The broad canvas covered by the articles in the present volume celebrates the diversity and richness of the writings of Frank Manuel during a scholarly career that spans over five decades. The subjects of the articles - ranging from science to utopia, from theology to political thought - mirror many of the themes Manuel has written about with erudition, flair and uncommon perception. It is only fitting that in paying tribute to such a defiant intellect each author brings to his treatment a distinct perspective and texture, the result of his own original forays into the history of ideas. Yet underlying all the essays is the conviction that the study of the intersection of individuals and ideas still yields a rich harvest. Presented to Frank on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, In the Presence o/the Past honors a teacher, a friend and, above all, a scholar. R. T. Bienvenu and M. Feingold (eds). ln the presence of the past. vii. MARTIN PERETZ Frank Manuel: An Appreciation It was finally because of Frank Edward Manuel that I decided (however belatedly) to forgo a proper academic career. Since I had not left so much as a leafscar on the tree of the scholarly culture this is not a fact which anyone else would have reason to notice. It is also not, I am happy to add, something for which Manuel will be especially remembered.

Frank Manuel: An Appreciation.- The Diffusion of Science and the Conversion of the Gentiles in the Seventeenth Century.- Good Aristocrats/Bad Aristocrats: Thomas Hobbes and Early Modern Political Culture.- John Selden and the Nature of Seventeenth-Century Science.- Reason and Revolution: Political Consciousness and Ideological Invention at the End of the Old Regime.- Victor Considerant: The Making of a Fourierist.- Utopia and the Sharpest Anguish of the Age?.- Auguste Comte and the Nebular Hypothesis.- The Profits of America: Early Nineteenth-Century British Travel in the United States.- Hawthorne in Utopia.- Human Rights and Democracy.- Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences: Liberal Social Thought in the Second Reich.- Above and Beyond Party: The Dilemma of Dossiers de l'Action Populaire in the 1930s.