Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making, and many individuals and institutions have contributed to bringing it to fruition. My interest in the history of political thought is one of long standing, going back to my undergraduate days at UCLA and my graduate studies at Harvard with C. J. Friedrich and Judith Sklar. I have had the opportunity to teach courses on early modern political and legal thought at the University of California, Berkeley, in the departments of Rhetoric, History, Political Science and Legal Studies and in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.

I have had valuable discussions with many scholars including Victoria Kahn, Barbara Donagan, Blair Worden, Paul Sniderman, Paulina Kewes and Michael Mascuch. Brian Cowan, Fred Greenstein, Paul Raffield and Gordon Schochet read earlier versions of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions. I have been fortunate to have had several able research assistants to help me locate texts and track down missing footnotes. Among them are Steve Macias, J. T. Hoppes, Jared Greene, and Laura Carrier. I am especially grateful to Norris Pope, at the Stanford University Press, who has provided continual support for the project.

Research on the project has been supported by a Huntington Library fellowship, grants from the University of California, Berkeley’s Committee on Research and the Mellon Foundation. Librarians and library staff at the Huntington Library, the William Andrews Clark Library, the University of California, Berkeley, the British Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, have uniformly been helpful. The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law has provided generous financial, computer and library support.

Law and Humanities has generously permitted me to use material from “Political Theology and the Courts: A Survey of Assize Sermons c. 1600–1688,” Law and Humanities 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–28. This material was also presented to the Early Modern England seminar at the Huntington Library. I also wish to thank Eighteenth Century Thought for permission to use “Empiricism and English Political Thought 1550–1720,” Eighteenth Century Thought 1 (2003): 3–35 (copyright c. 2003 AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved). A paper on empirical political thought was presented at the American Political Science Association’s meeting in 2003.

This book is dedicated to my grandson Nicholas Ridgers and to Martin Shapiro, who has been forced to read the manuscript more often and in more incarnations than anyone should be required to do. Under and beside my desk without complaint, Gracie has endured the manuscript’s many revisions.