Few scholars these days like to be called political or constitutional historians: it is widely held that those have ceased to be useful occupations. Especially in the United States, a preoccupation with social analysis and the study of ideas and ideologies has become not only predominant but arrogant. It is, I suppose, quite just that political historians, who have for long derided the work of even earlier annalists, should now in turn suffer the contempt of the modern Annalistes, but neither these debates nor the prevalent attitudes are especially beneficial to the study of history. Contempt for political history arises from a sometimes justified conviction that its practitioners have in the past been too ready to rest content with surface history – with the lives and doings of kings, bishops, soldiers, politicians and diplomats; they have ignored the great mass of the dead, allowed a few individuals much too great an influence on events, and by-passed the operation of impersonal ‘forces’. On top of this we have the beliefs of those to whom no history is worth writing unless it fits a framework of general theory and contributes something to the search for predictable developments. The result has been to replace the political historian's simplifications with the vast simplicities of dehumanized generalization: events have given way to circumstances and men to movements.