The Press Saturday, February 13, 1932. Political Science.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20470, 13 February 1932, Page 14

The Press Saturday, February 13, 1932. Political Science.

It may or may not have a bearing on the situation in Shanghai that one of the fullest and Lest works on the political problem of federation has just been produced by a Japanese. If we listen to Mr G. B. Shaw we will of course not agree that good works in political science are being written anywhere. "The scientists will have " nothing to do with us," he makes King Magnus complain to his Cabinet in The Apple Cart, " for the at- " mosphere of politics is not the " atmosphere of science. Even political " science, the science by which civilisa- " tion must live or die, is busy explain- " in.g the past whilst we have to grapple with the present: it leaves '■ the ground before our feet in black " darkness whilst it lights up every " corner of the landscape behind us." This gibe has been thrown at the political scientists so often that few people ever stop to think what it means and whether it is true. The political science taught in the Universities is often a weary pilgrimage from Plato and Aristotle, through the morass of medieval political apology, to the moderns—a logical" enough approach in itself, but having the 'disadvantage that, to students making their first acquaintance with the theory of politics, the reflections of Aristotle and Plato, and still more those of the mediseval thinker's, seem either childishly simple or wayward and fantastic. A mature acquaintance with political theory is necessary if the contribution of pre-Reformation thinkers is to be appreciated. But it is wrong to suppose that because the historical method provides an easy way of teaching political science, all political scientists are concerned exclusively with the past or with concepts toq remote to be practically useful. As in any other science, there are some who ' live in a world of abstractions and do not worry themselves about the inefficiency of the House of Lords anymore than Lord Rutherford worries ibout the defects of wireless sets, others have been quite definitely prac:ical. Jeremy Bentham, for example, is Professor Graham "Wallas has jointed out, was as prolific an inventor n politics as Edison was in applied ;iectricity, and in our own time people ike the Webbs have had some success n the same sphere. • The political scientists, however, would not be so .•ash as to justify themselves by their .nventions; the materials with which they work are ideas rather than institutions, and it is only rarely that they have the mechanic's gift for translating their ideas into reality. By the light they shed they must bo judged, and Mr Shaw's complaint is that they light the past instead of the future; that when they should be writing about the breakdown of Parliamentary government they are producing treatises on Althusius. The complaint is plausible enough to make an epigram for a play, but it ignores the fact that political ideas almost always travel forward by way of the past. .English political reforms, with hardly an exception, have been based on specious appeals to documents like Magna Charta or to the supposedly advanced democratic theories of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and it is extremely interesting to note in this new work from Japan—The Problem of Federalism, by Sobei Mogi: Allen and Unwin, Ltd.—that a similar process is going on wherever politics is the subject of theoretical study. So far as federalism is concerned, or rather its theoretical foundations, it has been pointed out often enough that the Platonic tradition has shackled political science to the idea of the State as unitary' and sovereign. Ir the two centuries following the Reformation, when the task was to justify 'the State against its enemies, the idea was relevant and necessary; in an age when everything hangs on our ability to show that there are reasonable limitations on external and internal authority of the State, theory whici cannot logically admit any such limitations whatever is dangerous and useless. The idea of sovereignty eannol be fitted into the theory of the American Constitution, or for that mattei of any federal constitution, and yet as Mr Laski is fond of saying, the political future of humanity is the future of federalism. It is natural that political scientists should turr from this impasse to a study of the Middle Ages as the one period ir human history when the idea of authority as federal" was a working reality. The insubstantial guild Socialism of Mr G. D. H. Cole is one of the more spectacular consequences of this appeal to mediaeval experience, but it is curious to find its more enduring consequences set out so clearly by a Japanese. As seen by him, the development of thp federal idea is little more than the blowing of nev; life into the ideas that lay behind the institutions of the Middle Ages. Whal Mr Shaw will say to this it is not easy to imagine, but as he is so fond of paradoxes, he should not be impatienl because the political scientists fine their arguments for Trade Unions and the League of Nations in Althusius and Marsilius.