The purpose of this paper is not to reconsider Sir Lewis Namier either as a person or as a historian. Since his death in 1960 there has been a spate of critiques, ranging from sound discussions of his historical method appearing in this and in two sister journals to the treatment by a Hindu journalist of Namier and other contemporary British historians which appeared in the New Yorker magazine under a title provided by the epigraph to Sir Lewis's most famous work. Whether his work should properly be interpreted in terms of his “continental conservatism” as Sir Edward Carr suggests, or whether Namier's influence on British historiography on balance has been pernicious (as one L.S.E. don believes), are not questions with which this discussion will be concerned. Its function is much narrower; to examine a recent contribution to these pages, the article by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., entitled “Sir Lewis Namier Considered.”
In this essay Mansfield purports to explain just how Namier interpreted the early years of George III and exactly what his line of argument was in reaching his conclusions. Inevitably the question is raised: “Was there actual danger of tyranny in the political philosophy of the youthful George III?” This is an important question to which a number of distinguished historians have turned their attention; but Mansfield does not use the methods of the historian — whether sympathetic to Namier like Richard Pares, or admittedly hostile like the Master of Peterhouse. Mansfield is not a historian but a political scientist, and he writes that he is not proposing to question Namier's investigations of political facts.