ABSTRACT
The British style of political education and investigation has traditionally been Socratic in style. The stress has been upon critically questioning key concepts and assumptions, rather than building up a comprehensive and systematic science. Reflected in the tutorial style of teaching, which spread from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the emphasis is upon dialogue as a training of the mind not as a more specifically utilitarian exercise. In practice, the critical function has often assumed such destructive forms that what is left of political science may have no higher ambition than to ‘muddle through’, in ways that are familiar to the practitioner of politics. Scepticism about the possibility of political science is deeply rooted in the British intellectual tradition, represented notably by the University of Oxford. Writing in 1932, R.B.McCallum accurately conveyed both the prevailing attitudes and the state of affairs when he described the study of politics in Oxford in these disenchanted terms: ‘The subject is taught by a very few specialists and a large number of philosophers and historians who approach it with varying degrees of enthusiasm or disgust’.2 The belief that a liberal elite education could best be acquired through an acquaintance with the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, coupled with a knowledge of the history of the political systems of Athens and Rome, survived the Second World War. It is captured by Alfred North Whitehead (a once celebrated philosopher who had moved from England to America) in his rearguard assertion ‘based upon no confusing research, that as a training in political imagination, the Harvard School of Politics and of Government cannot hold a candle to the old-fashioned English classical education’ (Whitehead 1948:33).
