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Few Are Chosen: Some Reflections on the Politics of A. J. Balfour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

David Nicholls
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Extract

Jogging along the road to a dinner party one evening, Balfour's sister said she thought that the coachman had taken a wrong turn. “Well, that is his business,” remarked the politician laconically, “not ours.” The lady was quite in order to speculate about the matter, but interference was forbidden. Likewise, academic philosophers and sociologists have a perfect right to speculate about politics, but they must not, as academics, interfere with the political process; that is the job of the practical politician. Balfour himself theorized about politics and about the nature of human society, and also took a hand in directing the course of political events; but he saw the two as quite distinct activities. “Knowledge,” he maintained, is seldom power. And a sociologist so coldly independent of the social forces among which he lived as thoroughly to understand them, would, in all probability, be as impotent to guide the evolution of a community as an astonomer to modify the orbit of a comet.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , January 1968 , pp. 33 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1968

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References

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