Tag Archives: political philosophy

Politics Is a Strong and Slow Boring of Hard Boards

07 Friday Aug 2015

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Portrait of German political economist and social scientist Max Weber (1864 - 1920), a founder of the discipline of sociology, who called himself 'The Enemy of the Squires' and championed the cause of social and economic reform in Wilhelmine Germany, circa 1910. His most famous work is 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' (1905) in which he explored the cultural and religious roots of Western capitalism. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth — that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.”

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Max Weber, writing in the final paragraph of his truly edifying political-philosophical essay, “Politics as a Vocation”. You’ll find it in his Essays in Sociology. (Buy the book, but the whole thing’s here.)

Though Weber wrote his essay in German, adapted as it was from a 1919 lecture he gave to the Free Students Union in Bavaria, I can’t help but love the double entendre of “boring” in the opening sentence. Whenever there’s a showmen performing rhetorical tricks — like a magician proudly parading his assistant or waving a colored hankerchief — reach for your pocket, and see who’s pulling out your wallet.

Thanks to my friend M.S. for reminding me of this one.

There’s more:

In a Real Democracy April 15th Would Be a Day of Mass Celebration

13 Monday Apr 2015

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Noam Chomsky

“Look at our political institutions. You have, say, the New Hampshire primary. In a democratic society, what would happen is the people in a town in New Hampshire would get together in their own organizations, assemblies, groups, whatever they are, and take off a little time from whatever careers or other activities that they’re engaged in and say, ‘Alright, let’s work out what we would like to see in the next election.’

And they’d come up with some sort of program: we’d like to see this. Then, if some candidate says, ‘I would like to come to town to talk to you,’ they would respond, ‘Well you can come if you want to listen to us.’ And the candidate could come and they would explain to him what they want…

What happens is totally different.

Nobody meets in the town. The candidate and his media representatives announce that he or she is coming to New Hampshire and they gather people together. The people sit there and listen to the candidate saying, ‘Look how wonderful I am, I’m going to do all these great things,’ and nobody believes a word and then they go home. Well, you know, that’s the opposite of democracy.

In fact, we see it all the time. Take, say, April 15th. In a functioning democratic society that would be a day of celebration, the day you hand in your taxes. You would be saying: ‘Alright, we got together, we worked out some plans and programs that we think ought to be implemented and we’re now participating in providing the funding to get these things done.’ That’s a democracy. In the United States it’s a day of mourning. It’s a day when this alien force, you know, the government, which comes from Mars or somewhere is arriving to steal from us our hard earned money and use it for their own purposes, whatever they are. That’s a reflection of the fact that the concept of democracy is not even in people’s minds anymore. Now, I’m exaggerating. It’s not quite this sharp, but it’s pretty close.”

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Noam Chomsky, speaking in ‘Part IV: Political Institutions’ of The Chomsky Sessions on ZNet. You can find extended interviews with Dr. Chomsky in the always challenging Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian.

In the United States, April 15th is statistically shown to be the second most stressful day of the year, as 56% of American adults say the tax-filling process is “stressful” and 18% say it is “very stressful.” (Data from a Zogby poll shows peak tornado season to be the most stressful day of the year.) Three quarters of Americans say money is “a significant cause of stress in [their] lives,” leaving us unsurprised that the day a large stack of that cash is handed over would be an especially anxious one. You are also far more likely to be injured in a car accident on April 15th and 16th, given each sees statistically significant spikes in incidents of road rage (Super Bowl Sunday is the second most dangerous day to be on the road, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association).

Don’t agree with Noam? You’re still in some good company:

Andrew Sullivan: What I Believe

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in Essay, Freedom, Philosophy

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Andrew Sullivan 345

“I believe in liberty… I believe in a system of government that places that liberty at the center of its concerns, that enforces the law solely to protect that freedom, that sides with the individual against the claims of family and tribe and church and nation, that sees innocence before guilt and dignity before stigma. I believe in the right to own property, to maintain it against the benign suffocation of a government that would tax more and more of it away. I believe in freedom of speech and of contract, the right to offend and blaspheme, as well as the right to convert and bear witness. I believe that these freedoms are connected — the freedom of the fundamentalist and the atheist, the female and the male, the black and the Asian, the gay and the straight.

