We are living in a society which has been in manifest crisis. Prolonged crisis is both an indication that the ideas that have guided the society are flawed and a stimulus to rethink them. While our political parties have been flailing around in the minutia of chaotic emergencies, an intellectual revolution has begun. The looming battles of ideas will be as much within the parties as between them: between those who cling, and those who leap.
We should start by recognising we live in a world too complex to be fully understood. The best we can do is to learn by experimentation, copying what works – pragmatism. The concept is radical uncertainty, on which John Kay and Mervyn King have written an important eponymous book, published last year. In writing it, the authors recanted a set of established 20th-century ideas that they once taught. Integrity compelled them to leap.
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