TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES
Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno
On Religion, Karl Barth
The Intelligence of Evil, Jean Baudrillard
In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda
A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin
Discourse on Free Will, Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther
Education for Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire
To Have or To Be?, Erich Fromm
Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer
All Men Are Brothers, Mohandas K. Gandhi
Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer
After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre
Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri
The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière
An Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski
Building a Character, Constantin Stanislavski
Creating a Role, Constantin Stanislavski
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Bernard Crick
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First edition published 1962 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Fifth edition published 2000 by Continuum
This edition published 2013 by Bloomsbury
© Bernard Crick, 1962, 1964, 1992, 2000, 2005, 2013
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-7809-3678-9
2A Defence of Politics against Ideology
3A Defence of Politics against Democracy
4A Defence of Politics against Nationalism
5A Defence of Politics against Technology
6A Defence of Politics against False Friends
A Footnote to Rally the Academic Professors of Politics (1964)
A Footnote to Rally Fellow Socialists (1982)
A Final Footnote to Rally Those who Grudge the Price (1992)
Almost forty years ago my Preface to the first edition began by saying that here was simply an essay ‘occasioned’ – in the words of Thomas Hobbes – ‘by the disorders of the present time’. It was an attempt ‘to justify politics in plain words by saying what it is . . . I believe the essential matter to be very simple. The reader may welcome an unfashionable attempt to avoid covering him with all the author’s chaff on everything before ever the grain is reached. . . . I am constantly depressed by the capacity of academics to over-complicate things. . . . [So this is not] a systematic treatise . . . simply an attempt, inspired by seeing a fairly obvious impatience with politics in the new nations of the world, and provoked by a personal dislike of exhortation and mere cant about “the ideals of freedom”, to describe what in fact are the minimum benefits of politics as an activity . . .’
The essay arose mainly from conversations with a German friend to share grounds for hope that her people could exorcize the past and establish a political or republican tradition of active citizenship (as they have done so remarkably). But because this was an essay written with some intensity, in one deep breath and at one particular time, I have not in subsequent editions risked spoiling it by making substantial changes to the text, only some minor corrections (as now). References to past events once topical are merely illustrative of general points, not important in themselves, so I have left them unchanged with an occasional explanatory footnote; I have observed that for most people knowledge of what happened in the generation before they became adult is less than it is for earlier periods (such has been the decline of contemporary history in schools – or was it ever so? The broad shape of the distant hills can be seen but not the dead ground in between).
Since this book had been in print so long (and is now revived by a new publisher), I have felt the need in each new edition to add something timely or more fully explanatory rather than to rewrite. So the brevity of which I once boasted, always enjoying the speculative essay more than the monograph, has suffered. The tail is now almost as big as the dog. But each of these added ‘Footnotes’ can be read separately, and where only the original text is still in print in translation (with publishers too poor or mean to add the ‘Footnotes’), the essential point comes across, not too much is lost. Indeed, I was delighted when I learned that pirated and illicit translations of Chapter 1, sometimes also of Chapter 7, had been circulating in the USSR and in Pinochet’s Chile.
Some excuse for the Footnotes may, none the less, be needed. ‘A Footnote to Rally the Academic Professors of Politics’ was added because, although this was a book intended for the general reader, it has become much read by students. And at that time an absurd either/or debate raged among teachers of politics: that the study must be either science and neutrality, or else commitment and action! The ‘fallacy of the excluded middle’ was long ago diagnosed but there is still no easy cure. So I wanted to argue that the study of politics is necessarily part of politics, is committed to the preservation of free-politics, but not to any particular form of politics, still less to party doctrine. The professors deceive themselves (and others) in thinking that the study can be a science (except at the cost of intense triviality) or that it can, in some refined, pure philosophical way, avoid relevance to actual politics. But commitment to freedom and political rule becomes discredited if the authority of the teacher or the curiosity of the student is tied tightly to a particular cause or orthodoxy, becoming, in Michael Oakeshott’s scathing words, ‘a hedge-priest for some doubtful orthodoxy’.
Having said that, however, I came to see that my position was often misunderstood. I did not mean to argue for less commitment to political life (indeed I find little that is new, though much that is very welcome, in the current rediscovery of positive citizenship), only that academic authority should not be invoked for comprehensive commitments; and, above all else, that all commitments should and could take a political form. A whole chapter had dealt with the dangers of three typical positions: the non-political conservative, the a-political liberal and the antipolitical socialist. Perhaps the polemic against the latter sounded so strong (as family quarrels could be in the far-off days of Marxist intellectual hegemony – or so they thought) that some readers took me for an eccentric Burkean conservative. They did not seem to notice that I had said in that very section, deliberately polishing an epigram, that ‘indifference to human suffering discredits free regimes’ (thinking of unemployment and poverty quite as much as of famine and concentration camps). And I also said, with only a little irony, that ‘to think of the growth of the British Labour movement is to be impressed not with the efficacy of a single doctrine, but with the wonder of politics’ (meaning that when judged by behaviour and deeds, not by rhetoric, the British Labour Party has always practised and sustained parliamentary politics in a pluralistic manner, as much as the other main parties in Great Britain).
