In this chapter I argue that the construction of European political identity does not necessarily rest on a definite conception of what it is to be European. This is so for two reasons – one related to the transformation of the very conception of political identification with one's own community in modern societies, and the other to the mixed nature of the European Union as a multilevel polity comprising both intergovernmental and supranational levels of governance. Any normative discourse about political identity in Europe must accommodate these two realities.

Political identity is both a social and a historical construct. As a social construct, it reflects the institutional nature of the political community As a historical construct, its emergence and consolidation is bound up with historical contingencies and with the way in which competing narratives and ideologies shape the self-perceptions of the members of the community. As suggested in the introductory essay to this volume, Europe's identities exist in the plural; and so it is for the more specific sense of political identities.

But there is an important functional element to political identity, insofar as this plays an important role in sustaining citizens' allegiance and loyalty to their political community. In this respect, the different kinds of motivations and cultural and psychological constructions that make different people identify with a political community may be irrelevant, as long as political identity helps to bring the members of a community together.

The idea for this book derives from conversations between the two editors – two different nationals with different national upbringings in the history of political thought. Whilst one of them was learning about yet a third and fourth national context (Iain Hampsher-Monk was at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study as the guest of the Dutch Begriffsgeschichte project), the other – Dario Castiglione – organised a conference in Exeter, at which exponents of a range of different national histories of political thought were invited to speak on the topic. Whilst the participants judged the conference a great success, we were aware that the original invitation was likely to produce a disparate set of responses, not only in terms of content but in terms of how the history of political thought was construed. And so indeed it proved.

Although the conference provoked the book, there remained much to be done before a coherent volume could result. New papers were commissioned in order to fill gaps, a great deal of rewriting, editing and translation was undertaken and time – and length – limits imposed on the authors. Given all this, and a range of other circumstances (not least the current external forces shaping university life – which often seem devised specifically to prevent academics from doing the kinds of things they thought they were there to do – namely teach and conduct research), it has taken a long time to bring the volume to its present shape, and we are aware that we have tried the patience and good will of some of our earlier contributors. We hope they will think the result worth it – for we do.

A number of studies over the past two decades have explored the national context of movements and ideas with a predominantly universalist character or aspiration. Although this has often meant a revision in our understanding of how such ideas and movements developed and of the impact they made, the approach chosen did not entirely go beyond the now widely accepted scholarly othodoxy of presenting ideas ‘in context’ – even if the identity of the appropriate context often remains a point of contestation.

The idea of this volume – of nationally contextualising the history of political thought – presents, however, a number of difficulties that were not germane to these other studies. This is so on account of the peculiar nature of the subject of our investigation, which can be understood both as an academic discipline, ‘the history of political thought’, but also in more substantive terms as a form of discourse, the history of ‘political thought’. Such an ambivalence is exemplified to the point of ambiguity in the chapters comprising the volume. As we collected, reflected and commented on the essays provided by our illustrious contributors, we realised in just how many directions this particular field can be ploughed. Hence rather than offering a state-of-the-art picture, the present volume opens up an array of problems for the location and study of the history of political thought. From such a perspective, the ‘national context’ approach functions to place in sharp relief the intricate web of issues in which our subject matter is implicated.

In spite of recurrent criticism, Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between two concepts of liberty maintains its grip on the imagination of Anglo- American political historians and philosophers. Perhaps it does indeed capture a genuine difference between ‘two … families of conception of political freedom abroad in our civilisation’. Yet there is more to liberty than meets the conceptual eye.

Berlin admitted that negative and positive liberty ‘start at no great logical distance from each other’, though they address two slightly different questions: ‘who is master?’ and ‘over what am I master?’ When taken together, answers to these questions give content to any perception of what it means to be free. In more recent phases of European history, however, the negative and positive conceptions were progressively subject to ‘fission’ by means of a separation of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ conceptions of the self which resulted in positive liberty becoming identified with something different: with authority and with the moral conditions for liberty itself. Hence the recurrent temptation to those writers whom Berlin takes to be metaphysically and holistically inclined to sacrifice the ‘real’ for the ‘ideal’ self.

Scottish intellectual history during the eighteenth century possesses various advantages in any attempt to locate the moment when Berlin's two questions began to separate – or, as will be contended here, they do not entirely do so. The period has been identified as one such moment, with recent political historiography being divided over whether a jurisprudential or a republican paradigm can best capture the intellectual context of the Scottish science of society and politics, with the former emphasising negative, and the latter positive understandings of liberty.