The chronological boundaries of this book are largely arbitrary ones. It is not implied that there were seams in Clio's garment either in 1760 or in 1832. The changes that took place were significant, but gradual. The social arguments of the 1830s would have shocked no one in the 1760s, although the need to reiterate them so frequently, stridently and almost exclusively would have suggested a lack of confidence in the stability of society. The religious grounds of political obligation as advanced in 1760 would have been denied in the 1830s only by the most radical, although even to conservatives pragmatic or utilitarian arguments would have seemed safer than those based on abstract principles.

Yet something momentous had happened. Coleridge, in 1816, asserted that ‘the epoch-forming Revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion, and with them the civil, social and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems’. Somewhat less portentously, J. G. A. Pocock suggests that the history of political thought ‘might be defined as a history of change in the employment of paradigms’; and, one might add, of change in the agenda of debate. Certainly, both the agenda and the paradigms most frequently used in 1832 were significantly different from those employed in 1760. Whether they can be regarded as belonging to a different metaphysical system is another question.