1. *This article is part of an ESRC-funded research programme on 'the political theory of politics' on which I am engaged.
2. 1'Continental' refers less to a geographical entity than to a school, much as the label 'Anglo-American' does.
3. 2Recently, John G. Gunnell,The Orders of Discourse(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
4. 3B. Barber,The Conquest of Politics(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); B. Honig,Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Both emphasise the malady rather than the cure, or see the cure in terms of new ethical dimensions.
5. 4This point is persuasively made by Pierre Rosanvallon, 'Towards a Philosophical History of the Political',The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. D. Castiglione and I. Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 189-203, although he also relates this to the French focus onmentalites. The study of concrete political thought and the study ofmentalitesis similar, but the differences lie mainly in the equal emphasis the latter assigns to a broad range of political culture, while the former foregrounds political thought and concepts against a backdrop of political culture.