Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

182 W. J. M. Mackenzie
sophic radicalism; the reaction was in some respects elitist and parochial, but it
made great contributions to scholarship in the humanities. The Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge contrived to find the way back to the origins of their
own history, in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and devised an education
very well designed to bring together the sons of powerful men and the aspiring
sons of the middle classes, who had no assets but ability shown in educational
competition. The pattern was of necessity a compromise; and its form was not
the same in Cambridge as in Oxford. But one might risk the generalization that
in various ways it combined those disciplines which were part of traditional cul-
ture (law, history, philosophy, literature) with a decent show of interest in the
methods and discoveries of the social sciences as they then existed. This mixture
created intellectual stresses, which had some relation to social stresses: but the
English interest in competitive achievement (in the same period they launched
most of the present forms of athletic competition, in that case also by a mixture of
aristocratic and plebeian interests) meant that the top intellectual standard was
good. The best work of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in England
is still influential in political science; and even at the worst, the nineteenth
century Oxford and Cambridge system served to keep communication open
between the aristocratic Lumpenproletariat like the rising middle class, between
hunting men and intellectuals.
Politically, this was a great service. It has however left England (and English
influence is now many times more important than Scottish influence) awkward-
ly poised between two strategies of teaching and research in political science.
One cannot at present concede victory either to the English humanistic tradition
that political education involves apprenticeship in a political culture, or to the
English radical tradition, that politics - like any other subject - is amenable to
rational scientific analysis.
This underlying controversy raises the level of debate and is intellectually
fruitful. But it has meant that English universities are eclectic in teaching and
are in research inclined to favour individual initiative rather than major collec-
tive enterprises.
The colonial countries of the British Empire, whether colonies of settlement
or colonies of conquest, inherited something of the English tradition. But in
Canada, Australia and New Zealand the Scottish Universities were at first more
influential, as they were in the United States of America; and these countries
have therefore been readily open to American influences in political science. In
India and the rest of South Asia the universities owe most to the nineteenth
century traditions of the University of London, which were not well adapted to
their circumstances; the process of reform is likely to lead them towards Ameri-
can rather than towards British models. In Africa (hally) there is the paradox
that the British, so far as it was possible, attempted to introduce the humanistic
pattern of socialization for leadership rather than the radical rationalist
pattern (which they introduced in India) or the American pattern of basic civic
training combined with practical skills. Here (as in South Asia) later American
influence has complicated further the originally complex English pattern.