ABSTRACT
Of the many virtues of Larry Markus none is more widely appreciated than his willingness to transgress departmental barriers and cooperate freely and fruitfully with colleagues in other disciplines. This is natural enough in the physical sciences, where there is a mode of thought sympathetic to “the euristic vision of mathematical trance”, but rare indeed in the social sciences, where the writ of natural law runs haltingly and the concepts are much less amenable to the niceties of mathematics. Nevertheless, for some years Markus ran a seminar jointly with Holt, a distinguished colleague in political philosophy, and, as his bibliography will show, has published in this area. The following paper, which essays to use mathematical modelling as an ancillary science in the study of an historical question, is dedicated to Larry Markus by two of his colleagues who esteem his disciplinary transgressions as highly as they regard his mathematical rectitude.
