The Limits of Politics: An Inaugural Lecture Given in the University of Cambridge, 23 April 2008

This page intentionally left blank

THE LIMITS OF POLITICS


This lecture explores the limits of politics in three senses: as a subject of study at Cambridge, as an academic discipline, and as a practical activity. Politics did not develop as an independent academic subject in Cambridge in the twentieth century, and only now is this situation being rectified with the creation of the new Department of Politics and International Studies. Politics as an academic discipline was once conceived as the master science. More recently it has become much more limited in its scope and its methods, but it still needs to preserve a tradition of political reasoning which focuses on problems rather than methodology, and is concerned with understanding the limits to politics. The limits of politics as a practical activity are explored through four modes of political reasoning: the sceptical, the idealist, the rationalist and the realist, as exemplified by the writings of Oakeshott, Keynes, Hayek, and Carr. andrew gamble is Professor of Politics, Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies, and a Fellow of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on British politics, public policy and political economy and his book, Between Europe and America, won the W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize for the best book published in political science in 2003 . In 2005 he was awarded the PSA Isaiah Berlin prize for Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies.

andrew gamble


the limits of politics
An Inaugural Lecture given in the University of Cambridge 23 April 2008

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521145985 © Cambridge University Press 2 009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009 ISBN-13

978-0-511-64148-0

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-14598-5

Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

THE LIMITS OF POLITICS An Inaugural Lecture given by Professor Andrew Gamble in the University of Cambridge on 23 April 2008


I would like to thank everyone for coming to this Inaugural Lecture, and a special thanks to those who have travelled some distance, and in particular to Professor Tsuzuki who has come from Tokyo to be here tonight. Groucho Marx once declared: ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I have others.’ This has long been regarded as a succinct summary of politics, and still more of politicians. Politics has been considered one of the most noble, most elevating and most necessary human activities, but perhaps more often as one of the most disreputable, oppressive and corrupt, something not to be talked about in polite company, and, if possible, suppressed. This is not particularly new. In the national anthem, the lines about the seditious Scots may have been carefully excised, but the second verse still confidently proclaims: ‘Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks’. Politics and knavish tricks are indelibly linked in most people’s minds. Politics is often regarded 1

as one of the black arts, its activities cloaked in mystery. As the Queen herself is alleged to have said to her former footman, Paul Burrell: ‘Paul, be careful. There are forces at work in this country of which we have no knowledge.’ Asked in court what he thought the Queen had meant by that remark, Burrell replied stiffly: ‘One doesn’t ask the Queen what she means by something.’1 People who study politics have at times been suspected of possessing knowledge of these dark forces. Thomas Hobbes suffered the indignity of having his books burnt in the Market Square in Cambridge after the Restoration. Fortunately not all of them. On the 400th anniversary of his birth, in 1988, I helped to organise an excursion around various places associated with Hobbes in Derbyshire. The vicar at St John the Baptist Church at Ault Hucknall where Hobbes is buried was most welcoming. He turned out to be an enthusiast for Hobbes and all things Hobbesian, but told us that when he was first appointed and tried to interest his parishioners in Hobbes, telling them what an honour it was for the Church to be associated with such a famous man, he was looked at askance. The previous incumbent had tried to deny that Hobbes was buried there (despite the existence 1

‘What the Butler Paul Burrell Said about the Queen’, Daily Mail 15 January 2008, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5 0823 8.

2

of a large flagstone proclaiming the fact) and had frequently delivered sermons denouncing Hobbes as the Anti-Christ. All this would have amused Howard Warrender, my old Head of Department at Sheffield, who was a legend both for his Hobbes scholarship and for his eccentricity (on one occasion he delivered the same lecture twice in the same week to a rather astonished group of first-year students). In his Inaugural Lecture in Belfast, Howard noted that, under the Charter of the former Queen’s College, a professor was required to make a declaration promising, amongst other things, that he would not ‘introduce or discuss . . . any subject of politics or polemics, tending to produce contention or excitement’. When Queen’s University was founded, this stipulation was dropped, thus reducing the danger, as Howard pointed out, that ‘a Professor of Political Science might lecture himself out of his Chair in the act of lecturing himself in’.2 In this lecture I want to reflect on the limits of politics and some of the different ways of thinking about them. Limits signify boundaries and frontiers. They define jurisdictions, institutions and identities, the fixed and 2

Howard Warrender, ‘The Study of Politics’, in Preston King (ed.), The Study of Politics, London: Cass, 1977 , p. 181.

