Leo Strauss once observed that in the 19th century, Germany's politics were "a mess" while its thinkers were "first-class". England's politics, on the other hand, were "fine", and its thinkers "second-class". The implication (which Strauss did not have to spell out to his disciples) was clear: there may be an inverse relationship between philosophy and politics. Grand philosophies of the Germanic order - abstract, systematic, comprehensive, engaging all aspects of nature, aspiring to create a whole that would subsume all contingencies and rationally construct (or reconstruct) the world - such philosophies were not only irrelevant to the mundane affairs of social and political life but also fatally distracting and disruptive. Conversely, the modest philosophies favoured by the English (a German philosopher might say of Mill, as Churchill said of Clement Attlee, that he had much to be modest about) were attuned to a culture that was practical and prudent and thus conducive to a polity that was humane and responsible.

Economists have recently elaborated a theory of the second-best, in which the optimum resolution of a problem may involve a strategy of second-best devices. At least one legal philosopher has invoked that model for the discipline of jurisprudence. But it was more than 150 years ago that Alexis de Tocqueville delivered what may still be the last word on the subject. Tocqueville was speaking of America when he extolled its philosophy of "self-interest rightly understood". But he might have been speaking of England too - the source, after all, of the phrase, "self-interest". And he was speaking, more broadly, of a moral philosophy (Adam Smith, after all, was a "moral philosopher" by trade, as well as an economist) that went well beyond the economic context of that phrase.