The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics. By John Dunn. New York: Basic Books, 2000. 401p. $20.00.

Extract

If I had to talk about this book to my students, I would begin by describing its cover. The image of the upside down Capitol with the cupola hanging over the key word of the title (Cunning) invites the reader to peruse this fascinating and melancholic book as a species of inverted Hegelianism. This is a book about regret. It regrets what seems out of reach—politics as “something … uniquely courageous, direct, and even potentially effective in its assault on the misery and injustice of the great bulk of collective human life” (pp. ix–x). Its perspective is realistic but contains a glimmer of hope. Dunn's realism is ateleological and open to a moderate voluntarism; it conveys a disillusioned pessimism along with the belief that our politics can be less corrupt and cynical. Hope counterbalances the inexorable fatalism of reason. Its source is acceptance of the limits of human rationality, an endogenous fact unamendable to History's infallibility. Hope is the daughter of judgmental fallibility, the hunch that there is “room for maneuver” (pp. 347–8).