Imagination and Acquaintance in Political Science* What Bergen and Stein Rokkan have meant to me

I must say first that it is a great honour and privilege to be invited to give this lecture in memory of my late friend, Stein Rokkan. He was a great human being, a great scholar, a great Norwegian, and I owe him much. It is not easy to frame any material worthy of such an occasion, knowing that I am (in the Homeric phrase) not strong enough to bend the bow of Ulysses. And there was perhaps some physical likeness too; see the famous passage in which Homer tells how the Greek leaders looked and spoke. Old King Priam stands on the walls of Troy, looking down on the besieging army and talks to Helen, the pretext for the war. I quote as briefly as I can. 'Come now tell me, dear child, who is he, shorter by a head than Agamemnon, but broader of shoulder and of chest? His armour lies spread upon the earth, and himself like a bell-wether rangeth the ranks of warriors. Yea, I liken him to a thick fleeced ram ordering a great flock of white ewes.'

Then said Helen 'that is Laertes' son, the astute Ulysses, who was reared in
the rocky land of Ithaca' (call it Narvik?) 'and is skilled in all sorts of sophisticated
and original devices'.

And here, skipping some good lines, is Ulysses at a seminar or a committee:
'When he uttered his great voice from his chest, and words as copious as
the snowflakes of winter, then could no mortal man contend with Ulysses.'1

My tactic then is not to try to adapt any of the things which we learned from Stein and which Stein did supremely well, but to follow a different, perhaps complementary line of thought. Nevertheless perhaps the puzzling title of this lecture, 'Imagination and Acquaintance in Political Science', was suggested partly by the title Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences² which Stein and others gave to the volume they dedicated to the memory of Peter

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* Given as the Stein Rokkan Memorial Lecture 1982 at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Nettl, an outstanding scholar killed in an air crash at the age of 42. I hope to
tie that theme to experiences which we shared.

By Stein's good offices I came to the Christian Michelsen Institute for a sabbatical term at the beginning of 1966, carrying with me what I then thought was a shameful secret, that I was really a classical philologist and not a social scientist, though I had been pretending to teach political science for some thirty years. I had served a sort of apprenticeship in law, and some experience in government had taught me a lot. But I had abandoned mathematics at the age of fifteen and had acquired in government service a reasoned scepticism about all statistical sources for aggregate data — 'garbage in garbage out'. Nevertheless, I shared the creed of science, that this is an intelligible world, to be constructed, known and mastered by the human intellect. What one knows is limited and so is one's capacity, but nevertheless the boundaries of darkness can be pushed back, and there is a tradition, ethical and sceptical, about the people who join this enterprise and about the canons of procedure. I am not ashamed to repeat the old platitudes about the Greek tradition, created in a corner of the Mediterranean some 2500 years ago, but perhaps I should add that this tradition is not all sweetness and childlike optimism. Part of the tradition is embodied in the words of Ajax battling in the mist imposed by stupid gods on a stupid war: 'Kill us if it is your pleasure, but in daylight'.³

It is not then necessarily a naive or optimistic tradition, nevertheless a tradition that the world (and that includes the world of men) is intelligible (I am here avoiding the word 'rational') and will yield in the end to hard work and clear thinking. What is more, the world of man could by these means be made better, not by unthinking natural increment but by human action.

I must not generalise rashly, but I think it is fair to call that the mood of the 1950'5; it was at least the mood of our group in Manchester, in particular my friends, Ely Devons, Max Gluckman, Harry Johnson, Dick Spann, who all died too young, and Arthur Lewis and Dorothy Emmet, who are still active. And in that mood I came to Bergen, to write down what I thought we had learnt about social man by the procedures of social science. I had visited Norway before, in conditions of great delight, but never to work and never in the dead of winter, and I had known Stein and his work for some years. What appealed to me was the hope of quiet complementarity. I had to make up my mir.d about the utility of German-American sociology, the school of Weber and Parsons, from which we in Manchester felt excluded by a language barrier. Parsonian writing defies all the canons of the English intellectual style, to which we were committed, and yet these were strong intellectuals, in a great tradition, and surely there must be something there. Stein had read

it all and judged it without fuss from a position both inside and outside
Europe. I hoped to learn.

