Book Reviews: The Autonomy of Politics, The Limits of Political Science, The Middle East: Ten Years after Camp David, The Next Arab Decade: Alternative Futures, in Search of Leadership: West Bank Politics since 1967, Karl Jaspers on Max Weber, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber, Ministerial Responsibility, La Révolution Française n'est pas Terminée, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the ‘Well-Ordered Society’, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings
| Author | Bernard Crick,Robin Maxwell-Hyslop,Jack Hayward,Ralf Dahrendorf,Jeremy Lester,Preston King,Anthony Parsons |
| Date | 01 December 1989 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1989.tb00296.x |
| Published date | 01 December 1989 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Political Studies
(1989), XXXVII, 665-675
Book
Reviews
Paul A.
B.
Clarke,
The
Autonomy
of
Politics
(Aldershot, Avebury,
1988),
xi
+
242
pp.,
€25.00
ISBN
0
566
05533
3.
Nevil Johnson,
The
Limits
of
Political Science
(Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1989),
vi
+
Both these books raise fundamental questions, but in fundamentally different ways. Paul
Clarke writes in a difficult mode that could be called ‘post-modern’: at his fingertips are
both the analytical and empiricist mode
of
philosophy and the ‘continental’ hermeneutic
and ontological concerns. Nevil Johnson writes in an easy mode that could be called ‘anti-
modern’,
or
just plain old-fashioned: political studies should only be taught in a university
if it stays close to history (whether of institutions
or
ideas)
or
limits itself to a descriptive
and technical public administration, avoiding the ideological assumptions of policy
studies.
Clarke is at times needlessly complex and cannot resist reopening major issues on every
step, even if they are only side issues to his argument; and either he has not read (unlike the
students) some simpler books on these matters,
or
he scorns those who can be understood
by any but academic political philosophers. But Johnson is needlessly easy and
oversimplifies: he is in danger
of
debasing Oakeshott’s ideas about the priority
of
‘prejudice’ and ‘tradition’ into unhappy groans and grumbles from the back of a quad.
‘The foundation
of
the political impulse is the capacity
for
judgement’, writes Clarke,
‘and the wish of communal beings who possess that faculty to exercise that judgement on
matters of common concern’. Following Arendt, but far from slavishly, Clarke is
concerned that the very structures
of
modern society threaten a reduction of the idea of
autonomous
or
free political action to social determinants. The way to avoid this
is
to
reconstruct a sense of individualism that is neither, as in market liberalism, above mere
politics nor, as in (old-style?) Marxist socialism, reducible to the social.
Clarke is unconcerned with disciplinary border-lines. Johnson, thinking they are
wrongly drawn, is obsessed with them. Clarke is concerned with the nature of
political
judgement
(like Ronald Beiner in
a
recent and important book
of
that name). Unlike
Beiner however, he seems to accept that good judgement can come from either player
or
spectator: the reasons why many players have bad judgement are contingent, not
philosophical: spectators have their biases too. Therefore, there is no need to draw
absolute lines between the study and practice of politics: only to discriminate between
good and bad play and books about play. But to Johnson
a
contingent tendency to bias
seems a good (if nervous) reason to avoid an activity entirely. ‘Value judgement’ is as red a
rag to him as it is to the behaviourists he belatedly berates. Clarke would see the very
concept of ‘value judgement’ as a somewhat arbitrary arrest of experience (to translate
him into basic Oakeshott for Johnson’s benefit). None the less, a fundamental
commitment to freedom, to individuality and to the possibility ofcommunality is involved
in the very nature of politics.
142
pp.,
€17.50
ISBN
0
19 827341 X.
0032-321 7/89/04/0665-11/$3.00
0
1989
Political Studies
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