Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence…politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.

Here is Ezra's reaction to the news that eminent political theorist Bernard Crick had died. Although he was a good age, Ez couldn’t help but be saddened by the news.

You see, unlike Henry – naturally attracted to the political firebrands like Robespierre or Trotsky – Ezra is a conciliator, thus naturally Crick was his kind of guy. Essentially a moderniser rather than a radical, Crick’s notion of political reform appeals to Ezra’s astute sense of balance and responsibility.

Like myself, Ezra was attracted to Crick primary through his masterful In Defence of Politics (1962). At a time of ideological tumult, the book reasserted the importance of politics and the nobility of the political vocation to an age that seemed either apolitical or anti-political in character.

For Crick, the ideologically driven leader – think Castro, Mugabe or Chavez – practises a form of anti-politics, in which the goal is the mobilisation of the populace towards a common end – even if it means killing someone to liberate them.

Mao, it is said, believed that “Power grows from the barrel of a gun". Such a view – in Crick's estimation – is thoroughly anti-political, because the speaker assumes an almost divine right to ignore or overcome any burden of ethical responsibility to his constituency with recourse to violence.

The beauty of A Defence of Politics lies in its argument that politics could exist only in societies in which the facts of diversity of opinions and interests were accepted as permanent and legitimate.

This was not a fashionable view in the 1960s, and his acknowledgement that politics – by its nature – is inevitably messy and complex, compels some tolerance of differing truths and recognition that government is best conducted amid the open canvassing of rival interests.

Thus, for Crick, Ezra and Me (Henry is holding out), the political process is not tied to any particular doctrine. Genuine political doctrines, rather, are the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to this perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation.

Conciliation, you see, is the essence of politics.

That’s what Crick understood and that’s why we’ll miss him.