3

seemingly permanent determinants of our world. A limit is also a boundary beyond which something ceases to be possible or allowable, and as such is always contestable by human action. It places constraints on action, but these constraints can be challenged and frequently are. We speak of the limit of our power, the limit of our authority, the limit of our interest, the limit of our ambition. There is often a tension between what is possible and what is allowed. Something may be possible but not allowed, or allowed but not possible. Testing limits and wanting to go beyond them is a characteristic human desire, just as overreaching ourselves is a characteristic human failing. A great deal of politics is debate about what the limits of politics are, how they are determined and whether those limits can and should be altered through politics. To call something limited implies that it is restricted and inadequate, and should be overcome. But to many critics of contemporary politics, it is our failure to respect either natural or social or epistemic limits which is the cause of our present problems.

The limits of politics at Cambridge I want to begin these reflections with Cambridge. It is hardly a secret that the study of politics has been limited 4

in Cambridge, and that these limits are a result of what has been allowable rather than what has been possible. The discipline has been fragmented between Faculties and submerged in other areas. It was not until 2004 that the University created a Department of Politics, and shortly after established the Chair to which I have been elected. There has been a marked contrast with Oxford in this respect, which, together with the LSE, pioneered the development of the discipline in Britain. Oxford currently has a combined Department of Politics and International Relations with more than 100 active research staff, and 10 research centres and institutes. The reasons for the relative neglect of Politics at Cambridge are complex. There is after all an old tradition of Political Science at Cambridge, represented by Henry Sidgwick and John Seeley.3 Political Science for them was a broad multidisciplinary enquiry, drawing on law, philosophy, history and economics. They wanted to knit together all the different insights of thinking about the problems of government and provide an education suitable for those who would serve the Empire in a variety of capacities. Seeley, the historian of British imperial expansion, believed in building Political Science through the 3

Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: a study in nineteenth-century intellectual history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 .

5

empirical study of politics and history, collecting together a mass of facts and developing theory inductively from them. Sidgwick was the successor to Mill as the main exponent of the utilitarian tradition, and wanted Political Science to become the heart of the Moral Sciences Tripos. He was a rather severe figure, severe in particular on himself. He once confided to his journal: ‘Pascal was right, If one is to embrace infinite doubt . . . it ought to be upon sackcloth and ashes and in a bare cell and not amid ’47 Port and the silvery talk of W. G. Clark. When I go to my rooms, I feel strange, ghastly . . .’; and in another passage: ‘I always feel it only requires an effort, a stretching of the muscles, and the tasteless luxury, the dusty culture, the noisy, inane polemics of Oxford and Cambridge are left behind for ever.’4 Political Science at Cambridge had its critics. When the Master of Trinity Hall referred disparagingly to trivia in popular newspapers, such as calculations of the number of pocket-handkerchiefs which would stretch diagonally from the earth to the moon, F. W. Maitland, formerly one of Sidgwick’s students, replied: ‘That is what we call

4

David James, Henry Sidgwick: science and faith in Victorian England, Riddell Memorial Lectures, 3 9th series, Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1970, p. 14.

6

Political Science here.’5 After Sidgwick’s death in 1900, Alfred Marshall succeeded in establishing Economics as a separate Tripos, and the empire of Political Science came to be divided between History and Economics. Economics took Politics into the title of its Faculty (it only removed it in 2004), while History retained some Political Science papers in their Tripos. At Oxford a very different path of development opened up. The endowing of the Gladstone Chair in 1912 was followed in the 1920s by the establishment of Modern Greats, the combination of Politics, Philosophy and Economics which grew in strength and led to a gradual increase in the number of college appointments in Politics, and the foundation of the great strength of Oxford in the discipline today. Cambridge lacked the funds to establish a Professorship in Political Science, but in 1928 it received an offer from the Laura Rockefeller Memorial Fund in New York to endow two Chairs, one in Sociology and one in Political Science, to help the establishment of social science at Cambridge. The University declined the Chair in Sociology, but accepted the Chair in Political Science, acknowledging that it would ‘give the subject a status and influence such as it has in most other important 5

Collini, Winch and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, p. 3 49.

