"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."