"It has been the greatest of Sir Lewis Namier's achievements to exhibit the personal and local nature of political issues and political power at this time—to show how few members of parliament were, in the first instance, there for the purpose of taking a stand on political questions. They were there in their own right for their own purposes, or as the relations or nominees of other people who held political power in their own right and for their own purposes. The political questions of the day were important to many of them—and to more and more of them as the reign went on; yet they did not, for the most part, enter parliament beforehand, nor did their electors send them there beforehand, in order to determine these questions. This interpretation of British politics in terms of local or personal connexions and family prestige, first rendered popular by Sir Lewis Namier, has lately been confirmed by Professor Neale's discovery of very similar conditions in the reign of Elizabeth; indeed, the same method can be applied to any society which is, in form or in substance, an oligarchy."