The humanities are central in today's academic turbulence and in the cultural crisis of which it is a manifestation. The crisis, with its long genealogy and manifold issues in society and the academy, is real enough. The heritage of an age of individualism in which many traditional forms of authority had survived is passing through the ordeal of irrelevance. In exaggerated reaction to the communitarian requirements of society, not to mention industrial society, this heritage is not simply found wanting but is pronounced to be corrupting, misleading or irrelevant. The disparity between institutions, values and received ideas and the needs of society is so great that past experience may also be dismissed as irrelevant for what some will ponderously call “the end of the neolithic age.” Ill-equipped and confused we face the problem of adaptation and innovation required by the encounter of civilizations in our world.

Francois-Etienne, due de Choiseul-Stainville, chief foreign policy-maker of France between 1758 and1770, sought to reverse the Peace of Paris which marked France's humiliating defeat by England in the Seven Years War. The objective of his “Revanche” was the restoration of the prewar maritime, commercial and colonial equilibrium with the British. To accomplish it, he relied on the Family Pact of 1761 with Spain, then the world's third naval power, and on the defensive Franco-Austrian alliance concluded in 1756 and revised in 1759, which Choiseul believed would suffice to keep the European continent at peace while the Bourbon powers concentrated all their forces, military and financial, for a purely naval war with Great Britain.

Apartheid and international monetary reform have received much attention in recent years yet littleof the discussion of these issues has linked them in any meaningful way. The call for changes in the international monetary system has been based upon an alleged insufficiency in international liquidity anda need for an adjustment mechanism for secular balance of payments disequilibria. Opposition to apartheid, South Africa's segregationist racial policy, has been based upon humanitarian concern for the condition of black Africans in that country.

AlSmith, so the story goes, was in the midst of his camaign for president in 1928 when a newspaper friend remarked, that the Lutherans would not vote for him because of a grievance, one or two hundred years old, that they had against the Roman Catholic Church. “Well, holy smokes,” the Happy Warrior retorted (“holy smokes”being a journalistic substitution for a somewhat more profane utterance), “they are going back pretty far to get an issue against me.”

Some years ago Charles G. Sydnor made a rather revolutionary interpretation of politics in the ante-bellum South. He argued that the location of political power was for themost part to be found in the counties and, more particularly, in the county courts, which were usually the governing bodies of the counties. He, furthermore, suggested that county government was in many ways the most influential and meaningful government for the majority of the southern citizenry. Not many people, he contended, had direct dealings with either state or national governments because of the limitations and locations of power, the problems of communication and transportation and the essential provincialness of most of the nation. The business of most was with the various agencies and agents of county government. Regrettably scholars have ignored Sydnor's imaginative interpretation and its implicit challenge to investigate more completely the workings of county government in the South. Few revealing accounts have been published on the political realities of local government below the Mason-Dixon line. This article will seek partially to correct this historiographical deficiency by attempting to identify and explain the majorthemes of the politics of county government in antebellum Kentucky.