For many of us, the practice of intellectual history has become so thoroughly and happily post-Kuhnian that we sometimes forget what historiography was like before the early 1960s. When this forgetfulness occurs, the most effective mnemonic is often the appearance of a work that would have been almost inconceivable half a century ago, written in self-conscious exploration of the landscape that Kuhn and others have since opened up for us. Such a work is J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion-a twovolume study not so much of Edward Gibbon (1737-94) or even of his classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) but rather of the intellectual world within which he both lived and breathed.
Born in London and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, Pocock was educated at the Universities of Canterbury and Cambridge, and since 1974 has resided on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University, where he is presently Harry C. Black Emeritus Professor of History. In the 1960s, while still a Cantabrigean, he discovered that his unhappiness with the secondary literature in the history of political thought was shared by his colleagues Quentin Skinner and John Dunn; and throughout the decade, these three made their objections repeatedly and abundantly clear in a series of critical methodological essays-for example, Dunn's 'The Identity of the History of Ideas' (1968), Skinner's 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas' (1969), and Pocock's 'Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought' (1971)-as well as through exemplary studies of writers including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Harrington, Locke and Burke.
Undeniably, the history of political thought was ripe for revision. There was little consensus on whether its appropriate designation should be 'political thought', 'political theory' or 'political philosophy', and while a canon of 'classic texts' had been settled on, there was no agreement about how these should be studied. Most of these texts had been written by philosophers, so that the natural temptation was to treat their authors as our contemporaries, and to subject their writings to philosophical-and frequently anachronistic-commentary and critique. The parallel insistence that such texts be made relevant to our present problems-often construed as the justification for their study itself-meant that they were often subjected to criteria of selection and emphasis that were oblivious to the concerns of their own authors or of their original audiences. What was lacking was the self-conscious exploration of questions that were specifically historical-e.g., What were the intentions of the author? How were these intentions understood by his audience? What concrete social, political and material interests guided both? As a result, historians found themselves facing the impossible task of somehow