Europe, what Europe?

Colin Kidd

• BuyThe Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History by J.G.A. Pocock
  Cambridge, 344 pp, £18.99, September 2005, ISBN 0 521 61645 X
• BuyBarbarism and Religion, Volume III: The First Decline and Fall by J.G.A. Pocock
  Cambridge, 527 pp, £19.99, October 2005, ISBN 0 521 67233 3
• BuyBarbarism and Religion, Volume IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires by J.G.A. Pocock
  Cambridge, 372 pp, £17.99, February 2008, ISBN 978 0 521 72101 1

Few areas of the humanities have undergone such a remarkable transformation over the past half-century as the history of political thought. Students were once introduced to it by way of its giants – the likes of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Marx. Rather than a living discussion among contemporaries, between great thinkers and lesser fry, political thought was reckoned to be a more elevated – if stilted – affair, of giant responding unto giant, sometimes across centuries of silence. Its history belonged not to historians but to philosophers; and political scientists, broadly speaking, concurred. They too studied political thought by way of its canonical figures, for the light their ideas shed on perennial problems in government.