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That Noble Science of Politics

Collini, Winch and Burrow’ have staged a rescue mission-though ‘mission’ is not a word that endears itself to the authors or their subjects. Their book deals with British thinkers who, although usually omitted from courses on the history of political thought and of the social sciences, nevertheless aspired to found a modern science of politics from which both legislators and citizens could benefit. None held a chair in political science, which had not yet received its professorial warrant. They all lived in a period when faith in deductive political rationalism had been undermined by the messiness of the French revolution. And most of them displayed a Whiggish suspicion of plans to achieve an earthly paradise. The story opens in Edinburgh where Dugald Stewart, successor in 1785 to Adam Ferguson as Professor of Moral Philosophy, initiated a separate series of lectures on the ‘noble science’. Scornful of Tory pressures to confine himself to a patriotic endorsement of the British constitution, Stewart instilled his students with enthusiasm for systematic political knowledge which, though inductively-based, could be raised by ethical and metaphysical considerations from myopic empiricism to the realm of general principles. Stewart seems an odd choice with which to begin a book intended to rehabilitate thinkers who were healthily sceptical of grand schemes of human improvement and who did not, in consequence, succumb to a belief in the progression of society to a happy conclusion. Less pessimistic than Hume or Smith about the possibilities of human perfectibility, and unwilling to genuflect in Burkean fashion to the historical past, Stewart appears to have had great faith in the capacity of enlightened statesmanship to attain a bright tomorrow. It is hard, despite Winch’s subtle account, not to conclude that Stewart viewed political science as a kind of theodicy-the source of informed public opinion through which humanity could be reconciled to, and hence co-operate with, some benevolent divine mission. Stewart deserves his place of honour largely through his influence as a teacher. His unique course of lectures attracted brilliant students, who eventually transmitted the novel science of politics, shorn of some of its metaphysical lumber, to a wider audience. The founders of the Edinburgh Review were all taught by Stewart, as was James Mill, with whom some of the reviewers were later to debate the issue of parliamentary reform. Prompted by the polemical fury of this controversy, we are accustomed to imagine an ideological