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KANT'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN NEGLECTED IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD. PERHAPS THIS IS DUE TO OBSTACLES TO UNDERSTANDING IT: THE GRIP FO UTILITORIANISM; ACCEPTANCE OF HEGEL'S UNFAVOURABLE VERDICT; THE MISTAKEN IDEA THAT KANT MERELY REPEATS ROUSSEAU AND OTHERS; AND THE COMPLEXITY OF HAVING TO CONNECT IT WITH ALL THE REST OF KANT'S PHILOSOPHY.

In 1968 there appeared in New Left Review an essay by its editor, Perry Anderson, which attracted considerable attention. Detecting in the student unrest then at its height 'stirrings of a revolutionary consciousness', Anderson was concerned to identify (and of course attack) the main elements ofthat British cultural conservatism which, in his view, the burgeoning revolutionary consciousness must overthrow. In brief, his view was that British intellectual life was dominated by a '"White", counter-revolutionary emigration' from Eastern and Central Europe – men who had fled the instability of their own societies for the continuity and order of the British tradition. Among them Anderson listed, as the dominant influence in social theory, Karl Popper. This was an accolade of sorts, but by no means any kind of intellectual tribute, for Anderson went on to dismiss Popper as nothing more than a 'fluent ideologue', incompetent alike in sociology and political theory.

Those who lived by reason are Christians, even though they have been considered atheists: such as, among the Greeks, Socrates....—Justin Martyr, The First Apology, ca. AD. 150We live in a curious time. We are agreed that our educational and university system has been increasingly dominated for the past half century by a pseudoscientific philosophy that doubted on principle the validity of moral values. Our constitutional system is implemented through courts managed largely by a legal profession educated in such an amoral environment that any explicit value or religious criterion is practically precluded from being taught as true.

The Leveller movement of the Puritan Revolution was composed chiefly of people who represented economically the lower middle classes and religiously the Independents and the Sects. Thus, they had a respectable basis, though their enemies claimed otherwise, and while. they were interested in certain political reforms which appeared sweepingly radical for their times, they did recognize the value of a visible church organization (not a state supported church) and the necessity of such fundamentals of English life as the sanctity of property and the existence of government.

ALL INVITATIONS TO WRITE SOMETHING THAT COME WITH FAR distant deadlines are a subtle exercise in entrapment (and I speak here from experience as both hunter and quarry) resting on the usual tendency to discount the future. How could anyone resist the temptation to talk about everybody's favourite subject – themselves – when it is enhanced by the flattery implicit in the suggestion that other people might be interested? So easy too: just a few thousand words about changes in the discipline in the last twenty-five years and the way in which one sees it.