Good and Bad Power: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government by Geoff Mulgan

Good and Bad Power: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government Reviews

• 
  Virginia Rand

  Geoff took a subject I was interested in and made me board. He writes like someone who's used to putting together white papers.
• 
  Darran Mclaughlin

  A wise, thoughtful, eye opening analysis of statecraft. Geoff Mulgan has worked as a political activist, in local government, founded and directed the think tank Demos and acted as Director of Policy to the New Labour government under Tony Blair. He is uniquely well qualified to write a book such as this. It is always interesting to encounter ideas on politics and the role of the state from someone who actually has first hand experience of it at work, as opposed to someone who comments without having got their hands dirty.
  
  Mulgan draws upon an astonishingly wide range of sources in this analysis of statecraft, including the usual references drawn from recent history, the French Revolution, Renaissance Italy and Classical Greece and Rome, but he seems to also be au fait with the political history, writers and thinkers of the Islamic/Arabic tradition, India and China going back thousands of years.
  
  His account seems reasoned and well balanced, demonstrating that in many ways governments have become more ethical, open and accountable over time, but also showing that they are always at risk of becoming remote, alienated from the people and liable to being taken over by Oligarchies. The problem is that he does an excellent job of analysing and identifying the behaviour of state's and the people they govern, but I'm not sure he presents a convincing case for how to resolve some of the serious problems we are facing today. He suggests that electorates should be encouraged to become more deeply involved in the process of Government, by perhaps being made to participate as a condition of citizenship. This would keep governments in check and make people better aware of the fact that we have duties as well as rights. But do governments really want an engaged electorate who actually pay attention to the business of the state? He argues that a fully functioning free press is essential to a healthy and successful state, but how are we to guarantee this in an era dominated by market values? Flat Earth News by Nick Davies made a very convincing case as to why market driven business values are destroying the free press and I can't see how this is going to be reversed any time soon, especially as it is in the interest of the political and economic elites to keep things as they are. He also makes the case that we need more transnational governing to deal with transnational problems like ecological destruction and climate change, but how are we going to make these bodies democratic or prevent national interest from undermining them?
  
  This book contains so much food for thought that it requires more than one read to fully grasp it. I might have to come back to it in a few years.
• 
  Jet

  I finally got my hands on this book. hardcover. Sheesh. They could really produce more paperbacks on these titles. So far so good. 2 chapters into the formation of the state, and the nature of the state and no mention (hardly) of Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke. I am impressed, thus far, with the breadth at which Mulgan has chosen to take the subject - incorporating Eastern philosophy alongside Aristotle. That has hitherto been my chief gripe about traditional approaches to the subject - we neglect the non-Western world.