THAT THIS ESSAY SHOULD HAVE TURNED OUT TO BE AS MUCH a matter of introspection as of retrospection should not, after all, have surprised me. As Pascal said, ‘la dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir qu'il faut mettre la première’. If the study of politics has changed over the last half century, why then, so have I. ‘You cannot step into the same river twice’. This is my apologia for starting off, not with my subject matter, but with myself!

WE ALL APPROACH THE POST-WAR PERIOD THROUGH THE PERspective of our own pre-war experience and, for those who lived through it, of the war itself. We approach it, with a country as a starting point, on the basis of the experiences and books which formed our vision of Europe and the world and made us aware of the problems facing contemporary societies. For me, the country is Switzerland: a federal state which has remained fundamentally a confederation of sovereign states, linked by an alliance, the framework of which has been filled in by the successive adaptations imposed upon it, but which have not led to anything which could be called integration. The political structure has been built by delegation from the grass roots, through crises which, although they have sometimes been violent, have never called into question the fundamental principle of cantonal sovereignty. Each canton has preserved its originality which, although it may not immediate1 strike the passers-by, is expressed in the different shades of accent and in the variations in daily life, even more than in the folklore, touching and sometimes almost a caricature, which surrounds it.

DESPITE EVERYTHING, THE DECADES BETWEEN 1945 AND THE oil crisis will in retrospect be seen as a new belle époque. The basic features of our social and ideological landscape have not changed since, yet somehow the sky has become darker, lowering and menacing. There is a sense of civilization, liberty, decency being in a state of siege, more deeply precarious than before, more fragde, and also more rotten and betrayed from within.

Why, all in all, had things seemed so good? Indeed, we had never had it so good, in a variety of senses. Now it feels as if we were going to pay for it.

THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS HAVE PASSED WITH SURPRISING speed. They have certainly fulfilled the imperatives of the curse: ‘may you live in interesting times!’. Too much has happened in too many places – on the moon as well as on earth. New movements, new ideas, new cults have emerged. Populations have multiplied and so have inventions. New centres of learning have been established and old ones have been subverted, not least by an overdose of political zeal. The sciences of man have developed – more painfully than was hoped and with fewer concrete results than was (and is) desired. I think we have learned that our efforts to understand complex social and political structures (including those constituted by governments and oppositions) may themselves founder (or flounder) in complexities. Some of those complexities are endemic to the subject of our study; others are the result of our own confusion of categories or of premature conceptualization; others result from overspecialization – and others from the hazards of cross-disciplinary study. Perhaps the cardinal error has been to seek too much – and expect too much – from a narrowly ‘scientific’ approach. We all know of cases on the heads of which one or other of these caps can fit.

AS I LOOKED AT MY READING NOTES IN ORDER TO RETRACE the evolution of my thought on politics in general, and political thought in particular, over the last two decades or so, I found that my present concern with the reality of modern political thought could be progressively detected in those notes as from 1964. The rest and the bulk of the notes converge in three main themes: my first books on comparative communist politics, my interest in the development of the modern science of politics, and the incessant (pace Tocqueville) reflections on how to reconcile, in logic and in ethics, the variances between the quest for social justice and of that for political freedom in an advanced industrial society. But the post-1964 notes show now, more than I remembered, my early uneasiness about two, albeit different, orientations of modern political thought, or at least of its most popular schools. From one point of view, I felt that we were increasingly estranging ourselves from the existential reality of man. From another, I feared that our present methods of political analysis blur, rather than focus on, the distinctiveness of the politics of the modern industrial society.

These notes, even trimmed and edited, inevitably form an amalgam of impressions, jotted down in a kind of intellectual shorthand, and insufficiently expounded. But as our contributions to this special issue are in the nature of a backward glance, I submit them as they are.

SINCE FIRST I BEGAN TO THINK ABOUT THE SUBJECT OF WHAT I called ‘pure politics’ twenty years ago, it has, sad to say, become more immediate. This is because of something I emphasized at the time: the effectiveness of a dedicated group of activists. Although few in number, the group's intensity of will gives it a formidable strength. It is like a projectile which can easily penetrate the soft body of society. It is the generator of the unforeseen, and ushers drama on to the political stage.

In my book De la Souveraineté (1955), I contrasted two pictures familiar to us since childhood: Bonaparte on the bridge at Arcola and Saint Louis under the oak tree at Vincennes. The first is standing erect, calling on his men to charge; the other is seated, serene, welcoming the various plaintiffs who press towards him and sending them away content. On one side of the diptych we see a leader who exalts, and on the other side an umpire who corrects and conciliates – an agent of momentum and an agent of equilibrium. Bonaparte points to a direction and the narrowness of the bridge is a symbol of the one-way narrow track, the precise intention. In contrast, the oak tree is the centre of a circumference, from every point of which the plaintiffs or suitors could approach, so that the king's attention was called from all sides: he needed the eyes of Argus.

SCHOLARS RARELY WRITE IN THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR and even less often tackle the examination of ideas or events overtly in the context of autobiographical ruminations. I therefore find myself a trifle ill at ease in trying to express my thought in what is, to all intents and purposes, an unaccustomed mode.

