WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT

There is a convention sometimes found amongst academics of beginning books and articles with an inaugural lecture in reverse. Whereas the inaugural lecture conventionally opens with a series of polite tributes to predecessors, showing how the speaker is doing no more than standing on the shoulders of giants, making an inadequate attempt to fill the majestic shoes of exceptional predecessors, and simply acting as a feeble stand-in, the reverse can occur once the scholar is released from ceremonial restraints and unleashed on the wild world of monographs and journals. This reverse version lists all those who have in any way touched on the author's subject, and condemns them as theoretically impoverished, empirically threadbare, and intellectually sterile. Their crime usually turns out to have been the rather different one of failing to have contributed to the author's own enterprise because they were in fact doing something quite different. Historians of the poor law are dismissed for not having provided policy recommendations for twentieth or twenty-first-century governments, writers on political rhetoric for not having dealt with the distribution of capital, and analysts of trade unionism for having ignored conspiracies in the cabinet. So might the author of Winnie the Pooh be dismissed for having failed to contribute anything to the analysis of tactical voting.

I am not going to be so self-denying as to refuse from the outset to make any critical assessments whatsoever of any previous work.