What is Political Thought Thinking of Now? ‐ Reading Notes 1964–1980-

Extract

AS I LOOKED AT MY READING NOTES IN ORDER TO RETRACE the evolution of my thought on politics in general, and political thought in particular, over the last two decades or so, I found that my present concern with the reality of modern political thought could be progressively detected in those notes as from 1964. The rest and the bulk of the notes converge in three main themes: my first books on comparative communist politics, my interest in the development of the modern science of politics, and the incessant (pace Tocqueville) reflections on how to reconcile, in logic and in ethics, the variances between the quest for social justice and of that for political freedom in an advanced industrial society. But the post-1964 notes show now, more than I remembered, my early uneasiness about two, albeit different, orientations of modern political thought, or at least of its most popular schools. From one point of view, I felt that we were increasingly estranging ourselves from the existential reality of man. From another, I feared that our present methods of political analysis blur, rather than focus on, the distinctiveness of the politics of the modern industrial society.

These notes, even trimmed and edited, inevitably form an amalgam of impressions, jotted down in a kind of intellectual shorthand, and insufficiently expounded. But as our contributions to this special issue are in the nature of a backward glance, I submit them as they are.