"It is now nearly twenty years since Sir Geoffrey Elton revived and restated Seeley's dictum in the book called Political History: Principles and Practice (1970), one of the most reflective (if I may presume to say so) of all my predecessor's writings: reflective, that is, in the layered depth of the categories and definitions of political history which it acknowledges and deploys, seeing politics as the active expression of a social organism, those dynamic activities which arise from the fact that men create, maintain, transform and destroy the social structures in which they live. But it was also a pugnacious book, pouring scorn on those who supposed that political history was a spent force, "a very old-fashioned way of looking at the past"."