Clubs as Political Institutions
In this project, I argue that clubs have been an integral part of democratic life, from Classical Athens’ hetaireiai. Alex Gottesman, in a new study of life in Classical Athens and the informal institutions that surrounded the Greek democracy, points out that the conspiratorial argument against club life existed in Athens, too, and “a favourite rhetorical tactic against such practices of “clubbing together was to present the group as a conspiratorial club or hetaireia.” That Plato sought to institutionalise and co-opt hetaireiai into the official structure of the polis in Magnesia to ensure that the “street” can be recreated through institutional means is important and one of the stark departures from the Republic, where none such provision exists (Laws 780d).
I begin with a historical excursus, from the Ancient Athenian hetaireiai, integral unofficial institutional appendages to the Athenian democracy (sec. 1), to nineteenth century Britain (sec. 2), where membership in a political party entailed being invited to join a club where meetings were held—the Carlton Club for the Conservatives, and the Reform Club and later the National Liberal Club for the Liberals—and across the pond to the North in the Civil War (sec. 3), where Union and Union League clubs popped up around the country, in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles (where the Union club was called the Jonathan Club) among other places, to support the cause of the Union against the Confederacy during the Civil War. I end with an assessment of club life today (sec. 4).
From Some Place to No Place: Liberalism, Architecture, and City Planning
A burgeoning interest in the aesthetic dimension of politics has, as is the norm, come up against the interests that political theorists maintain in democratic politics and liberalism.
This project brings my art historical knowledge to bear upon the aesthetics of liberalism by examining official buildings from liberal regimes and post liberal regimes. I begin with Charles Barry’s Gothic Revival Palace of Westminster, which houses the Houses of Parliament in London, and proceed to Eero Saarinen’s now-decommissioned mid-century modern American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, also in London, before I finally land up in India, where I begin with an excursus of the marriage of Occident to Orient in Edwin Lutyens’ and Herbert Baker’s New Delhi, the eighth capital of India in that location. I finish with an evaluation of the Central Vista Redevelopment Project in New Delhi and the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya to examine what a post liberal architecture might look like.
The title of my essay was inspired by James Howard Kunstler’s book, The Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler is terrified of the staid uniformity that takes away the specificity of locales—New England seems an awful lot like the Deep South, architecturally, and not merely because of the financial incentive or the homogenisation of national identity. I am not arguing that the intrinsic logic of liberalism produces this staid uniformity; indeed, the one case study I do draw upon in all three situations, from liberal democracy to illiberal democracy, from the “old” sort of liberal democracy to the new one—India—is that there will always be change, sometimes not always in the direction one inherently hopes for. I do not intend to argue that liberal democracies reproduce staid uniformity across national lines, but only that their relationship to the past, instrumental in origin, seated in the need for legitimacy, becomes completely untethered. The relationship of liberal democracy to the past is dogged, haunted, by the newness of liberal democracy to the long story of human interactions and regimes that have endured, and rather uneasy in its recent triumph.
Sportsmanship as Statesmanship
This is a project that has been ruminating in my head for years—it is somewhat orthogonal to my dissertation—but still an important and personally meaningful project for me. I grew up playing one racquet sport or the other. At eight, I was ceremoniously handed a full-sized squash racquet—I remember distinctly that it was a Head i110, which was almost the same size as me, and thus began a lifelong fascination with busting balls. But the explanations, the reasons, I found for the importance of sports seemed to be somewhat incidental and unreflective of my time spent on various courts. It was always about team building, about learning how to play well with others: important skills, no doubt, but still quite unsatisfactory as explanations.
Here I try to look at the importance of sports from a different angle: good judgement, practical wisdom, the kind of level-headed prudence that finds condemnation from almost every position on the spectrum. Add to this the disdain for sports among some of the faculty and the graduate student population around me: you aren’t going to be a professional, so who cares? I defend here the virtues of amateur sportsmanship, perhaps projecting some, for I am but a lifelong amateur.
For more technically minded readers, I examine in depth the role of sports and of the amateur sportsman in political education for Aristotle. This is very much a work in progress but an important one nonetheless. Aristotle’s discussion of the polis kat euchen, the city according to prayer, of Books VII–VIII of the Politics includes a significant section on schole—leisure—as a key component of the continual habituation that renders a citizen fit to rule and be ruled. While excessive athleticism breeds the desire to win at all costs, as epitomised by Alcibiades, sportsmanship conditions and habituates citizens through the continual exercise of judgement and moderation in the pursuit of a goal while permitting a certain indifference to outcome. The kind of moral formation and instinctual knowledge that sportsmanship can provide is perhaps epitomised by the Duke of Wellington, who famously remarked that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. This paper argues that not only does sportsmanship encourage Juvenal’s “mens sana in corpore sano”, it also creates pathways of phronetic reasoning and restraint that are reliable under duress. Through Aristotle it argues for the importance of sportsmanship as a school for statesmanship, creating amateur sportsmen that dominate the psyche of the life of citizens.