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Political discipline in a free society

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: London; George Allen and Unwin; 1961Description: 383pSubject(s): DDC classification:
  • 320.5 Bla
Summary: THE CHAPTERS of this essay in revision are strung on old radical slogans of the movement of thought which has made the running and is now loudly declared, in various terms, to have forced the pace and to have headed in the direction of doubt and disaster. Although this is nonsense, there is no sense in pretending that eighteenth century faith in enlightenment and emancipation, or in reason and nature, is active and persuasive today in Western industrial democ- racies. The social enthusiasm of that time cannot be recaptured, but to look back on what happened then and later and to gain a vision of what is now practicable is the source of new energy to supply a flagging political impulse. Current social analysis tends to be gloomy. We are tormented by dilemma and confused by paradox: on the one hand, we are over- organized and stifled, on the other, we are not organized enough to keep anything under control; unprecedented expenditure on security buys unprecedented insecurity; and all this unbearably familiar kind of thing. Whether these frustrations induce sluggish- ness or anger, scepticism or anxiety, the consequences are uniformly unhealthy. There is no remedy in shrugging off these contemporary judge- ments of society, however loose and ill-founded many of them may be; they make the intellectual and moral climate of the time. There- fore, echoes of them reverberate throughout this book. Dominating these undertones, the essential theme is that we can bring things under due, not undue, control if we learn how to learn from political experience, and that enlightenment on this theme, how to learn from political experience, is the main present business of political philosophy. Science is the conspicuous example of having to learn how to learn from experience and of success in doing so. It used to be thought that the methods of science might be applied equally suc- cessfully to political thinking: Bentham, or some other, was to be the political Newton. Undoubtedly, progress in political thinking was made on these lines. But the techniques of learning from political experience have not been and cannot be quite the same as those which have enabled us to find out what goes with what and what follows what.
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THE CHAPTERS of this essay in revision are strung on old radical
slogans of the movement of thought which has made the running
and is now loudly declared, in various terms, to have forced the pace
and to have headed in the direction of doubt and disaster. Although
this is nonsense, there is no sense in pretending that eighteenth
century faith in enlightenment and emancipation, or in reason and
nature, is active and persuasive today in Western industrial democ-
racies. The social enthusiasm of that time cannot be recaptured, but
to look back on what happened then and later and to gain a vision
of what is now practicable is the source of new energy to supply a
flagging political impulse.
Current social analysis tends to be gloomy. We are tormented by
dilemma and confused by paradox: on the one hand, we are over-
organized and stifled, on the other, we are not organized enough to
keep anything under control; unprecedented expenditure on
security buys unprecedented insecurity; and all this unbearably
familiar kind of thing. Whether these frustrations induce sluggish-
ness or anger, scepticism or anxiety, the consequences are uniformly
unhealthy.
There is no remedy in shrugging off these contemporary judge-
ments of society, however loose and ill-founded many of them may
be; they make the intellectual and moral climate of the time. There-
fore, echoes of them reverberate throughout this book. Dominating
these undertones, the essential theme is that we can bring things
under due, not undue, control if we learn how to learn from political
experience, and that enlightenment on this theme, how to learn
from political experience, is the main present business of political
philosophy.
Science is the conspicuous example of having to learn how to
learn from experience and of success in doing so. It used to be
thought that the methods of science might be applied equally suc-
cessfully to political thinking: Bentham, or some other, was to be the
political Newton. Undoubtedly, progress in political thinking was
made on these lines. But the techniques of learning from political
experience have not been and cannot be quite the same as those
which have enabled us to find out what goes with what and what
follows what.

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