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

And I believe in a country that enshrines each of these three things, a country that promises nothing but the promise of being more fully human, and never guarantees its success. In that constant failure to arrive — implied at the very beginning — lies the possibility of a permanently fresh start, an old newness, a way of revitalizing ourselves and our civilization in ways few foresaw and one day many will forget. But the point is now. And the place is America.”

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From Andrew Sullivan’s article “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

Gore Vidal Obliterates Ayn Rand

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Gore Vidal

“She is fighting two battles: the first, against the idea of the State being anything more than a police force and a judiciary to restrain people from stealing each other’s money openly… But it is Miss Rand’s second battle that is the moral one. She has declared war not only on Marx but on Christ… Now I doubt if even the most anti-Christian free-thinker would want to deny the ethical value of Christ in the Gospels. To reject that Christ is to embark on dangerous waters indeed. For to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. For one thing, it is gratuitous to advise any human being to look out for himself. You can be sure that he will. It is far more difficult to persuade him to help his neighbor to build a dam or to defend a town or to give food he has accumulated to the victims of a famine. But since we must live together, dependent upon one another for many things and services, altruism is necessary to survival. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea which has figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race. We often fail. That predatory demon ‘I’ is difficult to contain but until now we have all agreed that to help others is a right action.

Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life a right action is consideration for the welfare of others. In the one case, through a state which was to wither away, in the other through the private exercise of the moral sense. Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.”

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Gore Vidal, writing a comment in Esquire in July 1961. You can check out Vidal’s supremely erudite, always entertaining cuts in United States: Essays 1952-1992.

More Gore:

Ayn Rand

Why Liberty?

17 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by in Freedom, Political Philosophy

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H. L. Mencken“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value.

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave…

In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen… I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.”

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From H.L. Mencken, writing in his article “Why Liberty?”, published in the Chicago Tribune on January 30th, 1927.

I had to reread this essential essay after scanning the sixth chapter of Mencken’s Prejudices a few nights ago and running across his consummately cool statement that, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Of course the thought is only metaphorical — and its overt violence only meant to instill verve, not aggression, in the reader — but under the shadow of the monsters now slitting throats under black flags across Iraq and Syria, the paragraph didn’t sit well. But that’s not Mencken’s fault, and there could be no more durable, stalwart rebuke of Takfirism, Salafism, and all other totalitarianisms than his article “Why Liberty,” published only a decade after the October Revolution and a decade before the Spanish Civil War.

Read on:

Our Partisanship as a Moral Failing

02 Tuesday Sep 2014

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David Brooks 32

John Meacham: If our country itself is irreconcilably polarized, then in classic republican — lowercase “r” — thinking, that is going to be reflected in our political system.

David Brooks: I’m coming around to that view, which I was very resistant to over the last ten years. A lot of people have argued that [polarization] begins out in the country, not in Washington. I guess I more or less accept that now.

And I think it’s a moral failing that we all share. Which is that if you have a modest sense of your own rightness, and if you think that politics is generally a competition between half-truths, then you’re going to need the other people on the other side, and you’re going to value the similarity of taste. You know, you may disagree with a Republican, or disagree with a Democrat, but you’re still American and you still basically share the same culture. And you know your side is half wrong.

If you have that mentality that ‘Well, I’m probably half wrong; he’s probably half right,’ then it’s going to be a lot easier to come to an agreement. But if you have an egotistical attitude that ‘I’m 100% right and they’re 100% wrong,’ which is a moral failing — a failing of intellectual morality — then it’s very hard to come to an agreement.

And I do think that we’ve had a failure of modesty about our own rightness and wrongness. And I’m in the op-ed business, so believe me that people like me have contributed as much as anybody to this moral failure. But I think it has built up gradually and has become somewhat consuming.

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David Brooks and Jon Meacham, in conversation when Meacham subbed for Charlie Rose this summer.

More:

  • George Washington rips party politics
  • Mark Leibovich rips our cowardly political culture
  • Meacham and Brooks riff on Jefferson and Hamilton

John Meacham

What Is a ‘State’?

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

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Max Weber

“But what is a ‘political’ association from the sociological point of view? What is a ‘state’? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand… Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force.

‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state — nobody says that — but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions — beginning with the sib — have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.”

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Sociologist Max Weber, writing in his seminal 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation”.

This is the best definition of the state that I’ve read. It is also, in a nutshell, what we Americans have never understood about our guns — that although we may have the right to violently defend our selves and our property, we ultimately cede to the state the right to legitimately exercise force.

