A collection of essays treating leading inter- and postwar historians including Carl Becker, Fernand Braudel, and JGA Pocock. As in other works, Hexter’s discussions of strength and weakness reveals his primary point only late in the game. Becker is shown to have recanted the relativism of Everyman a Historian, on the impetus of Nazi nihilism: ‘in the long run all values are inseparable from love of truth and disinterested search for it’. Braudel, whose remaking of the French academy is praised, could not connect the durable phenomena (e.g., geography) with rapid change, in part because he ignored law and custom. A ‘revolution’ is not always successful, Hexter, writes, but nonetheless reveals profound currents. Puritanism pressed Elizabeth but was diffusive not polarizing of England governance because of the peers-gentry and court-country axes. Although Hexter is strongest regarding England, the best chapter treats Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment. To know the political language of an era is to understand what words were intended to mean. Pocock shows the transition, beginning in 15th century Florence, from valuing stability, hierarchy, and universality to republicanism, patriotism, equality, utopia, etc. Florentine thought followed Aristotle but the ‘Anglosphere’, where next the revolution surfaced, grafted a view of God’s elect onto Italian humanism. Why? Hexter contends Pocock didn’t go far enough: in showing that Machiavelli and company demonstrated the fundamental condition of liberty is participation in public life, without which civic virtue can never be realized, Pocock omitted considering the alternate definition of liberty – freedom from state control. The opposition of positive liberty and negative liberty (‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’, as enunciated by Berlin) has a long history in the West. Positive liberty is Aristotelian; negative liberty is Roman (i.e., Stoic). Positive liberty was lost in the Dark Ages, resurfacing in Renaissance Florence and then Stuart and Georgian England. The rise of commerce upended classical conceptions of positive liberty, which presumed smaller, agrarian society. Its theorists include Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison. Whereas negative liberty is unconcerned with social structure – not who should govern but what should be the limits of power? Pocock ought to have raised new questions of the duality which are entailed by his showing the trajectory of positive liberty. Elsewhere, Hexter notes historians are obliged to police themselves, unlike scientists, for their researches are more difficult to check; the practitioners themselves best police the thesis and identify new horizons.