This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned principally with the history of British political thought in the eighteenth century. Several of the essays have been previously published (though they have not all been widely available), and several appear here for the first time in print.

1. Introduction: the state of the art; Part I: 2. Virtues, rights and manners: a model for historians of political thought; 3. Authority and property: the question of liberal origins; 4. 1776: the revolution against parliament; Part II: 5. Modes of political and historical time in early eighteenth-century England; 6. The mobility of property and the rise of eighteenth-century sociology; 7. Hume and the American Revolution: the dying thoughts of a North Briton; 8. Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the world view of the late enlightenment; 9. Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke and Price: a study in the varieties of eighteenth-century conservatism; 10. The political economy of Burke's analysis of the French Revolution; Part III: 11. The varieties of Whiggism from exclusion to reform: a history of ideology and discourse; Index.