Irish political thought has scarcely had an independent history due to the thrust of academic history writing in Ireland. This discipline had dual origins: in an Irish Protestant liberal tradition dating back to W. E. H. Lecky, and in a conservative variety of English historiography cultivated in the 1930s at London, and in the 1950s at Cambridge. Thus influenced, historians have had two principal concerns: to achieve a mean between denominational competition for the ownership of Ireland's past, and to understand the intersections between the histories of Ireland and Britain. In this light, the history of political thought has, until recently, focused on thinkers concerned with disputes over the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England, while Ireland's relationship with the European continent, and particularly with Catholic Europe, was left to Catholic (frequently clerical) historians writing to their own agendas.

These distortions have been largely remedied by a new generation of historians who have delved into an ever-expanding range of sources concerning Ireland's multifarious links with Continental Europe. This work has also alerted scholars (including literary scholars) to the importance of printed and documentary sources in the Irish and Latin languages, while English language sources have shed fresh information following their re-interrogation by historians who have read more extensively on various historical experiences than their predecessors. Practitioners of both the new British history and Atlantic history have also been situating developments in Ireland (including the formation of political ideas) in ever widening contexts.