In the partly mimetic, partly dystopian, world envisaged by the anti-Jacobin novelists, ‘new philosophy’ was the language in which Jacobinism was conveyed and understood, the currency in which it circulated. The new philosophers, however, were not so much Jacobinism's perpetrators, as just the first in the long line of its victims. There were two kinds of miscreants populating the anti-Jacobin novel – those who had been somehow convinced of the virtues of new philosophy, had really believed in all that it seemed to offer for the good of mankind; and those who had been responsible for instilling this conviction, this delusion, who had made dupes of the new philosophers. This second sort of character used new philosophy without ever being quite so naïve as to believe a word of it themselves.

Such men, and in some cases women, I shall rather arbitrarily be referring to as ‘vauriens’, a term imported from the French (from which it translates as a good-for-nothing) by Isaac D'Israeli for the protagonist of his novel of 1797, Vaurien: or, Sketches of the Times.