So I added the ‘Footnote to Rally Fellow Socialists’ (which grew into a Fabian pamphlet and then a small book) to defend a democratic socialist tradition that is thoroughly political. Perhaps this was a self-indulgence which risked that some readers would then see this as a committed book, and switch off. But I thought it important to tell some fellow socialists bluntly to stop pretending that they had an all-embracing, self-sufficient and exclusive system, superior to normal (what they called bourgeois) political restraints and values; and also to tell some Conservatives that they discredit and devalue political debate if they portray all socialism as either a spendthrift half-way house to old Communism or a frustrated form of it. I was stung into this Footnote by a chance incident. A thoughtful Derbyshire miner (in the days when there were miners) said to me, after reading the book in an extra-mural class: ‘Ay, I gets all that; but does thee not believe in anything, Professor lad?’ He deserved a temperate answer. Of course, some of the pragmatic mystics of ‘The Third Way’ may now think that my temperate reply is way-out, certainly a little ‘off-message’. We must wait and see. I am a democratic socialist.
Lastly, this book was written during the depths of the Cold War. Like most people I did not believe that the Soviet Communist system and its empire could collapse or wither away. But unlike some of my friends and students, I neither expected nor feared a Third World War. The atomic arsenals were unusable, the deterrents did deter, but the great tragedy was that they made the Iron Curtain seem indestructible and permanent. We might enjoy a kind of peace but only at the price of a war mentality, inhuman misuse of scarce resources and an acceptance of the permanent unfreedom of others – as when the tanks moved into Budapest in 1956 and into Prague in 1968. Influenced by Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism I believed that once people got into that condition, there was little hope of change – at best, a dilution of totalitarianism into autocracy. The answer then became not to risk going that way at all, when and where choice was still possible. So I offered a defence of politics, not a pseudo-proof of its inevitability. But now, whatever happens to the countries of the former Soviet Union, and to China indeed, totalitarianism seems a faded relic of the mid-twentieth century, a perversion of modernism that ultimately failed, however much damage it did and left behind. The events of November 1989 in Eastern Europe showed a civic courage greater than anything seen since the Second World War, perhaps since the French Revolution or the uprisings against Britain and then Spain in the Americas. But, as in all revolutions, nothing went according to plan: there were unexpected consequences; expectations were aroused that could not be fulfilled; and the rest of the world was slow to grasp the full significance and opportunity of such events, and has failed to help with the skills and resources needed.
The price to be paid in terms of human suffering in times of transition can be greater than under some periods at least of the old oppression. The market determines prices but it does not solve, indeed can exacerbate, moral problems of distribution and the environment, ultimately of human survival. It must always be responded to and mediated by a democratic politics. So in 1992, after the fall of the Wall, I added ‘A Final Footnote to Rally Those Who Grudge the Price’, which contains some modifications of the more optimistic tone of the last chapter proper, ‘In Praise of Politics’, and I have now had to add an even darker Epilogue.
Alas, in one respect at least I have been too clever. Few noticed that, in the title of those footnotes, ‘to rally’ was an antique pun to convey a deliberate ambivalence. Stand fast, indeed; but when we lose self-irony, then dogmatism or even fanaticism takes over.
In the first edition I spoke enigmatically of having ‘bitten two of the hands that had fed me’ at the LSE. I meant Harold Laski, socialist, and Michael Oakeshott, conservative. I did learn much from both. By the second edition I was aware how much in debt I had been to the late Carl Joachim Friedrich at Harvard and to the writings of Hannah Arendt. Ernest Gellner gave me stern and helpful criticism of my first draft, and my friends Dante Germino, Melvin Richter and the late Harold Swayze reacted to the first edition to help the second. Irene Coltman Brown’s Private Men and Public Causes: Philosophy and Politics in the English Civil War (Faber, 1962) appeared at about the same time, and our letters crossed in the post saying how good we thought the other’s book, how similar our basic argument, and that we didn’t normally write to strangers. That is a good way to make a life-long friend and most helpful critic, such as has also been Dr Sally Jenkinson. Each of the Footnotes contains some reaction to criticism by good students at LSE, Sheffield and finally Birkbeck.
Some paragraphs in the ‘Footnote to Rally Those Who Grudge the Price’ have been adapted from my essay ‘The High Price of Peace’ in Hermann Giliomee and Jannie Gagiano (eds), The Elusive Search for Peace: South Africa, Israel and Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, Cape Town: 1990), and many friends and others in each of those countries have contributed to my change of tone from a qualified optimism to the qualified pessimism of the Epilogue. My tone is much the same as that of J. M. Ross in his Forward to Basics – Back from the Brink (Pentland Press, 1999). Some paragraphs in the Epilogue draw on the last chapters in my Essays on Citizenship (Continuum, 2000). I thank Penguin Books for permission to quote passages from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, in Rex Warner’s fine translation (first published 1954). Lastly I thank Dr Francis Celoria for interrupting his labours on ‘Folly’ to help me with the proofs of the fourth edition.
Bernard Crick
Edinburgh
4 July 2000
There are limits to everything. In all this time something definite should have been achieved. But it all turns out that those who inspired the revolution . . . aren’t happy with anything that’s on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren’t trained for anything else, they don’t know anything except that. And do you know why these never-ending preparations are so futile? It’s because these men haven’t any real capacities, they are incompetent. Man is born to live not to prepare for life.
PASTERNAK, Doctor Zhivago
I immediately discerned within the Russian Revolution the seeds of such serious evils as intolerance and the drive towards the persecution of dissent. These evils originated in an absolute sense of the possession of truth grafted upon doctrinal rigidity. What followed was contempt for the man who was different, For his arguments and his way of life. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest problems each of us has to solve in the realm of practice is that of accepting the necessity to maintain, in the midst of the intransigence that comes from steadfast beliefs, a critical spirit towards these same beliefs and a respect for the belief that differs. In the struggle, it is the problem of combining the greatest practical efficiency with respect for the man in the enemy; in a word, of war without hate.