is of paramount importance. There is a point in J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian moment that is paradigmatic of Locke's heavily revised place in the post-canonical reading of political thought made by the Cambridge School. Detailing the English Augustan debate on land and economy, Pocock declares that ‘the deemphasizing of Locke is for the present a tactical necessity. The historical context must be reconstructed without him before he can be fitted back into it.’Footnote ³ When he is fitted back into it, it is frequently as a theorist of the money economy, rather than as the architect of the ‘complacent Lockean liberalism’ that has fed into later American political self-perception.Footnote ⁴ As Pocock argued in the 2002 ‘Afterword’ to the book, there was no ‘Lockean Moment’ during the eighteenth century, and that, consequently, whatever historians of liberalism might desire, this was not a lineage which he had felt obliged to trace in the available languages of Atlantic political thought.Footnote ⁵ Pocock's revisionist account of Locke's place in eighteenth-century thought was further advanced in a lecture given not long after the publication of the Machiavellian moment, when he posited that it was Locke the author of The essay concerning the human understanding and the Letters on toleration, rather than the author of the Two treatises on government, whose influence was most clearly felt in the Atlantic world during the course of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶ It is the immediate prehistory of this trajectory that his Cambridge-educated former graduate student John Marshall has followed, thereby placing Locke in a broadly European rather than a purely Atlantic setting. In reading Marshall's theologically nuanced account it is necessary to bear in mind Pocock's pregnant observation that: ‘The great discovery which we constantly make and remake as historians is that English political debate is recurrently subordinate to English political theology; and few of us know one-tenth of the theology available to competently trained divines and laymen among our predecessors’.Footnote ⁷

Marshall's John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture is largely but not exclusively concerned with European thought and religious experience in the 1680s and 1690s, chiefly in terms of reactions to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. These are decades, he notes, that have been under-explored by students of the Enlightenment, who have been more typically concerned with the High Enlightenment of the mid-eighteenth century; in emphasizing instead the pressures on international Protestantism, and the importance of the ‘Republic of Letters’ that germinated in the experience of exile, Marshall, who associates his approach with the work of the Cambridge School, has explicitly expanded and crucially developed the story influentially told by Paul Hazard in La crise de la conscience Européenne (1935), a seminal work.Footnote ⁸ Marshall's study advances appreciation of the period as it ‘navigates a course between intellectual history, cultural history, religious history, political history, the history of science, and the histories of sexuality and gender’.Footnote ⁹ It is an unusually wide-ranging, uniquely rich, and thoroughly contextualized study.

Politico-theology of the sort evoked by Pocock, but extended to a wider European context, is absolutely vital to the history Marshall charts. Elaborating Mark Goldie's insight that toleration was the aberration in an age when intolerance was the norm, Marshall spends some time examining the legacy in this respect of St Augustine, who claimed that a heretic was someone who obstinately persisted in following and promoting false doctrine; Augustine was to be the major influence concerning the assumption of the right to use state compulsion over the lives and security of the heretics and schismatics so identified. It ought, then, to come as no surprise that those Protestants who argued the tolerationist case in the late seventeenth century – Anabaptists, Arminians, Socinians, and Quakers – were also theological opponents of Augustine's insistence on the depravity of humanity following the Fall.Footnote ¹⁰ Calvinist orthodoxy naturally followed Augustine with particular enthusiasm, and Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor in Geneva, was to publish a tract in 1554 which influentially encouraged the execution of heretics, since heresy, being a crime against God, was the greatest of crimes.Footnote ¹¹ Consequently, the question as to how to tolerate the intolerant accordingly became a major problem for theorists of toleration, and it is much to the credit of Pierre Bayle that he castigated John Milton for effectively denying toleration to Catholics on religious grounds, and that he also disputed Jean Le Clerc's denial of toleration to atheists.Footnote ¹²

