In response to the preceding article, Professor Sven-Eric Liedman's very interesting critique of my The Decline of the German Mandarins, let me begin by describing how I selected and approached my sources for that work. I first studied printed collections of speeches given at various German universities during the Weimar period, which I happened to encounter in the library. I next made a list of all nonscientists above the rank of instructor who taught for three or more years in faculties of arts and sciences at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Freiburg, and Heidelberg between 1918 and 1933. I read everything written by these men during those years that was relatively unspecialized or methodological in character. Finally, I extended my reading of university speeches and of my authors' works backward in time to 1890, while also adding major handbooks and anthologies in several disciplines, along with writings by academics—and a few nonacademics—who were not members of my original sample, but who were prominently mentioned in the material I had already read.