Editorial
| Author | F. F. Ridley |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1975.tb00078.x |
| Date | 01 December 1975 |
| Published date | 01 December 1975 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
EDITORIAL
This is the last issue but one for which
I
take editorial responsibility and, as the
March
1976
issue is one devoted to Marx studies for which my colleague Terrell
Carver has undertaken much of the editorial work, this is a suitable place for the
editor’s farewell.
I
have enjoyed editing
Political Studies.
Over the years
I
have looked at
a
good many proposals for improvement. Quite a few were attractive in themselves
but on examinttion they seemed mutually incompatible,
so
that their adoption
would have involved more
loss
than gain. Indeed, though always aware that a
better product must be possible, there is no change in policy that, looking back,
I
now wish
I
had made. That is another way of saying that in my view an editor
must have confidence in his own judgement and not act simply as the agent of a
host of conflicting voices. But there cannot be just one correct way of editing a
journal, and
so
it is right that there should be periodic changes in editorship.
It would nevertheless be wrong to pretend that my departure was voluntary.
It is linked, of course, to the change in the Executive of the Political Studies
Association that occurred at the Oxford conference in March of this year.
Though
a
dismissed minister is allowed a personal statement in Parliament,
and the convention might be adopted here, this is no place to discuss the internal
affairs of the P.S.A. The majority of our readers, after all, are not members of the
British academic profession and its affairs do not concern them. Suffice it to say
that the election reflected demands for a more active P.S.A. (a sentiment
I
support) and part of the revitalized association promised by the new Executive
is this journal. In that light a change in editorship is understandable. And it is
fitting, in
a
sense, that it should come almost immediately after the special issue
I
edited for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Political Studies Association
which may, in retrospect, be seen not as the end of an era-that is too grand a
term-but at least as marking a point of generational change.
In that special issue Wilfrid Harrison, the journal’s first editor, gave an ex-
cellent account of his editorial philosophy. It would be tempting here to do the
same but there would be much repetition (for
I
agree with most he said) and the
remainder would read embarrassingly like self-justification. Though
I
have views
about the nature of political studies and the purpose such studies should serve
(somewhat polemically expressed in my recent book,
The
Study
of
Government),
moreover,
I
have deliberately tried to avoid too clear an image in my editorial
capacity lest the journal become idiosyncratic in style. My views about what
a
journal should be have doubtless influenced both form and content, but
I
have
deliberately stuck to traditional forms and tried to keep the contents as eclectic
as possible, serving the whole field
of
political studies (a term quite deliberately
preferred to political science).
What one publishes partly reflects what one receives from contributors,
and that has been a determinant which
I
think outsiders often underrate. One of my
greatest disappointments has been the paucity of broad-based
or
controversial
articles (‘think pieces’ if you like); another has been the absence of unsolicited
contributions from senior colleagues, though they responded nobly to my request
for the anniversary issue. Given the limited space available to
us
and the range of
our
subject (Politics departments always seem to me like miniature faculties in
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