This book represents a personal journey, with all the parochial, idiosyncratic, and narrow-minded limitations of such journeys. Having started life focused on an academic career in social science and history, I, like many who saw the waning of professional opportunities in the early 1970s, turned to law. Unlike my more focused colleagues, the tug of the academy continued to beckon, be it at an angle, and I went to Oxford to study philosophy – and proper British analytic philosophy at that. Philosophy degrees having much the same market currency as (and perhaps less caché than) social science degrees a decade earlier, I have spent my life practicing law, mainly, surprisingly enough to me, in a field few choose and hardly anyone with a “decent” degree mentions: tort law. Having handled several thousand tort cases of every kind and having tried close to two hundred while, at the same time, reading just enough in various fields to pass minimal competency to qualify to teach at several law schools that generously overlooked my limitations as a scholarly dilettante, I observed the obvious: academic studies (from economics to history to philosophy to science) present a small and remote voice typically lost in the din and clatter of the law courts.

The most daunting concern in writing this book is illustrated by a story a friend told me about the European history faculty where he taught.