Read on:

  • Andrew Jackson elaborates on the importance of the rule of law
  • Martin Luther King outlines when and how you should break the law
  • Chief Justice Robert Jackson argues why the state must let people think freely

Can We Be Optimistic about America’s Future? (Yes, Says Charles Krauthammer)

02 Monday Jun 2014

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Charles Krauthammer

“Looking down the road, to the future of the United States, I… I really am, despite the burden of our current problems, optimistic.

If you believe, as I do, in the political ideology of liberty; in the importance of an open civil society, and that the relationship between the citizen and the state should be a limited one, then I think you must believe that, if we can advocate those ideas clearly enough, we will win out in the end. And when you take away the other contaminants — the personalities, the contingencies, the financial crises, the Congressional gridlocks, the things that are confined to ‘the times’ — those ideals will survive for another generation. And that’s why I think, in the end, reality does win out. That’s why I’m confident.

Let me just end by saying that I’ve always had a sense that there is something providential about American history — and this is from somebody who isn’t strictly religious. But here is a nation founded on the edge of civilization by a tiny colony, living on the outskirts of the civilized world — one that, at a time when it needs it, miraculously finds within its borders the most brilliant generation of political thinkers in the history of the world. Then, a century later, when it needs a Lincoln, it finds a Lincoln. Then, in the 20th century, when it needed an FDR to fight and destroy fascism, it found it. When it needed Reagan to revive the country, it found one. And I don’t think there is a Reagan or an FDR on our horizon.

But there’s something about American history that redeems itself in a way that should inspire even the most pessimistic cynic. The way I would summarize the root of this feeling is by quoting my favorite pundit, Otto von Bismarck. He’s not known for his punditry, but he did famously say that, “God looks after four things: children, drunks, idiots… and the United States of America.”

I think he still does. I hope he still does. Thank you.”

__________

Charles Krauthammer, speaking off-the-cuff at the closing of his address to last summer’s Bradley Symposium.

More from Bradley:

Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

19 Monday May 2014

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Gore Vidal Portrait Session

“We would together constitute a new nation, founded upon ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The first two foundation stones were familiar, if vague… ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is the real Joker in the deck. To this day, no one is sure just what Jefferson meant. But I suppose what he had in mind was that government will leave each citizen alone, to develop as best he can in a tranquil climate, to achieve whatever it is that his heart desires, with a minimum of distress to the other pursuers of happiness. This was a revolutionary concept in 1776, and it still is…

Although the Founding Fathers were, to a man, natural conservatives, there were enough Jeffersonian-minded pursuers of happiness among them to realize that so lawyerly a Republic would probably act as a straight jacket to those of an energetic nature. So to ensure the rights of each to pursue happiness, the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution. In theory, henceforward, no one need fear the tyranny of either the state or of the majority. Certain of our rights, like the freedom of speech, were said to be inalienable.

But some like to remind us that the right to privacy cannot be found anywhere in the pages of the Constitution, or even in the Federalist Papers… We are told that since the Constitution nowhere says that a citizen has the right to have sex with another citizen, or to take drugs, or to OD on cigarettes — or, as the nation is now doing, on sugar — that the Founders therefore did not license them to do any of these things that may be proscribed by the prejudices of a local majority. But this is an invitation to tyranny…

Was the United States meant to be a patriarchal society? I think the answer is no. Was the United States meant to be a monotheistic society, Christian or otherwise? The answer is no. Religion may be freely practiced here, but religion was deliberately excluded from the political arrangements of our republic…

Each year it is discovered with some alarm that American high school students, when confronted anonymously by the Bill of Rights, neither like it nor approve of it. Our society has made them into true patriots — but not of the idea of a free society, but of a stern patriarchy, where the police have every right to arrest you for just about anything that the state disapproves of. To me the tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crack up of an empire we never knew what to do with in the first place; but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous, whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

__________

From Gore Vidal’s speech at The Nation’s 125th Anniversary in 1990.

As typically is the case with Vidal, the combination of his intelligence and charm — conveyed as they are in his patrician, cisatlantic tones — masks a scattering of sins of hyperbole and historical judgement. I nevertheless recommend the speech below, and have listened to it twice now — not because of it’s heavy scholarship, but because it’s as heady and sardonic a piece of political theater as you’ll find.

