Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Murdoch's firewall. I don't mind paying but I want to be able to share

"A political community is properly bounded when congruence and symmetry prevail between the “governors” and the “governed” and when an imagined community of fate connects its envoys directly to a common political project. Or not.

I read that in a paper by Professor David Held, of the London School of Economics, and it may, just possibly, be the wisest observation on politics that I have yet come across. But it also might not be. I can’t be sure because I haven’t got the first clue what the professor is going on about.
...
It is a frustrating feature of much academic political science that reasonably simple points are made in an impossibly complicated way — presumably to make them sound more profound. Straightforward distinctions between people who imprison dissidents and others who think that this is not a very good idea disappear in a mass of verbiage. And everything sounds reasonable. Or not."

So wrote Daniel Finkelstein in a really perceptive column in The Times today entitled "The LSE scandal is intellectual, not financial".

Unfortunately if you follow this link, you won't be allowed in without a subscription, because it's behind Rupert Murdoch's firewall. I don't actually object to paying for news, and contributing to Daniel's salary - I have a subscription. But it's a massive pity not to be able to share gems like this column. So I've torn the article out and shared some of it here.