Some days ago, a correspondent asked, not unadmiringly, how it was we 'got away with' so much, not only in the postings in this blog but in the open and radical arguments made elsewhere on the internet by our public personae.

It made us think about this for two reasons - first, because we have never done otherwise or been anything but ourselves and, second, because it is about time we considered why our style seems to be a winning formula at this particular point in history.

Regular readers will know that we take a hyper-realist view of international relations. Our watchword is 'sentiment is not analysis'. We look at national and international politics with a clinical, almost alien eye, not as engaged participants (although we do participate) but as observers.

They will also know that we are not afraid to adopt this approach in covering hitherto taboo subjects in the professional advisory world such as antisemitism, national mythologising or sexuality if we think that this has relevance to political or business decision-making.

If you seek any of us out on the web beyond the blog, you will find yet more radical and contentious material, designed to provoke, elicit debate or criticise the 'idees fixes' and assumptions of our culture. We do it because it is fun but also because it works for us.

We know about the authoritarian right or the libertarian left because we engage directly with them. We disagree with but respect the positions of people who have been neglected by the traditional political adviser but who are giving us important clues to the future direction of politics.

By analogy with ecology, you might say that in the political and cultural ecosphere are species of thought that might prove more adaptive to radical change than the grazers who seem to dominate the grasslands today. Our assumption in politics as in evolution is 'punctuated equilibrium'.

For example, twenty years ago, 'Greens' were nutters on the fringe. Now they are not only a small but significant force in the politics of Europe but their attitudes inform much policy-making on the Western centre-left - and the European centre-right as well.

All this 'engagement' seems to go against the grain of the 'professional' approach of many consultancies where the consultant acts as a discreet hired gun separating their private views from their public persona, working within the system and its expectations rather than as gadfly in its borderlands.

When the day ends, they switch off and go yachting. We don't - our engagement is our life or rather we let life into our business.

This clearly works because once we start with a client, we tend to remain with them for a long while - if not on retainer then for repeat business. The interventionist, participative, risk-taking gadfly approach gets us serious information and it puts us, more often than not, ahead of the game.

We have had our ups and downs but no-one has ever questioned our integrity (so far) nor have we ever been in a position where our private stances and corporate positions have created a conflict of interest. There is a cohesion and consistency to our game play in the world.

We have taken all this for granted until now - initially as a discreet operator in unfavourable circumstances and then as an open operator in favourable circumstances. But what is going on here? Are we just lucky or is our style an indicator of other changes in our business and political culture?

After some thought, we incline to the latter - but also that we are lucky to be around, just as thinking about how to solve business and political problems is beginning to change.

There is a new awareness that sticking to the rules is only useful if the rules represent all that there is. In the three key areas of international affairs, politics and international business, game players have assumed until recently that the rules were all clear and were sufficient.

A series of shocks - the collapse of public trust in the political process at home, the break-down of American hegemony as mere assertion of power and the credit crisis and its associated economic correction - have shown that man cannot live by Davos alone.

The world exposed to scrutiny between 2003 and 2008 has resulted in a hunger for change (represented by the election of President Obama but still delayed in the UK by the clinging to power of New Labour) and in a world of smart diplomacy and (on its way) negotiated international regulation.

New rules are in formation. As things settle down, the traditional finance and professional services community (lawyers, accountants, management consultants, bankers and new breeds such as compliance and security consultants) will adapt and create a new order.

Yet there is a recognition that ideological 'group-think' got us into the mess in the first place. Within a framework of new rules, the necessity for order needs to be tempered with a commitment to flexibility and to the wise use of legitimate executive power if the new order is not to become sclerotic.

The age of Gramscian top-down manipulation is coming to an end in favour of direct dialogue and direct and open use of power. Talk of 'nudge' philosophy and the arrival of cognitive science in politics will not last too long because such techniques cannot be effective at our current level of knowledge.

This means that the arts of politics and of free-form diplomacy and the management of the struggle both between companies and between business and discontented populations is back on the agenda.

These are arts not sciences, played within the law but ones where judgement and real time analysis are more important than knowledge of the rules themselves.

Three years ago, our analyses were often regarded as so radical as to be embarrassing. This summer, a presentation to senior overseas bankers on political risk which we had considered radical resulted in amusing exchanges in which our audience proved to be more radical than us (too far so, we think)!

It is as if their perception of the world had been so changed that they were now liberated to think not merely the 'unthinkable' but to consider thoughts that, bluntly, questioned their own possible future existence as a means of ensuring that continued existence. Denial is no longer an option.

The point here is that, so long as certain boundaries are maintained, managing reputational risk now requires a very different approach to communications than hitherto - defensiveness based on 'who you know' in a closed network of media outlets operating to shared and cosy rules is not sufficient.

The new media have transformed the way information is issued to the public while the old media no longer has quite the power to make or break people or businesses. The consultancy of 'what is being said at dinner parties' still has its role but it is not, in itself, enough.

