By examining the thought of four seminal thinkers, Shirley Robin Letwin in The Pursuit of Certainty provides a brilliant record of the gradual change in the English-speaking peoples' understanding of "e;what sort of activity politics is."e; As Letwin writes, "e;the distinctive political issue since the eighteenth century has been whether government should do more or less."e; Nor, as many historians argue, did this issue arise because of the Industrial Revolution or "e;new social conditions [that] aggravated the problem of poverty"e; but, Letwin believes, because of the "e;profoundly personal reflection"e; of major thinkers, including Hume, Bentham, Mill, and Webb. David Hume, for example, believed that to "e;reach for perfection, to seek an ideal, is noble, but dangerous, and is therefore an activity that individuals or voluntary groups may pursue, but governments certainly should not."e; By the end of the nineteenth century, as Letwin observes, Beatrice Webb came to "e;equate the triumph of reason over passion with the rule of science over human life."e; Thus did the "e;pursuit of certainty"e; displace the traditional English understanding of the limitations of human naturehence the necessity of limits to governmental power and programs. Consequently, in our time, "e;Politics was no longer one of several human activities and at that not a very noble one; it encompassed all of human life"e; in quest of philosophical "e;certainty"e; and social perfection. The Liberty Fund edition is a reprint of the original work published by Oxford in 1965.

Shirley Robin Letwin (19241993) was a Professor of Political and Legal Philosophy at Harvard, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics.