I have been talking about the rise and fall of a particular theory of civil liberty. There is an obvious danger, however,that in speaking as briefly and programmatically as I have been doing I may betray rather than illustrate the principles on which I try to base my practice as an historian. So I ought perhaps to stress that one of the principles I have been trying to illustrate is that intellectual historians will do well to focus not merely or even mainly on a canon of so called classic texts, but rather on the place occupied by such texts in broader
traditions and frameworks of thought.