The Liberal Democrats, at the time of writing, have only fourteen MPs. Yet the significance of Liberalism in the history of the Constitutional History of the United Kingdom does not lie in the immediate present: this is a story that stretches deep into the past; covering not merely the giants of the historic Liberal Party in the nineteenth century, but the Whig inheritance from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional disputes. Hence, while this chapter will conclude with reference to the modern Liberal Party – an alliance, from 1981, between historic Liberalism and the Social Democratic Party; fusing formally in 1988 – it will primarily consider the longer history of Liberalism and the British Constitution.

Chapter 2 explores how Behn’s works use earnest commitments to heighten and refine her more traditional satirical attacks on political enemies, resulting in complex and multilayered subversive ironies: it is often Behn’s insistence on affirming certain political commitments that endows her work with its acerbic bite. Her supposedly conservative fictions antedate, rather than satirically reacting against, the later more progressive, Whiggish novels, and her works thereby demonstrate the complex symbiotic relationship between irony and earnestness. In her work, satiric attack functions not simply as a way of denigrating enemies, but also as a means of inoculating and immunizing creative energy against possible attack. Her satire on the Whigs also has an earnest dimension, implicitly praising a new model for sovereignty that identifies it closely with women’s vulnerable positions in a patriarchal world. This earnest deployment of satire emerges as Behn engages the problem of actresses and women in the theater more generally to emphasize her subtle differences with some of her male peers and to reimagine Tory politics from their perspective.

This chapter argues that contemporary claims about what empiricist history can offer international law are part of a longer tradition. A particular vision of law and figure of the lawyer have been central to claims made by empiricist historians of political thought for at least a century. The chapter focuses on four influential scholars whose work has influenced the method debates in international law – Herbert Butterfield, JGO Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Ian Hunter. It traces the figure of the lawyer as apologist for power that reappears in their texts and against which their historicizing methods are staged. While the figure of the lawyer appears in different guises – as Whig constitutionalist for Butterfield, English common lawyer for Pocock, Italian scholastic lawyer for Skinner, and Prussian natural lawyer for Hunter – in each narrative the lawyer functions as the foil for a new heroic figure. That figure, the historicizing humanist, arrives on the scene to offer an anti-metaphysical challenge to the oppressive authority of received tradition. This chapter situates debates over the turn to method in international law within that longer story, in which historians are able to take up their preordained place as radical disrupters of orthodoxy.

This chapter relates the turn to history in international law to the corresponding international turn taken in the discipline of history. It explores the effects of translating the stakes of those turns into a technical debate involving abstract claims about the proper scientific methods for understanding the past of international law. The chapter analyses the wide-ranging set of arguments about the scientific nature of empiricist history and the partisan character of international legal arguments that have accompanied the turn to history. It argues that international lawyers have been uncritically receptive of the idea that empiricist historical methods offer a set of technical rules to which legal scholars should conform when writing about the past.

Among Hume’s most important discussions of party can be found in his History of England, especially in the volumes on the seventeenth century. Hume explained to Adam Smith that he had begun his historical investigation with the Stuart period partly because the factions, which he believed still informed British politics in the eighteenth century, arose at that time. His own historical work, however, was a conscious attempt to rise above faction and to see things both ways, which he believed English historiography had failed to do before him. This chapter places Hume’s History in the context of Rapin and Bolingbroke, but also in the broader context of debate around ancient constitutionalism and Whig history. This chapter points to the important influence of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which had a notable impact on Hume between his essays and the publication of the History.

The Afterword (“Works and Days and Then Some”) is a miscellany consisting of anecdotes and observations about sustainable living and systems dynamics based on the author's own experiences of raising a family and building a house and a farm from scratch in the midst of intellectual pursuits. It also contains some concluding thoughts on presentisms old and new, and on the enduring ecological value of studying the Classics in an age dominated by the STEM disciplines.

Chapter 8 introduces and establishes the theoretical premise of the “Narratives” portion of the book, namely that the received history of Song, as codified in the Song History of 1345, can be deconstructed as a metanarrative or “grand allegory.” The chapter explores similarities between daoxue historiography and Herbert Butterfield’s notion of “Whig history,” an account of Britain that rendered Whig political ascendency over the Tories historically inevitable. First, both are blatantly presentist: historical events are chosen because they contain positive or negative value as guidelines for present action. Both rely extensively upon abridgment to foreground these examples. Both generate clear heroes and villains whose earlier struggles presage the political conflicts of the present. And finally, both create a teleological trajectory of moral rectitude that ensures the ultimate intellectual and political triumph of the writer’s own beliefs. I use the term “grand allegory” because the Western notion of allegory indeed seems appropriate for how these late Song and Yuan historians accessed their own daoxue convictions to impose structure and meaning on the disparate data of Song history. The chapter introduces the three major thematic clusters that comprise the grand allegory as presented in the 1229 preface by Zhen Dexiu (1178–1235) to Chen Jun’s history of Song.