Ideas in Context at 100: Introduction

The publication of Christopher Bayly’s Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire at the end of 2011 marked the one hundredth volume in the Ideas in Context series. Retrospection loves an even number, and although the ever-productive Cambridge University Press series has already marched past that milestone, it seemed a perfect moment to reflect on one of the great publishing ventures in the history of our discipline. Launched in 1984 with Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, edited by the original editorial board of Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, the series quickly became a choice address for intellectual historians publishing in English. Since Ideas in Context—as its collective title indicates—reflected the methods and concerns of the so-called “Cambridge School,” it was fitting that volume two was a collection of essays by John Pocock, who along with Skinner is considered one of the two shapers of the Cambridge approach to the study of the history of ideas. Not surprisingly, the Cambridge School’s shaping themes are reflected in many of the monographs in “Ideas in Context”—a focus on the history of political thought, concern with the career of republicanism and its various ideological challengers, a tendency to study secular political ideas in isolation from religion, preoccupation with early modern Europe and a predilection for a canon of Western European and English authors situated within a thick contextual web of arguments, languages, and texts. But the series rapidly expanded to embrace broader chronologies, themes, domains of intellectual endeavor, and territories. The same is true of its relationship to the methodological concerns most closely associated with the Cambridge School, which have tended to govern more in the spirit than in the letter of the many distinguished works that constitute Ideas in Context. In lieu of a comprehensive appraisal of the series’s many achievements—in any case an impossibility—the following essays consider how a number of key periods, movements, or regions have fared in its first hundred volumes.