P Bowman and Nicholas Gruen on 13th Jan 2022.
Following up on our last discussion in about the significance of paying attention to things that surprise you or deviations between the way people describe their behaviour or their situation and what one can observe we explore similar questions in the world of politics.
We begin by discussing this post on my distinction between policy ideas and policy hacks, and, later in the podcast talk about James Burnham's devastating critique of political thought as wish fulfilment. Viz:
<blockquote>It would be a great error to suppose that Dante’s method, in De Monarchia, is outworn. His method is exactly that of the Democratic Platform with which we began our inquiry. It has been and continues to be the method of nine-tenths, yes, much more than nine-tenths, of all writing and speaking in the field of politics. The myths, the ghosts, the idealistic abstractions, change name and form, but the method persistently remains. It is, then, important to be entirely clear about the general features of this method.</blockquote>
