British Political Tradition

Abstract

GREENLEAF'S THE BRITISH POLITICAL TRADITION IS ONE OF the most impressive intellectual and physical endeavours of modern British political studies. And yet even with these two recent books of over five hundred pages each, to match the first equally wellloaded and well-balanced double-barrelled pair which appeared in 1983, The Rise of Collectivism and The Ideological Heritage, the enterprise is still not complete. A fifth book is to follow on ‘The World Outside’ —which must dampen down for the moment an obvious criticism that the British political tradition would seem, on Professor Greenleaf s account, to be uniquely unaffected, like ancient China or Japan, by the outside world; or the outside world by it.