real interest in revolution. To the contrary, their experience was in practical management and governance, and for the most part they did not act out of simple self-interest. The Civil War needs, therefore, to be seen as the story of how such solid, service-minded and economically comfortable men were persuaded to resist the King, and not as any particular group's economically motivated power grab. His ultimate self-definition was overtly, unabashedly, and often polemically whiggish. For Hexter, the English Civil War was to be seen as the defence of traditional English liberties against an aggressive Crown. This position contrasted in the 1970s with the revisionist views of Conrad Russell and others who disputed both the uniqueness of the English Civil War and its connection with ideas of liberty. However, inasmuch as the revisionists were also explicitly anti-Marxist, their stance owed a great deal to Hexter's critiques. Russell in particular echoed Hexter's emphasis on continuity in English political values, Hexter's distinction between the Civil War and the subsequent Revolution, and Hexter's belief that contingencies better explained the coming of the War, while rejecting Hexter's view that Parliament was acting out of a clear-cut sense of constitutional obligation and embracing instead the view that religious conflicts and practical problems in the composite monarchy were more decisive. Hexter in 1978 wrote a bitter historiographical review in which he attacked younger scholars for reducing the analysis of the Civil War to an essentially amoral struggle for power (socio-economic for the Marxists; religious, political and fiscal for the revisionists), which he argued was too dismissive of the intrinsic moral strength of Parliament's position. He thus declared his preference for the 19th-century narrative by Samuel Rawson Gardiner over the new interpretation, and, true to form, even adopted an exaggerated Whig-style argument: that one should recognize and accept the principles of the Parliamentary rebels because these ideas about freedom were the very foundation for our modern sense of political liberty. Hexter on Braudel Another famous Hexterian intervention in historiography is his article "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," which can be seen as a more appreciative, temperate, and intellectually sophisticated antecedent to Hexter's attack on Hill. Here, Hexter dissected Braudel's vast "geohistory," La Mediteranée, marvelling at the organization of the Annales School but pointing out the ironic tensions between the Annales' rigorous, collaborative, scientific institutional ethos and its leader's passionate, highly personal, often factually inaccurate or poorly sourced