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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2011

John Dunn
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
John Dunn
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

There is no commanding reason to suppose that a clear and accurate understanding of modern politics really is available to human beings at all. But those who earn a living by purporting to teach others how to understand it must at least try, as best they can, to understand it first for themselves. More pressingly and less parochially, those who choose to take political action need at least some conception of what they are attempting to do, and it is hard to see how they can hope to sustain such conceptions without some sense of what politics today is in fact about or what its human significance now really is.

This collection of essays focuses upon a single key issue in the somewhat groggy history of modern political thinking: the limits set to what is now politically possible by economic structures, processes, and activities. These limits have been a pressing preoccupation, for those in quest of practical just as much as theoretical understanding, for at least two centuries. They have prompted the most ambitious and confident of modern attempts to explain political processes and political development. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the heyday first of liberal and then of socialist political ideologies, they underpinned the boldest expectations of moral and material progress and inspired great social and political movements devoted to bringing such progress about.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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  • Introduction
  • Edited by John Dunn, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Economic Limits to Modern Politics
  • Online publication: 01 June 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511559174.003
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  • Introduction
  • Edited by John Dunn, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Economic Limits to Modern Politics
  • Online publication: 01 June 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511559174.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by John Dunn, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Economic Limits to Modern Politics
  • Online publication: 01 June 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511559174.003
Available formats
×