Establishing direct and unambiguous connections between any book's availability, reading and reception, and its subsequent impact is difficult. Basic questions pertaining to the influence of books on readers have been long standing. However, the difficulty of accounting for the influence of a book on its past readers is but part and parcel of the larger problem of establishing points of influence in the world of ideas — a problem to which Quentin Skinner pointed brilliantly more than thirty years ago. If Skinner was right, the difficulty is such that it behooves historians of ideas to assume a more descriptive (as well as quantitative) language in their attempts to understand the past. Looking to the sciences, Skinner argued that it was possible to breakdown “the line between describing and explaining.” “It is a commonplace of the more advanced sciences that an explanation can be the result merely of establishing the most precise correlation between all possible variables. It is more than arguable that very precise and complete historical descriptions might stand of themselves as explanations in a similar way.” Historical context, in this way of thinking, is not only necessary to historical explanation but perhaps even commensurate with it.

HISTORY AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL THOUGHT

That history was an important genre to the Age of Enlightenment has long been appreciated by scholars who have, however, given less attention to describing the precise uses to which history was put.