TO AN ORDINARY DEMOCRATIC CITIZEN THE QUESTION ‘DO parties matter’ might seem a typical pseudoproblem of scholars. Everybody knows that parties matter, otherwise nobody would leave home on election day and cast his vote. Even the enlightened politicians have hardly any doubts that parties matter. When Margaret Thatcher was asked before her first electoral victory what her access to power would change in Britain, she answered in one word: ‘everything’. This means that she firmly believed that parties almost exclusively matter in a political system. How did scholars come to ask such a stupid question – so contrary to democratic common sense? New and unfamiliar questions normally rise when a change of paradigm in science takes place. The change of aradigm in this case was the shift of attention from the study of politics to policy analysis.

FRANCIS BACON OBSERVED THAT IN THE DECLINING AGE OF A state, mechanical arts and merchandise flourish. Unfortunately, Britain's case is now almost the obverse of this. The underlying causes of Britain's present circumstances are evidently complex but a fruitful place at which to begin is with the country's technology policy and its associated research and development orientation.

It is especially alarming politically that the long run decline in manufacturing industry which Britain has experienced, and tolerated, throughout this century has recently accelerated. The country's share of world trade in manufactured goods fell precipitately in the 1960s (15 to 9 per cent), but worse still, there is evidence that imports have on balance become steadily more technologically advanced than exports. Inevitably, manufactures have contributed a falling proportion of overseas earnings (52 per cent 1971, 43 per cent 1981), leading to a historically unprecedented deficit on manufactured goods. Inevitably too, and worsened by the international recession, employment in manufacturing industry has fallen sharply (8.1 million 1971, 5.7 million 1982). The economic slide relative to other advanced industrial countries which has resulted has been disguised only by the strength of the service sector and the fortuitous arrival of North Sea oil. All this has naturally received an abundance of academic discussion.

A PREDOMINANT THEME OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICAL liberal thought is the claim that piecemeal acts of intervention by government in a free economy and society will, if continued over an unspecified period of time, bring about the transformation of that society into a totalitarian regime in which all but the most trivial decisions affecting an individual are taken by the state. The crucial feature of the liberal's argument is that this process generates an outcome which was not intended by the originators of the acts of intervention: it is the method or mechanism of intervention itself which produces a state of affairs undesired by both non-statists and (at least moderate) collectivists alike. Thus, in addition to general economic and moral arguments that a classical liberal might raise against, say, a nationalized health service, he also maintains that an abridgement of the right to provide health care privately, which the collectivist does not value, must set in motion a process which culminates in the direction of medical personnel, and the prevention of the emigration of doctors by the state, to which, presumably, the moderate collectivist would himself object.

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, THE THEME OF POLITICAL PARTICIpation and the set of issues connected with it are as old as politics itself, because they touch on some of the most central and perennial questions of political life – who decides, where are the boundaries of community and citizenship to be drawn, who benefits, how will decisions be made? However, beyond this, participation has from time to time become a particularly central and salient issue in British politics. In the seventeenth century the issues revolved around the ‘claims of the gentry and merchant classes to play a larger part in the making of government policy’. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the issue moved on to representation of the nonropertied classes – the town worker, the rural worker and Etterly universal suffrage.

CHARLES PÉGUY IS CERTAINLY NOT FORGOTTEN. IN DEATH, as in life, he remains a controversial figure. A man of passion, he still arouses passion in others. Even today, at least in France, a book on Péguy is almost certain to give rise to polemics. The details of his political, sentimental and religious life are scrutinized in minute detail. What is most often neglected, what is not taken seriously in this stormy celebrity, is the thinker or, if you like (Péguy would have liked), the philosopher. His views on the city and the Church, on Sophocles and on the Gospels, on the modern world and what makes it move, on men and gods, are sometimes very profound and beautiful. So many writers who are greatly inferior to him now occupy a major place in the text-books of philosophy, sociology and historiography that it is only fair to deal, even if only briefly as here, with Péguy's thought. He himself would have liked to be considered from this angle: was it not the ambition (one of the ambitions) of his life to finish a thesis on the place given to history and sociology in modern times? Although unfinished, the few hundred pages which he left are rich enough to show that he was one of the most enetrating critics of the historical and sociological points of view which dominate modern consciousness.