Few things inspire both tempestuous passions and rabid indifference as the practice of politics today, stuck between rampant idealism of the sort that seeks to remove the human from humanity and the kind that seeks to base everything on licentiousness or expediency. There is, however, a third way, that I shall call spezzatura, studied nonchalance, which is essential for any student of political philosophy, and for any deep understanding of the principles of politics. All sorts of dubious ethical and moral reasoning is acceptable today in politics, and has been for a long time, not least since Cleon’s infamous speech that Thucydides recreated for the benefit of the reader, or that of the Athenian envoys later in his book. Expediency and self-interest are the sovereign monarchs of political activity, unfortunately so, but they can never have any sovereign claims in the field of political philosophy, for they are prima facie opposed to anything but a brutish despotism, one where the only state is that of a bellum omnium contra omnes, not one where the possibility of the polis as the highest sovereign association can exist. I do not intend to argue that the student of political philosophy should be ignorant of the history of ideas, or of history in general; nor should this seem to advocate that history is not an integral part of the tout ensemble of political philosophy, but only that a passionate fervour in political activity in the present moment is antithetical to the study of political philosophy, and that one should be cognisant of the present while maintaining a certain nonchalance about it to ensure that one is intent on answering the fundamental questions of political philosophy and their derivatives.

Political activity today, in most nations, towns, and cities, is a variation of democracy. In the West, this is most certainly the case. This has led many to believe that the fundamental question of the ‘best regime’ has been solved; that there are no other alternatives; and that democracy is the only regime worth studying. This is the rot of political philosophy today: the tacit assumption is that other lines of inquiry into the ‘best regime’ are best confined to the philosophical historian or the historian of ideas, and have nothing to do with the domain of the political philosopher. Having taken its conclusions as axiomatic, with no question of challenge to be understood as anything but vicious heresy, done malum in se, political philosophy in practice itself has become the bedfellow of political activity in devolving from the love of wisdom to the propagation of one set of principles held to be true that are unquestionable to the point of expulsion and ostracisation.

This so-called ‘democratic theory’ assumes the answer, works backward to find premises, and then fills in the gaps with castles conjured at will in the clouds. It assumes that the demos is always right, that what it thinks it always right, and consequently that there is no right or wrong, only what is popular and discernable through the vote. It is the product of the slow march of relativism and subjectivism, itself the highway to meaninglessness, anomie, and existential despair. But this is not political philosophy –– it is an apologia for precisely the sort of regime that the pursuit of political philosophy seeks to preclude as being ipso facto valid. Perhaps the only thing that is fixed in political philosophy is the questions that are asked: even if there can be no wide agreement on the conclusions, there is most certainly agreement as to its aims, means, and ends. In brief, its aims are the questions of political legitimacy, obedience, and of the best regime; its means are reason and philosophical enquiry, not sentimentalism and brute force; and its end solely the love for wisdom, philosophia. The role of the political philosopher is also to teach, but Michael Oakeshott expresses it with a marked scepticism and in such eloquence in his essay ‘Political Education’ that it is not worth repeating here, except in brief.¹

    Oakeshott would be aghast at the spate of the charade of ‘democratic theory,’ which is thinly veiled political ideology, nothing more than a paltry “system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to [politics] … [it is], in the strict sense, preposterous.”² I would venture to say that this obsession and fetishisation of democratic theory is the near-sighted obsession that arises from hasty ex post facto rationalisations and not from dedicated study that does not take its conclusions to be fixed before its investigations. Oakeshott goes to the extent of noting that “political education is not merely a matter of coming to understand a tradition, it is learning how to participate in a conversation: it is at once initiation into an inheritance in which we have a life interest, and the exploration of its intimations,” to which I add its limitations.³ If the pursuit of a grounded political education is one that introduces one to the history of political philosophy and to its modes and incarnations, then surely ‘democratic theory’ is a gross failure, because it rejects all but the most sordid parts of the wisdom of the lineage of political philosophers all students of political philosophy must be familiar with. Similarly, the move to numericise political activity and thought, to make it empirical, irrationally rational, must be condemned: “we must decry the style of politics which approximates to pure empiricism because we can observe in it an approach to pure lunacy.”⁴ Political philosophy is prima facie opposed to lunacy of the sort that reduces man to numbers, strips him of his inherent dignity, and reduces him to an ignominious being whose sole aspiration is to Homo Ignoramus, or alternatively to the being a member of a barbaric, unthinking horde whose passions reign supreme over his reason: both absurd propositions that Oakeshott rightly confines to the domain of lunacy and idiocy.

There is, however, the issue of spezzatura, of studied nonchalance. It has its roots in Baldassarre Castiglione, the Renaissance courtier and friend of Raphael Sanzio. The understanding is that the good courtier always knows what is happening, but keeps his distance from it. That is what the political philosopher must do: he must keep abreast of political events, in any case, but must fastidiously keep away from them. He must find a perch from which he can survey, without the arousal of passions or intense feelings of a similar kind that would corrupt his spezzatura, the events of the cosmic play that politicians and their citizens play. He must see how human fallibility taints and affects how political ideas play out, how regimes rise, decline, and fall, closely so, but must not be involved in them. Political philosophy descends from its premier, first rate position in the studia humanitatis to the third rate position of empiricism and ‘quantitative social science’ in whatever field it chooses to become, because the political philosopher, whilst contemplating, is active in knowing the polis, an inherently social act. People, he will notice, are unable to be reduced to numbers without stripping them of their humanity, so he will avoid an education in statistics and maths in general beyond the basics, to ensure that he can keep his accounts but no more. The moment the political philosopher succumbs to the lure of the vita coactiva and turns to the practice of politics, he steps down from love to lust, from the love of wisdom to the lust for power. If the political philosopher has nothing to gain but wisdom from his contemplation, he is disincentivised to lust, and is induced to lead a virtuous life; he surveys all, spares none, and leads the cloistered life of a scholar, teaching those who accept his superiority in at least the narrow domain of expertise that political philosophy, the study of the philosophy of the polis animal, is.

It is the rare exception that Edmund Burke and Marcus Tullius Cicero represented. Even Edward Gibbon, for that matter, attended Parliament without much ado and regularly, but never spoke, and only voted on motions. But these three men were exceptions that proved the rule, for they were unlike many of us. They had the moral strength and fervour to ensure that they did not contaminate their philosophical life with their political practice, and in Cicero it reached its highest form: Cicero, as consul, ran perhaps the greatest state in all of history, the Roman Empire. But exceptions are almost never the rule, and in this case it is profitable for the political philosopher to invest time to graze upon the pastures of their green and eventful lives, and to understand them, noting the fortitude and intrepidity which guided their predecessors. Michael Oakeshott, perhaps the only first rate political philosopher of the last century, knew this all too well, and stayed away from politics, refusing even a knighthood from P.M. Thatcher; still, he kept and maintained a circle of politically active friends, but they were only that — friends.