It has now become orthodoxy for historians to write about political texts as being part of discourses or languages. This approach has much merit. At the very least, the work of Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock and John Dunn has encouraged historians to use a broader range of sources, and to ground their analysis of political thought in a firm historical context. Beyond this, discourse analysis offers a means of establishing a causal relationship between political thought and political action. To echo Richard Ashcraft’s definition, political theory is not merely a product of its social context. It supplies the criteria according to which the actions appropriate for changing that context are rendered intelligible. For Skinner and Pocock, the governing paradigms of political discourses, as much as concrete institutions and social structures, have an influence on political actions. However, this approach also has some limitations. Even after the “linguistic turn,” the history of political thought is still predominantly concerned with the accurate recovery of the meaning of texts, not with the reception or dissemination of ideas. To realize the full impact of political texts, we need to uncover not only the author’s intentions in writing, but also the ways in which these works were read and used by their audience.

During his own lifetime John Bright (1811-1889) assumed an iconic status in the history both of Quakerism and of middle-class radical politics as “the Tribune of the people.” Yet he remains an anomalous figure, difficult to place in the frameworks that presently organize the historiography of modern Quakerism, and of reform politics in the nineteenth century. In large part this reflects a failure among his biographers and social historians of this period to analyze in any depth the relation between his politics and his spiritual life. His religious values have been variously denied or given a nodding acknowledgment as fundamental to his radicalism. And where the religious basis of John Bright’s radicalism is accepted, there are varying and contrasting accounts of that relationship.

In 1959 C. P. Snow turned a phrase that continues to shape our perceptions of intellectual life in the twentieth century. Intellectuals, he observed, were divided into “two cultures,” the arts and the sciences, and between them stood “a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” That gulf constituted a crisis, because while literary intellectuals were said to control the heights of power, only the scientists possessed the knowledge and vision necessary to confront the problems of the modern world. Snow’s argument attracted widespread comment on both sides of the Atlantic, and its continuing purchase is attested to by the Cambridge University Press’s reprint of the lecture in 1993 with an introduction by Stefan Collini.