Secondly, as a classical scholar who had abandoned mathematics at the age of fifteen, I was haunted by the grim words said to have been inscribed above Plato's door. 'No admittance except for mathematicians'.⁴ I had put some sweat into this on a previous sabbatical, had found that comprehension was easy enough, swift manipulations of symbols were very hard. One's inborn language gift departs (they say) in middle age, and all I really got out of it was an obsession with the energy/information model of systems as taught by Ross Ashby and von Bertalanffy. It illuminated much for me, but I could see no practicable way to operationalize it in the social sciences; I found it too hard to bridge the gap between living words and 'BITS' of information, the on/off switch, the unit of electronic language. In this, too, I trusted Stein's judgement absolutely; he did things with data which made sense in my language.

In practice, I doubt if we ever discussed either of these problems academically. I sat daily in a beautiful room in the old Institute building and from January to April 1966 watched the sun slide along the southern hills of Bergen (scarcely a drop of rain for three months), and I gradually got the floor satisfactorily heaped with books. Stein's study was next door, already carpeted in the same way. I never lacked for what I needed, and I wrote more steadily than ever in my life, backed by splendid secretarial help. Hence the book Politics and Social Science, published in 1967, a book which now seems to me to be visionary, even Utopian, but nevertheless a rationalist book written in a rationalist environment in a prudent Scandinavian country.

But in 1967 the sky fell in. Since 1967 nothing has gone well, or so it seems.
We ask now, as at the end of Ibsen's Brand, 'Can human will summed avail
no fraction still or salvation?'5

But before I go further I owe some explanation of the title of this lecture, and some apology for pinning it to these two words, Imagination and Acquaintance. The former is a very familiar English word, much in use and much debated, especially among scholars of English literature. It would be unfair to try to reproduce these long debates; it may serve well enough if I explain negatively, by exclusion. One may say of a thesis or an essay or a book in our field: 'this is able, learned, lucid, accurate, but it lacks imagination'. Sometimes this may be said rather spitefully, claiming simply that I am better than you. I can see further than you do into your own concepts. I can draw out from their implications, connections, consequences beyond your vision.

But it can also be said with humility: you are in some respects better than I am,
you are in some respects my master. But not in all.

'Acquaintance' is in this usage less familiar. I was struggling to find an equivalent for the Greek word 'empeiria'. This is the same word as our word 'empiric' and its family, but all our debates about empirical science have added complications to the simple Greek contrast between knowledge formally stated and communicable unambiguously in words and symbols, and the inarticulate knowledge of the experienced practitioner, the man who has his knowledge at his finger-tips, who can perceive and do but who cannot explain, excepting by inviting imitation, 'See, this is how I do it'.

There are good political scientists of whom one must say sadly he or she lacks imagination. There are others who can spin conceptual frameworks for any set of data; who do not lack imagination but have little sense of real situations, who cannot make a useful first guess as to what will work in explanation and prediction, or what is alien to the real world of politics.⁶

It would be unfair to pursue the point here by trying to point to cases of competent political scientists who lack imagination or lack acquaintance. My purpose is served if I can secure agreement that these two characters exist, that they are not easy to define, and that they are still more difficult to communicate as part of any formal programme of academic studies. At most I hope to extend the framework of discussion in an individual and personal way.

Thus I return to take up the previous thread of argument. In 1967 the sky fell in. Till then things had since World War II gone right, at least in Britain; poverty declined, production grew, the health and welfare system was stabilized, art and intellect grew in prestige and in impact. Greatest of all perhaps, we shook ourselves free from the bonds of the colonial system, which had humiliated both masters and servants, and we seemed to be advancing towards a free commonwealth more peacefully than might have been expected. True, there hung in the background the threats of nuclear war and of ecological disaster which haunted the science fiction of the time. But CND, the antinuclear movement of the 1950'5, faded into the background, perhaps because, as Harold Macmillan said in the election of 1959, 'We never had it so good'.

Exact dates and unconditional statements may be misleading. But there is no doubt — is there? — that things have gone wrong. No long explanation or commentary is needed, because certain words and phrases have become symbolic in all Western languages; should I say in all human languages? The madness of Vietnam, the madness of armed confrontation in Northern Ireland, the Czechoslovak Spring, the student movement of May 1968 in Paris, its collapse, the end of the dream of Israel as a shrine of humanity and civilisation,

the unchanging situation in South Africa (that negation of God),⁸ and in so much of Latin America. Perhaps most of all the nightmare of zero growth rate — the sense that there are good things which we know how to make, which we have the human and material sources to make, and yet which are denied us by our own incompetence and folly. These are things within the scope of political and social science, are they not? And yet as we press forward towards rational understanding our desired objectives slip further away from us into the mist. Or so it seems; it is no longer possible to say confidently to our young children that things will be better in the year 2000 or 2500 or 3000, and that our children's children will still have much to learn and to achieve in these days.

I state this as provocatively as I can to challenge a response. Perhaps this
vision is merely what beMls a man of 73, in any age of the world. Convince
me of that and I shall feel more cheerful.

My own reaction was perhaps the one most suitable to my age; I began to look backwards rather than forwards. I had been trained rigorously in an archaic tradition, one now so dead that it is hard to persuade the new generation that it was once the steel framework, the spinal column of European civilization. My own recollection is that I began Latin at the age of seven, Greek at the age of nine, that science and mathematics ceased at the age of fifteen, and that this strange education brought me success, security and an assured career by the age of twenty-two. The things that I was taught to do now astound me. Not that I did them well — to write Latin and Greek prose and poetry is a thing that no-one now can do well, but we did it, often against the grain, in that we knew that we should never be very good poets, even in our own language.

This system of education was valueless, even pernicious, in terms of language study (which I now regard as the queen of the social sciences), in that it was built axiomatically on Indo-European grammar, and above all on the concept of correctness. It was taken to be axiomatic that to be well-educated was to speak and write a language 'correctly', and that to be 'correct' was to obey authority. It was a very long time before I realised that this conception of grammar was at heart social and political, and that creative change depended on continual slight divergencies from orthodoxy. Imagination in the creation and use of language is both collective and gradual; enforced revolution in the life of language is not impossible, but it is a very rare limiting condition. 'Though language is in general ownership, its employment is always particular'.⁸ And so in politics, perhaps.

But these are reflections long after the event. In the climate of the 1930's it was psychologically impossible for an active young scholar to remain within the boundary of the classical tradition as taught in England. I tried various possible escape routes within the bounds of the discipline, such as archaeology,

linguistic change, the great religious movements of the early Christian era, but I found no leader, no creative guru — a matter of chance perhaps, because they did exist, and have transformed the character of classical studies. Other accidents turned me abruptly from classics to law and political science, and I have never regretted the change.

For some 25 years, interrupted by war service, I struggled to find light and order in these kindred disciplines. Anything that I wrote then was tentative and incidental, blown to and fro by circumstance, and so I came to Bergen at the end of 1965 to try to state coherently what I had learned in these years about the rational tradition in the study of politics, the tradition that the world, including the political world, is unbounded and yet comprehensible:

'that untravelled world, whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move.'9

Nevertheless, we move forward, in a direction chosen by our own volition. The twenty years since the end of World War II had been, to my mind, a great creative period in political and social science, so profligate in new ideas that I personally needed a pausing place and a new launching pad, and I hoped that this was a project useful to others as well as to myself.

In fact things worked out rather differently. In the late 1960's there came the great change of climate that I have described; the world must once again, as in the 1930'5, be seen as a troubled and savage place, in which horrible things might happen, and it could not this time be specified in terms of a military threat which might be met and defeated. There were indeed a polarization and an arms race, but we all knew in our hearts that the supposed enemies were all alike locked into a spiral not of defence but of selfdestruction.

Here I attempt to shift the argument into a different style, but without loss of
continuity.

When I was twelve, my grandmother McClymont, then 81, gave me, along with a couple of texts from the Psalms, a very nice copy of the Holy Bible, Revised Version, and her spoken comment was 'What you learn when you are young will come back to you when you are old, and will give you comfort'. I was reminded of this recently when I came on a recent book by a great literary critic, Northrop Frye with the title The Great Code: the Bible and Literature ⁰ His theme is that (in a phrase of William Blake) the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, constitutes 'The Great Code of Art'. In his own phrase, it is 'a single gigantic complex metaphor'. Northrop Frye is a Professor of literature, writing in terms of his own special interest, and it is obvious that until recently European art and literature, Protestant and Catholic alike,

were only intelligible in terms of a common education in a single book. This is most conspicuous, at least for students of history and politics, if one refers to the Hebrew books of mythology and history; all political discourse, including conspicuously that of Hegel and Marx, assumes that a very brief reference to a few words of the creation myth, of the story of Esau and Jacob, or to those of Samson, of Daniel, of David and Saul, and so on, is enough to conjure up in the minds of man a chain of images and arguments. These actors in European history might be quite simple men and women, they might be violently in dispute, their supposed knowledge of texts and facts might be all awry, nevertheless there was; a common territory of words and images within which they lived and within which they could be mutually intelligible, even across the barriers of languages.

