ABSTRACT
Author of numerous books on philosophy, religion and the history of ideas, John Herman Randall, Jr. was a Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. There were more political principles in active circulation in recent times than for many a long year. One has only to open the morning paper to be caught in a barrage of them. In fact most of the world's political difficulties in recent times focus in men's preference for laying down principles and fighting over them rather than engaging in the give and take of discussion and eventual compromise. For no man is so omnipotent, not even a dictator, that he does not have to resort to all kinds of compromises with his followers to secure the power to shoot those who disagree with him. Principles are accordingly instruments not of action but of understanding. Their place is not in the practical art of politics but in the knowledge that is science.