Read on:

  • Vidal’s hilarious, prophetic rebuttal to Bush’s second inaugural
  • Reader of this site Dr. Robert P. George debates Krauthammer on the founders’ views of human nature
  • The greatest debate of all time: Hitchens grapples with Galloway on Iraq

Gore Vidal

Reinhold Niebuhr on the Redemptive Power of Forgiveness

15 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Philosophy, Political Philosophy

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Reinhold Niebuhr

“There is no simple congruity between the ideals of sensitive individuals and the moral mediocrity of even the best society. The liberal hope of a harmonious ‘adjustment’ between the individual and the community is a more vapid and less dangerous hope than the communist confidence in a frictionless society in which all individual hopes and ideals are perfectly fulfilled. The simple fact is that an individual rises indeterminately above every community of which he is a part…

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature’s caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

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From the conclusion of chapter III (“Happiness, Prosperity, and Virtue”) of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History.

There’s a suggestive moment in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America during which the high-strung Louis Ironson is airing a breathless litany of complaints to the serene but naive Joe Pitt. “You believe the world is perfectible,” Pitt interrupts, “so you find it unsatisfying. You have to reconcile yourself to the world’s unperfectibility. Be in the world, not of the world.”

A thank you to reader Brenton Dickieson for recommending Irony to me (via Twitter, no less). It had been on my radar since I first heard it quoted at length by Chris Hedges in a debate a few years ago, but I wouldn’t have gotten to it so soon unless it had blipped once again on my screen. That last paragraph, with its measured repetitions and corresponding, collective incitements, is among the ten or so that I’d include in a collection on human striving and ambition. Our unyielding desire to cling to the teleological — or the belief that there is some idealized future for which present sacrifices or sins may be justified — gets us into so much trouble, as Niebuhr nods to in his initial mentioning of communism. This fact can lead you in a host of alternate directions, from nihilism to resignation to denial, but Niebuhr effortlessly dispenses with such jerks of the philosophical knee. Don’t forgo personal ambition, the great theologian reminds us; don’t give up on striving for the good society, and don’t relent on living a virtuous life. But make sure you realize and keep in mind that each of these goals has its limit — its temporal, spatial, and interpersonal limit — and that forgiveness is ultimately what redeems both the injustices of others and the inadequacies of oneself.

Confucius, What Would Be Your Top Priority as a Ruler?

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by in Philosophy, Political Philosophy

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Confucius

“Confucius said, ‘If you put the honest in positions of power and discard the dishonest, you will force the dishonest to become honest.’

Zi Lu asked about how to govern. Confucius said, ‘Lead the people and work hard for them.’

‘Is there anything else?’

‘Do not be easily discouraged.’

Zhong Gong, currently serving as chief minister to the head of the Chi family, asked about government.

Confucius said, ‘First get some officers; then grant pardon to all the petty offenses and then put virtuous and able men into positions of responsibility.’

Zi Lu said: ‘The ruler of Wei is anticipating your assistance in the administration of his state. What will be your top priority?’

Confucius said, ‘There must be a correction of his language.’

Zi Lu said, ‘Are you serious? Why is this so important?’

Confucius said, ‘You are really simple, aren’t you? A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows cautious reserve.’

‘If language is not corrected, then what is said cannot be followed. If what is said cannot be followed, then work cannot be accomplished. If work cannot be accomplished, then ritual and properties cannot be developed. If ritual and properties cannot be developed, then criminal punishments will not be appropriate. If criminal punishments are not appropriate, the people cannot make a move. Therefore, the noble man needs to have his terminology applicable to real language, and his speech must accord with his actions. The speech of the noble man cannot be indefinite.'”

__________

From parts 12 and 13 of the Analects of Confucius. (There are full versions of the text all over the internet — a good one is here.)

At the end of Book 12, as Confucius discusses friendship with his devotees, the following exchange occurs:

Fan Chi asked about the meaning of ren (Confucian virtue denoting the positive feeling a virtuous person experiences when being altruistic).

Confucius said “love others.” He asked about the meaning of “knowledge.”

The Master said, “Know others.” Fan Chi couldn’t get it.

Zi Gong asked about the way of friendship. Confucius said, “Speak to your friends honestly, and skillfully show them the right path. If you cannot, then stop. Don’t humiliate yourself.”

Which brings up some related reflections:

  • Socrates explains the significance of friendship
  • Epictetus summarizes his path to self-improvement