To some extent, my grandmother's advice has come home to me, and I am more interested in the Old Testament now than I was then — partly because one is forced to read of the Old Israel in the context of the new Israel, and to pose modern questions of right and wrong in terms of Judaea and Samaria, Philistines and Amalekites, the unchanging political geography of the Near East. Northrop Frye believes that this common inheritance of codes and metaphors is wearing thin, that children no longer learn the Code, and that literature is therefore impoverished.

He may be right; I am not sure, and could summon up contrary examples by the score, from the contemporary politics of Europe, Africa, Latin America, territories not dominated by the other great metaphors of law and life, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese. I think I could argue a case that we are still People of the Book, even though we are no longer very regular in our religious observance.

But I do not think it can be denied that the other mythology, that of Greece and Rome, is fading away from us. It is now virtually unknown for a student to enter university in Britain with a reading knowledge of ancient Greek. The position of Latin is not much better, though it is sustained at a low level in Scotland by the existence of schools supported by the Catholic community, largely of Irish origin. I am rather proud that the Labour Leader of Glasgow City Council, Mrs Jean McFadden, has a first class degree in Latin from Glasgow University and still teaches Latin in a Catholic school.

Does it matter to political scientists and other social scientists that there has been this decline in our acquaintance with the pre-modern world? It would be hard to quantify, but probably there would be agreement that the Old Testament, the Greek and Latin Classics are fading from the consciousness of educated people. As you can imagine, I am tempted to refer also to the

saga-writers and to my old ally, Snorre Sturlason, to the Makars (the poets
of fourteenth and fifteenth century Scotland), to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans
as myth-makers. But there is no time.

I raise these diffuse questions because of my own experience of trying to write political science in the fierce years which succeeded the rational optimism of the 1950's and the debacle of 1967 and succeeding years. Probably my grandmother was right; one learns intensely only in the years of one's own intense growth, to the age of about twenty-five. I had been rather ashamed of my own education in dead languages and mythological history. But in face of new perplexities over the madness, the delirium of political behaviour on a world scale I began to find myself driven back upon my origins, in a strange craving for mythological explanation. The result was a book published in 1975 called Power Violence Decision¹¹ which I have been trying to clarify ever since. I tried then, as I see more clearly now, to juggle with three frameworks of explanation which at first sight and perhaps finally cannot be made to fit together.

The first of those was the attempt, an aspect of American empiricism and rationalism, to define and in the last resort to quantify the concept of power. In those days social scientists were emancipating themselves from the bonds of jurisprudence; if one shakes off the juridical concepts of sovereignty and supreme law then one must replace them as key concepts in political science by a frontal attack on the so-called problem of power. I respect that piece of American academic reasoning: what has political science to offer to social science if it cannot at least clarify the unsolved problems inherited from Thucydides, Plato, Tacitus, Machiavelli — who governs,¹² subject to what constraints? and how to be destroyed and replaced? I read widely about that excellently conducted American debate and tried to summarize it, but in the end I abandoned it not as wrong but as inadequate. I expressed its inadequacy by a quotation from our best writer of action stories, Eric Ambler: 'Power's a great thing you know. To be able to move and control great affairs ... that is the greatest of all pleasures. You feel it in the stomach ... Here, I feel it now.'¹³ That is to say, one cannot exhaust the meaning of the English word 'power' in behavioural terms; it is in one aspect a subjective word, and in another it is a relational word. It is about two people in inter-relation or a collectivity of people in inter-relation, and about the intricate web of sentiments which defines them as a human community and not as (shall we say) a data bank.

This feeling for the complexity of language threw me back incidentally to the problem of definition. The rational method implies — does it not? — stipulative definition, not necessarily in the form of mathematical symbols, but at least in a form sufficient to give us mastery over words as scientific tools. But this is not how I was taught to define and use words in Greek and

Latin and English. I have never gained adequate mastery of any European language except English, but I think I could still set an agenda for a debate about the usage and context of Greek and Latin words related to the English word 'power'. One's tools are partly 'acquaintance', a language user's feeling for usage, partly these marvellous tools of nineteenth century scholarship, the great dictionaries of usage and context.

