Civics

Odd that I should have mentioned Bertrand Russell in my first post of 21st July as I have just finished, after rather a long time, a first reading of a book he wrote in 1938 about power: 'Power, a new social analysis', published in a small but handsomely produced book by George Allen & Unwin Ltd and complete with its more or less immaculate yellow dust jacket. Picked up from somewhere or other, exactly where being now forgotten.

But including the slip illustrated for a society which looks to be very much of the fifties, appropriate to when this seventh impression was printed in 1957. An outfit which draws just a single screen from google, a single screen; an early music screen including, for example, something from an auctioneer about a chest of viols. Something else from OUP for which I have to pay if I want to see it, so google must have some cunning arrangement whereby it can index stuff which the rest of us have to pay to see.

The book itself was rather good, a book which like the roughly contemporary 'Jesting Pilate' (vide supra) has worn rather well. The mathematical genius - if not giant - of the very beginning of the twentieth century had turned into a social scientist by the middle of it, a social scientist who from a position of never having had much power - beyond that which accrues to any successful upper-crust socialite and philanderer - has a very fair stab at working through the workings of same.

Priestly power, kingly power and naked power. This last being the sort that claims no legitimacy than that of itself, of brute force. The tools of power, for example castles and roads. Economic power and the distinction between the power of shareholders and the power of the executives, generally not the same people.

For a life-long atheist, he takes a positive view of the rôle of organised religion over the centuries. On the whole, a force for progress. He does not go in for the rather tiresome priest bashing of Dawkins and the late Hitchens.

Forms of government. The need for the rule of the majority to be tempered by the needs of the minority. For the need for all of us to rub along with each other, without reaching for our equalizers (see http://www.colt.com/ for a rather unpleasant display of such and where the Colt Single Action Army® Revolver can be seen to be the name of the current offering) when we disagree, to be able to disagree in a civilised way.

A book which, I would have thought, would make a very good text for the lessons in what we used to call civics when I was at school. One period a week when we learned about how and why the country was organised, mainly based on the lessons of the history of Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries; this in the days when we could hold up the House of Commons to the rest of the world as the example of how things ought to be done. I think the chap who taught this class was a regular reader of the then long parliamentary columns of 'The Times' and I associate to my days at what was then OPCS (now lost inside ONS) where it was normal for budding young statisticians such as myself to turn the pages of Hansard most days, to see what was happening at the seat of power.