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In a stimulating essay on the future of political history, Susan Pedersen recently argued that there has been a convergence between the 'high politics' school and the more recent 'new political history'. From the narrower concerns with ambition and manoeuvre and intrigue, students of the former have become increasingly involved in the 'cosmologies', 'thought worlds', and 'doctrines' of politics, and so have paid greater attention to its 'intellectual setting'.1 Meanwhile, the trajectory of social history away from social and economic determinism has created a new autonomy for politics, and more nuanced awareness of the evolution of political languages and subjectivities and the way that culture and communication could shape the preoccupations of voters.2 Pedersen's arguments have been influential, but she was not the first person to suggest such a convergence. This was first hinted by Philip Williamson - himself an advocate of 'high politics' - in a review of essays which had stressed their pioneering focus on 'politicians' electoral perceptions, linguistic manipulation and building of social alliances'. Such ideas, he suggested, were not in fact new and had been well understood by 'the once-derided and still much-misunderstood "high politics" historians', not least Maurice Cowling himself.3
The 'new political history' has been unusually self-conscious in the way that it has developed its arguments and sketched its genesis. It largely grew not from traditional political histories, but from studies of popular politics, labour history, and electoral sociology. These fields, so the story goes, were then transformed by the impact of the 'linguistic turn' pioneered first by Gareth Stedman Jones and later developed by Patrick Joyce in a post-structuralist direction. It should also be noted - because it is sometimes neglected - that the wider interest in 'political culture' was also spurred on by American historians of France such as Keith Michael Baker, Lynn Hunt, and William Sewell. The key point, however, is that this theoretical reflexiveness has tended to monopolize discussion, and marginalize awareness of alternative, but related, traditions and debates. Pedersen notes that convergence has arisen despite these schools having different 'intellectual heritages, methodological convictions and (often) political affiliations', and suspects that Cowling would have had little sympathy with theoretical trends that have brought 'his opponents to...