A defiant ethical stance to reputational attack, based on the facts and good practice, can be used to stand up to the self-regarding claims made against clients by journalists, politicians and bureaucrats. No one need crumble before the Fourth Estate. No one need cut deals if they are sure of their ground.

Above all, reputation management is moving from that phase in history where it was centred on emotional responses (the 'Diana effect'), in a world dominated by tabloids and earnest 'trust me' Prime Ministers, to one where each 'hit' can be countered with an ethical factual counter-strike.

Just as the best defence against a viral disease is often inoculation with a weak form of the virus, so defence against criticism is self-criticism that pushes the client on to the high ground from whence he can exploit the internal moral contradictions found amongst all self-regarding NGO and media critics.

Perhaps a turning point in the UK was Max Mosley's determination to fight (on privacy grounds) the attempt to damage him for a somewhat louche private life that was nobody's business but his family's.

Perhaps another has been the repeated defeat of political attempts to use dossiers to damage private interests as a means of creating political momentum amongst weak legislators rather than open a proper debate within strengthened legislatures on the facts of the case.

But privacy and dossier journalism are now on the agenda for reform. The way that we conduct our politics, and so the issues surrounding reputation management, will be very different in the next great thirty-year economic cycle than they were in the last.

We will continue to engage directly (albeit in a non-partisan way) with the political process (though never as lobbyists ourselves) and in international affairs.

We will continue to take an assertive stance with the media on behalf of our clients and we will continue to tell it like it is - especially when the message might not be what they want to hear.

What are nations? Now there's a big question.

They are territorial yet their laws of domicile can cover assets far away from their homelands whether as informal or formal empire. They are certainly not the possessions of their peoples in any meaningful way despite the elaborate liberal theory claiming otherwise.

Can a nation have a mind? Nothing can have a mind existentially except an individual person (unless you are a believer in some world-soul), yet nations behave as if they have personalities or minds of their own. They appear to have essentialised existence after the fact.

Nations raise major philosophical questions about our own humanity. How can a single person or a committee of persons, elected or in power through a coup or by chance, become the epicentre of the destinies of millions - and, in great wars, hundreds of millions?

How was it that Napoleon Bonaparte could so manage his society that he could leave Poland with 690,000 men in 1812 and return with only 93,000 yet see not one assassination attempt or coup from the relations of his apparently willing victims?

It seems that we can be managed into a lemming-like state with surprising ease.

Whatever the answers, national societies, almost all of either dynastic origin (essentially the war band) or outgrowths of party-led liberation struggles against the heirs of war bands, seem to have developed 'social personalities' and something close to an organic life cycle.

National defence and security policies appear to follow the patterns of behaviour of persons in a Hobbesian universe. Every state at any time appears to be somewhere on the following continuum, each phase shading into the next ...

• the expansion of the war band into a vacuum - or rather an apparent vacuum created by the differential in technologies between a predator and the predated, with the only difference between imperialisms being whether the predation is for profit (dynastic) or ideological (liberatory)
• the settling of interstitiary vacuums between rival powers of equivalent or near-equivalent strength - this is the boundary-setting and soft power competition in a multi-power world that seems to be taking place today
• the defence of integrity, with varying degrees of fear that stronger powers might decide to become a nouveau war band (as national socialism decided to do quite consciously), instead of looking elsewhere and in other ways for profit and influence (assuming such options are available)

Although we might like to fantasise about world government and about noble democracies maintaining peace in our time, the reality is that even the most open democracies behave somewhere along this continuum in ways that are less than altruistic.

If anything, because of the need to justify their position to themselves (another 'human' trait), a hybridisation of inherited dynastic self interest and of the export of values in the Western democracies muddies the water further.

Internal contradictions will always create more heat than light in internal foreign policy debate about the precise nature of the national interest. That is why Gordon Brown appears terrified of admitting the truth about energy and strategic interests in relation to Libya and falls back on the 'war on terror' chestnut.

This is all being raised because we (TPPR) tend to take a hyper-realist view of international relations, one that emphasises that there is little new under the sun and that the primal drives of nations, like persons, are only thinly veneered by reason.

Wherever we look, we see 'histories' that are redacted to maintain cohesion and inconvenient interpretations or alternative explanations of the past and of others' pasts being edited out, much as personal memories are self-edited in order to construct personality.

Wherever we look, we see, regardless of the huge diversity of individual personalities within nations, the observable fact of a 'national character', predispositions and attitudes that are not imposed by elites on people but appear to be shared by both elites and people in a dialectic of mutual myth creation.

Mircea Eliade was a pioneer in bringing to our attention how myth was not something Greeks did but something that is omni-present in our own contemporary narratives. The interplay between past, emotion, reason, convention and obligations or guilt are present in nations as in persons.

