Month: August 2020

The Historicist Error Projected Onto Disraeli

Ishaan Jajodia

It has been the hallmark of criticism directed toward a working politician or a man whose principal focus lay outside of the contemplative sphere that some historian has managed to find some basis, more often than not obscure, to sully said man’s reputation with as a thinker, and then to level charges of blatant hypocrisy such that character assassination is brought out in the open, with mud-slinging and shit-throwing part of this cabalistic rite. And this, as you may have guessed, has been the sorrowful position of our hero, Benjamin Disraeli, who has been subject to the torturous examinations of unsympathetic historians more frequently than any other in the tradition of conservative thought. While his predecessor Edmund Burke was indefatigable and found enough time to address to the sympathetic listener a rebuke of those who thought he was acting out of line with his principles,[1] the same privilege was not afforded to Disraeli, for whatever reason one might attribute it to. “The truth,” Lord Blake remarked, “was that Disraeli had never at any time in his life been an easy man to know.”[2] But that difficulty in examination, that pedestal upon which Disraeli stood that set him apart from illustrious peers, many of whom are now extinct in the popular and moral imagination of today, seems so alien to us that we tend to curl and walk to the familiar. The strength of Disraeli’s convictions affects us significantly, and we find ourselves questioning the motive and the effect without understanding the world in which Disraeli operated, or whether his thoughts were mere purple prose and not some extensive and seriously held positions that ought to have been followed in due stead.

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The Moral Economy of Benjamin Disraeli

Ishaan Jajodia
PPainting of Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt | National Portrait Gallery, London.

Much has been written about Benjamin Disraeli, but more so about his life and his actual conduct in the political arena than his work. Those who tend to study his work congregate in departments of literature, not of political philosophy, and thus the social and political thought of Benjamin Disraeli, distinct from his actions, is left to be condemned to appropriation and recasting by politicians of all veins, whether it be Ed Miliband or David Cameron. Disraeli the thinker had much in common semantically with Edmund Burke the pamphleteer, but they share important differences, despite the former’s attempt to fashion himself in the style of the latter in his Vindication of the English Constitution, a work that takes aim at the utilitarian creed of Bentham and other rationalists of his time. Although both thinkers, one more prominent in the conservative tradition than the other, were products of the romantic imagination, they came to be its bookends in the manner in which they represented its political thought: if Burke represented the commercial interest and tolerance and a respect for hierarchy, Disraeli turned that around to subvert the expectations of the commercial by tearing it away from the desire to profit without duty.[1]

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Marginal Notes toward a Politics of Space

Ishaan Jajodia

Socrates, awaiting his execution in a prison cell in Athens, tells his protégé this nugget of wisdom: “the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same” (Crito, 48b). The just, the beautiful, and the true are intrinsically linked together, for they take their ideal form in the wholly abstract world of forms. In this essay, I do not seek to argue for the nature of beauty, or for aesthetic characteristics of an objective standard of beauty, but only that the current manner in which aesthetic degradation has permeated into life is subversive to the ends of the polis — namely, it actively works to subvert human flourishing, broadly understood — and must be dealt with in the strongest possible terms. The importance that is attached to this subject arises from a strong sense of architectural exceptionalism and the moral character inherent in architecture and in any sort of grand design.

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A Commodity Fetish: Marx and the Moral Economy

Ishaan Jajodia

J.G.A. Pocock writes in Virtue, Commerce, and History:

“It was hard to condemn the destruction of rural society without engaging in some degree of nostalgia, and a wholesale condemnation of modernity necessarily entailed some degree of neomedievalism. there was a neomedievalism among romantic gentry who liked to imagine the days when they had been Tory protectors of the poor, Whig defenders of their ancient liberties, and Burkean-Coleridgean upholders of a code of chivalric manners. … Even today, it might not be impossible to classify English Marxist thinkers as either progressive radical Whigs for whom socialism is the rebellious but natural son of liberalism, or alienated Tory radicals who denounce liberal capitalism, instead of praising it for its revolutionary role, as the destroyer of popular community and moral economy.”[1]

Pocock was writing in the middle of the 1980s, and in any case my general unfamiliarity with the discourse of the times renders his judgement the one I admit as prima facie true. But behind this sentiment is the coming together of two disparate lines of thought that are pervasive in most analyses of economic thought, especially when concerned with questions of a moral character. Why is it that questions of the moral economy are wholly dominated by the Germanic ghost of Karl Marx? For someone who eschewed the market en masse, surely, he would find himself surprised to be the progenitor and monopolistic owner of ostensibly an entire field of academic inquiry, which has been abandoned to his dialectical and historical materialism and to the supposition that surely, moral relations in economic forms cannot exist in any scheme of action apart from his. It is this that is my complaint with William James Booth’s otherwise first-rate analysis of the role of households in the moral economy: it is too deferential to Marx; it refuses to see beyond the Marxist paradigm even though it readily and openly admits to the practical and theoretical failures of the doctrine.[2] That the question of moral economy was breached with sufficient detail by Aristotle and Xenophon, Locke and Rousseau, is important — but is the discussion of Marx always the feather in the cap?

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Conservatism’s Divorce from Laissez Faire, Laissez Passer

Ishaan Jajodia

I have refrained for the most part in making comments about the present state of the world, or of things that may have direct application and value to the issues of political practice today. But seeing that today is a Sunday, and that I ought to revel in some mischief of my own making, I will allow myself certain observations today that I will not make in an ordinary course of action, and even then only because of my interest in the relation of forms of economic organisation within broader political movements. The question that we are then faced with, today, is the economic means of conservative politics, in the USA more than anywhere else.