7

Universities but still lacks in Cambridge’. Although the University accepted in correspondence with the Memorial Fund that the purpose of the endowment was to develop ‘research work and instruction in the social sciences’,6 it arranged that the new Chair would ‘be primarily held for the time being in the Faculty of History’. The Chairholder was expected to study the constitutions of the world and for this purpose was allowed to be away from Cambridge one term in every three.7 The first holder of that Chair of Political Science was Ernest Barker, a historian of political thought trained in Oxford, who renamed the two surviving Political Science papers in the History Tripos – Political Science A and Political Science B – ‘The History of Political Thought’ and ‘Theories of the Modern State’ respectively. He also brought forward proposals for a Tripos in Social and Political Studies. These got nowhere. According to one account, Barker was quickly ‘drawn into the Byzantine network of already established committees and degree structures, and whatever expectations of radical change might have been envisaged by electors and 6 7

Laura Spellman Rockefeller Fund, Rockefeller Archive Center, Folder 5 21, Box 20. The wider plans which were discussed between the University and the Memorial Fund at that time were not realised. They are set out in the papers collected in the Rockefeller Archive Center, New York, Folder 5 21, Box 20.

8

candidates alike were quickly neutralised in the labyrinth of long-settled practices’.8 Barker did, however, help to consolidate the study of political thought at Cambridge, which grew into a major strength, and for which Cambridge scholarship and Cambridge teaching has become renowned. Kingsley Smellie, later a Professor of Political Science at the LSE, once reminisced: ‘Sitting by the side of the sluggish but lovely river Cam, we discussed rival theories of the state.’9 What was lost almost entirely was the empirical and analytical tradition of Cambridge Political Science. This had no champions, and some formidable opponents. The young Michael Oakeshott, aged twentyfive, in an essay on political science in Cambridge, argued strongly for a rejection of any attempt to apply scientific methods to the study of politics.10 The dismemberment of Political Science by History and Economics meant that there were never the same developments in the curriculum or the staffing of the 8

9 10

Robert Wokler, ‘The Professoriate of Political Thought in England since 1914: a tale of three chairs’, in D. Castiglione and I. HampsherMonk (eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 149. Kingsley Martin, Father Figures: a first volume of autobiography  –  , London: Hutchinson, 1966, p. 116. Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Cambridge School of Political Science’, in What is History? and Other Essays, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004, pp. 45 –66.

9

subject that occurred at Oxford and the LSE – and, after 1945 , in a growing number of other universities. Politics and some of the other social sciences could be studied at Cambridge only as part of other degree schemes. When I read Economics, I took papers in British and US political institutions, the British industrial revolution, political sociology, sociological theory, Russian economic development, as well as macro and micro economics. Such a combination of subjects would be impossible today. The creation of the Social and Political Sciences (SPS) Committee in 197 0 was an important step forward for the social sciences at Cambridge at the time, but it was hedged around with restrictions. Later it evolved into a single-department Faculty, but the disciplines within it remained very small in comparison with those elsewhere. International Relations gained a foothold in Cambridge with the creation of the Centre of International Studies. The Centre has flourished in the last ten years, but always remained separate from SPS and from Politics. Yet, despite this fragmentation, the conception of Political Science as a broad all-encompassing field also lived on in Cambridge, in the form of the contribution of particular individuals to the study of politics, even if few, if any, would have called themselves political scientists. There have been some rich veins of work, including the history of political thought, associated with Dunn, 10

Skinner, Barker and Oakeshott; political economy, associated with Keynes, Sraffa, Dobb and Robinson; international politics and law, associated with Butterfield, Carr and Hinsley; political philosophy, associated with Russell, Wittgenstein and Bernard Williams; sociology, associated with Runciman, Goldthorpe, Abrams and Giddens; comparative and institutional politics, associated with Brogan and Pelling; and cultural studies, associated with Raymond Williams and Collini; nor should we forget political satire, associated with Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, David Frost, John Cleese and Stephen Fry. Cambridge has often provided lively political debate as well, and a home for lost causes. When I was a student here in the 1960s, certain senior members were noisily celebrating the Chinese cultural revolution,11 while others were still toasting the ‘King over the Water’, and regretting the abolition of the protective tests and restrictions which had once barred the University and public life to Dissenters, Jews and women, among others.12 As the University of Cromwell and Milton, Newton and Darwin, Cambridge has often been associated with 11 12

Joan Robinson, The Cultural Revolution in China, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Home Thoughts’, The Independent on Sunday, 9 December 1989.

