Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (1962)

This is a stimulating meditation on politics, which Crick defines, borrowing from Aristotle, as the "master science." It is this master science because politics, on Crick's definition, means the hard work of conciliating the plural interests in a given society, a balancing act that is the prerequisite for individual freedom and the pursuit of all other worthwhile activities. Early in my reading, I wondered whether the book wasn't merely a defense of pluralism and "open access socities," which I thought had been made earlier (the Federalist Papers, especially nr. 10) and perhaps more persuasively elsewhere (Mill? Hayek? Popper? North?). As I read on, though, I began to think that Crick's argument was something else - namely, not just a defence of pluralism as a necessary evil, but a positive endorsement of the compromises, empathy, fallibilism, etc. necessary for such conciliation. These original elements came out especially when Crick drew contrasts between politics in his sense, on the one hand, and "ideologies" - whether of Communism, democracy, nationalism, technology - on the other. There were some echoes in the book of Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation."

Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (1997)

I can't recall exactly how I came to this book. It may have been that by familiarizing myself (a little) with Scholasticism and medieval Muslim explorations of the relationship between revelation and reason, on the one hand, and having some superficial impressions of what I understood to be a Talmudic culture of debate about Biblical interpretation, on the other, I began to wonder just what this Jewish tradition was like, and whether it, perhaps, bore some similarities to the Christian and Muslim scholasticisms. I may have been intrigued, I can't really remember, by the possibility that a tradition had developed a critical tradition on its own, largely without the "outside" impetus of Greek philosophy. I hoped Fisch's book might provide an intellectual prosopography of this tradition. In fact, it was rather different than I had expected, but nonetheless still fascinating. In the first, much shorter part, Fisch, an eminent philosopher of science in his own right, developed a kind of meta-Popperian account of rational projects, a standard independent of the projects' goals. I found this part to be quite persuasive. In the second, much longer, and for me quite challenging part, Fisch tried to show that Talmudic texts contained both traditionalist and antitraditionalist - i.e. critical in the meta-Popperian sense - strands. The persuasiveness of this part I really couldn't judge. The material was simply too dense, and I didn't have the patience to try to follow Fisch's argumentation. So I can't say how rational the rabbis were, though I want to think that Fisch is correct. I did come away struck by just how much of the Talmud dealt with "halahkik" questions, very specific issues of ritual law.