Abstract
Not many knights are knighted for services including those to ‘political studies’. That award to Bernard Crick, made in 2002, was one of many, including four honorary degrees and a posthumous Democracy Award, nominated by the Hansard Society at the 2009 Channel Four Political Awards. The Political Studies Association of the UK picked out Bernard in 2000 as one of a select group of six who merited the description of one of the most influential political scientists since World War Two. But he was very different to the other five – Brian Barry, Jean Blondel, David Butler, Stanley Hoffmann and Richard Rose. All those had outstanding scholarly distinction, and some, especially David Butler, an impact that extended beyond the academy. But none had the unique mix of scholarship and impact that Bernard had.
A first glance at the Crick timeline might suggest that ‘scholarship’ and ‘impact’ were two distinct phases of his career. His most influential academic work was in the first decade of his career, with two influential books – The American Science of Politics (1959) and The Reform of Parliament (1964) – sandwiching his classic, In Defence of Politics (1962; 1964). His biggest impacts were much later: the prototype he drew up in 1995 with David Millar on how the future Scottish Parliament should work, much of which was adopted when the Parliament was established in 1999; and the work he led for David Blunkett on citizenship education and naturalisation into UK citizenship between 1997 and 2005. The two reports which marked that work, The Teaching of Citizenship and Democracy in Schools (2001) and The New and the Old (2003), very directly changed UK government policy.
The period in between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s might appear by contrast to have been fallow. Far from it. If anything it may have been over-productive, even indisciplined; one of the words most of his obituaries had in common was ‘gadfly’. As he put it in 1971 ‘Like many academics nowadays, I tend to do too much and spread myself thin’ (Crick 1971, ix). He wrote a lot, on many things, glorying in the self-indulgence of the essayist. And he took on a lot of functions for various organisations. But most of what Bernard did had a logic, his work on Orwell perhaps excepted. There were two strands. One was about the relationship of politics as theory and politics as practice. The other was about political literacy as a foundation for active citizenship. Both had to do with an understanding of politics he set out in In Defence of Politics.
Bernard saw politics as an activity some societies engage in: it was about diversity and dispute, and working out ways to reconcile diversity. It was about the freedom to have different views, about tolerating opposition, and finding ways of dealing with difference which did not undermine freedom: ‘Politics is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence – and most societies are divided, though some think that that is the very trouble’ (Crick 1964, 33).
Politics as Theory and Practice
Two themes stand out in Bernard's view on the relationship of political theory and practice: one was admonitory; the other had to do with the possibilities of theory in practice once the admonition had been heeded.
The admonition was about supposedly scientific approaches to the study of politics, as reflected in particular in American scholarship (and subjected to Bernard's caustic pen in The American Science of Politics). Such approaches, modish when he started his career and periodically since, fell foul of his standards of clarity of analysis. He didn't like political scientists sheltering ‘behind unnecessary technicalities’: ‘I firmly believe that if things are of public importance they can be publicly stated: incompetent governments thrive on secrecy, incompetent scholars on pseudo-technical vocabulary’ (Crick 1964, 11).
But that complaint – from the foreword of the second edition of In Defence of Politics – had a deeper foundation. The search for certainty, regularity and prediction in political ‘science’ went against his understanding of politics as always contingent, based in untidy processes of different people setting out what their interests were and finding ways of reconciling them with others' interests. Politics was not orderable, and those who tried to order it analytically ran the danger of providing platforms for those who would order it in practice: ‘The claim for objectivity can be a kind of arrogance which leads men to despise the slowness of improvement and reform by persuasion and discussion.
Bernard's complaint might seem a little overblown now, but surely was not for someone whose formative years were dominated by ideologically motivated war and Cold War. It laid a foundation for his thinking about how the study of politics might interact with the practice of politics. This thinking included a staunch attack (Bernard did intellectual ‘attack’ well and with gusto) on another branch of political science: philosophical political theory. This was generally (and often still is) understood and taught as an ‘ill-focused enterprise giving us a rather blurred vision of the purely philosophical aspects of certain writers’ (Crick 1971, p. 10):
We find courses in the ‘History of Political Thought’, meaning political philosophy, which are then so abstract and analytical that one becomes doubtful whether there really is a history, rather than a few masters scattered here and there at odd points in time (Crick 1971, p. 9).