This is a line of reasoning very familiar to students of language, but not (on the whole) to political scientists. It sets a problem analogous to that of early physiologists; one cannot study the creature without disturbing it, perhaps killing it. Technology has eased the probem, but it has not resolved it, even for biologists. Translation, it has been said, is necessary but impossible, an active language cannot be translated into stipulative and operational terms without loss of meaning. Now I must not allow myself to wander into the intolerable debate about 'the meaning of meaning', it is enough to say that there is an option open. It was a favourite trick of the Platonic Socrates to offer the option: 'shall we reason this out or shall I tell you a story?' And Athens in Plato's time was, it seems, a city of story-tellers. It had a rich stock of ancient mythological poetry summed up in the name of Homer; it had ancient shrines and rituals, each with its stories and its symbols. Above all, perhaps, it had its tragic dramatists, whose task was to simplify, modify and re-tell myths in competitive public performance. Plato's Socrates was offering to discuss moral problems in the manner of a tragic poet. He was very good at mythological explanation, so were the poets of Athenian tragedy.

There is another line of reasoning familiar to students of literature, not grasped by contemporary political scientists. And yet its appeal has continued, especially in time of emotional stress. In my book I gave a very superficial account of the political afterlife of Aeschylus's tragedy, Prometheus Bound, through the poet Shelley's rhapsodic poem of liberty, Prometheus Unbound, and his wife's powerful black invention of Frankenstein, A Modern Prometheus, to the new version of Aeschylus's play written for Harvard students to act by the Harvard poet, Robert Lowell, at an early decision point of the Vietnam war. Sartre and Camus knew the method very well, not simply as a device to evade censorship in time of tyranny but as a means of complex and powerful statement to a wide intellectual audience. In Britain the most influential political myth-makers of my generation have been George Orwell in Animal Farm and in 1984, and William Golding in Lord of the Flies. I am not altogether happy with their doctrines, but they are complex and powerful, and are now taught in schools alongside Shakespearian myth. Of course this line of speculation leads off into chat about vulgar and commercial myth, television, science fiction and comic books. This was a topic that fascinated George Orwell,¹⁴ who would probably have concurred with that very unsuccessful Scots politician, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, 'if a man were

permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws
of a nation.'15

So much for mythical explanation. It was Lloyd George, I think, who said that war is too serious a business to be left in the hands of soldiers. To my mind mythology is a subject which political scientists dare not leave to literary critics and to cultural anthropologists.

In my book I aligned mythological explanation, the Prometheus myth, with the section on Violence, thus leaving what was most difficult to the end. The word Decision challenges the word Power for primacy in the debate about the concerns of science and brings the issue to an acute point of focus. A decision is an act of choice, at least in the context of the present discussion. Modern historians, A.J.P. Taylor for instance, stress that chance has more influence than choice in the working of events, and that argument has a great emotional appeal to people of my generation and to the later generations of the 1970's and 1980's. Nevertheless the argument postulates that there is a true contrast between chance and choice. We may never attain to rational choice, either individually or collectively; nevertheless, it is a wished-for goal of the human spirit that we should collect information, muster arguments, then decide. We seek to move from a detailed acquaintance with relevant facts, through a sequence of reasoned steps, to decisions which have a real influence on events. Power according to this ideal is made effective, not by violence, but by decisions. There is a branch of mathematics known as decision theory; properly programmed machines can be powerful agents in directing rational choice, mechanically and electronically. Nevertheless, a decision by its nature places an individual face to face with the unique circumstances of unique human lives. We as political scientists are expected to cast light on the relation between the choices of individuals and the choices made by a community, and our professional commitment denies us the right to say that the task is an impossible one and should not be attempted.

Now I must attempt to clarify and summarize this lecture in which I have been deliberately personal and discursive rather than rigorous and professional. My first point was that when I came to work in Bergen in 19661 hoped to find, and I did find, a climate for hard intellectual work, based on the faith that the problems of the natural world must yield in the end, though perhaps not swiftly, to method and perseverance. In this sense the natural world includes the world of man, including his social and political world.

That ancient and simple faith has been severely shaken by the course of world events since 1967, and some friends have asked me if I now recant the rationailist and positivist approach to political science learnt in Manchester and Bergen and expressed in by book Politics and Social Science published in that year.