It might even be argued that new mythic personalities have emerged for trans-national ideologies that compete within nations for control of nations and that nations themselves are constantly struggling to 'square' contradictory mythic personalities internally in order to maintain their cohesion.

International relations might also be considered analogous to relations between persons. Persons can be rational in pursuing their interests externally but the interests themselves (or 'constructed personality') are not necessarily wholly rational.

We reject, however, the idea of the psychotic State (the liberal myth of Nazi Germany) because a psychotic State would not be able to hold its own personality together. Somalia may be psychotic, interwar Germany was not - it was deeply neurotic.

But we do retain the notion of the neurotic State, the functioning State that is still highly disturbed and capable of causing friction and even a fist fight with its neighbours - or blundering into slighting the fragile ego of another State so that it throws a punch.

All this sounds like conservative pessimism but there is no reason to believe that we are doomed to centuries of Napoleonic egos leading sheep to slaughter.

As in 'real life' (international affairs has an air of fantasy sometimes little different from tales of Narnia or of Middle Earth), bad behaviour can be contained.

In 'real life', we have a police force (or a strong headteacher or parents), or we have a culture of constraint and restraint from birth or we learn to be less neurotic over time through experience, will or therapy. To some liberals, our police force might be world government or a truly dominant hegemon.

The problem here is one liberals refuse to face. Whether world government or hegemon, this single 'State' would still have a personality of sorts, would still be the creature of its history and the mythic presumptions of its constituents and would not be the rational actor of progressive fantasy.

Moreover, neither of the two great hegemons of the last two hundred years (the Pax Britannica from 1815 to 1914 or the US informal imperium which subsisted briefly over the two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union) have evidenced anything other than self interest and self regard as to values.

Like Rome, they merely expanded to fill a vacuum and they were forced to retreat when their values and claims were resisted by equal and countervailing forces and when the costs of filling the vacuum proved greater than the benefits.

On the other hand, the model of a culture of constraint that accept the neurotics and psychopaths in our midst and works around them, calling in the police only when necessary, was the ideal of the failed League of Nations and the failing United Nations.

It depends on everyone knowing the rules, everyone abiding by the rules and effective police power being in place when the rules are broken. This consensus is breaking down within liberal democracies so there is every reason to believe the situation is no better at a global level.

Unfortunately, the 'real world' analogy for our current international legal framework is village policing in the eighteenth century. The global village is run by the squire and parson with one rule for them and another for the local peasants.

Given that (to extend the analogy) the squire's sons are partial to seducing or even raping the village girls occasionally, an international system like this is doomed to create resentment and resistance.

A third way of dealing with the situation is the analogically personal - that each person/nation becomes emotionally stable in themselves, compassionate towards others but realistic about the need to retain their own reserve power when faced by others less stable and less giving.

You might call this benign nationalism, integral, non-interfering elsewhere, concentrating on economic strength and security yet supportive of any measures that remove the anarchy 'out there' within its means.

Unfortunately, many persons 'out there' have the illusion that they are emotionally stable when they are not. This lack of self-knowledge also applies to the complacent faux-democracies of the West.

If nations have minds and personalities and there is little that we as individuals can do except our bit in rewiring a few of the national neurones in competition with millions of others, where should we direct that tiny bit of energy?

Free-for-all Hobbesian international affairs, like the market, works but at immense cost. Like punctuated equilibrium in evolution, long periods of peace and trade get interrupted by horrible episodes of limbic breakdown, like the Thirty Years War or the horrors of China between 1911 and 1949 and beyond.

If we want to live like that, fine, but progressive dreams of 'world government' are no solution. In the end, without other reforms, it will become an 'authoritarian personality' that begs for its own revolt and resistance. Its eventual collapse will mean that we are back where we started.

If we want better, then there are only two ways forward. The first is the radical reform of the United Nations so that it is no longer the vehicle of the squire and the parson but acts in a more limited way than it has been doing to provide basic rule of law and justice for the peasants (the weak nations).

Second, and equally important, national personalities have to be recognised and encouraged to develop in ways that are far less dynastic, far less ideological and far more attuned to the actual life needs of the general population.

I suppose we are saying that, in order to preclude another case where 690,000 men (and women) are directed into some snowy waste and then only 93,000 return, foreign and security policy needs to be taken out of the hands of dynastic successor politicians such as Presidents and be democratised.

If liberals want to avoid the conservative pessimism of our realpolitik analysis, then they need to stop flaffing around with grand visions and get down to basics:

• a more limited in scope but stronger, fairer and more independent UN with teeth and
• the radical democratisation of their own bourgeois democracies before they interfere in the affairs of less developed states.

Strong stable and responsive democracies prepared to concede some of their own interest to the international rule of law - now that's the basis for peace and security!

This is not perhaps what the functional heirs to Sceaf of the Angles or Ascaric of the Franks want to hear but, hey, a mature personality eventually grows up and put away the toy guns and childhood gangs and so should nations.