Intellectual history is a practice that, in one form or another, has been inherent in European civilization virtually throughout its entire existence. Wherever we encounter reflection on the content of individual thinking or collective representations of humans and society, we are dealing with intellectual history. The ability to detach oneself from the world and its current meanings, embodied in the everyday practice of those around us, and the critical evaluation of these meanings constitutes a kind of thinking about thinking, the depth of whose historical dimension is determined only by the horizon of the observer’s interests. Civilization never deals with a zero point of reference—it is always a matter of thinking within an already existing intellectual context: “Any idea we record on paper or utter aloud is expressed through language, which is a social convention and which, by virtue of its existence, has extension in time. Therefore, when considering any modern doctrine, we are entitled to assume that it, like any other words, has a past, has a history.” In this sense, thinking is always, in part, thinking about history.

The need for intellectual history in the modern sense of the term arises from the growing gap between the worldviews of generations and an increasingly clear awareness of this gap. However, the functions of intellectual history as a practice of preserving ideas from oblivion can be diametrically opposed in their essence. One approach suggests a striving for a consistent liberation from history. It requires the study of ideas for the sake of determining their place in the sequence of steps of intellectual evolution undergone by humanity, where the present moment acts as the point of most complete realization of the reason’s potentials. Another approach views the history of ideas as an opportunity, through an act of will, to bridge the gap with the past, returning practical value to old ideas as tools for social transformation. This approach may be considered archaic now—it was this approach, in particular, that guided medieval authors who studied the heritage of the ancients.

However, it is precisely in such an actualization of ideas that the author sees the value of intellectual history as a whole and of the present work in particular. It may seem strange to apply such tasks to a subject of research whose timeframes are deliberately limited to the Early Modern period, which is chronologically and ideologically close to us. Indeed, we are talking about a society already sufficiently equipped with tools for the preservation and transmission of ideas, the study of which is practically devoid of translation problems—even 17th-century American authors already used a quite modern English language. In other words, what new things can a researcher discover in doctrines that are technically accessible to the reader, and whose authors are surely far less different from us than the inhabitants of poleis were from medieval intellectuals? Do these doctrines require additional explanation?