Bernard Crick - In Defence of Politics (1962)

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Too often the revolutionary is the man who must create order in the chaos left by failed conservatives.

Bernard Crick
Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.

Bernard Crick
What matters in Politics is what men actually do - sincerity is no excuse for acting unpolitically, and insincerity may be channelled by politics into good results.

Bernard Crick
Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.

Bernard Crick
Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.

Bernard Crick
The method of rule of the tyrant and the oligarch is quite simply to clobber, coerce, or overawe all or most other groups in the interest of their own.

Bernard Crick
A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.

Bernard Crick
Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.

Bernard Crick
BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.

Bernard Crick
If, of course, one builds into the concept of an 'individual' all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laisser-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance.

Bernard Crick
The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.

Bernard Crick
There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.

Bernard Crick
In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of 'reason' as single sources of authority.

Bernard Crick
The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

Bernard Crick
If a government is to do great new things, it will need more support. If a government is to change the world, it will need mass support. This is one of the discoveries of modern government.

Bernard Crick
Where government is impossible, politics is impossible.

Bernard Crick
Politics are, as it were, the market place and the price mechanism of all social demands - though there is no guarantee that a just price will be struck; and there is nothing spontaneous about politics- it depends on deliberate and continuous activity.

Bernard Crick
Politics is too often regarded as a poor relation, inherently dependent and subsidiary; it is rarely praised as something with a life and character of its own.

Bernard Crick
The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.

Bernard Crick
To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.

Bernard Crick
Politics has rough manners, but it is a very useful thing.

Bernard Crick
The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.

Bernard Crick
The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.

Bernard Crick
Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.

Bernard Crick
One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from the 'inner contradictions' of such a system.

Bernard Crick
Since the business of politics is the conciliation of differing interests, justice must not merely be done, but to be seen to be done.

Bernard Crick