INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS POLEMIC: AND VICE VERSA

To expect an historian to write with no polemical intent is not unlike expecting a privately owned business to conduct its affairs with a view to the public interest. No doubt it can be done. But to require it is unreasonable and is, moreover, to miss the point of the activity. History is served not so much by the pure intentions of the author as by the criticism of his colleagues.

The original purpose of this book, therefore, was unashamedly polemical. It was to disturb a popular view of modern intellectual history, and to challenge one of its scholarly correlatives. I have by no means lost sight of this object. But its pursuit has generated a number of secondary aims, some of which may interest historians, economists, theologians, political theorists, and others with no desire to grind my particular axe. What this means is that instead of having only one reason for existing, my book now has no fewer than five. For the evidence which supports my primary thesis bears upon two questions much canvassed by historians of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British politics; and upon two others of importance for some, at least, among my fellow economists. Each of the five must be explained.