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Lockenomics

Ishaan Jajodia

John Locke’s career as a political economist, and more commonly as a philosopher of politics, seems to have been distilled down to the now famous Second Treatise on Government, but in light of recent criticism over his involvement with the slave trade, it seems that there is more illiberality to this man of ostensibly liberal disposition even if one does not engage the ad hominems and concentrates solely on the substance of Mr. Locke’s published works. The items in question are a small tract entitled ‘Venditio’ and a series of recommendations for the revival of Elizabethan Poor Laws.[1] The matter is substantially put into motion by Geraint Parry, who notes that: “Locke’s draconian proposals for the treatment of the poor and the unemployed are of a piece with his position on individuality and paternalism. Charity was inappropriate to adult men with the capacity to be industrious.”[2] We are faced with an inconsistent philosopher — though that is the domain of most human philosophers — one whose claims for the treatment of the poor are irreconcilable with the claims he makes, in my opinion, in his famed Second Treatise. I do not intend to be unfair to Locke, which is why I will omit discussion of the infamous constitution he drew up for South Carolina, for it is my understanding that the aforementioned document was merely written and executed by Locke as part of his responsibilities as a public servant. It is the crux of my contention that Locke’s philosophy, wholly excluding his more practical pursuits, is decidedly illiberal in tone and scope, for it does not commit to all men as having some sort of dignity by virtue of existence, but rather only in accordance with the dignity accorded to men by virtue of the possession of some degree of physical property that is distinct from the labour and enterprise that each possesses. In the introduction to his recommendations on the problem of poor relief, Locke writes:

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Rethinking Rousseau

Ishaan Jajodia

My first introduction to Jean Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, occurred in less than favourable circumstances, and it is only today, earlier rather than later in my journey, that I have had the chance to see him in a new light. The agent bearing principle responsibility for this shift is Judith Shkar’s essay on the two types of utopias Rousseau advocates for: ‘Sparta and the Age of Gold.’[1] It is one of those fortuitous occurrences one does not imagine to intentionally come across, but manifests itself as a chance encounter that can only be the mysteries of fate and chance. Such accidental meetings are essential encounters, fleeting as they may be, for while the agents themselves may be small — sometimes even words or phrases, not even entire sentences, sometimes essays, not books — they are shifts of some ethereal character in otherworldly encounters that break what can sometimes turn into monotony and banality. To this date, I have thought of Rousseau as the proud father of the noble savage (knowing fully well that he never used the word even once in his oeuvre), of fantastical lands, the theoretician of the Homo Ignoramus.

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A Short Note on Reaching 100,000 Words

Ishaan Jajodia

On May 17 of this year, I wrote my first post for this blog, and precisely eighty days later, on August 4, on this very post, I will have finished writing my first 100,000 words for any single project. At the outset, I must state that the original mission of the blog — to be a running journal for my thoughts — has been modified. It contains few knee-jerk reactions, but more of the passing thoughts of a scholar. My sole digression — the interest in Indic religion and the search for a political ethic and understanding of politics in Indian texts was limited to one, but the blog provided an avenue for the understanding of what it means to be doing political philosophy as a career and vocation and less as an academic burden. The topics it has addressed are wide-ranging; they are extensive only because I cannot keep myself placated with a minor feat of learning but am animated by the desire to continuously learn more. In these eighty days, I have had many crises of faith, some of which have found their way on its blog; I have remembered, forgotten, and then channelled some of my passion into a more regular form of learning and understanding; I have read beyond my wildest dreams, and yet, for some reason, I find the need to know more. It is a compulsive desire to know — but also to remember, to write for friends and fellow travellers on my academic journey — that has guided this blog [and a love for Chicago-style full notes]. Thus, I venture to offer a few thoughts, more supported by the brunt of my experience than by other sources of knowledge.

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The Functional Aristocracy

Ishaan Jajodia

R.F. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society is a hallmark of thinking about the moral economy, and this is not the first time that I have expressed any measure of sympathy and agreement for the criticism he makes of the present system, without necessarily approving of its consequential form of organisation.[1] In my last post, I covered some of the key aspects of Tawney’s thought; this post is dedicated to his definition of hierarchy’s role in property. At the outset, it must be noted that Tawney’s aristocratic politics have a remarkable salience with Alexis de Tocqueville’s, but there is a marked difference insofar as while both recognise the aristocracy to be functional, to be with an end, a purpose, Tocqueville is far more enraptured by it while Tawney’s praise is strongly qualified and is present as a conditional preference, not as a good in itself. I will first examine Tawney’s thoughts on aristocratic governance before comparing them with Tocqueville’s in The Ancien Régime.[2]

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The Roots of Acquisitive Societies

Ishaan Jajodia

It is my earnest belief that all young men and women ought to read R.H. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society, a book that is sincere, thoughtful, and probing, but without the hawkishness of Burke, for example.[1] It is not a revolutionary tract — it is exploratory. And that is what separates it in essence from that of Karl Polanyi’s work, for example. Tawney understands perfectly well the desire to make the world anew, and then, in his subtlety, lets that desire go to be more prudent and moderate. One must not necessarily subscribe to the conclusions that Tawney advocates — I do not — but that does not mean that the arguments expanded upon are worth examining, and that the questions posed demand answers, even if those answers are not Tawney’s, or may require some modification to accommodate the rise of our technological society.

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