ABSTRACT
DURING the last thirty years there has been little to encourage serious thought about the fundamentals of politics. The increasing specialisation of university studies has been against it, and a code of academic manners has grown up which sanctions no more than an ironical profession of ignorance in the face of manifest absurdities in some other person's specialism. The crisis of self-criticism and abnegation within philosophy has been against it, and philosophers have sought respectability in specialism too. But chiefly, perhaps, the course of events has been against it, since so many of the societies and institutions set up in response to the idealism of former times are foundering, and social policy is more often approached in an attitude of disillusioned pragmatism than considered in the light of principles.
