The core problems of political philosophy are largely the same as those considered in the Classical age: our contemporary issues are most intelligible when viewed through the lens of democratic-minded masters from Socrates to Tocqueville. That is, the field is not progressive (additive) and certainly not historicist. The main issues deal with law and justice; authority and order; who should rule (what is the statesman)?; what is the best regime, and what is its relationship to the actual (current) regime?; what is a good citizen, and what is the relationship to the ideal (virtuous or perfect) person? The primary subject of political judgement is decision making. The conclusion departs from its study of towering figures to assert the national and the cosmopolitan (i.e., the ideal) each have a role to play is shaping the patriot. The answer depends mightily on the ethos of the people.
Month: May 2022
15. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (10 Oct 2016)
Evaluates the conceptual novelty and disciplinary trajectory of 18th-century thought, emphasizing the pervasiveness of reason. In contrast to the Renaissance concern for maths-based systems, the Enlightenment sought for approaches to accommodate continuous, scientific progress. Descartes and Newton exemplified the former, while the French philosophes represented the latter, as they were responsible for introducing systemic analysis to philosophic thinking. Leibniz bridges this gap, due to his theory of entities (monads) in an ever-becoming status. Lessing, the poet, emerges the author’s final hero for adding to rationalism’s perfunctory analysis an endemic creative power. Deeply exploring concepts across many fields — science, religion, statecraft, psychology, aesthetics — this is a first-rate history of ideas.
16. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (23 Oct 2016)
British thinkers following in the footsteps of Locke and Hume — Berkeley, Hutcheson, Gibbon, Smith joined by Burke and Wesley — were the Enlightenment’s first and foremost cohort, seeking to elaborate social compassion, benevolence, and sympathy. Where the French philosophes concentrated on the ‘ideology of reason’, born of universally applying the systems of Newton and Descartes to society’s structure and pursuits, and the American Founding Fathers on equitable political liberty, the British sought new precepts for a gentler, more virtuous society. These moral philosophers ‘posited a moral sentiment in man as the basis of the social virtues’. Himmelfarb places a major emphasis on Methodism (as an offshoot of the Anglican Church) and Dissent. Burke’s role was to take the British approach further, ‘by making the “sentiments, manners, and moral opinions” of men the basis of society itself, and, ultimately, of the polity as well’.
17. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (6 Nov 2016)
Essays criticizing the theoretical basis and methodology of ‘new history’, including social history, psychohistory, quantification, and work driven by socialist theory. Each violates the principle of deriving explanations of the past from its base of evidence. The social sciences, whatever their merits, are often unsuitable for considering the ‘things that really matter’ to a given topic. The opening chapters on social history (e.g., Annalisme) and socialist history are most persuasive, as there are several decades of output to evaluate. Interesting but inconclusive discussion of the idea of progress, which takes the reader toward the territory of philosophy of history.
18. Elton, The Practice of History (17 Nov 2016)
History exists distinct of the social sciences because it treats of particular people and events as they have changed over periods of time. The purpose of assessing dynamics is unlike disciplines which seeks to draw conclusions, even laws, from a static, measurable state of affairs. Further, the study of history is its own end, toward the understanding of what happened, rather than any analog or determinant of future events. History is rarely settled because new evidence appears and new ways of conceiving problems are formulated. But history is never relative: the past is dead. It is not the problems studied nor lessons learned but intellectual rigor of assessing evidence and explication that distinguishes the practitioner and the output. Evidence itself can never fulfill the job; while one must gather all he can, one must also criticize (evaluate) its contents and use imagination (investigative thinking) to assess the gaps and the misdirection. While there is a place for description and analysis, narrative is the highest form of the craft; the format will often be suggested by the problem.
Virtu vs experience
Do civic elites seek to frame judgement on those matters which the populace cannot properly evaluate, so to insulate themselves from criticism?
Writing of Guicciardini’s
- Dialogo
, JGA Pocock observes:
…Guicciardini had himself expressed in earlier writings that the many are good judges of their superiors, able to recognize qualities which they themselves lack, and so fit to be trusted with the selection of the few to hold office. Once the distinguishing quality of the leader ceases to be virtu and becomes esperienzia, this belief becomes less plausible, since esperienczia is an acquired characteristic which can be evaluated only by those who have acquired some of it themselves, and since a republic is not a customary but a policy-making community, there is little opportunity for the many to acquire experience of what only governors do – a form of experience whose expression is not custom but prudence.
JGA Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 2016, p234.
