The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics Book

Why politics? A disingenuous question, perhaps, but John Dunn, Professor of Political Theory at King's College, Cambridge, succeeds in spinning the conceit over more than three hundred pages of closely reasoned, stimulating supposition in The Cunning of Unreason. Matching a stridently jaunty tone to typically Oxbridge dissembling, he disarms potential cynics with his admission that politics can be a "vaguely degrading" profession that constantly disappoints, while being "blatantly unfit for gentlemen--let alone gentlewomen". However, he also allows that it can be noble, while noting that no system of human authority is more noble than the human beings who exercise it. The initial overview builds on abstract visions of rule and political understanding, and the collision between human purposes, drawing on Aristotle, Locke, Marx, Adam Smith, Max Weber and, most appreciatively, Thomas Hobbes. Dunn applies his broad brush with deft strokes, and it's for the most part fluent, discursive writing. The middle eight, a consideration of the significant political and economic shifts during the Thatcher years, treads on more swampy ground. He proposes that the British populous was more repulsed by Labour than attracted by the Tories; a case of omission rather than commission. Thatcher, a political "dominatrix", personally interpreted her electorate, and sought to communicate what seems with hindsight more a response than a considered ideology. The subsequent Just War to systematically refashion the economy to be internationally competitive saw economism far outstrip political advances, a disparity through selective radicalism also addressed in Larry Siedentop's Democracy in Europe. The later chapters drift around more general issues, centred on the capitalist legacy of recent history, "a low dishonest quarter of a century" according to Dunn. If Harold Wilson's week was a long time in politics, this era of "globalisation" has been an eternity. But politics can still surprise. Demonstrations of public protest can wrest back power from those who may have lost sight of their elective mission. Politics may elude precise definition, but Dunn's skilful analysis provides an illuminating and enjoyable blazed trail through the gloom. --David VincentRead More