From Alien Powers (Kenneth Minogue, 1985) pp17-9
Political argument is, then, hopelessly unscientific both because it rests upon shifting judgments, and also because we are essentially ignorant of many important considerations. The most useful thing would be knowledge of the future, and this has always been the great dream of the human race. The Greeks used oracles and we use social scientists in trying to achieve some helpful foreknowledge, but no real solution has ever been forthcoming. But even this dream of a crystal ball is, when more deeply considered, no more than a technological swindle, because it would not solve the problem of how we are to construe the events of the future. The difficulty becomes obvious when we seek to construe the events of the past. We do not cease from arguing about such questions as the wisdom of investing so much blood in the First World War, or whether a stronger stand by Britain and France in 1938 would have prevented war in 1939. and our judgments are no more conclusive about the past than they are about the future. The problem is in part one of validating counterfactuals, and it reveals that the problem of politics is only partly a problem of uncertainty about the future turn of events. It is also a problem of logically incompatible values, as they appear in the changing dispositions of all the actors involved. And in the process of deliberation on this rickety logical foundation, decisions must be made determining whether thousands may live or die. The outcome might depend upon nothing more important than shift of mood, a clever intervention here, a little flattery or an issue fudged there. The solemnity of public ritual invests statesmen with a gravity remote from the uncertainty of ordinary life, and the Churches emphasize that nothing better can be expected from fallen man, but it seemed clear to many educated men in the nineteenth century that the process of public decision-making was in little better shape than transport had been about the time when the wheel was invented.
Our problem now becomes: in what way might the discovery of undesigned patterns in human affairs come to be seen as a solution to what we may call the problem of politics? The answer is that, seen in the right way, the discovery reveals that the entire problem of politics results from looking at human affairs through the wrong end of the telescope. Thucidides took as fundamental, in his account of Cleon, Diodotus and the rest, their purposes and intentions, and his story inevitably became an account of how the whole thing went wrong. For such was the inevitable fate of human endeavour. The general form of the mistake was logically built into all forms of understanding (such as history and political thought) which descended from the classical art of rhetoric, for rhetoric begins with the practical (and Chaney) business of persuading other men. Machiavelli had been forced to recognize that fortuna could render the designs of the most talented statesmen entirely nugatory: no peak of virtu could in the end stand against it. But now, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was beginning to dawn upon various people that the problem of politics in both its practical and its theoretical forms might be solved by a new understanding which began not with the intentions, but with the results. For the first time, but not for the last, politics sought salvation by following in the wake of economics. For what the economist seemed to have discovered was marvellously independent of the thoughts men entertained. If famine came, the price of food would certainly rise, and it did not matter whether the economist had to deal with Hindu or Muslim, with republican or monarchist. Adam Smith had made it evident that men lived, without being aware of it, within an investigable structure which came in time to be called the economic system. It was tempting to think that the next move was to discover the wider system which might be presumed to determine political life.
The intellectual history of this development is enormously complex, and it is not my purpose to attempt to relate it. Rather, like a tourist guide who supplies un peu d’histoire before getting down to the business of explaining and describing some cultural monument, my concern is merely to set up a few temporal markers that will serve to show how the inertly static thing I wish to analyse came into being. And even that must be done by rational reconstruction rather than by genuine historical narrative. But it is worth noting briefly that several features of the intellectual climate of the early nineteenth century greatly facilitated the emergence of ideology.
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