indicate, in broad outline, how the present situation has come about.
The book is addressed not simply to specialists, but to a wider public;
in particular to those engaged in politics and administration, and to
those beginning to study political thought in Universities. It is of
direct personal concern to all who read these pages that the misuse of
science should be arrested and political thought swiftly directed
to that end.

The survey is therefore planned to set present problems in an
historical perspective. It should lead to a fuller study of the writers
concerned; to illuminating comparisons between them; even to a new
approach. Following the design of the earlier work, a full, if simpli-
fied, account will be given of representative writers who were to
shape the future, though often immediately disregarded. With the
increasing complexity and range of political thought, the net has
been cast more widely, though important writers have had to be
omitted. Those examined express influential and contrasting points
of view. In the first book, for example, the romantic Herder and
Hegel are compared with Bentham and both with the conservative
de Maistre. Saint-Simon's collectivist attack on traditional society
is compared with that of Godwin and Owen, and both related to the
revolutionary ideals of Mazzini and the liberal compromise of de
Tocqueville and J. S. Mill. These thinkers have been fully described
at the expense of minor figures of rather similar outlook. The
French writers Chateaubriand and Constant, for example, have
been omitted; de Bonald gives way to de Maistre; Cobbett to
Proudhon; Guizot to de Tocqueville. These limitations have been
deliberately accepted. Considerable space has also been devoted
to Utopian and anarchist ideas. If often embodied in fantasy,
they contain flashes of original and now useful insight.

In the second book, British liberal writers at first preponderate.
They were then at the peak of their influence. Militant nationalism
has been represented solely by Treitschke, the most influential of its
exponents, though there was much similar propaganda in other
countries. Acton, rather than the pluralist lawyer, Gierke, repre-
sents the later nineteenth-century idea of liberal commonwealth.
Two sociologists, Durkheim and Graham Wallas, have been included,
not as the climax of the book, but as portents of the future, for socio-
logy now increasingly absorbs political thought. Essential historical
background has been roughly indicated, particularly in the opening
and concluding chapters. The main theme is the development of
liberal constitutional commonwealth into social democracy to meet

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