In the late 1960s, Quentin Skinner, John G. A. Pocock, and their students at the University of Cambridge developed a new form of intellectual history. They understand political ideas not as timeless entities but as part of communicative processes in specific historical situations. Inspired by speech act theory, they are interested in the intentions and purposes that historical actors pursued with their political statements, as well as the embedding of arguments in "political languages." Their focus includes complex discursive contexts of statements beyond the drafts of great thinkers. This conception is now one of the most influential approaches to the study of modern political thought. The volume presents Skinner's and Pocock's seminal texts on the theory of intellectual history for the first time in their entirety in German.