Marshall's study demonstrates how deeply intertwined the early experience of Enlightenment was with a continuing Reformation; for example, early proponents of toleration sometimes saw theirs as an Erasmian enterprise.Footnote ¹³ It was among those calling for farther reformation in the party of international Protestantism, whom the Calvinists therefore considered heretical, especially the Arminians and the Socinians, that toleration had become a desirable goal of religious practice, and it was against them and their representatives that Pierre Jurieu, the dominant orthodox figure in the Huguenot diaspora, fulminated in his impassioned defences of religious intolerance. It was consequently against Jurieu that much of the tolerationist argument of Pierre Bayle and John Locke was directed.Footnote ¹⁴ Defenders of a magisterial Reformation that had established Protestant orthodoxy were opposed by thinkers unafraid to engage with the much disputed doctrine of the Trinity; the ‘Unitarian Controversy’, which took place in England between 1687 and 1695, was but one instance of what Pocock has called an Arminian (transmuting into a Socinian) Enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁵ By placing Locke and Bayle in such a richly reconstructed context, Marshall has done much to affirm the place of the early Enlightenment within a theologically informed, if religiously unorthodox, European epicentre.

Students of the early Enlightenment reaction against the dominant cultures of intolerance and persecution will be much indebted to Marshall's study, both for its exemplary work of contextualization and for its concomitant interest in demonstrating how profoundly drenched in the experience of persecution early Enlightenment toleration writings actually were. Similarly, students of Locke have now been definitively shown just how cosmopolitan a thinker he actually was, and just how much he and the pioneering Latitudinarian divine Gilbert Burnet were to draw from their sometimes dangerous exposure to the vicissitudes of European exile.Footnote ¹⁶ Burnet acts as an interesting orthodox analogue to Locke in this study, and one might have liked to see Marshall make a little more of this experiential comparison; certainly, the early Enlightenment relationship with Latitudinarianism is well worthy of the exploration already given to it by scholars.Footnote ¹⁷

The sheer geographical reach and analytical control of Marshall's study is enormously impressive, and he depicts with precision and deftness an early Enlightenment centred in the ‘Republic of Letters’ that was very largely created by the Huguenot diaspora in Holland. His characterization of the intellectual culture so created is masterly and convincing. Fraternal disputes notwithstanding, it was the ideal of friendship, especially as depicted in Cicero's De amicitia, that shaped the intellectual contours of the Republic of Letters, and it is in its support for enquiry, civility, and the avoidance of religious disputation that its legacy to the High Enlightenment is to be found.Footnote ¹⁸ This inclusive conception of their task provided the rationale of such influential works as Bayle's Dictionaire historique et critique and Locke's Letter concerning toleration, writings promoted by such journals as Le Clerc's Bibliothèque universelle in notices which effectively encouraged the work of translation that made the early Enlightenment a truly European phenomenon. Marshall's attention to this tolerationist ethos allows him to argue that it is in Locke's judicious silences regarding difficult religious issues in such texts as the Reasonableness of Christianity and the Paraphrase on the Epistles of St Paul that much of his exploratory understanding of Christianity is to be located.Footnote ¹⁹ The long-term effects of the toleration promoted by the early Enlightenment is convincingly related by Marshall to developments in the High Enlightenment, so that, for example, John Locke's views on the toleration of Jews would come to affect the thinking of Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and Thomas Jefferson.Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, in the appeal to the witness of history made by Gerard Brandt and Gilbert Burnet in their histories of the Reformation, and by Philipp van Limborch in his history of the Inquisition, the intimation that history could be charted as a history of progress would begin to echo effectively throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote ²¹

There is much for students of European intellectual and cultural history to consider in Marshall's suggestive and admirably argued study. This is not, however, the place to consider Marshall's acute analysis of the widespread inclusion of sodomy as a vice associated with heresy by many of its opponents in early modern Europe, and the consequences for modern histories of sexuality and gender of such an identification, but it is clearly a major intervention in such studies. The charges of libertinage often made by theorists of intolerance against heretics do, however, connect Marshall's study with John Robertson's The case for the Enlightenment, in which Bayle once again appears as the challenging Epicurean exponent of the possibility of a thriving society of virtuous atheists;Footnote ²² as Robertson charts the intellectually epochal years between 1680 and 1760, the sheer force of Dunn's observations on the theological rupture between Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment can be most definitively felt.

