Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PROLOGUE: The governing science: things political and the intellectual historian
- I The system of the North: Dugald Stewart and his pupils
- II Higher maxims: happiness versus wealth in Malthus and Ricardo
- III The cause of good government: Philosophic Whigs versus Philosophic Radicals
- IV The tendencies of things: John Stuart Mill and the philosophic method
- V Sense and circumstances: Bagehot and the nature of political understanding
- VI All that glitters: political science and the lessons of history
- VII The clue to the maze: the appeal of the Comparative Method
- VIII Particular polities: political economy and the historical method
- IX The ordinary experience of civilised life: Sidgwick and the method of reflective analysis
- X A separate science: polity and society in Marshall's economics
- XI A place in the syllabus: political science at Cambridge
- EPILOGUE: A nebulous province: the science of politics in the early twentieth century
- Index
PROLOGUE: The governing science: things political and the intellectual historian
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PROLOGUE: The governing science: things political and the intellectual historian
- I The system of the North: Dugald Stewart and his pupils
- II Higher maxims: happiness versus wealth in Malthus and Ricardo
- III The cause of good government: Philosophic Whigs versus Philosophic Radicals
- IV The tendencies of things: John Stuart Mill and the philosophic method
- V Sense and circumstances: Bagehot and the nature of political understanding
- VI All that glitters: political science and the lessons of history
- VII The clue to the maze: the appeal of the Comparative Method
- VIII Particular polities: political economy and the historical method
- IX The ordinary experience of civilised life: Sidgwick and the method of reflective analysis
- X A separate science: polity and society in Marshall's economics
- XI A place in the syllabus: political science at Cambridge
- EPILOGUE: A nebulous province: the science of politics in the early twentieth century
- Index
Summary
I take this defect among the Brobdingnagians to have risen from their Ignorance; by not having hitherto reduced Politicks into a Science as the more acute Wits of Europe have done. For, I remember very well, in a Discourse one Day with the King; when I happened to say, there were several thousand Books among us written upon the Art of Government; it gave him (directly contrary to my Intention) a very mean Opinion of our Understandings.
jonathan swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls?
thomasmann, The Magic Mountain (1924)this book deals with some of the forms taken by the aspiration to develop a ‘science of polities’ in nineteenth-century Britain. By speaking of an ‘aspiration’ we point to a project which was in some sense perpetually falling short of its realisation; by referring to ‘forms’ we indicate the diversity of the endeavours which issued from this common aspiration; and by limiting ourselves to ‘some’ of these forms we signal that we have not attempted a comprehensive survey or continuous narrative.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- That Noble Science of PoliticsA Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983
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