The present volume has its beginnings in a conference of the same title held at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 2003 – the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. We would like to start by thanking everyone involved in making that event a success. To Holly Hamilton-Bleakley we owe both the original idea for the conference and an enormous amount of the work involved in organising it. Aysha Pollnitz and Jacqueline Rose helped us out with exemplary efficiency and cheerfulness. But our greatest thanks are, of course, due to our speakers, whose uniformly excellent papers and comments made for such a memorable and stimulating intellectual occasion. We can only regret that for reasons of space we were not able to include all their contributions in this volume, and we would like to express our gratitude in particular to David Colclough, Tim Hochstrasser, Kari Palonen and Joan Pau Rubies for their part in the proceedings. We would like to express our special gratitude to John Salmon, whom we remember for his generous help with the project and outstanding contribution to the history of European thought.

There are several reasons why, twenty-five years on, Quentin Skinner's Foundations presented an apt subject for the kind of rethinking we wanted to encourage. It was in many ways an act of rethinking itself.