Before detailing the major components of Robertson's fundamentally secular conception of Enlightenment, it is well to reflect on the essentially theological components of a major contributing element to that Enlightenment, as negotiated in Robertson's account: the fusion of Augustinianism and Epicureanism effected by Bayle in his essay on ‘Epicurus’ in the Dictionaire historique et critique, first published in Amsterdam in 1697. It was a development of a resolution also reached by Blaise Pascal and Pierre Nicole at Port Royal in the 1670s, whereby they realized that the Augustinian account of human depravity after the Fall (the doctrine rejected by so many tolerationist theorists, but not by Bayle) paradoxically also accounted for man's ability to live successfully in society with others, not despite his amour propre, but because of it: it was the sin of self-interested man that made it possible for him to live in society. It was through this insight that thinkers on the fringes of Port Royal began to see the possibility of a rapprochement between Epicurean and Augustinian moral thought, the basis of Bayle's essay.Footnote ²³ Clearly, the ‘Augustinian moment’, capable as it was of so many permutations, embracing both antitolerationists and tolerationists, was both infinitely more influential and infinitely longer-lasting (from late antiquity to the eighteenth century, and well beyond in some particulars) than the ‘Machiavellian moment’, but it is one of the many strengths of Robertson's richly engaged study that he is able to analyse the influence of both moments on Scottish and Neapolitan thought during the eighteenth century. As with Marshall's study, so with Robertson's, this is a refreshingly broad European survey in which the details of Scottish Enlightenment thought find their major interpretative context. The perceived insularity of much British intellectual history is suitably corrected by Marshall and Robertson, and Robertson, drawing on an essay by Marc Bloch, makes an incontestably strong case for the usefulness of comparative history in this context.Footnote ²⁴

Whilst his appeal to the comparative method necessarily involves Robertson in some political and social historical discussion, largely the subject of his second chapter, it is with intellectual history as the history of ideas that he is fundamentally concerned.Footnote ²⁵ It is this concentration on the ideas of the Enlightenment that leads to his strong argument for its unitary, cosmopolitan, and secular identity, and his extensive appeal to two contexts, Scottish and Neapolitan, yields the shared experience of the one Enlightenment.Footnote ²⁶ In order to appreciate the signal achievement of Robertson's study, it is vital to concentrate on his conviction that the ideas that constitute Enlightenment are those centring ‘in the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this world’. The starting point for that understanding was human nature, which was in itself to be understood in terms of a single mental and moral philosophy, ‘in which the framework for the investigation of individual behaviour was provided by human society rather than divine authority’. The ultimate means of assessment and encouragement of betterment was located in the new science of political economy, which is at the very core of ‘Enlightenment’ in Robertson's ‘case for the Enlightenment’.Footnote ²⁷

In reaching that moment of European self-definition, to which Jean-François Melon's Essai politique sur le commerce (1734) is crucial, an immediately pre-Enlightenment experience has to be understood, and in that experience the Augustinian-Epicurean model of human sociability initially proposed by Bayle is essential.Footnote ²⁸ Robertson's working out of this pre-Enlightenment through close textual analysis requires that one attend to his warning that ‘intellectual history which spares its readers the complexity of its subjects' arguments cannot do justice to their achievements'.Footnote ²⁹ He goes on to offer a convincing explication of the notorious complexity of Vico's New science in which Vico is revealed to be a modern thinker, albeit one who thought humanity too fallen in sin to be capable of permanent improvement; the divine providence which oversaw the corso and ricorso of nations likewise left no sort of guarantee for the progress of society.Footnote ³⁰ A similarly attentive reading of Mandeville's writings, in which the imperatives of religion are discounted and scorned, leads to a rich and rewarding reading of much of Hume's moral theory and his own reflections on religion. Proper attention to the argumentation of Hume's various texts reveals an engagement with the Baylean conjecture of a successful society of sociable atheists in which Hume concluded that such a society was effectively the one in which he and his contemporaries actually lived, and one that was preferable to one composed of Christian theists. It is Hume's involvement with such ideas that leads Robertson to conclude that Hume the moral theorist belonged, with Bayle, Mandeville, William Warburton, and Vico, to ‘the immediate pre-Enlightenment.’ It was only when Hume turned to bring Enlightenment to Scotland through his studies in political economy that he himself fully entered the Enlightenment.Footnote ³¹

