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 CRICKIf, of course, one builds into the concept of an ‘individual’ all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom.
More Bernard Crick Quotes
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Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence…politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.
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In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of ‘reason’ as single sources of authority.
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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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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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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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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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The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.
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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 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.
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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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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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Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.
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Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.
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Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laisser-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance.
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Free men stick their necks out.
BERNARD CRICK