Month: June 2020

The Image of A New Barbarism

Ishaan Jajodia
JerryColt
Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19. | If you look closely, you will see the individual manqué here, too, alluded to through the suspicion of cannibalism.

Michael Oakeshott is perhaps best known for his essay ‘On Being Conservative’, where he describes conservatism as a disposition. Opposed to the conservative, however, seems to be what Oakeshott terms the ‘individual manqué’, aptly described as “the image of a new barbarism.”1 Oakeshott’s characterisation of the manqué is one of the left-behinds, the ‘mass man’ who is anything but the man of the masses, but is a strange character in itself. “He is not necessarily ‘poor’, nor is he envious only of ‘riches’,” Oakeshott notes, adding that “he is not necessarily ‘ignorant’, often he is a member of the so-called intelligentsia; he belongs to a class which corresponds exactly with no other class. He is specified primarily by a moral, not an intellectual, inadequacy.”2 Even though the reader may be casually misled into believing that the mass man is the sort of individual who would be the working poor who may be the leading advocates for socialism and totalitarianism, Oakeshott emphasises that the issue with this manqué is a moral deficiency that no sort of educational attainment may solve: it is, at heart, a moral issue, one that cannot be dealt with immediately or brusquely unless its origins are traced.

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  1. Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’, in Freedom and Serfdom: An Anthology of Western Thought, ed. Albert Hunold (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1961), 151–71, 163. ↩
  2. Oakeshott, ‘The Masses’, 167–68. ↩

The Cursed Impasse

Ishaan Jajodia
Durer Melancholia
Albrecht Dürer, Melancolia I, c. 1514.

An impasse is a dreadful thing, particularly for any writer and thinker. It either signifies impending doom for a line of thought, the futility of one’s labour, or worse, the loss of inspiration which can only correlate with an unprofitable state of mindless grazing upon pastures which may yet retain their lustre. The impasse is a stupefying event that takes from its victim any intention of working toward something, filling its victim with a sense of faux inebriation and listlessness and severing him with acedia and robbing alacrity of its rightful place in the sun. Even worse is the debilitating randomness of such an event, for it robs its victim so viciously and so swiftly of his agency that it compels the weaker victim to abandon the pursuit altogether, and the stronger victim to the compulsions of the outside world, until the Muses dote upon him again.

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A Critical Distance

Ishaan Jajodia

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.

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On Crito and Lawlessness

Ishaan Jajodia
David Socrates Sketch
Jacques Louis David’s study for his painting, ‘The Death of Socrates.’

My excessive procrastination in the two days prior1 stems from a question posed to me by a friend, which can be summarised, in the original questioners’ words, as follows: “If the laws are not based in what is just, do you have any obligation to follow them?” This is one of the fundamental questions of political philosophy: who must you obey, and why? I do not claim to have the answer to this, but what follows is an elementary account drawn from Socrates’ speech on the laws in Crito2 using Ann Congleton’s emphasis on the two kinds of lawlessness, and my own observations on legitimacy, authority, and the power of the law.3

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  1. That is not the only reason why I have been torn away from my studies — some aesthetic and functional changes were needed in my study to permit me to add to collection of books. ↩
  2. All quotes from Plato are from: Plato, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). ↩
  3. Ann Congleton, ‘Two Kinds of Lawlessness: Plato’s Crito’, Political Theory 2, no. 4 (1974): 432–46. ↩