A Centre for the History of British Political Thought, such as sponsored the seminar out of which this volume has grown, must sooner or later pay attention to its own title. The enterprise which Roger Mason was asked to initiate was that of examining and if possible establishing the distinctive characteristics of Scottish political discourse – meaning a discourse including among its concerns those of a kingdom and nation of Scotland – and proceeding to enquire into the nature of ‘British’ political thought, meaning by that term not just the aggregate of ‘political thought’ conducted in the several nations and sub-nations composing modern ‘Britain’, but a discourse directed at the ‘matter of Britain’, that is at the problematics of conceiving and realizing a political entity to be known by that name. The length of the sentence just concluded is an index of the complexity of the problems arising once one asks what ‘British political thought’ really signifies, or (to be more daring) really is.

The volume which has emerged is both nationalist and unionist. It has as one of its themes the shaping of a political discourse concerned with a nation and kingdom to be known as ‘Scotland’, and as another the shaping of a discourse concerned with the union of this entity with another, described and self-described as ‘England’, to form a third entity to be known as ‘Britain’ and perhaps (or perhaps not) to furnish this last with a self capable of setting about shaping and describing itself.