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Utopianism and Politics:
A Conservative View
- Abstract
SINCE the time of the French Revolution, a substantial proportion of the most politically conscious and active people have tended to equate Politics with Utopianism. Yet the two are, in essence, quite different. Politics I would define, in Aristotelian terms, as the art of husbandry, the technique of administering a state conceived of as being an enlarged household. It has often been said that politics involves a choice between evils or, more charitably, an acceptance of the second-best. This is because politics is concerned with very intractable material-and by that, I mean men. And it is not only men who have to be administered. It is also men who are engaged in permanent debate as to how and by whom the task should be carried out. In this sense politics is of course a struggle for power, and thus charged with an ambivalence which can hardly ever be resolved by any attempt to apportion the share of disinterested conviction and the part of the urge for power that respectively go to make a statesman and to shape a policy decision. The two are so intertwined that the cynic who can see only naked ambition and the naive doctrinaire who acknowledges only principles incarnate will prove equally wrong.
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