Humes Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England
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Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Duncan Brown rated it it was amazing Sep 07, Kar Wai Ng rated it liked it Feb 17, Will rated it it was amazing Aug 07, Alex Schulman rated it it was amazing Jun 25, Helen Andrews rated it liked it Apr 18, This is a book full of ideas.
The big idea is that politics is mostly a challenge of coordination, not cooperation. If we don't agree on who the government is, we end up with anarchy and civil war, and almost any government is better than that. So it's more important to agree than it is to agree on anything in particular.
But because of that, the road is open for rogues and scoundrels to push for the government so that we have to rally behind them, and the challenge of politics is to steer towar This is a book full of ideas.
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But because of that, the road is open for rogues and scoundrels to push for the government so that we have to rally behind them, and the challenge of politics is to steer towards better coordination mechanisms, without breaking down the system we have. Instead of "consent of the governed" we ought to talk about the habitual obedience of the governed. People are accustomed to following certain specific leaders, certain laws, and the occupants of certain offices.
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We like the status quo. In normal times, all our habits are lined up, and we are in no doubt who has authority. In a crisis, different rules pull in different directions. After a coup for instance the law and the status quo might disagree, and it is only in those cases that we have a meaningful choice about the regime.
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The smaller idea is "Hume already understood much of this and if you look for it, you see this theme running through his History of England. As a philosopher, Hume was famously associated with empiricism and the notion that our beliefs about the world are more based on observing conventions and patterns than on strict deduction or formalism. It is therefore plausible that Hume understood government in a similar way, and wanted to dispense with all metaphysical talk about consent, 'the legitimate government' and so forth, and build a theory of politics purely on descriptions of people's habitual behaviors of obedience or disobedience to particular kinds of authority.
There is an amusing self-reference here. One of the ideas that Sabl attributes to Hume is "when reforming a government, it's important to make it not look like a radical reform. If you're going to radically increase the power of Parliament, the best and safest way to do that is to claim that you are just restoring the old system and carrying through Magna Carta. After all, all this talk of coordination games is heavily shaped by 20th century economics, particularly the work of Schelling.
I thought the big ideas about political theory were interesting, useful, and fresh. The prose is unusually good for an academic writer. There are considerable citations to the literature on Hume and on social coordination, but these are sufficiently unobtrusive to maintain the flow of the narrative. The book is fairly short, and felt like it was neither padded nor abbreviated. I would recommend this to anybody interested in political theory and looking for a hard-headed but humane and moderate-liberal account of how government comes to be. Andrew Sabl is professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He is the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics Princeton.
Hume's Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England
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Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders. Political Offices and Democratic Ethics. How should politicians act? When should they try to lead public opinion and when should they follow it? Should politicians see themselves as experts, whose opinions have greater authority than other people's, or as participants in a common dialogue with ordinary citizens?
When do virtues like toleration and willingness to compromise deteriorate into moral weakness?
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In this innovative work, Andrew Sabl answers these questions by exploring what a democratic polity needs from its leaders. He concludes that there are systematic, principled reasons for the holders of divergent political offices or roles to act differently. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. A groundbreaking new theory of the real rules of politics: As featured on the viral video Rules for Rulers, which has been viewed over 3 million times. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's canonical book on political science turned conventional wisdom on its head.
They started from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don't care about the "national interest"-or even their subjects-unless they have to. This clever and accessible book shows that democracy is essentially just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching.
The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance. The History of England: The 48 Laws of Power: With the publication of Servant Leadership in , a new paradigm of management entered the boardrooms and corporate offices of America. Not only would it create better, stronger companies, he said, but business leaders themselves "would find greater joy in their lives if they raised the servant aspect of their leadership and built more serving institutions.