Abstract
Ours is an age of ideas. Why this is so has much to do with changes in the world order and with the exhaustion of the attendant ‘isms’ that gave rise and sanction to the great wars, both hot and cold, of this century. It was said that in 1989 peace broke out throughout the world. Like all engaging generalities this was not quite true. War had been banished to the inner cities and to the developing world. The calming of the cold war loosed a whirlwind of ideas about the reordering of societies in the new global order.
I don’t want to make a long speech because the most important principles can be briefly expressed.
The Lord’s Prayer has 56 words; the Ten Commandments has 297; the American Declaration of Independence has 300; but an E.E.C. directive on the import of caramel and caramel products requires 26,911 words.
The moral is obvious.
Sir Frank Hartley, Vice-Chancellor,
University of London, 1976–1978.
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Notes
Jacques Attali, ‘Lines on the Horizon: A New Order in the Making’, New Perspectives Quarterly (Spring, 1990), pp. 4–11.
Eliot Cohen ‘The Future of Force and America’s Strategy’, The National Interest, No. 21 (Autumn 1990), pp. 3–15.
In an earlier era James Burnham had written of a managerial revolution in which the world divided into three superstates, ruled by a caste of managers, scientists and bureaucrats. George Orwell took powerful exception to what Burnham was saying on the grounds that his ‘realism’ led to a fascination with power, a glorification of those who hold power and an easy acceptance of the status quo. Refer to Orwell’s classic essay ‘Burham’s View of the Contemporary World Struggle’ in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. IV: 1945–1950 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp. 313–26.
Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), pp. 95–6.
Robert Reich, ‘The American 80’s: Disaster or Triumph’, Commentary, Vol. 90, No. 3 (September 1990), p. 16.
Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Capitalism in the 21st Century (New York: Knopf, forthcoming 1991).
See David Marquand, Faltering Leviathan: National Sovereignty, the Regions and Europe (London: Wyndam Place Trust, 1989), p. 43.
Refer to K. Minogue et al., Is National Sovereignty a Big Bad Wolf?, Bruges Group Occasional Paper No. 6 (London: Paris Publishing, 1990).
Herbert Schiller, Culture Inc. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 120.
See the survey in D.V. Smiley, The Federal Condition in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1987), pp. 18–19.
Samuel Beer, in specific reference to the United States, has styled this a ‘technocrat’ vs. ‘topocrat’ fight. He composed the term ‘topocrat’ from the Greek ‘topos’ or place or locality and ‘kratos’ or authority. Topocrats refer, then, to state or local government officials. See his ‘Federalism, Nationalism and Democracy in America’ in the American Political Science Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (March 1978), pp. 18-19. A parallel point is made by Sydney Tarrow, ‘Introduction’ in S. Tarrow et al (eds), Territorial Politics in Industrial Nations (New York: Praeger, 1978).
Richard Simeon, ‘Considerations on Centralization and Decentralization’, Canadian Public Administration, No. 29, Vol. 3 (Autumn 1986), pp. 445–61.
Edmund Burke (ed. T. Mahoney), Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), pp. 86–100.
In the twentieth century, F.A. Hayek has taken the Burkean insistence that law and the institutions of society should grow out of experience, a’ social evolutionism’, and fused it with an enthusiasm for the market, for’ spontaneous order’. Refer to F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960)
Weber contrasted Germany’s ‘negative politics’ and underdeveloped parliamentarianism with the opposite condition which prevailed in England. Refer to ‘Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany. (A Contribution to the Political Critique of Officialdom and Party Politics)’ in M. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, G. Roth and C. Wittich (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 1381–1420.
This Mannheim labelled ‘bureaucratic conservatism’. He wrote that: ‘The fundamental tendency of all bureaucratic thought is to turn all problems of politics into problems of administration. As a result the majority of books on politics in the history of German political science are de facto treatises on administration’ Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 105.
Franz Neumann, Chapter 8, ‘On the Theory of the Federal State’ in F. Neumann, The Democratic and The Authoritarian State, H. Marcuse (ed.) (New York: Free Press, 1957), p. 229.
The point is elegantly taken in Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962).
Benjamin Barber, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990).
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Hunt, W. (1992). Federalism with a Bureaucratic Face. In: Robertson, P. (eds) Reshaping Europe in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21847-9_3
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