11

political and religious dissent, and with science rather than established government. But this did not prevent the University contributing the same number of Prime Ministers as Oxford before 1945 – including Pitt the Younger, Palmerston, Balfour and Baldwin. Since 1945 , however, the supply has dried up. Eight of the twelve Prime Ministers since then studied at Oxford, none at Cambridge, and this pattern seems set to continue. The present Cabinet alone has six members who studied PPE at Oxford. Cambridge has had its share of Cabinet ministers from both parties, but there is no doubt that Oxford has established itself as more engaged with government and public policy. The underdevelopment of social science at Cambridge has not helped. New subjects do take time to get established at Cambridge. F. M. Cornford, in his bible for the young academic politician written in 1908, describes the arguments deployed against any proposal for reform, including ‘The Principle of Unripe Time’: ‘People should not do at the present moment what they think right at that moment, because the moment at which they think it right has not yet arrived’; and ‘The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent’: ‘Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first

12

time.’ 13 Currently in Cambridge, the time does at last seem ripe, and the omens favourable, to create a new Department of Politics and International Studies and an integrated programme of teaching and research in politics true to Cambridge’s distinctive traditions, which may overcome at least in part some of the local limits which have confined the study of politics here.

The limits of Politics as a discipline Political Science, as it was thought of at Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century, was a discipline with few limits. Everything was allowed and everything seemed possible. It was conceived on Aristotelian lines as the master science, integrating all other disciplines in the human sciences into a compelling whole, and providing the ultimate education for the future national elite. Such a project proved too ambitious, and the Moral Sciences Tripos was dismembered. The pace of development in individual disciplines made it impractical for there to be one overarching discipline. Roger Scruton has remarked that the idea of a political science in principle 13

F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia academica: being a guide for the young academic politician, Cambridge: Bowes, & Bowes, 1908, pp. 15 , 16.

13

‘incorporates all studies which have politically significant thought and action as their subject-matter’, but he wondered whether it is ‘too wide and too ambitious to be an independent subject with a method of its own. It remains influential only as a projected unity rather than as an actual one.’14 In the United States, Political Science was redefined as a branch of behavioural social science, and its scope narrowed.15 In the United Kingdom, this trend was resisted. When a meeting was held in 195 0 in Oxford to discuss the formation of a professional association for the subject, several of the Professors present made clear that they would have nothing to do with an association which had science in its title, even though the Chairs at both Cambridge and the LSE were Chairs of Political Science.16 The title ‘Political Studies Association’ was chosen as a result, in direct contrast to the ‘American Political Science Association’. This squeamishness about the word ‘science’ was because of the desire to 14 15 16

Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought, London: Macmillan, 1996, p. 5 3 4. Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 195 9. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry and Archie Brown, The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

14

continue to root the study of Politics in history, law and philosophy, and scepticism that Political Science could ever provide predictions and falsifiable hypotheses in the manner of the natural sciences. Supporters of the term ‘science’ argued that a movement towards behavioural methods was exactly what was required if Politics was to become a true social science, and shed its dependence on history and philosophy, while others mildly observed that if only the English had had available to them the German term for science, ‘Wissenschaft’, with its connotations of rigorous systematic study rather than experimental natural science, much of the fuss could have been avoided. From very small beginnings the subject has expanded rapidly from the 1960s onwards, and there has been a parallel development of International Relations (IR), and increasing integration between the two. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the discipline has become an established subject in every major international university. At the same time, there have been continuing controversies over where to set the limits to the discipline, between those who want to narrow it and professionalise it, establishing a core of agreed methods and theories, in order to prescribe what can and cannot be taught within it, and those who have wanted to keep alive the broader,

15

more eclectic vision of Political Science, which was once held at Cambridge.17 The idea of an academic discipline, as Stefan Collini reminds us, is always an unstable amalgam of forces.18 Disciplines are constantly being reshaped and re-imagined, their cores disputed. Each new generation challenges some of the ideas held by the previous one, but there are certain principles which need to be observed if a discipline is to stay healthy and preserve the best parts of the tradition of study which it represents. Here the Cambridge tradition of Political Science has much to teach us, and its principles have been exemplified in the work of Geoffrey Hawthorn and John Dunn, who between them have preserved and extended a rich tradition of political education and political understanding at Cambridge, on which we intend to build. I want to pay tribute to them tonight. The first principle is openness – openness to other disciplines and other approaches. Political Science should always resist turning in on itself, and treating its own 17

18

Brian Barry, ‘The Study of Politics as a Vocation’, in Hayward, Barry and Brown, The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, pp. 425 –67 ; Colin Hay, Political Analysis, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002. Stefan Collini, ‘Disciplines, Canons and Publics’, in Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk (eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context, pp. 280–3 02.

