"To Lewis Bernstein Namier it had seemed obvious that political theories act as the merest ex post facto rationalisations of political behaviour. If we are looking for explanations of political action, he maintained, we must seek them at the level of 'the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality'. ... Namier and his followers [scorned] the naiveté of supposing that political actions are ever genuinely motivated by the principles used to rationalise them."