What I shall attempt in this essay is an account of a practice and some of its entailments; and while one cannot verbalise a practice without offering a theory, it is my hope–seeing that we are all in some degree committed to a common practice – to stay as far as possible on this side of metatheory. I do not want to find myself affirming and defending a general theory of language and how it operates in politics or in history, still less to offer an account of my kind of historian as, himself, a historical actor or agent. These are all real questions and from time to time they demand consideration; I propose, however, to let them arise, if they arise at all, out of the implications of what I shall be saying we as historians do. The métier d'historien, as I use the term, is primarily his craft or practice; his vocation and its significance, his experience of or action in history, are to me matters of self-discovery, to be met with in a time still to some extent our own. I shall hope, by proceeding in this way, to discover something about our shared and common discourse.

The word furnishes my starting point. The concept of a political language to me implies that what was formerly, and as a matter of convention still is, known as the history of political thought is now more accurately described as the history of political discourse.