Postscript to an Awfully Long Review

Extract

Two careful readings of Lawrence Stone's “Postscript to Eight Hundred and Forty-one Pages” did not relieve me of an uneasy sense of puzzlement. Even second time around the “Postscript” still seemed to be not quite relevant to the section of my article on “The English Aristocracy, Its Crises, and the English Revolution, 1558-1660” to which it purported to address itself. Somehow Stone seemed either to misunderstand or to misconstrue all my main intentions. If he did so, there are at least two possible explanations for the misconstrual.

First, quite understandably, Stone may have been just plain weary of the whole subject (the title of his reply somehow suggests this), so that he did not given his full attention to what I was saying. Or second, my indications of purpose may have been unduly opaque or ambiguous. After further careful scrutiny of both Stone's postcript and my article, I am inclined to suspect that a bit of both is involved, but a bit more of inattention on Stone's part than of opacity on mine. In any case, here is an attempt to straighten out any confusion as to what I was up to that may remain either in Stone's mind or in the minds of the readers of my article.

Stone ascribes to me the view that “the English Revolution cannot have had deep social causes because it did not have deep social consequences” and then suggests that I have “fallen for the theory of intended consequences, the notion that in history things turn out the way the actors intended them to.”