My aim in this essay is to distinguish and comment on a specific movement of thought which I shall call “democracy as a telos.” This expression refers to a conception of democracy, cultivated by normative political philosophers, in which all democratic potentialities have at last been realized. The result is thought to be a perfected political community. Democracy as a telos must thus be distinguished from the actual liberal democracies we enjoy at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, democracy as a telos takes off from a specific rejection of such familiar institutions as elections, political parties, oppositions, a free press, and the rest, which are regarded, according to taste, as individualistic, bourgeois, atomistic, formal, and abstract. Democracy as a telos refers to the theories of reformers who, dissatisfied with our present condition, argue that only a radically transformed democracy can generate a real political community.

Why Do People Disagree About Politics? Like All Naive questions, this one rapidly launches us into fundamentals. Without disagreement, there would be no politics.

Some of the answers are obvious, and all the common ones line up with popular political projects. If disagreement were attributed to error, for example, to know the truth would transform our condition. Let us review the commonest answers in turn and look at the sources of political disagreement.

It is one of Karl Popper's great distinctions that he has an intense—some would say too intense—awareness of the history of philosophy within which he works. He knows not only its patterns, but also its comedies, and sometimes he plays rhetorically against their grain. He knows, for example, that the drive to consistency tends to turn philosophy into compositions of related doctrines, each seeming to involve the others. Religious belief, for example, tends to go with idealism and free will, religious scepticism with materialism and determinism. Popper does not believe in a religion, was for long some kind of a socialist, and takes his bearings from the philosophy of science. Aha! it seems we have located him. Here is a positivist, a materialist, probably a determinist. But of course he denies he is any of these things. Again, like many modern thinkers, he wants to extend scientific method not only to the social sciences but also to history. So far so familiar, until we discover that he regards nature as no less ‘cloudy’ than human societies.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIND KARL POPPER BOTH FASCINATING and irritating. His vigour and lucidity are irresistible, and no one could complain that he fails to engage with the big questions. The problems begin when we consider his political thought. Some think him one of the great liberal philosophers of the century. I on the other hand, while being fascinated by The Open Society and its Enemies, am repelled by the grossness of its caricaturing of most of the thinkers it touches. The Poverty of Historicism is a marvellous text in the philosophy of the social sciences, but the idea of historicism is a straw man. The paradox seems to be that while there is a lot that refers to the political questions of the day, there is virtually nothing which takes up issues of political philosophy directly. The result is that he seems to me always to be on the wrong foot, and my problem is to discover why.

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.

BRITISH POLITICAL SCIENTISTS HAVE RECENTLY AWAKENED from their pragmatic slumbers to discover a dragon loose among them: the dragon of evaluation. The University Grants Committee has just been grading the quality of research in university departments, and some have been found ‘below average’. (To be merely ‘average’ hardly seems much better.) How were these gradings arrived at? We do not know, but we do know that among the documents available to the committee was a paper by Ivor Crewe analysing the publications record of all British departments of politics over a six-year period from January 1978. (It will be published in Political Studies next year.) Professor Crewe's paper reveals, to no one's surprise, that there are immense differences in publication rate both between individuals and between different departments; his revelation will not enhance his popularity. But it is clear that these events are just the beginning. The dragon of evaluation is on the loose and there's no St George in sight.