16

methods and preoccupations as sacrosanct. Discipline boundaries exist but they are not fixed, and, like national boundaries at the present time, they are often irrelevant. Disciplines increasingly overlap. There are no tidy limits, and it is not desirable that there should be. Political Science in the past has drawn on Psychology, Law, History, Economics, Sociology, Classics and Philosophy, among others. Political Science, like the other human sciences, is a science of complex phenomena, and positivist models designed to study simple phenomena and detect empirical regularities in order to make predictions are inappropriate.19 Political reasoning can explain how or why something works the way it does, drawing on a toolkit of methods, but never relying on only one, because the aim is the most complete form of understanding possible. A second principle is that Political Science should focus on problems rather than on methodology. When a discipline like Politics or IR becomes concerned primarily with its own methods, and its practitioners with commenting upon each other’s work rather than trying 19

F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: studies in the abuse of reason, Glencoe: Free Press, 195 2; Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: an intellectual biography of F. A. Hayek, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004; Tony Lawson, Economics and Reality, London: Routledge, 1996.

17

to find out something new about what is happening in the world, it starts to lose touch with what should be its main rationale. There are surely enough political problems in the world – whether it is conflict in Africa and the Middle East, the emergence of India and China, the threat of climate change, the challenge of multiculturalism, the persistence of inequality and discrimination, or the failings of democracy – to keep us busy. A third principle is that Political Science should aim for a balanced curriculum, built around political thought, political economy, comparative politics and international relations. It needs to be able to help its students to understand public policy in its broadest sense, through studying the contexts, the constraints and the agencies that are at work in a variety of ways in politics across the globe. It needs to transcend the limits that have been put on the study of politics in the past by, for example, the adoption of gendered or Eurocentric perspectives. Developing the ability to think critically about politics is not only valuable in itself but a preparation for almost anything students of politics will go on to do. A fourth principle is that one of the central purposes of an education in Political Science is not just to develop the capacity to think critically but also to become acquainted with the nature of political reasoning. Every 18

major discipline in the social sciences has developed its own form of reasoning to understand the complex phenomena it investigates.20 It is particularly evident in Economics, but in an age when economic reasoning is tending to invade all aspects of social life, we should remember that other forms of reasoning are important too. Political reasoning is fundamentally concerned with understanding the limits to politics, what politics can achieve and what it cannot, and how best to deliver to us not only what we want but what we need.

The limits of politics as a practical activity Some of the different modes of political reasoning – sceptical, idealist, rationalist and realist – are exemplified in the writings of four people associated, to varying degrees, with Cambridge: Michael Oakeshott, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Edward Hallett Carr. Oakeshott, who taught in the Faculty of History at Cambridge before being appointed to the Chair of Political Science at the LSE in 195 0, succeeding Harold Laski, was opposed to the application of the methods 20

Caldwell, ‘Epilogue: a meditation on twentieth-century economics’, in Hayek’s Challenge, pp. 3 7 0–405 .

19

of the natural sciences in the human sciences, because they produced a rationalism which was deeply damaging to the traditions of a society, and in particular to the understandings which had formed about its political arrangements. Thinking about politics in rationalist and ideological terms meant for Oakeshott, as it had for Burke, mistaking the character of our politics and its limits, and led to ill-judged and inappropriate reforms.21 He favoured instead attending to the ‘intimations’ which were present in the traditions themselves. Political activity, he wrote, is ‘sailing on a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy.’22 In order to cope with a situation which had no limits, politics needed to be very limited indeed in what it tried to attempt, and in its understanding of political action. For Oakeshott, what was special about the English political tradition was the emergence of an understanding of the state as a civil association, a framework of general, non-instrumental law which left individuals free to make their own choices. It 21 22

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays, London: Methuen, 1962. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Political Education’, in Preston King (ed.), The Study of Politics, London: Cass, 1977 , p. 88.

20

was threatened always by the rival understanding of the state as an enterprise association, which sought to harness all the energies of civil society in pursuit of a single goal, and in so doing made government unlimited. John Maynard Keynes was a very different product of Cambridge. He belonged always to its rationalist, confident progressive side. ‘When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do sir?’, he once said.23 He believed in the power of ideas and in the power of intellect. If the state was not an enterprise association, what was the good of the state? He thought it was perfectly possible to improve the world if people would only entrust their affairs to those like himself who had the capacity to make informed judgements. Keynes was not only a leading academic economist, but a man of affairs, who worked in the Treasury during both world wars. Limits on government action should be set aside if there was a good reason for doing so. He stands in a long tradition of liberal reformers, going back to John Stuart Mill, who believe that the right institutions and policies can be designed, which will promote greater happiness. Suffering and misery could be eroded, progress was feasible. He believed strongly in the possibilities of enlightened 23

Alfred Malabre, Lost Prophets: an insider’s history of the modern economists, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1994, p. 220.

