For revisionism to occur, an orthodoxy of some vitality, political and intellectual, must exist. In the case of the 1919 settlement with Germany, revisionism of a certain kind emerged within the British Empire delegation and its epistemic community of experts sufficiently early and with enough credibility and vigor to affect what became the most tenuous of orthodoxies, the final treaty. Then and since, in British official and scholarly circles, revisionism has flourished to an extent that it has virtually institutionalized paradox - to defend the 1919 settlement would be revisionist. This state of affairs has come to pass, moreover, without there being a satisfactory account of British policy at the Paris Peace Conference.

Revisionism about the 1919 peace treaty has ranged in scope from the most abstract to the most pointed, instrumental level of analysis. It took two forms - political and historical - both driven by competitive interpretation. The former preceded and grounded the latter, and then recruited it. The distinction between them was, initially, sharp and clear; it became less so over time. Statesmen and officials, David Lloyd George, the prime minister, and Harold Nicolson, Foreign Office official, for example, became historians of a kind; historians, like economists and lawyers, populated temporarily officialdom. In some cases one can trace change - E. H. Carr the liberal idealist of 1919, expecting so much of Lloyd George and then turning, disillusioned, on him, and becoming the ultimately celebrated realist of 1939 - in others dogged consistency and determined defense of self.