Abstract
THE Riddell Memorial Lectures entitled “The Unknown State”*, delivered before the University of Durham by Lord Eustace Percy, represent a noteworthy plea for the study of government. They are indeed partly addressed to the scientific worker, and were delivered in the belief that a revival of the neglected study of government is the most urgent need of the present day, and that universities have a special responsibility to make it a learned study. Whether that responsibility can rightly be placed upon the universities is a matter of opinion; but no one who has considered Sir Ernest Barker's views on this problem of government, or J. T. MacCurdy's suggestive chapters in “The Structure of Morale” or has noted the difficulties into which the administration is being continually led from the Cabinet level downwards for lack of attention to the fundamental machinery of government, can doubt the need for critical inquiry if not independent research in this field, or that such inquiry should be entrusted to an institution of the independent and academic type. The problem appears to lie outside the field of the National Institute for Social and Economic Research, and there is no obvious independent body to which its study could be entrusted.
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Scientific Method in Government. Nature 155, 463–466 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155463a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155463a0