If radical criticism of society is to be possible, the critic must be able to rise above the society in which lie or she would otherwise be immersed and view it as if from outside; to think of it as something that is not natural, inevitable, and eternal. It is a matter of creating a space within which to talk about society, a distance between subject and object, observer and observed. The general context sketched in the preceding chapter encouraged and permitted this distancing. But economic, social, and political factors do not act independently of intellectual ones in causing individuals to think in certain ways. The wider context has to be experienced before it can be a cause of doctrines; and this experience is mediated and shaped by our mental furniture, our stock of attitudes, assumptions, concepts, and theories. We can only think what our mental furniture allows us to think. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to survey, in the light of modern scholarship, aspects of the generally available mental furniture that made radical social criticism possible. The topic is discussed under eight headings: (1) ideas of human nature and the individual; (2) conceptions of society and of the ways in which individuals do and should relate to one another; (3) economic theory; (4) moral discourse; (5) political thought; (6) religious ideas; (7) conceptions of time and change; and (8) methodology and epistemology, the methods of arguing and proving theories, and the conception of truth.