Bernard disliked abstraction as an end in itself (though was ever keen to apply the ‘old masters’ to contemporary conditions – not many official reports quote Aristotle, as did The Teaching of Citizenship and Democracy in Schools). He insisted on relevance. He saw himself as a practitioner of a British school of political science which is ‘aware of the inextricable relationship of theory to practice and hence the need for political relevance. The world may not need political science … but political science needs to be relevant to the world to be profound as a discipline’ (Crick 1971, pp. xi-xii). His relevance was that of the ‘public intellectual’ (another phrase that tended to pop up in his obituaries), which he defined carefully: the political scientist
has both to satisfy himself in terms of his craft and to prove himself publicly as explainer, generaliser, specific critic of other theories and as a continual critic of the concepts used in doctrines, but not to set himself up as a direct assertor of doctrines or censor of political opinions (Crick 1971, pp. 32–3).
He generally followed his own advice. His The Reform of Parliament provided some of the intellectual background for the reform of parliamentary procedure, and was more or less a foundational document for the Study of Parliament Group, set up in 1964 (and still going strong) as a meeting place of parliamentary practice and academic legislative studies. His long editorship of the Political Quarterly helped cement that journal's reputation as a place for dialogue between the study and the practice of politics (and its continuingly fierce edict to contributors to keep footnotes to an absolute minimum is a monument to Bernard's disdain for ‘unnecessary technicalities’).
Political Literacy and Citizenship
One of Bernard's central concerns in theory and practice was the relationship of politics and active citizenship. That relationship was one of the fundamentals of his definition of politics as an activity of expressing, reconciling and containing difference. Politics so defined created obligations: ‘The price of politics is eternal involvement in politics ourselves’ (Crick 1964a, p. 159). Only with that involvement, evolving with ever new generations and ever new views, could politics persist and with it freedom be maintained. For that reason political literacy – which created the capacity of all of us to engage in politics – was a conditio sine qua non of politics.
Political literacy was the area in which Bernard contributed most as public intellectual. He was a pioneer of the teaching of politics in schools, helping to found and serving as inaugural president of the Politics Association, which brought together schoolteachers of politics, and serving for years as the Chief Examiner for the London University A-Level in Government and Politics. He also took on a number of Hansard Society roles which led research that showed how painfully illiterate many Britons were about politics. But the reports that followed (Crick and Porter 1978) probably did not have that much effect.
The effects came later, the first in Bernard's role, together with David Millar, in imagining on behalf of the Scottish Constitutional Convention the procedures a new Scottish Parliament might adopt to be better tuned to ‘Scotland's more democratic civic tradition’ than the pomposity and arcanery of Westminster. The result was published as To Make the Parliament of Scotland a Model for Democracy (Crick and Millar 1995). Even if some of the recommendations were naïve in underestimating the role party discipline would play in the future Parliament, much of what they recommended was adopted when the Parliament was established in 1999.
An even bigger opportunity to make a difference came with the election of the Labour government in 1997, and with it the appointment of David Blunkett, one of Bernard's former students, as Secretary of State for Education. Blunkett gave Bernard the platform – one of direct access to power – that had not been available before. He took it, with citizenship, including political literacy, being introduced into the school curriculum in England (and in different form in post-devolution Scotland).
When Blunkett moved to the Home Office in 2001, Bernard was recruited again, this time leading work which took active citizenship and political literacy into policies on the naturalisation of immigrants. This work – including Bernard's historical introduction to the guide Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship (Home Office Life in the UK Advisory Group, 2004) – took him into more difficult waters. Some objected to Bernard's interpretation of UK history, others to the very idea of requiring immigrants to have to take a particular ‘journey to citizenship’. Very likely Bernard had ‘set himself up as a direct assertor of doctrines’ and violated his own rules on the role of the public intellectual.
But then again even his work for the Home Office was consistent with one of Bernard's other strictures, one which ran through all of his scholarship and all of his impacts, and one which defined his special persona: ‘to be speculative, thought-provoking and thoughtful, I hope; argumentative, sometimes polemical indeed and often informal in style, with a personal tone’ (Crick 2000, p. ix).
