Raymond Geuss’s warning against excessive abstraction in political philosophy is well taken and familiar. Similarly, the claim that attention to history is also important for progress in political theory and philosophy is also eminently sensible (as far as it goes), and unlikely to be denied by any but the most uncompromising of rationalists: the late Robert Nozick and more recently the late Gerry Cohen might perhaps come to mind. Most contemporary political philosophers acknowledge the importance of history and contingent circumstances in thinking about politics and moral life. What is at issue is how far we should push this acknowledgement of the claims of history for any viable political philosophy. This is the issue I wish to address in this chapter. For despite the superficial good sense of Geuss’s claims in the opening epigraph, he goes on in most of his work to make a much stronger assault on the possibility of a political philosophy that does not give pride of place to history, and he uses an appeal to history to support his scepticism about the claims of reason in political theory.