June 27, 1888

Lewis Bernstein Namier, is the anglicized name of a Russian-English historian who died in 1960. Namier (27 June 1888 – 19 August 1960) whose historiographical methods assumed that self-interest influenced a man's behavior, wrote numerous histories of Great Britain, such as The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, England in the Age of the American Revolution, and taught at the University of Manchester. Namier was enamoured of the psychohistory possibilities of Freudian theory, though Namier's metaphor that the past hovers over the present like the smile of a Cheshire cat, blurs the problems that dog those who fall on either side of a controversy about the possibility of free will.  You cannot lay out boundaries between free will and determinism in a coherent manner.