During the last dozen years, something which looks rather like a consensus has developed, to the effect that in the political debates of the 1790s the conservatives or anti-Jacobins had the better of the argument. Harry Dickinson, for example, says that it can be argued quite strongly that the radicals were defeated, at least in part, ‘by the force of their opponents' arguments’. This remark has been cited by Ian Christie, who has described the intellectual defences of the Hanoverian regime as ‘formidable’, and by Jonathan Clark; while Philip Schofield has endorsed another remark of Dickinson's about the appeal and intellectual power of late eighteenth-century conservative ideology. Faced with this phalanx, one feels rather as Home Tooke must have felt in about 1800; and I have no intention of making a frontal assault on it. Nor do I favour a reversion to an earlier consensus, which Harry Dickinson has quite rightly criticised: the consensus among historians operating in the Whig tradition of English radical and labour history, who regarded the intellectual case for extensive political reform in the late eighteenth century as unanswerable, and who treated the case against reform with facile neglect. All I want to do is to ask some questions about the new Dickinsonian consensus: to ask, for example, what assumptions and contentions are being made by the various members of the phalanx, and in what senses it can really be said that the arguments of the anti-Jacobins were stronger than those of their opponents.