The answer is that I have recanted nothing and am strong in the faith; rational analysis is 'necessary', but I no longer believe that it is 'sufficient', in that it slips away from and does not face the subjective and individual character of political experience. Hence my attempt, not very successful, to supplement social science by the elements of mythological explanation and detailed first-hand experience. Given my original training, it was for me almost instinctive to take refuge in the society of the great myth-builders and imagemakers of Israel, Greece and Rome, and also to face up to the character of language itself. Language is in itself necessarily general, in that it is held in common by its users and it cannot without generality be a reliable means of communication between persons. But language is at the same time idiosyncratic; no two native speakers speak exactly alike. Common language is continually modified by individual usage, and subjective experience is brought into the common fund only through the individual use of language, including all its finer shades of accent, gesture and expression.

These two categories, that of mythological reference and individual personality, came sharply into focus during recent British experience in the South Atlantic. There was a sudden refreshment of the heroic myths of English and British history: Boadicea and the Romans, Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada, armed and isolated resistance to Napoleon and to Hitler. A load of rubbish, in the context of General Galtieri and his inadequate armed forces, and yet a political factor in changing the image of the Conservative Party. It had seemed to be spokesman of a minority of rich people, people alienated from tradition and speaking an Americanized language of economic calculation ¹⁶ now it began to speak with the voice of tradition, sacrifice and national unity.

All this could be illustrated and quantified fairly easily by the routines of content analysis. It is not so easy to grasp the war in terms of the subjective experience of individuals, from that of Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister (chemistry student and court-room lawyer, ferociously able in both capacities) down to the unlucky Chinese cooks and seamen who were caught up in the civilian ships commandeered for the occasion. This element of subjective experience was poorly conveyed, partly because of poor reporting and unimaginative presentation on television. But this is still within the scope of social and political science, and demands all three tactics, imagination, precision and methodical analysis.

In conclusion, I have perhaps two things to say for the future, in memory

of Stein. The first is that I fear impoverishment of our resources for understanding and communication, as our common memories of the resources of the ancient world, in language and story-telling, are dying. The languages, once the common property of all Western elites, are now no more than academic specialisms, and the ancient myths are things diffused in a wide range of language not mutually comprehensible.

Probably I underrate the myth-making capacity of mankind; certainly the young hunger for mythology, in music and dancing, in the search for what is to be learnt from strange cults, and they are quite shrewd in their selfdefence against the commercial astuteness of media men.

My last point is that to my mind political science among the social sciences has a special obligation to listen to the many voices in the conversation of mankind.¹⁷ It may be true that poets and novelists have little to say to economists and statisticians, but they have much to say to political scientists, and we dare not let ourselves be isolated, either by arbitrary academic barriers or by the changing character of social and aesthetic culture. We must not lose touch.

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NOTES

1. Homer: Iliad, Book 3, from lines 191-224: adapted from the translation by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, Ernst Myers, London, Macmillan, 1923.

2. Essays in Memory of Peter Nettl, edited by T.J. Nossiter, A.H. Hanson and Stein Rokkan. London, Faber, 1972.

3. Homer: Iliad, Book 17, line 647.

4. According to Liddell and Scott's dictionary, there is no evidence for this till 1000 years after Plato: but Aristotle did use the word, 'Ageometretos'.

5. English translation by F.E. Garrett, p. 223 of Dent's Everyman edition, 1917.

6. An allusion to C.B. Macpherson: The Real World of Democracy. London, Oxford University Press 1972.

7. Gladstone on the Bourbon regime in the kingdom of Naples, 1851: 'This is the negation of God erected into a system of Government'.

8. Robert Robinson, quoted in The Listener, June 3rd, 1982, p. 15.

9. Tennyson: Ulysses, 1.19.

10. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

11. London, Penguin, 1975.

12. Robert A. Dahl: Who Governs. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961.

13. Eric Ambler: Judgment of Deltchev. Fontana Books, 1966, p. 177.

14. For example, see the reference to his essay of 1944: 'Raffles and Miss Blandish', p. 468 of Bernard Crick: George Orwell, A Life. London, Penguin, 1980.

15. David Daiches, ed. Selected Political Writings and Speeches, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1979, p. 108. It is clear from the context that Fletcher meant disreputable street ballads, pop songs, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley.

16. 'But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.' Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolutions in France, 1790.

17. 'The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind' in Michael Oakshott: Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, London, Methuen, 1962, p. 197.