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.

REALITY IS UNTIDY AND WE SHOULD THANK OUR LUCKY stars for the fact. Liberty thrives on (and in) interstices. The reality of Hayek's world would be no less unbearable than that of Marx's. There is in fact no capitalist society, nor is there a socialist one. All variants of really existing capitalism — and socialism — are mixtures of both, and those which have come closest to the concepts were also the least attractive. The first question to address to any real society is therefore not whether it can be labelled this way or that, but what is the peculiar blend of ingredients which makes it tick.

THIS ARTICLE' PUTS FORWARD SOME GENERAL reflections on the Single European Act, on the conditions in which it was negotiated and on its first consequences. But a detailed description of the modalities of the Single Act, of the entire range of changes which it will introduce and of its potential would be beyond its scope. The Single Act has been extremely controversial, during its negotiation, after its conclusion, and for different reasons, during the ratification process. Some decried it as inadequate, even derisory, but others saw in it a threat to national sovereignty. Two referendums (in Denmark and in Ireland) were needed before it could be ratified. Today, on the contrary, the Single Act and its best-known feature — the achievement of the internal market in the Community by the end of 1992 — are presented in the media as the basis of a new Europe, the foundation of all European policy. The Single European Act does not deserve so much honour, any more than it deserved the past indignity, but it contains important innovations, which might lead to significant changes in the behaviour of the institutions and in the way in which the Community itself will develop. This is what I shall try to put forward by recalling briefly first the background of the Single Act, describing the details of the negotiations and, lastly, by singling out some of the original features of the new Treaty.

I SHOULD LIKE TO START WITH AN EXTREMELY SIMPLE STATEment about the French Revolution. This is that there are many historical arguments among historians on many subjects, but that none of these arguments is so intense and so heated as the one which takes place in every generation about the French Revolution. It is as though the historical interpretation of this particular subject and the arguments of specialists directly reflect the political struggles and the gamble for power. It is true that we are all aware today that there are no unbiased historical interpretations: the selection of facts which provide the raw material for the historian's work is already the result of a choice, even although that choice is not an explicit one. To some extent, history is always the result of a relationship between the present and the past and more specifically between the characteristics of an individual and the vast realm of his possible roots in the past. But, nevertheless, even within this relative framework, not all the themes of history are equally relevant to the present interests of the historian and to the passions of his public.

WHAT IS RESEARCH IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES FOR? SHOULD (much of) it be financed by the state? How should it be organized? Where should it take place? In the United Kingdom, these questions thud down each morning on the desk of the Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council, which now has a new home (in Swindon, with its big sister Research Councils) and a new Chairman, Professor Howard Newby. Six years, and more than one chairman, have come and gone since I sat at that desk; I have a short memory, and a full recognition of the duty of a retired bureaucrat — ‘get out, and shut up’. I am not willing or able to bore readers with a description or a critique of recent policies. But my present function gives me a new standpoint; things look different from Strasbourg, and an international perspective helps; above all, my responsibilities now spread widely (although jolly thinly) over the whole range of learning, scholarship, and science. So these are home thoughts from abroad.

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’.

IT IS NOW OFTEN SAID THAT THE MODERN WORLD IS interdependent, that there is an intensive interaction of military, political, economic and other factors in the world. There is no doubt that one of the most important aspects of this interaction process is the international flow of information, and that political ideas have a special place in that exchange of information.

What follows is an attempt to look at some phases in the development of the Soviet perception of Western non-socialist political ideas over the past few years. As is generally known, Soviet ideologists have often emphasized the need for ideological struggle against these non-Marxist, bourgeois political ideas, and they continue to do this even in the present period of perestroika. At the same time it is obvious that major changes are taking place in Soviet political thought.

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 ELECTION OF GEORGE BUSH TO THE PRESIDENCY IN 1988 was a triumph for Ronald Reagan. The margin of victory was substantial (54 per cent to Bush over 46 per cent to Michael Dukakis in the popular vote) — though not of Reaganesque proportions. But then the master might not wish his apprentice to do as well as himself. Reagan has not only brought peace and prosperity in his own terms while in office, but also has succeeded in leaving a legacy. And the legacy is not only in the political changes he instituted but partly in the person of his immediate successor, the first vicepresident to succeed as president by election since Martin Van Buren in 1837.

IN A BRILLIANT ARTICLE, FERDINAND MOUNT RECENTLY drew up a balance sheet of the ‘Thatcher decade’ in which he attempted to discern the laws governing political longevity. Now, when he looks at various politicians who are or were remarkable in their capacity for survival, it is striking that he does not so much as mention the head of a neighbouring country, an almost exact contemporary of Mrs Thatcher, since Franpis Mitterrand has been President of the French Republic since 1981 and should, in principle, remain president until 1995. This no doubt is because, in the eyes of F. Mount, Mitterrand's longevity is of a different nature from that of Mrs Thatcher and is far less politically instructive.

COMPARED TO OTHER COMMUNIST STATES IN EAST-CENTRAL Europe, Romania offers a fascinating case of neo-Stalinist radicalism cloaked in nationalistic language. A hyper-centralized model of leadership, based on clan instead of party dictatorship, an obedient, corrupt and strikingly incompetent political class, a marked preference for coercive rather than persuasive methods of domination, and stubborn opposition to reforms have contributed to the development of a deep and potentially explosive social, political, and economic crisis. But the price for this unabated commitment to the Stalinist model has been a gradual institutional erosion, the growing deterioration of the social fabric, the heightening of economic tensions, and intellectual asphyxiation. The conflict between state and society has been exacerbated by president Nicolae CeauSescu's wilful and increasingly idiosyncratic behaviour.

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.

MUCH OF OUR RHETORIC IS, TODAY, GLOBALISTIC. THE STATE unit, we say, is obsolete, and we are moving toward a global market with fewer and fewer frontiers. Concurrently our minds are opening themselves to a broader world, indeed to the ‘other worlds’ that surround our own. And the catalyst of this globalization is the enormous expansion of all kinds of communication, thereby eminently including our being able to see the world, all the world, in images in our homes in real time.

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.

ANDREW SHONFIELD DID NOT DISCOVER THE HIDDEN AFFINITY between modern corporatism and modern capitalism. John Maynard Keynes should probably be credited with that insight, even if it is contained in just a paragraph cited in part by Shonfield) in his essay: The End of Laissez-Faire. Mihail Manoilesco, an economist of lesser renown and much less reputable politics, was probably the first to offer a systematic argument to this effect, but he located its site on the periphery of European capitalism and (mistakenly) believed that it could only be brought into existence through imposition from above, either by the state bureaucracy or by ‘un parti unique.’ For a while, Mussolini's corporativismo seemed to prove him right. With its ignominious collapse, the concept disappeared from respectable political discourse -except as an insult to throw at one's opponents.

THESE ARE UNSETTLED AND UNSETTLING TIMES HERE. THE NEW government of the United States remains un unknown quantity, so that the public eye has been directed outward to Gorbachev's spectacular efforts to free the Soviet Union from the dead weight of bureaucratic communism while simultaneously holding together the disintegrating Federation of Soviet Republics, and inward to the continuing decay of our cities, our environment and our race relations.