21

reform, and intelligent public policy. Faced by the realities of the slump in the 193 0s he devised practical policies for getting Britain out of it, arguing that the Government was imprisoned by dogmas which stopped it doing the things which should be done. Keynes helped to lay the intellectual foundation for the great revolution in policy and the extension of the role of the state which occurred in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century, and has still not been reversed, despite everything that has happened in the last thirty years. He argued that the ‘important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse, but to do those things which at present are not done at all’.24 He wrote to Hayek about the latter’s fears that liberal England was about to disappear forever: ‘Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.’25 Hayek was not reassured. A leading member of the Austrian School of Economics, he was appointed Professor of Economics at the LSE in 193 0, and almost 24 25

J. M. Keynes, ‘The End of Laissez-faire’, in Collected Writings ix, London: Macmillan, 1972, p. 291. J. M. Keynes, Collected Writings xxvii, London: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 3 87 –8.

22

immediately began to clash with Keynes both theoretically and over matters of policy. Keynes once remarked that Hayek was an example of how a remorseless logician could start with a mistake and end up in bedlam.26 But when Keynes disappeared once more into the Treasury at the beginning of the Second World War, the LSE was moved out of London and quartered in Peterhouse, and Keynes found rooms for Hayek in Kings. Not being allowed to fight or to serve in government because of his Austrian connections, although he was by then a naturalised British citizen, Hayek spent the war sitting in Cambridge writing The Road to Serfdom,27 his passionate denunciation of the drift to collectivism, and of the abandonment of the liberal principles of limited government on which, he argued, the success of western civilisation, and British civilisation in particular, in the nineteenth century had been based. Some of his views were close to those of Oakeshott, but Oakeshott always regarded Hayek as a rationalist – a plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, he remarked, but it belongs to the same style of politics.28 To a greater extent than any of the other thinkers discussed here, Hayek at 26 27 28

J. M. Keynes, Collected Writings xiii, London: Macmillan, 1972, p. 243 . F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London: Routledge, 1944. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, p. 21.

23

times combined sceptical, idealist, rationalist and realist modes of political reasoning. He became the most important inspiration behind the intellectual revival of liberal political economy, the champion of free markets and limited government, and warned constantly about the limits of human reason and human knowledge, and the consequent dangers of state involvement in the planning of the economy and civil society. Although he was one of the fiercest critics of Keynes and still more of Keynesianism, they shared much in common. Both gave enormous importance to ideas, and both believed in the possibility of truth and progress. There was a right pattern to society which it was the duty of the state to recognise and to enable, using the coercive powers at its disposal. The state had to be limited in its functions but strong in carrying them out, to support the institutions of a free society. Hayek ultimately saw the state as an enterprise association in Oakeshott’s sense. It had a supreme purpose – to encourage a political climate, a political movement and political leaders able to reverse the extended state and re-establish a market order, in which political and administrative discretion would be reduced to the minimum. E. H. Carr read classics at Cambridge before serving in the Foreign Office for twenty years. He subsequently took the chair in International Relations at Aberystwyth, 24

and wrote leaders for The Times. In his sixties he eventually returned to Cambridge, to Trinity, to work on his compendious history of the Soviet Union. Carr’s sense of the political was substantially different from that of Keynes and of Hayek, because he put very little importance on the role of ideas in history and politics, and was scornful of idealist modes of political reasoning. On the contrary, he believed that history was shaped by power and interests. One of his classic works, The Twenty Years Crisis, written on the eve of the Second World War, was a brutal exposure of liberal illusions entertained by liberal statesmen like Woodrow Wilson and liberal academics and commentators. This did not make Carr a supporter of Churchill. He was a strong advocate of appeasement, based on his assessment of geopolitics and relative power relationships, and the options open to the democracies. Carr belongs to a tradition of thinking about international relations which goes back to Thucydides in its emphasis on statecraft, and was to become a leading strand in International Relations after 1945 . As he explained in What is History? he did not believe it was the job of the historian to make moral judgements about personalities in history. He preferred to understand Stalin as the vehicle of vast impersonal forces, and argued that he owed his success to the dynamic force unleashed

25

by the revolution.29 Carr believed in progress but not in liberal progress; he thought that liberalism was finished, and that the world had outgrown it. The limits to politics for him were set by global economic and social forces, not ideas, and what happened in politics was not a question of human will, but of how well individuals understood the nature of their times and adapted to it. The constraints on human action were always more obvious to him than the opportunities for individuals to make a difference. He was accused by his critics of believing in determinism and inevitability, and by Oakeshott of writing history as though it were retrospective politics, written from the standpoint of the victor. Carr was scornful of the pessimism among his contemporaries, their outdated faith that Europe was still the centre of the world, and their remoteness from real politics.3 0 These different thinkers suggest some of the characteristic modes of political reasoning – by turns sceptical, 29 30

Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr –, London: Verso, 1999, p. 180. Stefan Collini, ‘The Intellectual as Realist: the puzzling career of E. H. Carr’, in Common Reading: critics, historians, publics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. During the war, pleading for leave from Aberystwyth, Carr wrote ‘It would be . . . intolerable to sit in pure academic seclusion writing long-term stuff; indeed I’ve never believed that, even in peace, anything useful can be written on politics by anyone wholly isolated from current realities’: in Haslam, The Vices of Integrity, p. 91.

26

idealist, rationalist and realist. Must we choose between them? Any mature form of political understanding needs to draw on all four, if it is to grasp the nature of conflict in human societies, and its roots in our capacity to develop different interests, to hold different values, to form different identities and to come to different judgements.3 1 Studying almost any political problem forces us to acknowledge the complexity and intractability of most political situations, their dark side as well as their absurd side. We are confronted in the modern world with a plethora of competing and incompatible claims, and it is not surprising that scepticism about our ability to choose between them, still less to reconcile them, is rife. In the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur encounters two individuals whom he regards as peasants and behaves to them accordingly. They regard themselves as members of an autonomous anarchosyndicalist commune. When he commands them to be quiet, they object. The dialogue continues: ‘Who does he think he is?’ ‘I am Your King.’ ‘Well I didn’t vote for you.’ ‘You don’t vote for kings.’ ‘Well how did you become King then?’ 31

John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: making sense of politics, London: Harper Collins, 2000.

27

‘The Lady of the Lake her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your King.’ ‘Listen – strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.’3 2

What also gives force to sceptical analyses of the limits of politics is the scale of so many of the problems, when coupled with the inadequacies of human reason, human capacities and human knowledge, and the frailties of human will. Politics, other than in the most minimal terms, can often seem a futile exercise. There is a continual contrast between political rhetoric and political accomplishment, and the sceptic will argue that this must always be so, and that its reasons lie deep within the nature of politics. One line of sceptical reasoning is therefore to point to the folly of human ambition and to the need for humility in the face of the problems that human societies face, and to opt for the prudential, the tried and the known. Christopher Lasch asked in one of his last books, ‘Why do serious people continue to believe in the future?’, and Martin Rees’ recent book, Our Final Century, which details the different threats facing us, from terrorism and nuclear proliferation to 32

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 20th Century Fox, 1975 , scene 3 .

28

climate change and genetic modification,3 3 reinforces the point. Lasch believed that only a moral revolution, which reversed modernity, scaled down our desires, reduced our demands on the planet and taught us once again to live within limits, could save us.3 4 Not all realists share this pessimism. They point to the unavoidable constraints on human action which arise from the way in which the world is structured and power distributed. The limits on politics arise from these constraints, so that if politicians want to be effective in what they do they must first understand the nature of these constraints. They cannot succeed by ignoring them, or pretending that they do not exist, and, if they do, they risk achieving something quite different from what they intended. Realism as a form of political reasoning emphasises realities and therefore tends towards determinism and fatalism, but there are also strands of realism which see the acknowledgement of realities and constraints as the basis for progress. The world has less to do with ideas and values than with configurations of power.

33 34

Martin Rees, Our Final Century, London: Heinemann, 2003 . Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: progress and its critics, New York: Norton, 1991. He argues: ‘Only then might we develop a more vigorous form of hope which trusts life without denying its tragic character’, p. 5 3 0.

29

Where realists themselves disagree is over whether the constraints on political action are endlessly the same, and there is no way to break out of them, or whether the development of the modern world is creating new opportunities and new structures, which the successful politician can identify and ride to success. But they have to work within these structures, they cannot ignore them or abolish them. The challenges to these forms of political reasoning come from rationalists and idealists, some of whom seek moral change, some institutional change, and some both at once. They are much more likely to emphasise the opportunities for politicians and political movements to make a difference, to alleviate suffering, to reduce inequality and to achieve the dream of more just and more equal societies throughout the world. The idealist’s temperament is captured in some lines by Bertrand Russell, in Political Ideals in 1919, one of the first books on politics – together with Carr’s What is History? – that I ever possessed: Few men seem to realise how many of the evils from which we suffer are wholly unnecessary, and they could be abolished by a united effort within a few years. If a majority in every civilised country so desired, we could, within twenty years, abolish all abject poverty, quite half the illness in the world, the whole economic slavery which binds down