LATE IN 1952 I ARRIVED IN LONDON FROM AUSTRALIA. I WAS to spend ten happy years in England, a period from which can be traced many of the influences which still matter to me. Nonetheless, the thirteen years before 1952 had provided a good deal of intellectual luggage which served me in various ways in England, and which still has relevance; so it is probably best to start with that earlier period in Australia, and explain how I got some of the ideas with which I came ashore at Tilbury.

THE 1950s WERE A WONDERFUL DECADE FOR APPLIED SOCIAL science: for the belief that reason addressed to economic and social problems can improve the human condition. Compare the 1950s with the 1930s and ask how much of the improvement was due to Keynes and Beveridge. It is inevitable that a generation of debunkers should follow whose answer would be ‘not much’. But that would have seemed a strange conclusion in the 1950s; and the view of the 1950s was surely right. We had full employment in place of 10 per cent unemployment in the 1920s and nearly 15 per cent in the 1930s; and after the first years of post-war reconstruction, it was reasonable to attribute this to Keynesian demand management. We had a safety net through which relatively few fell into poverty; and this was Beveridge's social security and the welfare state.

IT WAS ONLY WHEN I CAME TO REFLECT ON WHAT I MIGHT write that I realised the folly of my acceptance. The shock of the exercise, indeed, was that I could make no list of developments in political science to trigger off this article; clearly, no thoughts on the important books of the past generation were stored at the back of my mind, awaiting this invitation for their release. Having little to say, and most of that negative, all I can offer is some fragments of an intellectual autobiography.

IN STRICT TRUTH, THE FIRST TWENTY OF THE FIFTY ADULT years of my life were spent either in practice at the Bar, or in military intelligence. The latter, and especially in wartime, is, of course, geared to the overriding practical objective of winning a war, though, since I was involved with assessment of the Soviet Union's military strength and achievement, my work provided me with some kind of an introduction to the study of the Soviet Union to which, after the mid-fifties, I was to devote most of my time. But the Bar is far too egocentric an occupation to leave much time for interest in political issues, at most permitting time for the narrow practical pursuit of domestic party politics. For party politics I have never had much appetite – though I did campaign for the Conservative Party in one election.

THE OUTLOOK OF ALL MEMBERS OF THE GENERATION OF social scientists contributing to this issue certainly bears the imprint of the upsurge of National Socialism and the chain of events this entailed and which led to the Second world War. On their part, these events are directly embedded in the aftermath of the First World War which began with the Bolshevik Revolution and was in many respects overshadowed by it. Some specificality of my way of relating to the more immediate background is accounted for by the fact that I experienced the events as a German Jew who decided to join in the return to the Jewish homeland, then Palestine. Furthermore, I left Germany in 1936 not only as a Zionist but also as a ‘Bernsteinist’ revisionist who remained unshaken in his belief that ‘Weimar’ had not suffered defeat as the result of a basic systemic weakness of liberal democracy which could accommodate social reform acceptable to an electoral majority. Ineptitude, shortsightedness and above all the lack of toughness of the German leaders dedicated to the democratic republic were one set of factors that made possible the victory of the Nazis.

MY DOMINANT INTELLECTUAL CONCERNS HAVE BEEN WORLD politics and history, with strong but subsidiary passions – engaging the mind not less than the body – for watching wild creatures, looking at paintings and buildings and walking and (in my younger days) climbing on mountains. These are not gregarious pursuits; and though I have been a fiercely, and perhaps parochially, loyal member of various small groups at various times I have mostly been a lone magpie, picking up small things from many places.

I used to think the word ‘scholar’ pompous and pretentious, but now I would accept it as a description, using it in the sense prevalent in the Middle Ages, when scholars travelled, in space and time, in pursuit of learning. A learner at least I have been and am. I once believed that I was learning in order to prepare myself for some special service to society: I long ago discovered that I could best serve, inadequately of course but still serve, by going on trying to learn. I have much of which to be ashamed in my life, but of this discovery I am not ashamed.

THE INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS REQUIRED FOR THE freedom of expression of beliefs and the representation of intertests and ideals – both of which can be divisive – can function effectively in society if those who use them for their own particularistic ends are at the same time restrained by an admixture of civility. Public liberties are conditions of the proposition, confrontation and persuasion of contending beliefs, of their cultivation in autonomous corporate bodies and of their presentation to public authorities. Representative institutions are the arrangements through which contending beliefs and interests are brought forward, considered and taken into account in the making of laws governing the territorially bounded society. The institutions in which beliefs and desires or interests are proposed and confronted in argument and the institutions in which beliefs and interests are taken into account and digested discriminatingly into law cannot work acceptably without some constituent civility and consensus of the contending parties. If the contending parties are vehemently irreconcilable and if effectively contending beliefs and interests are very widely disparate, one or another of the groups will resist physically or seek to impose its will by coercion and actual violence on the other. The representative institutions cannot moreover work effectively if they have too many tasks to master and if the different contending parties within them are irreconcilable to the point where they deny the legitimacy of the institutions themselves, of the procedures for arriving at decisions and the decisions themselves, should those decisions be uncongenial to their own beliefs and interests.

WHEN I WAS INVITED BY GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION TO contribute a memoir on my intellectual autobiography to its fifteenth anniversary number, it struck me that the most appropriate subject for me to treat was the nature of the change affecting my own discipline – sociology – during the transition from dictatorship to democracy.