It is at this juncture in Robertson's argument that it becomes necessary to revert to consideration of Marshall's study. Elements of what Robertson chooses to call, with rightly studied prolepsis, a ‘pre-Enlightenment’ plainly overlap with several of the issues Marshall identifies with an ‘early Enlightenment’, not least the place of Bayle in the world of tolerationist argument, and the role played by the Republic of Letters in the creation and promotion of Enlightenment.Footnote ³² How, then, is one to define that troubled period in European intellectual life, dated by Hazard between 1680 and 1750, the era of Robertson's pre-Enlightenment and (for many scholars) of Enlightenment? Plainly, ‘Baroque Europe’ will not do; considering it as a moment in the long-term development of the Reformation has its attractions, but this is to ignore the Counter-Reformation and those progressive developments within Catholicism in the age of Fénelon (and Vico) which are at least as important in the experience of Europe as a whole.Footnote ³³ The category of ‘Enlightenment’ would seem to absorb much, if not quite all, of this experience, and the case for an English Enlightenment within the wider Republic of Letters, for instance, might be made in terms of the steady absorption of Locke's major guiding ideas within the Anglican theological mainstream.Footnote ³⁴ In drawing a parallel with Vico, Robertson makes much of William Warburton as a figure of the immediate pre-Enlightenment; Pocock (and the present author) have presented Warburton as an Enlightenment figure, whose seminal work, The divine legation of Moses demonstrated (1738–41), had an impact on European thought that was only to be paralleled by the appearance of Gibbon's History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.Footnote ³⁵ One of the many scholarly virtues of Robertson's magnificent book is his graceful dissension from other views, a characteristic nowhere clearer than in his profound disagreement with Pocock on the possibility of the sort of religious experience of Enlightenment being argued for here. However this might be, Robertson also importantly questions Jonathan Israel's assumption that radical irreligion, predicated on a denial of the very possibility of revealed religion, is the core of the Enlightenment, as well as Israel's radical re-dating of the phenomenon, which claims that its main business was over by 1740.Footnote ³⁶

Where one is in complete agreement with Robertson is in seeking to ensure that ‘Enlightenment’ does not become a catch-all term for the entirety of eighteenth-century thought; exactly what it can be used to describe, and how compatible it is with aspects of piety, remains the point at issue. Robertson's statement of, and engagement with, the present scholarly standing of the Enlightenment, complete with the vastly over-promoted critique of a supposed ‘Enlightenment project’, from MacIntyre onwards, is masterly, and is easily the best currently available.Footnote ³⁷ Its twenty-eight distilled pages are much to be recommended to all students of the Enlightenment, and the modulation into his own argument for ‘the case for the Enlightenment’ (which develops Franco Venturi's argument for an Enlightenment in which cosmopolitanism and patriotism fruitfully co-existed) is a model of persuasive historical argumentation.Footnote ³⁸ What Robertson claims for Hume can also be said of himself: ‘Enlightenment was a serious intellectual exercise.’Footnote ³⁹ It is only right that it should continue to be so.