On universalism vs the polity
Elite insistence on Kantian universal polities (e.g., European Union, United Nations) is undermining the actual practice of republican government.
What was once understood to be the precondition of democracy or of a representative republic—the act of forming a distinct community capable of drawing from itself its own reasons for action—has become the main obstacle to what is now for us the only defensible objective of collective action: the formation of a universal society of the human species, where we will all be the “same” and separated by no borders.
We live under the authority of an idea of justice that can be summed up as follows: it is unjust to form and defend a common good that is our own.
Pierre Manet states a (unspecified) case for the French Third Republic:
The Third Republic had its faults and even its vices, but for my part I admire the way it knew how at once to impose its regime and to embed it in the continuity of France’s history, and in particular its was of conceiving the teaching of the French language and French history, so that every little French boy or girl would feel part of a long series of centuries and would be inspired to admire works produced by a world very different from his or her own and people very different from those who were familiar.
We prefer to flatten the child’s soul and to crush his or her nose into the wall of the present by making past centuries appear before our ephemeral certainties to be judged. But we will not accomplish the necessary political “reform” by invoking the glories of France against the miseries of the present. If we do not know how to link the elements of our threatened heritage with a common action to be undertaken today, then we will remain in the domain of nostalgia that may be sincere but is certainly sterile. If the two parts of our people—the ruling class and the “populist,” or simply demoralized people—manage to leave behind the mutual disdain into which they have settled, they will doubtless discover that they are both suffering, if not in the same way, from the weakening of the representative Republic and the emptying out of the nation’s interior life.
19. Turner, The Frontier in American History (6 Dec 2016)
The American frontier was settled by rough-hewn individuals and families migrating in search of the best free land to homestead, wanting to get away from coastal or regional elites. Settlement typically created a new type of American, as descendants of Puritan New England, Germans from Pennsylvania, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from the Piedmont South merged together into communities which were helpful to one another, but ultimately individualists who did not much trust government. Jacksonian democracy, with its eponymous hero, was its first political expression. Settlement of the old Northwest and Midwest of the country — roughly, Big 10 country — was the most significant phase as the region first tipped the balance between north and south toward the free soil, then produced the greatest generals and politicians (including Lincoln) of the age, and finally yielded the great resources for America’s industrial rise. Interestingly, the far Great Lakes and upper plains states (eg, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas) were often heavily peopled by immigrants — Germans and Scandinavians. Free land served as a natural outlet for low-wage earner of the cities. By the time the frontier closed in 1890, the migrants had switched to favoring government intervention to protect individuals from the economic power of consolidating industrialists. Another important outlet was the Midwest’s rise of the state university, to cultivate the talents of the new citizen.
20. Richards, A Game for Hooligans (16 Dec 2016)
Surveys elite-level rugby union from the 1860s to the 2007 World Cup. Most attuned to competitive outcomes, the author elaborates the impact of law changes, regional distinctions and trends, and even socioeconomic influences but declines to articulate a superordinate narrative. For example, while amateurism’s distortions figure in most in the work, the storyline seemingly forgets the old code as it portrays the new features of an overly professional game. This may be conscious decision: to present a more encompassing theory might have forced Richards into a history of World Rugby (nee International Board), which would be far more difficult to research, probably less interesting, and certainly exclusive of the majority. Although diligently touching base on emerging countries, there are omissions of the Pan American and Pacific Rim tournaments, plus the sign-off misses the growth of the Olympic version, seven-a-side. A very useful bibliography.
1. Beer, To Make a Nation (7 Jan 2017)
The origin of American federalism lays in the English Commonwealth, specifically the work of John Milton and James Harrington. The latter’s
- Oceana
most completely broke from the hierarchic, corporate views embodied in Thomas Aquinas and carried on up through the aristocratic Edmund Burke (the work’s antihero). Colonial- and Revolutionary-era Americans faced the task of justifying an expansive republic governed by popular sovereignty, in contradistinction to the classical small republic (as advocated by Montesquieu) or parliamentary sovereignty. Here James Madison and then James Wilson come to the fore, the former for overturning the prejudice against small states by asserting conflict rationally resolved prevents tyranny of the majority, and the later (the unexpected hero) for explaining how the people would come to love their federal government. Ben Franklin also is to be admired; Alexander Hamilton is slighted. The work is particularly strong in showing how the people are simultaneously to be in control of and benefit from the administration of government; but there is ever the hint of viewing the Constitution as a ‘living’ document, which would seem to unsettle all of its theoretical underpinnings and equipoise.