Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PROLOGUE: The governing science: things political and the intellectual historian
- I The system of the North: Dugald Stewart and his pupils
- II Higher maxims: happiness versus wealth in Malthus and Ricardo
- III The cause of good government: Philosophic Whigs versus Philosophic Radicals
- IV The tendencies of things: John Stuart Mill and the philosophic method
- V Sense and circumstances: Bagehot and the nature of political understanding
- VI All that glitters: political science and the lessons of history
- VII The clue to the maze: the appeal of the Comparative Method
- VIII Particular polities: political economy and the historical method
- IX The ordinary experience of civilised life: Sidgwick and the method of reflective analysis
- X A separate science: polity and society in Marshall's economics
- XI A place in the syllabus: political science at Cambridge
- EPILOGUE: A nebulous province: the science of politics in the early twentieth century
- Index
EPILOGUE: A nebulous province: the science of politics in the early twentieth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PROLOGUE: The governing science: things political and the intellectual historian
- I The system of the North: Dugald Stewart and his pupils
- II Higher maxims: happiness versus wealth in Malthus and Ricardo
- III The cause of good government: Philosophic Whigs versus Philosophic Radicals
- IV The tendencies of things: John Stuart Mill and the philosophic method
- V Sense and circumstances: Bagehot and the nature of political understanding
- VI All that glitters: political science and the lessons of history
- VII The clue to the maze: the appeal of the Comparative Method
- VIII Particular polities: political economy and the historical method
- IX The ordinary experience of civilised life: Sidgwick and the method of reflective analysis
- X A separate science: polity and society in Marshall's economics
- XI A place in the syllabus: political science at Cambridge
- EPILOGUE: A nebulous province: the science of politics in the early twentieth century
- Index
Summary
The study of politics is just now in a curiously unsatisfactory condition.
graham wallas, Human Nature in Politics (1908)although the opening sentence of Graham Wallas's Human Nature in Politics has been frequently cited, it could hardly be said that those who have used it for their own purposes have displayed any clear sense, or indeed much curiosity, about what its author meant by it. There is, of course, no dispute that what he had in mind, generally speaking, was the need, in attempting to understand the realities of democratic political behaviour, to take account of the non-rational and irrational springs of human action, especially as revealed by post-Darwinian psychology; and it was the failure of his predecessors to attend to this dimension which made their treatment of the subject unsatisfactory. Still, what, in any more precise terms, he thought constituted the study of politics at that date remains to be specified. Again, the answer in general terms might seem too obvious to need stating. His book is notoriously a criticism of the intellectualism of nineteenth-century English political theory, the chief example of which is always taken to be Benthamite Utilitarianism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- That Noble Science of PoliticsA Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History, pp. 365 - 378Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983