4 Preface to Part 1
and Peter Gay, and Mr. George Dangerfield, for reading and discussing various
chapters with me; Professor P. Geyl of Utrecht, for his guidance in Dutch history;
Professor Arne Odd Johnsen of Oslo for assistance in Norwegian and Danish;
Professors D. W. Rustow and Stanley J. Stein and Mr. Andre Michalski of
Princeton for assistance, respectively in Swedish, Portuguese, and Polish; Professor
C. E. Black and Drs. R. H. McNeal and W. L. Blackwell for assistance in Russian;
Dr. Peter F. Sugar for assistance in Hungarian; and my former students at
Princeton, now widely dispersed, Messrs. Immo Stabreit, Demetrios Pentzopou-
los, Thomas H. Kean, Elie Zilkha, and John W. Shy, and Drs. Stanley Mellon,
Gordon M. Jensen, Donald Limoli, and David Gordon for various contributions
whose ultimate usefulness to me they could not always foresee. I am indebted to
Professor Stanley E. Howard for assistance with the proofs, and to Mr. Jeffry
Kaplow for making the index. I have come to appreciate also the warm interest in
the present venture shown by Mr. Herbert S. Bailey, Jr., Director of the Princeton
University Press, and the careful work and exacting standards of Miss Miriam
Brokaw, Managing Editor of the Press, in preparing it for publication. My debt to
the Princeton University Library is very great.
To the Rockefeller Foundation, in its Division of Social Sciences, and to the
Council of the Humanities of Princeton University, I wish to express thanks for
financial support without which the book could not have been written, since it has
been used to free me from teaching and other responsibilities for concentration on
the present work. I have received smaller grants from the University Research
Fund of Princeton University, mainly for the employment of occasional student
assistants. I wish also to thank the editor of the Political Science Quarterly for per-
mission to reprint the substance of certain articles which first appeared in its pages.
No one except myself is responsible for any opinions, errors, or shortcomings in
the book.
The project has grown beyond what I at first anticipated, and the present work
is now seen as the first of two volumes, which together will survey the revolution-
ary period of the eighteenth century within the area of Western Civilization. The
point of division between the two volumes is, in general, the beginning of the wars
of the French Revolution. This first volume, entitled “The Challenge,” will I hope
be followed by a second, called “The Struggle.” Further reading should make clear
the full implication of these terms.
R. R. PALMER
PRINCETON, N.J.
DECEMBER 1, 1958