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The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.

Bernard Crick

Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.
BERNARD CRICK

Demand Fundamentals Problem
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.
BERNARD CRICK

Doctrine Political Politics Problem
BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.
BERNARD CRICK

Boredom Enemy Men
Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence…politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.
BERNARD CRICK

Evil Political Politics
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

Demand Guarantees Political
The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.
BERNARD CRICK

Character Lying Unique
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.
BERNARD CRICK

Acting Matter Men What
If, of course, one builds into the concept of an ‘individual’ all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom.
BERNARD CRICK

Builds Men Order Professor
Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
BERNARD CRICK

Ideas Simple Technology
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.
BERNARD CRICK

Giving Order Real
To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.
BERNARD CRICK

Derivatives Doctrine Social
Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.
BERNARD CRICK

Chaos Conservatives Men Order
Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.
BERNARD CRICK

Autocracy Totalitarianism
Politics 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.
BERNARD CRICK

Character Poor Relation
The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself.
BERNARD CRICK

Political Politics Together
There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.
BERNARD CRICK

Certainty Danger Desire

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 agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.

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