This book presents an interim report on an intellectual enterprise that is still going on. The company aims to develop a theory of politics, both national and international. It differs from the history of past political ideas, more or less as the search for an adequate economic theory. It differs from the study of the history of economic thought.
Such a theory should develop appropriate concepts and analytical models to help economics and the capacity of our thinking about politics.
It would have to show which facts may be most important, and help us to order them in meaningful contexts. It should indicate the likely trend of future political developments. (if present policies continue) and point out the likely consequences of particular political actions or decisions, while allowing us to assess the significance of particular institutions, and of actual patterns of political behavior, which may differ greatly from what formal laws and institutions would have us expect.
In short, it would have to be a theory endowed with the most accentuated characteristics of authenticity and realism that a social scientist respectful of truth and reality can imprint on it.
Finally, such a theory should link “being” to “ought to be,” show the effect of specific facts and policies on the main values held by men in Western culture, and point out the significance of some of our core values for specific policy choices to be pursued.
In addition, it should show which policies may be compatible with the pursuit of a wider scale of values, and which values may be more compatible with others in political practice.
Finally, such a mature theory should help us identify patterns of political values and action that are viable, developmental, and creative.
Today there is no such theory, there are current ideologies and political philosophies, although some of them claim to be “perennial”. We have important theories and ideas in different fields of social sciences. There are important elements in the discoveries and philosophy of the natural sciences that could help us in the task.
There is the great tradition of classical politics, from the ancients to our time, and important and imposing attempts at synthesis by contemporary authors.
However, it seems clear that we still have a task ahead of us, to elaborate and develop a theory of policy that is comprehensive, coherent, applicable and, it is our hope, increasingly effective.
The development of this block of thought, comparable to those of economic theory, the theories of evolution and genetics in biology or, to take in extreme cases as theoretical physics, will be the result of many stages and the product of many minds.
Certain individual contributions will be more fundamental or broad, and thus stand out more than others, but even these will become limited contributions to the joint and continuing work of many thinkers, living and past.
This book offers at most some constituent elements of such a contribution. It includes a set of considerations and ideas that may be important for the task of reorganizing and reinterpreting political thought, and for the future construction of a more specific and broader theory of politics.
These pages present above all concepts, propositions and models derived from the philosophy of science, and specifically from the theory of communication and control, often referred to by Norbert Wiener’s term “cybernetics”, which we hope will be important for the study of politics and suggestive and useful for the eventual development of an organic political theory more adequate or less inadequate to the problems of the last decades of the century XX…
For a long time and assiduously, men have been concerned with the power of governments, in the same way that certain observers try to determine the muscular power of a horse or an athlete. Others wrote the laws and institutions of states, in the same way that anatomists describe the skeleton or organs of a body. This book is less concerned with the bones or muscles of the body politic than with its nerves: its channels of communication and decision-making.
This Book suggests that it would be helpful to view government not so much as a problem of power, but rather as a problem of leadership. And it aims to show that driving is fundamentally a problem of communication.
Publishing: Editorial Paidos | Year: 1969 | Pages: 139 | PDF download not available