Personalinies and Policies

📙 This book is a by-product of an academic training compounded of equal parts of political and historical study followed by thirteen years' research and teaching in the field of twentieth-century international history. The author is by profession an historian and a student of international relations rather than a political scientist. His main concern, in publishing these essays, has been to bridge the gap between these two disciplines, by borrowing concepts from political science which might assist the elucidation of the historical problems which bedevil his field, in return for calling the attention of political scientists to a range of historical evidence which to some extent belies the assumptions on which so much of the theoretical discussion of political processes in Britain is based. The lot of a bridge-builder between disciplines is a hazardous and potentially unhappy one, and the author is well aware that much of what he has to say in these pages is controversial and contentious. In deciding to run the risks inherent in assuming this role the author's intention was less to settle old controversies than to provoke new ones. If he succeeds in provoking criticism and disagreement, or in stimulating his readers to re-examine the facts on which their assumptions are based, if only with a view to refuting the views here expressed, then his purpose is served. The old controversies have been too long with us, and the reexamination of old assumptions is, in the long run, the onl...