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This lively collection of essays gives a non-technical, but profound analysis of the essential relationship between politics and literature.

SUMARIO: I. La tradición. II. EL futuro del gobierno parlamentario.

'SEEK, AND YE SHALL FIND'. YET IT IS NOT IMMEDIATELY obvious that the last decade has seen a remarkable revival of a specifically English tradition of democratic socialist thought. Most political writing in England, of course, has a bad press. I use 'political writing' in an obvious but also a special sense. By 'political writing' I mean serious writing about politics which is neither academic nor purely polemical. Sometimes it may be by academics, but then not academics writing for academics in a manner only comprehensible to academics; rather those books or articles which are written for a general public who take a serious interest in politics, whether directly or indirectly involved — say 'literate citizens'.

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.