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THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS HAVE PASSED WITH SURPRISING speed. They have certainly fulfilled the imperatives of the curse: ‘may you live in interesting times!’. Too much has happened in too many places – on the moon as well as on earth. New movements, new ideas, new cults have emerged. Populations have multiplied and so have inventions. New centres of learning have been established and old ones have been subverted, not least by an overdose of political zeal. The sciences of man have developed – more painfully than was hoped and with fewer concrete results than was (and is) desired. I think we have learned that our efforts to understand complex social and political structures (including those constituted by governments and oppositions) may themselves founder (or flounder) in complexities. Some of those complexities are endemic to the subject of our study; others are the result of our own confusion of categories or of premature conceptualization; others result from overspecialization – and others from the hazards of cross-disciplinary study. Perhaps the cardinal error has been to seek too much – and expect too much – from a narrowly ‘scientific’ approach. We all know of cases on the heads of which one or other of these caps can fit.
1 By the same token I remain wary of Eurocommunism, or the Euroleft as it has lately come to be styled. Given the record of duplicity and opportunism that marks the history of Europe’s Communist Parties, who can be sure about their concessions to the procedures of liberal democracy? Are the ‘historic’ compromises any more than tactical shifts? I am glad that I do not live in countries where I would have to answer such questions. This is one more reason for my profound alienation from British Labour politics. Important groups within the British Labour movement keep an open line to the Euroleft: most of the old taboos on such social democratic contacts with Communist Parties have lost their force.
2 I devoted much attention to this and related visions in my Comte Memorial Lecture The Rational Society (1971).
3 Ibid., p. 12.
4 In Hirsch, F. and Goldthorpe, J. H., The Political Economy of Inflation, London, 1978.Google Scholar