Peter Laslett

"For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead."

"We shall try to prove in this chapter how questionable it would be to assert that the transformation of English society by industrialisation was accompanied by any decrease in the size of the average household until very late on in that process. The facts presented will show that mean household size remained fairly constant at 4.75 or a little under, from the earliest point for which we have found figures, until as late as 1901. There is no sign of the large, extended coresidential family group of the traditional peasant world giving way to the small, nuclear, conjugal household of modern industrial society. In England in fact...the large joint or extended family seems never to have existed as a common form of the domestic group at any point in time covered by known numerical records."

"From the point of view of our discussion, the book as a response to political and literary circumstances, its origin belongs to the autumn and winter of 1678-80, exactly a decade earlier than it is traditionally supposed to have been written. Two Treatises is an Exclusion Tract, not a Revolution Pamphlet."

"In some forty pages of introduction he has given us the most intelligent account of Filmer and his ideas that has yet appeared. There is a brief account of the results of his considerable researches into the life of Filmer, which is followed by an admirably concise statement of the argument of Patriarcha and its place in the political controversies of the seventeenth century. But the most notable part of the introduction is that in which Mr. Laslett deals with the place and significance of Patriarchalism generally in seventeenth-century thinking."

"Laslett's research was methodologically as well as historically important to me, because he tried to place Locke’s text within the precise historical context that made sense of Locke's preoccupations and commitments. I already believed in the need for such an approach, largely through my reading of Collingwood (who must surely have influenced Laslett too). But Laslett's edition seemed to me — and still seems to me — to exemplify the approach brilliantly."