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The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics
An essential guide to political theory by one of the world's eminent theorists.
John Dunn is the founding father of the Cambridge school, which introduced an approach to political theory that emphasizes the importance of historical context in the formation and interpretation of arguments and ideas. The Cunning of Unreason makes a powerful case for the application of the Cambridge school approach to the current political climate.
Emphasizing the tempering influence of actual social and political circumstances, as well as the enduring relevance of great political thinkers from Aristotle to Marx, Dunn addresses contemporary debates about democracy, corruption, globalization, and the recent trend toward conservatism.
416 pages, Paperback
First published August 7, 2000
About the author
John Dunn
305 books20 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 16, 2011
A while back I read a book that started by telling its readers what it wasn't. Dunn's book needs the same disclaimer. This is really a book about understanding politics- it discusses, analyzes and judges different ways of understanding, not different kinds of politics. He begins by describing what he takes politics to be - essentially, conflicts within and between states - but most of the book is about how we might try to understand and change this subject matter. So the book is structured more often than not around a binary or ternary: should we be fatalists or voluntarists when it comes to understanding politics? Should be we understand politics from a Platonic or a sociological perspective? Is politics best understood with the tools of disinterested epistemology, or from the perspective of a particular political interest? Is politics best understood as brutal power plays, or as the realm of human cooperation?
If you can accept that, it's bracing stuff, until he gets around to suggesting, as he almost always does, that you take a bit from each member of his binary or ternary or quarternary, if that's a word. Which sometimes feels like a let-down.
There are other problems, too. Someone suggested that Dunn writes like Mozart. And that is true. But it doesn't mean it's clear and easy. It means that, like Mozart, it's excruciatingly difficult to follow and awesomely abstract, but sounds pleasant. Dunn has written about the early modern English political theorists a lot, and it shows. This is political theory in the *literary* tradition of Hobbes, not of utilitarian prose. It's like late Henry James. If you can't cope with that, you probably want to avoid this book. I actually quite like it.
The most serious problem is his vacillation over the importance of the State for political understanding. Against anarchists or libertarians or neo-liberals he wants to insist on the importance of the state for our political understanding; but as a clear-eyed social scientist he essentially admits that the moving force of political change over the last fifty years hasn't been the state at all: the state has been an effective tool, not the major force, for the spread of capitalist policies. I'm not sure that this is an irresolvable contradiction, but it's very hard to read his conclusion - that the creation of the modern democratic republic is humanity's most advantageous deed, and that all political understanding must start from it - without flicking back through to check whether you missed something in the previous 200 pages which were about how, basically, it's the economy, stupid.
Also, he's got the usual 'I used to be a socialist but then the USSR collapsed and now I know that socialism was always a fairy tale' pessimism that you find in older political thinkers. Newsflash! Our options are not capitalism or Stalinism. It just isn't true to say that "there is a clear surplus of conflict over co-operation in human interactions and... there will always continue to be so," 361. This might be true at certain levels of abstraction and at certain times; but in general, everyone gets on pretty well: I drive on the correct side of the road, I stop at stop-signs, I use my indicator. The exceptions and conflicts are more noticeable, but only because the cooperation is so all-pervasive. And that cooperation is reason for optimism that we can, in fact, improve our lot.
If you can accept that, it's bracing stuff, until he gets around to suggesting, as he almost always does, that you take a bit from each member of his binary or ternary or quarternary, if that's a word. Which sometimes feels like a let-down.
There are other problems, too. Someone suggested that Dunn writes like Mozart. And that is true. But it doesn't mean it's clear and easy. It means that, like Mozart, it's excruciatingly difficult to follow and awesomely abstract, but sounds pleasant. Dunn has written about the early modern English political theorists a lot, and it shows. This is political theory in the *literary* tradition of Hobbes, not of utilitarian prose. It's like late Henry James. If you can't cope with that, you probably want to avoid this book. I actually quite like it.
The most serious problem is his vacillation over the importance of the State for political understanding. Against anarchists or libertarians or neo-liberals he wants to insist on the importance of the state for our political understanding; but as a clear-eyed social scientist he essentially admits that the moving force of political change over the last fifty years hasn't been the state at all: the state has been an effective tool, not the major force, for the spread of capitalist policies. I'm not sure that this is an irresolvable contradiction, but it's very hard to read his conclusion - that the creation of the modern democratic republic is humanity's most advantageous deed, and that all political understanding must start from it - without flicking back through to check whether you missed something in the previous 200 pages which were about how, basically, it's the economy, stupid.
Also, he's got the usual 'I used to be a socialist but then the USSR collapsed and now I know that socialism was always a fairy tale' pessimism that you find in older political thinkers. Newsflash! Our options are not capitalism or Stalinism. It just isn't true to say that "there is a clear surplus of conflict over co-operation in human interactions and... there will always continue to be so," 361. This might be true at certain levels of abstraction and at certain times; but in general, everyone gets on pretty well: I drive on the correct side of the road, I stop at stop-signs, I use my indicator. The exceptions and conflicts are more noticeable, but only because the cooperation is so all-pervasive. And that cooperation is reason for optimism that we can, in fact, improve our lot.
July 1, 2013
One of the best books that I've ever read on contemporary political theory. It is a shame that it has been somewhat underrated, mostly, I would suggest, due to its difficult to follow construction and language. It is a book for patient readers!
October 7, 2023
Absolute waffle and never reached any solid conclusion, kept going round and round in circles, not fun and very bland/pretentious writing
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews