THIS THOUGHT-PROVOKING SYMPOSIUM ORIGINATED IN A small conference organized at the London School of Economics by Government and Opposition and the papers printed here have been revised — in many cases extensively — by their authors in the light of the discussion there. With a single exception (Sir Arthur Knight) all the contributors are members of the Editorial Board or the Advisory Board of Government and Opposition, and the idea for the symposium was first put forward by one of the Editors, Professor Isabel de Madariaga.

The central issue addressed in the symposium is the adequacy or otherwise of the sciences, natural and social, in providing the information required by people in various capacities — as citizens, business leaders, politicians, judges, and so on — if they are to act intelligently.

MY SENSE OF OUR TIME IS OF A GROWING GAP BETWEEN THE good society that we seek and the ways and means of achieving it. As I have put it,

And my conclusion repeats: ‘We are . . . living above and beyond our intelligence, above our grasp of what we are doing. The more we engage in remaking the body politic, the more I am struck by the uneasy feeling that we are apprentice sorcerers’.

THIS ARTICLE USES THE CONCEPT OF ‘UNDERCOMPREHENSION’ to review some of the principal features of the European experience during the years from c. 1910 to c. 1920. It does so in the belief that this is a decade during which the sort of frailties of judgment signalled by that term were singularly catastrophic in their effects; and it reminds us that the year in which we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War is also the one in which we mark the 50th anniversary of the start of a second huge conflict whose causes are themselves rooted in the circumstances of the first. Reference to such an historical case-study can be particularly valuable insofar as the privilege of hindsight allows us not just to consider the nature of the challenges to political comprehension and action which manifested themselves at that epoch, but also to gauge (as we cannot yet do properly for our own age) the quality and outcome of the responses then elicited from statesmen, experts, or citizens.

THE THEME I PROPOSE TO TREAT HERE RUNS LIKE A PARALLEL tributary to the mainstream of Giovanni Sartori's theme: ‘We are living above and beyond our intelligence’. But while Sartori concentrates his attention on the pros and cons of ‘political engineering’ in the modern society, its feasibility and cost benefits, I concentrate on the question which can be summarily formulated as follows: ‘can modern political judgment itself, i.e. before it sets political engineering, or indeed policy-making, in motion, comprehend (in the double meaning of the expression) the issues upon which it should be exerted in their individual esotericism and in their collective array?’ But before starting to examine this question, I must make a few caveats.

SARTORI'S COMMENT THAT UNDERCOMPREHENSION APPLIES to the engineering of history provides a starting point for these reflections since those words suggest three familiar ideas — purpose, thought and action — as do also other expressions he uses: ‘our cognitive control of ourselves’, ‘the shaping of societies and polities’, and a ‘policy enactment which amounted to little else than allowing markets to blossom’. Purpose, thought and action can be seen as aspects of management, at least in the context of this discussion and provided it is clear that decisions not to act can often be a form of management; so can we justify equating undercomprehension with unmanageability.

Purposes with varying degrees of compatibility are pursued and both cooperation and conflict characterize the pursuit; instruments are required for planning, for conflict resolution and for damage limitation.

WHEN THE ARGUMENT FOR THE UTILIZATION OF THE RESULTS of scientific knowledge for the improvement of human life was first laid out, it was thought that the state would be a major promoter or patron of such research by encouragement, financial assistance and institutional aid. It was not anticipated that the state needed the advancement of scientific knowledge for the enhancement of its own powers, apart from that enhancement which resulted from the increased wealth furthered by scientific knowledge and its enhanced military power. At the end of nearly four centuries of development of opinion on this subject, government has come to be not only the major patron but also one of the major users of scientific knowledge for its own activities.

IT IS THE BURDEN OF CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE AND technology to produce change at a rate, and of a scale and character, which is genuinely without precedent. Science and technology have between them made the world a smaller and inescapably interdependent place, and as catalysts and instruments of change they are far from finished yet. In fact, the introduction into industrial societies of systematic research, development and innovation, as contrasted with the more or less serendipitous activity of invention, bids fair to being one of the few major benchmarks of history. It is also a benchmark to which political systems, and above all the international system (if one may so dignify what is still in many respects a rag-bag) have still fully to accommodate themselves.

IT WAS MACHIAVELLI, THE FIRST MODERN POLITICAL THINKER, who distinguished between two kinds of problem a prince might have to face. The first sort was easy to cure but difficult to recognise, the second easy to recognise but very hard to cure. The key to successful management of a state was thus the prescience to recognise problems early on, and the will to take the necessary action.

Five centuries later, the basic situation remains the same, but the terms have changed. First, whereas a prince merely took advice from a few counsellors, the contemporary ruler is at the centre of a complex network of committees which act, so to speak, as his channel of cognition. Such channels can get blocked. The effectiveness of governments thus depends on how successful experts are in translating their reports on new developments into terms which can serve the cause of wise political action.

ALTHOUGH THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE WAS AT the centre of classical political thought it has been only intermittently addressed in more recent theoretical writings. To the degree that modern political writing has concerned itself with the question of the kind of knowledge appropriate and possible in politics, it has focused on the capacity of core decision-makers to absorb and assess the information presented to them by experts.

I HAD THE PRIVILEGElTASK OF ‘CONCLUDING’ THE CONFERENCE at which the articles in this issue of Government and Opposition were originally presented. Now, as then, I can take up only a few of the central issues within the presentations and discussions. My comments seek to underscore the great range of ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ questions which the authors address. These include, obviously enough, the nature of knowledge in the social sciences, with the word ‘sciences’ being broadly interpreted -not in any narrow, behavioural sense: the way periods of confidence in such knowledge fostered, and have been fostered by, the perspectives of social democracy: how such confidence has waxed and waned in recent years: how political actors act, even have to act, in advance of data: how modern politics is aided or hindered by the pressures that come from sectional interests — which must now be taken to include the ‘media’ and those who work in or near the ‘think-tanks’ that have proliferated in the last two decades. I do not attempt the impossible — namely any detailed exegesis of all the rich and varied topics that emerged.