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Acknowledgments This book was written while I was on leave in Stanford, California, as the guest of the Hoover Institution. I would like to offer my thanks to the director and fellows ofthat institution for their generous support and for access to their unrivaled library and archive holdings. My stay in Stanford was made possible by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Research and reading at an earlier stage were conducted with the support of fellowships from the Nuffield Foundation and the Humanities Center ofStanford University. To all of these, and to New York University for granting me a leave ofabsence during the year 1990, my most grateful thanks and appreciation. Some ofthe arguments developed in this book were presented as lectures , seminar papers, or articles in the course ofrecent years. They have thus benefited from the comments ofmany friends and colleagues, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge these contributions, too many to list in full. Helen Solanum read the whole typescript-twice! Her help and support have been invaluable. I should also like to express my appreciation for the lively and intense discussions of some of the themes of this book that took place in my graduate seminar in New York, and for similarly provocative exchanges in Jacques Rupnik's seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, whose guest I was in the spring ofl989. Not the least interesting lesson ofthese experiences has been the marked difference in the way in which French and American graduate students approach problems of ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS intellectual engagement. It is a pleasure to be able to report that there is much to be said for both cultural styles. Finally, my thanks to my editor, Sheila Levine, for her enthusiastic support for this book. With her encouragement I have tried to adapt for a broader audience a text originally aimed at French readers. This has entailed some clarification of otherwise obscure references, an exercise from which the book as a whole has, I hope, benefited. ...

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