Robertson undoubtedly makes a singularly powerful case for a unitary Enlightenment, and for the centrality of the new science of political economy to its achievement in Scotland and Naples. What Hume did for Scotland with the publication of his Political discourses, Antonio Genovesi did for Naples, in taking political economy to make the case for Enlightenment through his own work in the new science.Footnote ⁴⁰ What Robertson has to say about Hume's often dense and involved essays in political economy can also be said of his elucidation of them; subtlety and refinement are to be expected, and his exposition is ‘not for the lazy reader’.Footnote ⁴¹ There is, consequently, much to reward the attentive reader. The political economy introduced into Naples by Ferdinando Galiani and Genovesi, and into Scotland by Hume, involved a reworking of Epicurean moral philosophy, as well as an engagement with the work of Melon;Footnote ⁴² the Enlightenment was built on firmly pre-Enlightenment foundations. There is a conviction and a consistent attention to firmness of argumentation in Robertson's The case for the Enlightenment, and it is sure to hold a prominent place in discussion of ‘Enlightenment’ for many years to come. The only regret one has about it is that it does not, apart from a series of illuminating concluding remarks, go beyond 1760; one would have liked to see more on Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar, the dominant figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. There is also an all-too-brief but profoundly suggestive examination of Smith's critique of Rousseau's neo-Stoicism, and one would like to know more about how the notoriously elusive Rousseau fits into the unitary secular Enlightenment explored so magisterially in these pages.Footnote ⁴³

As an Oxford historian whose passage into intellectual history was overseen by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Robertson writes at a critical distance from, but in close association with, the Cambridge School.Footnote ⁴⁴ His contribution to Wealth and virtue was indicative of the independent stance he has gone on to develop, marking as the essay effectively did the increasing distance felt by leading members of the Scottish Enlightenment from the civic republican ideal whose fortunes have been charted by Skinner and Pocock.Footnote ⁴⁵ Robertson has long engaged with Pocock's writings, especially with The Machiavellian moment, as can be appreciated in the pages in The case for the Enlightenment devoted to Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, on whom Robertson is the leading authority, and who is appraised as an acute analyst of the problem of multiple kingdoms and the fear of ‘Universal Monarchy’, as, likewise, is Paolo Mattia Doria of Naples.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hume's thoughts on the nature of ‘Universal Monarchy’ similarly provided the subject matter of an essay by Robertson contributed to a volume assessing the impact of Pocock's work in the history of political thought.Footnote ⁴⁷ There is a becoming scepticism in much of Robertson's work, and his encounters with Pocock's writings, leading to his disagreement with him over the identity and nature of the Enlightenment, have been particularly productive. The case for the Enlightenment will provoke lively debate, and it will stand as a consummate model in the writing of intellectual history.

As the acknowledgements to his Jealousy of trade attest, Istvan Hont is also a former graduate student of Trevor-Roper, but his migration to Cambridge (where he succeeded to the lectureship in the history of political thought formerly held by Duncan Forbes, to whose ‘stern wisdom’ he pays tribute), has placed him, unlike Robertson, at the very centre of the Cambridge School.Footnote ⁴⁸ Consequently, he engages closely and productively with the work of Skinner, Dunn, Pocock, and Richard Tuck, and his argument is thoroughly contextualized across a very wide European perspective, importantly taking in the German-speaking lands, and encompassing a deeply impressive familiarity with modern continental secondary literature. This includes, very significantly, work by Reinhart Koselleck, whose conceptual approach to the literature of political thought is distinctive from, if at times complementary to, that of the Cambridge School.Footnote ⁴⁹ There are also several points of contact between Hont and Robertson, and the singular merits of both books are probably best appreciated by reading them alongside each other, but one conspicuous difference between them lies in their use of the term ‘Enlightenment’. Hont pointedly avoids the word, citing approvingly in this respect a recent article by James Schmidt, who is notably sceptical of its usefulness, especially when prefaced by the definite article; by contrast, Schmidt's article is criticized, and quite rightly, by Robertson as ‘an object lesson in the dangers of relying on a dictionary for a definition of a concept’.Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘Enlightenment’ is explicitly absent from Hont's analysis, but it is worth reflecting on what it might mean in the various contexts of eighteenth-century thought which he explores.

