Customer Reviews

The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics

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Dunn is a Political Theorist at Cambridge who makes good in this book on the Theorist part of his academic title. Informing us at the outset that he's writing a book for the general reader about how to think about politics, his prose style (which employs parentheses to a fault) nearly defeats both him and us. Oracular, dense, he is prone to starting paragraphs that state there are such things as "three factors one must explore when thinking of government as coercive structure based on the provision of security for it's citizens." He writes sentences so long and so carefully balanced in tone that you forget what he's talking about before you get to the end of the sentence. Not really for the general reader in other words.

And yet...once he gets away from discussing great political thinkers from the past (and how to think about what they thought, and how to decide what makes them applicable) and gets down to describing a case study -- how Margaret Thatcher got into power and stayed in power -- he's quite readable.

Here's a passage about Thatcher that shows both Mr. Dunn for good and ill:

"In the case of the global neo-liberal agenda of the 80s and 90s (of which Reagan and Thatcher were prominent and consequential exponents), its public impact across large areas of the world, from some of the richest states to some of the poorest, depended both upon ideological impetus and upon drastic shifts in the international context in which the national economies operated.

"There were close and obtrusive links between these two factors throughout, since the agencies of international economic coordination were often potent vectors of the the conceptions of sound policy, and the ways in which they operated, and the institutional changes which they brought about, themselves brusquely altered the incentives faced by governments and economic actors across the world.

"Thge ideas themselves were in no important way novel(though their expression was naturally more up to the minute). What had always been less than engaging about them, and what had long proved ineffectual, remained just as engaging, and very often every bit as ineffectual. But ideological infection and institutional change, both carefully planned and essentially inadvertent, reinforced each other massively. What was evidently going on was a single interconnected process, a vast tipping in the balance of advantage between one set of ways of organizing production, distribution and exchange, subordinated, at least in intention to the pursuit of social welfare through public policy, and another set of ways of organizing production, distribution and exhange which had far weaker connections with the goal of pursuing social welfare, more especially through public policy." pg. 173-4

Not for the general reader, but nevertheless one appreciates his wide knowledge, flashes of insight and wit.

A title like "The Cunning of Unreason" promises much. This book does not fulfill that promise. Take my advice: Read the conclusion first, then the first few pages, then consider whether the effort of deciphering the author's overblown prose in order to reach such an conclusion is worth while.