In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of ‘reason’ as single sources of authority.
BERNARD CRICKPolitics is too often regarded as a poor relation, inherently dependent and subsidiary; it is rarely praised as something with a life and character of its own.
More Bernard Crick Quotes
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Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.
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The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself.
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The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.
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The political process is not tied to any particular doctrine. Genuine political doctrines, rather, are the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to this perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation.
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Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupation of free men, and its existence is a test of freedom. The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.
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If a government is to do great new things, it will need more support. If a government is to change the world, it will need mass support. This is one of the discoveries of modern government.
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Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.
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BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.
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Since the business of politics is the conciliation of differing interests, justice must not merely be done, but to be seen to be done.
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To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.
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One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from the ‘inner contradictions’ of such a system.
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What matters in Politics is what men actually do – sincerity is no excuse for acting unpolitically, and insincerity may be channelled by politics into good results.
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Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
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Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.
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Politics are, as it were, the market place and the price mechanism of all social demands – though there is no guarantee that a just price will be struck; and there is nothing spontaneous about politics- it depends on deliberate and continuous activity.
BERNARD CRICK