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Undercomprehension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Giovanni Sartori
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MY SENSE OF OUR TIME IS OF A GROWING GAP BETWEEN THE good society that we seek and the ways and means of achieving it. As I have put it,

Knowledge becomes more and more the problem as politics becomes more and more complicated. The growing complexity of the world of politics . . . results not only from increasing and global interdependencies, but from the very expansion of the sphere of politics. The more the visible hand and political engineering displace the invisible hand of automatic adjustments (and maladjustments), and the more politics enters everywhere, the less we are in control of what we are doing.

And my conclusion repeats: ‘We are . . . living above and beyond our intelligence, above our grasp of what we are doing. The more we engage in remaking the body politic, the more I am struck by the uneasy feeling that we are apprentice sorcerers’.

Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1989 , pp. 391 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1989

References

1 The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham, N.J., Chatham House, 1987, pp. 120 and 247.Google Scholar

2 Oxford University Press, 1983.

3 The story is told and appraised by Kirkpatrick, Evron M., ‘Toward a more Responsible Two‐Party System: Political Science, Policy Science or Pseudo‐Science’, American Political Science Review, 12 1971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 The quotations are from pp. 123, 126–27, 130, 132, 133, of Middle American Individualism, Free Press, 1988.

5 See my ‘Video‐Power’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 1989, esp. pp. 48–50.Google Scholar

6 A number of such problems are indicated and discussed in my Theory of Democracy Revisited, op. cit., esp. pp. 111–20. Gans also overlooks the problem of intensity that I cover in ch. 8, passim.

7 While economics doubtlessly is a ‘knowledge for use’, it will be argued that economists too are increasingly practice‐defeated. The reason for this is, however, their excessive inbreeding and isolation. In the all‐communicating society large segments of economic behaviour are dictated by news‐feeding far more than by economic fundamentals.

8 I dwell on the calculus that shows how and when it is convenient to collectivize decisions in The Theory of Democracy Revisited, op. cit., pp. 216–23.

9 A seminal, insightful exploration is de Jouvenel, Bertrand, L’Art de la Conjecture, Monaco, Editions du Rocher, 1964 Google Scholar. Tellingly, the work has largely passed unnoticed.

10 I draw here from Sartori, G., La Politica: Logica e Metodo in Scienze Sociali, Milan, Sugar‐Co, 1979, pp. 125–30.Google Scholar

11 For the complexities, which do not detract from the worth of the construct, see Lane, Jan‐Erik, ‘The Logic of Means‐Ends Analysis’, Quality and Quantity, 1986, pp. 339–56.Google Scholar