Hume the essayist is as central to Hont's book as he is to Robertson's, and the transition from the Hobbesian ‘jealousy of state’ to the centrality, in eighteenth-century political discourse, of the Humean ‘jealousy of trade’ is absolutely vital to his argument.Footnote ⁵¹ Hont thus demonstrates the fundamental importance to eighteenth-century thought of the political experience (and contemporaneous reflection on that experience) of the seventeenth century, and also of a creative tension subsisting between the leading ideas of the two centuries, not least the idea of reason of state. A point of contact with Marshall's book, therefore, as well as Robertson's, lies in Hont's emphasis on the importance of the attempts at universal monarchy made by Louis XIV in understanding the evolving political languages of eighteenth-century Europe. His brilliant chapter on Hume's fears regarding the national debt, one of the most thoughtful and illuminating contributions to the history of political thought made in the last twenty years or so, can thus be very usefully read alongside Robertson's essay on Hume's critique of universal monarchy.Footnote ⁵² In his concentration on the language of political economy, Hont focuses on a particular aspect of recent developments within the Cambridge School, which have emphasized the importance for the understanding of modern political thought of the collapse of most consciously socialist modes of analysis. (This fruitfully revisionist strand of thought might even be called the King's College School, as its major representatives, John Dunn, Gareth Stedman Jones, Emma Rothschild, Michael Sonenscher, and Hont himself, are all fellows of King's.)Footnote ⁵³ It is, then, a resolutely post-Marxist account of such language, and the retreat from Marxian interpretation is a marked, if frequently silent, feature of Hont's argument.

Hont profitably elaborates the other major political discourses that have been particularly associated with the Cambridge School, encompassing civic humanism, Machiavellianism and Neo-Machiavellianism, and natural jurisprudence, this last a notable feature in the essays collected together in Wealth and virtue. There is little political theology in Hont's study, although he does note how Samuel Pufendorf's Aristotelianism divided him from Pierre Nicole's Augustinianism, and he contrasts Herder's optimistic theology with Kant's less optimistic version of the Pietism in which the two thinkers were both reared.Footnote ⁵⁴ Most of the languages Hont analyses are either secular or secularizing, and this is especially true of the political economy of Melon, Hume, and Smith. The Hobbes encountered in his pages is the theorist of the state, and not a political theologian, while Pufendorf is read as an important theorist behind the four stages theory of human social progress, intent on reconstructing Grotian natural jurisprudence using Hobbes's method, but without drawing Hobbes's conclusions.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Neo-Machiavellianism of Charles Davenant, analysed alongside the political economy of John Locke, Henry Martyn, and the acute if remarkably dark insights of Fletcher of Saltoun, is placed within a developing reliance on empire as a means of maintaining England's liberty of trade; it provides a fascinating comment on the sometimes intellectually ruthless seventeenth-century world opened up in Pocock's The Machiavellian moment. Footnote ⁵⁶ The prevalence of natural jurisprudence as a means of understanding the status of property in eighteenth-century political thought is affirmed in Hont's account of Smith's argument regarding justice and fairness in the Wealth of nations, a major piece of revisionist scholarship co-written with Michael Ignatieff and originally published in Wealth and virtue. This essay predictably provoked the ire of E. P. Thompson, whose reading of the political economy of the grain trade differed markedly from the one offered in that ground-breaking and properly demanding piece of heavily contextual scholarship. As Hont and Ignatieff rightly emphasized, it was Smith's presence in France in the mid-1760s, when internal trade regulations were liberalized, that had by far the more influence over his thinking regarding the trade in grain, rather than any supposed exposure to the ‘moral economy’ of the Scottish or English crowd.Footnote ⁵⁷ The impact of the essay on intellectual history seems to be more marked than it has as yet proved to be in social or cultural history, a scholarly division of labour which fails to do anything like full justice to the texts intellectual historians examine to such constructively revisionist ends.

