The History of Political Thought as Window on the World

Everyone understands politics through their own life. The range of experiences that led me to spend mine thinking about politics preceded my experience of the challenges and opportunities of studying the history of political thinking. My vision of those began from my teachers in Cambridge. It was reshaped by friends and colleagues across the world over the next six decades, but was transformed too just as profoundly by political and economic dynamics across the world over the same time span. The upshot has been an acute sense of the power and danger of political parochialism in a world we have been menacing together, and the imperative to recognise our common peril in time to try to avert it.