The Foundations of Modern Political Thought is a two-volume work of intellectual history by Quentin Skinner, published in 1978. The work traces the conceptual origins of modern politics by investigating the history of political thought in the West at the turn of the medieval and early modern periods, from the 13th to the 16th centuries. It represents the culmination of the contextualist approach to the history of ideas which Skinner and his colleagues in the Cambridge School had pioneered in the 1960s.