Smith's prominence in Hont's study is an important act of historical reclamation in a post-Marxist appraisal of the history of economic thought, and in this way the book usefully complements the concluding pages of Robertson's equally revisionist account. In Smith the discourse of civic humanism can be seen as giving way to that of political economy, notably inflected by the language of natural jurisprudence. In a magisterial survey of the ‘rich country, poor country’ debate in eighteenth-century Scotland, Hont also demonstrates how these languages co-existed, and how the rivalries between them were not worked out in a strictly chronological sequence; John Millar was still concerned, after absorbing Smith's major writings, with the impact of luxury on the decline of Greece, Rome, and Italy, voicing similar concerns about the immediate future of England and France, but Dugald Stewart's lectures on political economy, delivered to the generation of the ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’, helped hasten the decline of civic humanism in the commercial society of Britain in the 1800s.Footnote ⁵⁸ Where Hont also strikes out new territory is in his provocative concluding essay, which seeks to place the ‘nation-state’ and ‘nationalism’ in historical perspective, the perspective being that of revolutionary France, interpreted, intriguingly and convincingly, as the arena of an anti-nationalist revolt that failed. His detailing of the political language of the Jacobins is supremely well done, and his reading of it alongside Herder's encounter with it is subtle and thought-provoking. In the course of the essay, Hont engages, like Pocock before him, with the arguments of Hannah Arendt, whose place in the American liberal pantheon has made her a talismanic spokesperson on the nature of the modern state.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hont concludes that the modern world has a lot to learn from the experience of the 1790s and 1800s, and it is his determination to find twenty-first-century political meaning in much of the intellectual history undertaken in this volume that is most striking to students of the recent evolution of the Cambridge School. As with Skinner in Liberty before liberalism, so with Hont in Jealousy of trade, historical revisionism is revealed to have strong implications for the practice of modern politics, as Hont resoundingly declares that ‘History is the tool of skeptics.’Footnote ⁶⁰

Hont has contributed an essay to The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought which complements several of the themes central to Jealousy of trade. It details, in an arresting and original manner, the intricacies of the debate on luxury that originated in the 1710s in Fénelon's hugely popular Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse, the continuously influential presence of which in much eighteenth-century reflection, right up to the 1790s, is also registered in Michael Sonenscher's equally distinguished contribution to the same volume.Footnote ⁶¹ Co-edited by the late Robert Wokler, a protégé of Isaiah Berlin, and Mark Goldie (an historian of, as well as being a practitioner within, the Cambridge School), this collection of invaluable essays does much to affirm the role of religion, both negatively and positively considered, in the dynamics of a European Enlightenment.Footnote ⁶² Aside from essays by Richard H. Popkin and Mark Goldie, and Dale van Kley, specifically devoted to religion, Sylvana Tomaselli infers that Montesquieu's defence of legal particularism was ‘part and parcel of his plea for religious toleration’, whilst Knud Haakonssen, in his study of the German natural law tradition, demonstrates that, whereas Thomasius had sought to keep religion a private matter, Wolffian philosophy had acted as an influential ‘civic religion’ in Prussia. Similarly, in his essay on ‘enlightened despotism’, Derek Beales notes that philosophes and enlightened despots were agreed in identifying religious persecution with distaste, thereby justifying their subsequent interference in the religious lives of their subjects.Footnote ⁶³ Religion is central to many of the Enlightenment debates discussed in the course of a properly exhaustive and thorough approach to the history of eighteenth-century political thought.

The Enlightenment is, moreover, encountered rather than defined in The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought, seemingly the result of a deliberate editorial decision on the part of Wokler and Goldie.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed, Enlightenment is most clearly defined by Wokler only when it encounters its nemesis in the 1790s through the emerging, post-revolutionary language of social science, which undid the goal of what he defines to be the key element of Enlightenment political thought, namely the creation of a science of legislation deployed for the promotion of human happiness (an older variant on Robertson's ‘case for the Enlightenment’, perhaps).Footnote ⁶⁵ Enlightenment as an organizing category of eighteenth-century thought is fitfully at work elsewhere in the volume, as, when dismissing the category of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ as the regrettably decontextualized placing by influential scholars such as Isaiah Berlin of the sometimes perplexing thought of Vico, Rousseau, and Herder, Wolfgang Pross reconstructs the specifically Enlightenment lineage of important elements of their writings.Footnote ⁶⁶ Similarly, it is in accord with the political rhythms generated by ‘enlightened despotism’ that T. J. Hochstrasser productively reads the evolving language of Physiocracy in eighteenth-century France.Footnote ⁶⁷ As with the work of Hont and Robertson, so in The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought, the language of political economy, be it Physiocratic, Smithian, or Cameralist, is quietly dominant in these discrete but inevitably interconnecting studies of Enlightenment discourse.Footnote ⁶⁸ In common with the interpretative essays at the heart of Wealth and virtue, the language of natural law and jurisprudence is also seen as complementary to developments in Enlightenment political economy, but just as James Moore's analysis (like Hont's) witnesses natural law ultimately giving way to political economy, so Frederick Rosen sees the language of jurisprudence gradually give way to that of Utilitarianism.Footnote ⁶⁹

