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Too Much or Too Little Knowledge?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
I HAD THE PRIVILEGElTASK OF ‘CONCLUDING’ THE CONFERENCE at which the articles in this issue of Government and Opposition were originally presented. Now, as then, I can take up only a few of the central issues within the presentations and discussions. My comments seek to underscore the great range of ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ questions which the authors address. These include, obviously enough, the nature of knowledge in the social sciences, with the word ‘sciences’ being broadly interpreted -not in any narrow, behavioural sense: the way periods of confidence in such knowledge fostered, and have been fostered by, the perspectives of social democracy: how such confidence has waxed and waned in recent years: how political actors act, even have to act, in advance of data: how modern politics is aided or hindered by the pressures that come from sectional interests — which must now be taken to include the ‘media’ and those who work in or near the ‘think-tanks’ that have proliferated in the last two decades. I do not attempt the impossible — namely any detailed exegesis of all the rich and varied topics that emerged.
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References
1 The fruitful errors of one of the ‘founding fathers’ of modern social thought are carefully discussed in Ghiia Ionescu’s introduction to his edition of The Political Thought of Saint‐Simon, Oxford University Press, 1976. I take up some of them in their modern context in my Auguste Comte Lecture, The Rational Society, London, The Athlone Press, 1970.
2 Francis Sweeney, S. J. (ed.), The Knowledge Explosion—Liberation and Limitation, Farrar, 1966.Google Scholar
3 See Gerth, H. and Mills, C. W. (eds), From Max Weber, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1947, p. 224.Google Scholar
4 No statement of these issues is final—but the timid in search of the definitive should examine Runciman, W. G., A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. I, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983 Google Scholar. See also the trenchant analysis in Flew, A., Thinking About Social Thinking, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985.Google Scholar
5 See Vaizey, J., In Breach of Promise, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983 Google Scholar; also my article ‘State and Society in Britain’ in Survey, Winter 1982, which explores in some detail Vaizey’s earlier Capitalism and Socialism, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.