J. C. D. Clark on Lewis Namier

“Namier, as a careful student of the Newcastle Papers, seems to have realised that transitions were occurring in the 1750s which transformed the Whig v. Tory alignment of the early eighteenth century into the multi-factional pattern which characterised the 1760s... A possible charge against Namier is that despite this youthful insight he did not afterwards object when his pupils and colleagues suggested that a Namierite analysis in terms of factions applied to much larger areas of the eighteenth century than that which it was devised to fit.”

“If Namierism is dying, it is because the psychological props to the theory of mass biography have dissolved: psychoanalysis no longer seems to us a viable means of insulating historical enquiries from materialist-reductionist claims. This, indeed, was Namierism's weak point: it damaged liberalism by a strategy which, in an English setting, actually promoted Marxist historiography. Namier's positivism, his deflationary desire to strip away psychological illusions and ideological rationalisations, led in the end to a materialist reductionism even in his own ascription of motives.”

“Eighteenth-century revisionists were puzzled to see Sir Lewis Namier, that fine though overrated historian, promoted to the status of bugbear by their seventeenth-century colleagues. Between Namier and the revisionists there are, perhaps, similarities of temperament; of scepticism about the autonomous force of ideas; of hostility to Whig sins of teleology and anachronism. Yet Namier was not, primarily, a narrative historian. His brief narratives, when he wrote them, were clever and highly selective sketches rather than detailed examinations. His relentlessly detailed researches were mainly in the structural analysis of the Commons, and were intended to dissolve Whig generalisations about the course of events at the centre by a series of constituency studies. One could argue that Everitt and Morrill more than Russell and Fletcher are Namier's heirs in the seventeenth century, Aydelotte and Davis rather than Cooke and Vincent in the nineteenth. It might be suggested that what Namier's critics really objected to is his caustic and exceedingly effective conservatism, not his historical method. Indeed, his legacy was divided: it did not descend intact.”