30

nine tenths of our population; we could fill the world with beauty and joy, and secure the reign of universal peace. It is only because men are apathetic that this is not achieved, only because imagination is sluggish, and what always has been is regarded as what always must be. With goodwill, generosity, intelligence, these things could be brought about.3 5

Sceptics and realists alike snort with derision at such sentiments. Joseph de Maistre’s attitude to Rousseau’s claim that human beings were born free but were everywhere in ´ chains was summed up, in an epigram by Emile Faguet, as like saying that sheep were born carnivorous, but everywhere nibble grass.3 6 Twenty years after Russell wrote the lines quoted above at the end of a world war which had claimed 20 million lives, the world was plunged into the Second World War, an even greater cataclysm, which left 70 million dead. Political idealism is generally less in fashion than it was, although the political world can still be swept by sudden gusts of hope, often focused on particular leaders, such as Nelson Mandela or Aung San Suu Kyi, who become powerful, almost timeless, symbols of a cause or struggle. 35 36

Bertrand Russell Political Ideals London, Allen & Unwin 1963 , p. 25 . ´ Emile Faguet, Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvieme si`ecle, Paris: Lecene, 1899, p. 41.

31

Sceptical and realist assessments of the limits of politics are an essential part of the craft of politics. But they also have their limits, since if taken too far they fuel the kind of apathy and disengagement from politics with which we are too familiar. On any historical assessment, the achievement of some form of limited democracy in so many countries today is an extraordinary one, even if much more fragile and less certain than we would wish.3 7 Many sceptics and realists today think it is transient, but their reasons are often different. Sceptics think that democracy can never work, while realists point to the structures which prevent the ideals of democracy from ever being achieved in practice. All this is part of the mood of disaffection with politics of all kinds, and the spread of cynicism and detachment, expressed in falling participation in elections, and the collapse of trust in politics and politicians – the mood that Nothing Works. Such a mood, fostered by parts of the media, narrows the limits of politics, because it is corrosive of the idea of a public realm, and of citizenship.3 8 Politics comes to be regarded as a corrupt and self-seeking activity. 37 38

John Dunn, Setting the People Free: the story of democracy, London: Atlantic, 2005 . David Marquand, Decline of the Public: the hollowing out of citizenship, Cambridge: Polity, 2004.

32

If such attitudes become widespread, then the capacity of politics to affect change also shrinks.3 9 Its limits contract. Reform agendas which draw on idealist and rationalist modes of political reasoning often face an uphill struggle, but they remain an essential ingredient of our politics. This is partly because, despite all the cynicism, citizens can still periodically be lured into putting their trust in a new charismatic political leader, such as Tony Blair in 1997 or Barack Obama today. There is a periodic suspension of disbelief, before the inevitable disillusionment. The hope that some substantial change for the better might finally be delivered through politics remains enormously powerful in western cultures, since human beings remain, on balance, and probably against the weight of evidence, remarkably optimistic. They have the future in their bones, as Carr said – unlike intellectuals, he added sourly. But it is also because of the huge change which modernity has wrought on our world. Collectively, and without anyone planning it, the human race in the last 200 years has embarked on a momentous experiment which is steadily transforming the conditions of 39

Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics, Cambridge: Polity, 2007 ; Gerry Stoker, Why Politics Matters: making democracy work, London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2006.

33

life for everyone on the planet.40 This is not a process from which any individual or any society can opt out. The consequences are all around us and are multiplying. The challenges which human societies now face are of a different order of magnitude from in the past, and our capacities for meeting them seriously inadequate. A sceptical response is understandable, but also an abdication of responsibility. Simply shrugging our shoulders and concentrating on looking after our own immediate interests is beguiling, but also a betrayal. A realist response directs us to the enormity of the transformation which is taking place, and the scale of the problems confronting us. But a realist response by itself is not enough, since there is no reason to think that the problems will be sorted by themselves. A reform agenda is also needed, which can knit together the different elements to provide the kind of new institutions and rules, the new governance arrangements that are necessary if the human race is to have any future at all, and that can also bring about a moral change. The limits of politics are clear enough from past experience but they have also to be overcome if appropriate remedies for the problems we face are to be adopted in time. There can be no more urgent task confronting us today than to 40

John McNeill, Something New under the Sun: an environmental history of the twenty-first century, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001.

34

use all our energy and our understanding to ensure that they are. There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.41 41

Brutus, in William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3 .

35