Anti-Jacobinism, insofar as it can be ascribed a coherent identity at all, was more propaganda than ideology. This, indeed, was its great tactical strength, for in defining itself purely in terms of what it was not, in terms of what it was opposed to, its protagonists evaded the necessity of having to formulate any doctrine of their own, a doctrine from which independently minded members of its potentially vast constituency might demur. Any attempt to assess anti-Jacobinism, then, immediately finds itself trying to define what that Jacobinism was that provoked anti-Jacobinism into being, or rather what conservatives thought it was. It is at this point that the seeming simplicity of the apparently polarised debate on the Revolution in France begins to dissolve.

Much has been written about radicalism in Britain in the 1790s, but this is not to say that a congruous ideology of radicalism has ever been discerned. Indeed, Jacobinism's heterogeneity is the most recurrent theme of those surveys which have been undertaken. Certainly, no single conception of Jacobinism has been found that might have been cheerfully subscribed to by both radicals and conservatives.