Snippets

1. Policy Analysis

Paul Cairney is one of these rare academics who writes well. He has had a policy analysis blog for 12 years which is simply the most comprehensive on the subject there is  He makes the topic as interesting as it actually ought to be.

His latest post refers to an article he’s just written about Covid 19 and health policy-making. I was impressed that, after the obligatory “abstract”, the article was preceded by a “Plain Language Summary” which I understand is a feature of at least this Open Research Europe site. And I also liked that he had teamed up with health and political science academics in at least one foreign university apart from his own, Stirling University.

I should at this stage confess that I was a graduate from one of the first (part-time) Policy Analysis courses run in Britain in the mid 1980s by Lewis Gunn of Strathclyde University – with the emphasis on the rationalistic side of things being challenged by the likes of Charles Lindblom. And I still vividly remember the first time “frame analysis” was presented to us.

But this did not prevent me from presenting an overly rationalistic “stage-approach” when, in 2002, I drafted a Manual for senior Slovak Civil Servants…. If only I had known that, by then, Deborah Stone’s Policy Paradox – the art of political decision-making was into at least its second edition! It remains for me the best read on the subject…although if it's a manual people are looking for Eugene Bardach's Practical Guide for Policy Analysis (2015) is an excellent intro

 

2. Eric Hobsbawm – a Life

Eric Hobsbawm was a brilliant British historian who lived to a grand old age and left us definitive and superbly-written histories of our age which you can access on this post of mine. There’s a nice 1995 profile of him here.

LRB commissioned an hour-long documentary on him which you can view here

3. Leading Questions

Dave Pollard is one of the few bloggers whose posts I generally read in full – always thoughtful, generally provocative. His latest post is typical - professing lack of interest in what people had to say about themselves in CVs or expressions of future hopes – but preferring rather to suggest…… 

six “leading questions” that might evoke some kind of useful sense of who someone is and what they care about - and possibly assess whether the person you’re talking with might be the potential brilliant colleague, life partner, inspiring mentor or new best friend you’ve been looking for. These are the questions:

1.      What adjectives or nouns would you use to describe yourself that differentiate you from most other people? When and how did these words come to apply to you?

2.     Describe the most fulfilling day you can imagine, some day that might realistically occur in the next year. Why would it be fulfilling? What are you doing now that might increase its likelihood of happening?

3.     What do you care about, big picture, right now? What would you mourn if it disappeared? What do you ache to have in your life? What would you work really long and hard to conserve or achieve? How did you come to care about this?

4.     What is your purpose, right now? Not your role or occupation, but the thing you’re uniquely gifted and inspired to be doing, something the world needs. What would elate you if you achieved it, today, this month, in the next year? What would devastate you if you failed, or didn’t get to try? How did this become your purpose?

5.     What’s your basic belief about why you, and other humans, exist? Not what you believe is right or important (or what you, or humans ‘should’ do or be), but why you think we are the way we are now, and why you think we evolved to be where we are. It’s an existential question, not a moral one. How did you come to this belief?

6.     What’s your basic sense of what the next century holds for our planet and our civilization? How do you imagine yourself coping with it? How did you come to this belief?

These are not easy questions, and asking them might prove intimidating or even threatening to some people, which is why in the last post I suggested volunteering your own answer to each question yourself first, in a form such as “Someone asked me the other day… and I told them…”. It’s also why there are supplementary questions to each, to get the person you’re asking started. And the last supplementary question in each group lends itself to telling a story, since that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Even then, some of these questions will stop many people cold, which might tell you something about them right there.

 

4. Britain - and its Union

Peter Oborne may be a right-wing British journalist but he is certainly not typical in his readiness to attack the myths of so many of his ilk – particularly the country’s highly elitist system of power. I have been a great fan of his Triumph of the Political Class since it came out almost a decade ago.  

When therefore he sticks it not only to Boris Johnson and Donald Trump but to the enture media class, you can rest assured you’re in for a great read. And so it is with his Assault on Truth – Johnson, trump and the emergence of a new moral barbarism (2021) which is in epub format.

It’s on Johnson’s watch that the collapse of the so-called UK is becoming final - as this paper from the neutral Constitution Society demonstrates - Britain at the Crossroads - can the British State handle the challenges of devolution?

Controlling the Masses

Second-hand bookshops do not get enough credit – first for their shelter from the juggernaut marketing of fashionable titles and then with the delight of a text found which has languished unappreciated after a decade or so…..

Two titles caught my eye this week in a new downtown outlet opposite Bucuresti University – the first Who Runs this place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21^st Century (2004) was the final contribution of a famous journalist, Anthony Sampson, who was of south African origin and had started in 1962 what became a series of efforts to capture the anatomy of the UK power structure. ….Extracts can be read here. Sampson himself became so ensconced in his role as voyeur that he almost became one of the institutions of which he wrote – as can be seen in this tribute. New Labour was half-way through its 13 years as he was drafting the book and the impact of its media manipulation was already in evidence. But a quick skim suggested that it might suffer from being a tad incestuous – with the references consisting of either newspaper articles or political biographies. Not a solitary academic reference

The Triumph of the Political Class by journalist Peter Oborne (2007)  was the other (smaller) bargain which I swept up – first read and blogged about in 2014. It has a much more powerful tale to tell - of the destruction by Thatcher in the 1980s of the traditional power of trade unions, universities, local government, the judiciary and the civil service. And of the huge rise under Blair et al since 1997 of the power of the political class and media – and the further emasculation of parliament, the Cabinet and the civil service. Interestingly, he coins the phrase “manipulative populism” – and identifies the significance of Peter Mair’s writing to the fate of the Western political party

The nature and location of power fascinated me from an early age – I had studied Elite theorists in the early 1960s on my political sociology course at University. Although Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) and Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) had led the way, it was Robert Michels’ (1876-1936) Political Parties (1911) which made the lasting impression on me - with his close study of trade unionists and social democrat politicians and derivation of “the iron law of oligarchy”.

For more than a century, one of the central issues of our time has been that of how “the masses” might be “controlled” in an age of democracy….These authors, thoroughly “Real” in their “Politik”, hardly suggested that the political and commercial elites had much to worry about – but this did not prevent writers such as Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion 1922) and Ortego y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses 1930) from conjuring up frightening narratives about the dangers of the great unwashed masses. Lippmann’s full book can be read here…

The scintillating prose of Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was also a favourite of mine – with his theory of the “circulation of the elites” reassuring the elites that all would be well….

But the populism evident since the start of the new millennium has sparked new anxieties on this count amongst the liberal elites – and indeed raised the question anew as to whether capitalism is consistent with democracy…

One guy whose words are worth reading on that question is SM Wolin – whose book on the history of political thought - Politics and Vision - held me spellbound in the 1960s. In his 90s he produced this great critique of the US system – Democracy Inc – managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (2008) – reviewed here. And this is an interesting recent article, Why Elites always Rule which reminds the new generation of the significance of Pareto’s work…..

Since starting this post, I’ve noticed quite a few new books on this topic and will do an annotated reading list shortly of the dozen or so more interesting of these….