There is at present no overall history of English and British political thought and literature in the early modern period although new approaches to the writing of its history have taken shape in the past forty to fifty years; and during that time British political history has itself been subjected to intensive revision. This volume, written by directors of seminars at the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought in Washington DC, attempts to review the period from the English Reformation to the French Revolution, to suggest new ways of studying the articulation of political consciousness and the conduct of political argument, and to point out the extraordinary intellectual and linguistic richness of the ongoing English and British political debate.