The identification of political economy and jurisprudence as central elements of the experience of Enlightenment unites practitioners of the Cambridge School with scholars such as Robertson. More directly Pocockian themes are central to the essays on England by Mark Goldie, with its frequent recourse to politico-theology, and by Iain Hampsher-Monk, who considers the 1790s as witnessing both the birth of Burkean counter-revolution and also the creation of an indigenous variety of radical political economy.Footnote ⁷⁰ The language of classical republicanism, made familiar by the Cambridge School, is shown by Keith Michael Baker to have been radically transformed in the accents of Robespierre, according to the exigencies of the Terror.Footnote ⁷¹ Unsurprisingly, then, there are many elements familiar from the researches of the Cambridge School at work in The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought, but that is not to claim that the collection as a whole is typical of work with this provenance.Footnote ⁷² As the editors make clear, they have chosen contributors from a diversity of generations and backgrounds both from Europe and North America, and the essays by Melvin Richter and Iring Fetscher, for example, are far closer to Begriffsgeschichte than they are to the Cambridge School, while the essay by Gordon Wood is typical of the revisionist approach to American national history.Footnote ⁷³ Daniel Roche's study of the Encyclopédie similarly marries the French tradition of the history of the book with revisionist strands in French revolutionary studies.Footnote ⁷⁴ In assembling so many approaches, largely complementary in effect if not necessarily always so in intention, this intellectually inclusive addition to the Cambridge histories of political thought is more typical of the recent collaborative turn made by Quentin Skinner, who, through the volumes he has co-edited for the European Science Foundation, has likewise opened up a dialogue between the Cambridge School and other approaches to what are largely perceived in those volumes to be the ‘heritage’ of European political thought and experience.Footnote ⁷⁵

What might one, then, conclude from study of these books on the nature and circumstances of eighteenth-century political thought? First and foremost, that ‘Enlightenment’ obviously remains an essentially contested historical concept, and whilst scholars of the eighteenth century might seek to avoid it as a term of art, it is surely an ineluctable presence, both in historical experience and in current historiography. The identification and characterization of ‘Enlightenment’ is certain to continue to be a controversial undertaking, particularly as regards its location in such decidedly clerical and conservative countries as England, but Marshall's Europeanizing of Locke's experience of the early Enlightenment is likely to prove helpful in charting the later impact of Enlightenment on and in eighteenth-century England. Robertson's incisive challenge to Pocock's plurality of Enlightenments is serious and suggestive, and negotiation between the two approaches to the field might well prove difficult to sustain, but the debate it opens up can only be fruitful for eighteenth-century intellectual history. Second, two recent and quietly momentous developments within the Cambridge School are readily discernible, both in Hont's book and in The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought. The first of these encompasses a sense of scholarly purpose, as is clearly enunciated in openness to the contemporary application of historical reflection hitherto lacking in a primarily historical manner of thinking, but now prominent in the work of Skinner and Hont (it has long been a part of Dunn's intellectual programme).Footnote ⁷⁶ What this entails for the techniques associated with the Cambridge School is an interestingly open question. Allied to this openness to contemporary theory as an aspect of historical reflection is the other major recent development within the Cambridge School, namely an open engagement with other, and sometimes rival, approaches to the study of the history of political thought.Footnote ⁷⁷ Just as the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters negotiated its way through intellectual rivalries and disagreements, as well as consolidating a new and concentrated mode of intellectual engagement, so the recent and willing exposure of the Cambridge School to European styles of intellectual history promises an increasingly sophisticated dialogue in current and future discussion of the history of political thought. It is supremely fitting that consideration of the age of Enlightenment should be at the fore of such cosmopolitan developments.