The Cunning of Unreason
John Dunn
HarperCollins £16.99, pp367
Buy it at BOL
The voters of the world stand on the plains and look upwards in bemusement. Journalists and politicians themselves stumble around the foothills of understanding. But the professor of political theory at Cambridge sits atop Mount Olympus, hurling his thunderbolts and mud pies with signal relish. Mere mortals, discarding their puny aspirations, must shrink from his presence. But there's no reason not to giggle and skip on your way.
John Dunn equals wit and insight as well as scorn. This is a book - more accurately, a polemic - about democracy and the modern nation state. It begins with an abstract attempt to define the nature of politics, wearing its learning on its sleeve and dropping names with abandon. 'So are Machiavelli and Hobbes and Lenin and Carl Schmitt simply right?... Or does the truth lie more with Plato, or Thomas More, or Rousseau, or Fourier, or Karl Marx, or for that matter Confucius, or the Buddha?' But persevere: we'll get to John Major in a minute.
The modern democratic republic, Dunn says, sounds like a fair system of rights embodied in a process of decision-making. 'But, directly encountered, it is quite obviously corrupt and feckless. Its outcomes are deeply pernicious and destructive. Its actual mode is a travesty of the system of rights which it continues to profess, and systematically distorts those rights in practice.' Our politics is 'disagreeable and frustrating'. The 'confusion and ineffectuality' of governance is endemic, 'ineradicable from the state form'.
Everything, in sum, is charade and farce. Voting is a rough, unready way of steering the ship of state. The leaders it throws up, with their deluded dreams and phoney promises, are foredoomed to failure. And don't forget, either, how economics - the law of the allegedly free market - has come to dominate. 'The politics which it prompts most readily... is irritable, reactive, myopic: endlessly saturated with resentment.' A bilious tirade in the manner of the early Bernard Levin? Sometimes: and enjoyable in just that way.
But Dunn strips away the cant to show us what lies behind. 'Capitalism has selected, refined and diffused quite widely a state form reconciled to human limitations (greed, quarrelsomeness, severely limited altruism) but still aimed at mitigating the vulnerability of its subjects and serving their more insistent and commonplace concerns.' This state form isn't 'inspiring or morally commanding'. 'We owe it no veneration... But we do owe it our loyalty and perhaps also some of our patience.'
The Cunning of Unreason fizzes and stimulates precisely because it is Olympian in tone and judgment. Politics, its practitioners and servants, need to be pygmies on the plain: distance lends perspective as well as disenchantment. There is no 'progress' to high-toned goals. There is only muddling through.
It's a valid and, at root, oddly positive thesis, the assertion of a clear-eyed reality. And yet I do have a problem. The contemporary meat in this sandwich of political science is Dunn's own take on the Thatcher years - her 'crusade against the tendency for every society's capacity for political agency to dissipate helplessly into endless factional squabbling and inanition... her Just War in which ultimate victory was in the end jeopardised by the pusillanimity of her colleagues and her (reluctantly chosen) successor'.
When the gods of academe play pundit, they make themselves mortal. Dunn is at his frailest when he tries to fit his views about Thatcherism to the era of The Lady. Did she consciously set about 'lowering labour costs by shrinking employment'? Did she really - genuinely obsessive - set out to purge the Civil Service and the professions of education and medicine of their capacity to resist her will? Would she even have torn down the union movement if it had been cannier in its campaigning?
None of this quite fits with the pensive, nervy Thatcher of Opposition painted so effectively in John Campbell's new biography, or with the real blankness of the 1979 manifesto. It's an unworthy thought, but you can't help wondering whether this particular Dunn vision owes more to affronted high-table chatter and the cuts that came alongside a university expansion which is (coldly considered) the biggest difference to our lives wrought in the last 15 years. More than that, he seems to think the tides of economic liberalism went out with Mrs T (which may be news to today's teachers or beleaguered doctors).
But no harm done. Writing about politics is a human activity: and humanity's flaws are salt in the stew. Dunn attacks with a disarming lack of certainty not reflected in his surface rhetoric. He says he's 'blazing a trail, not laying down a road': and he's right. 'On present evidence, there are no dependable sources of insight, and no methods which, clearly grasped and accurately applied, ensure even the haziest comprehension of what's going on politically.' Quite. Trying to help us understand, though, is great fun - and so is this blazing book. One, you rather think, that Tony might keep by his bedside against the moment Leo wails again.
