This book began as an account of the genre of ‘histories of morality’, written in French and German in the early Enlightenment, as prototypical histories of political thought. I have hoped to show how what began as a genre of radical rewriting of conventional understandings of the history of ethics and politics at the end of the seventeenth century succeeded in establishing itself as a new orthodoxy. In other words, on one level, this is a case study of the use of intellectual history to furnish arguments of legitimation and self-defence for groups of political thinkers partially or fully excluded from participation in their contemporary orthodox, established structures of both high politics and offcial higher education. From this standpoint the largest issues under consideration here concern the function of history within the discourse of natural law (taking the arguments of Leo Strauss in a different direction) and the use of history writing as a literary, academic and polemical device within the ‘republic of letters’. Thereby I hope to suggest a more plausible relationship between the early Enlightenment and alleged processes of ‘secularisation’ than is sometimes depicted.

As the research and writing of this project has developed over a number of years, it has become clear that the role of the histories was more complex than this, and also deeply implicated in the shaping of the key conceptual redefinitions of voluntarist (Pufendorf and Thomasius) and rationalist (Leibniz and Wolff) natural law theories.