Vacuum cleaner

thinking processes and that the content of thinking, including political thinking, is therefore best studied in the cultural and political contexts of meaning in which it occurs. If there are no context-free thinking processes, then there are no social vacuums in 95 Conover and Searing which, as microeconomists claim, we can theorize about thinking, or as we ourselves used to assume, discover universal laws of political behavior. The patterns and regularities that we investigate are not universal because

which is worth looking at. Besides the problem of literature, we have a problem of timescale. Where do we start? The seventeenth century propagandists, of whom Galileo and Descartes were the most persuasive, tended to present their work as marking a clean break from a past of ignorance and sterile muddleheaded scholastic disputes. The Greeks—some of them—were precursors, to be sure, but no one else needed to be considered. This view was generally accepted as the history of science developed 1. As the

emerged. Though provincial cities, such as Lyons, were centres of lively literary and artistic activity until after the middle of the century, Paris was, by 1600, the nation’s undisputed cultural heart. The nineteenth century defined the Renaissance as a clean break with the outlook and practices of the Middle Ages. Then it was argued that the introduction of printing in 1450 heralded a cultural revolution, explorers expanded the known world, Copernicus reshaped the cosmos and, by setting classical wisdom