ABSTRACT
In any period, what professors, publicists and journalists write can rarely be accepted as descriptions, and even less as explanations, of what governments do. What politicians say, when they are out of office, does not describe or explain what
they do when they are in office; and what they actually say when they become members of a government usually describes hardly at all what that government is doing in fact. It is easy to forget that academics, intellectuals, journalists and political speakers are all concerned with the presentation of what they hope are persuasive ideas; governments and their attendant bureaucrats, on the other hand, are concerned with the different task of dealing with situations as they are. In the field of politics, whether domestic or international, there are few situations that are not highly complex; and, in general, few which can be handled by simple reference to a basic principle. In politics, all situations are exceptional situations; those who write about them at the time rarely understand their complexity; those who handle them are, because human, fallible and, because political animals, neither free nor unfettered in their choice of action. Even if they get as far as understanding the causes of the situation that confronts them there is usually little to guide them towards an understanding of what will be the consequences of their actions. Rarely, too, is any act of government, even in the most authoritarian of states, the sole decision of one man; and, in England, every political act in the nineteenth century was the outcome of a conflict of views among cabinet ministers and among their official advisers at home and overseas.
