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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
That politics should not be a matter either of impulse and whim or of pure ratiocination, hardly anyone will dispute. But there is no settled agreement on the precise role that reason should play in political decisions. Disagreement is aggravated because those who have written on the question usually intended to correct some prevalent error and in their fervor have often fostered other, equally pernicious, errors. As a result, discussion about the nature of political reasoning has tended to oscillate between extreme positions that hardly anyone would uphold consistently. This tendency is illustrated once again in the recent attacks on Rationalism, where the authors, in criticizing the Rationalist misuse of reason, seem to identify all abstract reasoning with Rationalism and appear to distrust all general principles.
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