About

This story begins in many places, but the one place it can trace its origins to is Rome. While Greece was the cradle of our intellectual forefathers, Rome was where it reached its highest incarnation. Standing on the Palatine, looking over the vast ruins of the forum, it is plausible that one stands where Marcus Tullius Cicero once stood, gazing upon the district which housed both the imperial courts and the basilicas in which he conducted his famous transactions, legislative and legal, and from where he delivered the powerful orations, aimed at Verres, Catiline, Marc Antony, or any litany of enemies of the Roman Republic. It was in this dying moment of the Republic that its most eloquent defender found his home. Rome is where the classical tradition in antiquity reached its highest, most exalted form. It was also its last incarnation, its dying gasps, and every time the sun set over the forum, another nail was hammered into its coffin. Yet, its ideas stayed on, and formed the core of civilisation for the two millennia that followed. What made them so potent? What was this tradition like?

My interest in the history of ideas, and in the ideas themselves, started with my studies in the history of art and architecture. Walking through the streets of Rome, looking at the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur of la citta eternita, it was impossible to keep politics away from the mind’s eye, even though I did not know it then. The sublimity of the city, particularly at night, struck a wondrous terror in my mind and my heart, and an itch took root: an itch to know more about what made this place eternal and sublime. Was it the emperors? Was it the Republic which preceded it? Was it the power of their ideas — or the brute force of slave labour? How could its glory, its magnificence be recreated? Armed with a strong dose of youthful naïveté (which I possess to this day in copious amounts), I ventured out, searching for answers first in what I could see in front of me — art and architecture.

It is here that I reached my first discontentment, a primordial dissatisfaction with the road of inquiry I had embarked upon. Art was an expression — but of what? Was it merely the recursive activity of using one’s conjectures on beauty to inform artistic production — or was it the search for the ideal? Jumping through hoops, crossing bridges of various makes and stability, it was clear that the study of practical aesthetics — of art and architecture — would not be enough. Thus begins my acquaintance and interest in the questions of political philosophy, of the search for the best regime, of the search for how man must conduct himself if he is to live the good life.

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It is from Cicero that I borrow the title of this blog — O tempora, o mores! — Oh, what times! Oh, what customs! — first used against Verres, and then against Catiline. Expressing incredulity at the Senate’s refusal to indict Catiline despite ample evidence of the latter’s seditious activities, Cicero, the Consul, lets loose into the world these famed words, a slogan like his electoral call, the somewhat ambiguous yet powerful cum dignitate otium. In Cicero, Latin prose reached its highest form: an unrivalled eloquence that actualised the potential of the sheer force of a well spoken and well written language like no one else could.

It is to Cicero, the preeminent wordsmith of the Latin tongue, that we turn our attention to, if only to provide words for sentiments which abound in each of us. In his Pro Archia Poeta, a defence of the study of literature in general and of the work of the poet Archias in particular, he expresses a sentiment that would do us well, but if only we lent to its scope the entirety of the liberal arts:

“Though, even if there were no such great advantage to be reaped from it, and if it were only pleasure that is sought from these studies, still I imagine you would consider it a most reasonable and liberal employment of the mind: for other occupations are not suited to every time, nor to every age or place; but these studies are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; they are companions by night, and in travel, and in the country.” ¹

Cicero, in his days of self-imposed exile from the beating throb of the Roman Republic after the defeat of Pompey, found solace in these studies, the studia humanitatis, the study of what makes us human. It was to his great credit that the school of thought he started and systematised came back to us, fragment by fragment, through the Scholastics and the Humanists of medieval and early modern Europe, where it faced challenges of its own making. It was never entirely lost, and thrived in some form or the other, whether it was in the Strait of Bosphorus or the universities of Duocento Italy. For centuries, it was the providence of the greatest minds that have fixed their attention upon this planet, and then inward — into what made them human.

It is not my intention here to trace back in minute detail the fount of my thought or the genesis of my running commentary as it poses itself to me whilst I read, but a first draft of thoughts I may explicate from time to time. It is a journal of observations, of reactions, and of questions. It is not my desire to be limited to a singular field of inquiry or a single methodological approach, but instead to follow in the (hallowed) footsteps of Aristotle. In his Politics, he writes that “the city belongs to the class of things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” ² The polis exists prior to the individual and is the “most sovereign” form of association that is oriented to the actualisation of the potential for the common good. ³ Following this account, faithfully, it seems that all roads lead to Rome, and all ideas lead to political ideas. It is within the polis that ethics, morality, literature, art, and ultimately philosophy can exist. It is on this fertile pasture that I hope to graze. The study of political philosophy is the study of the Great Books as much as it is the study of what makes us human. It does not recognise disciplinary boundaries but instead takes aim at the highest good; with this it is my intention to introspect upon it.

At the outset, I must apologise for a few quirks, for which I kindly ask you bear with me. My language is often archaic, and more often than not my sentences long, but not arduous. It is often tinged with Latin phrases, either to avoid the connotations that certain terms have in common usage, à la Michael Oakeshott, or out of the brute force of habit. Sometimes ideas may seem to be posted prematurely, or without the required elucidation. This is as much a reading journal as a notebook of ideas. On occasion, I may be wrong, and for this I must ask that it be pointed out. I am, by disposition, conservative ⁴ — this I know — but otherwise it is my intention to read texts with as neutral a mind as possible, and only then think, and without an expressed or implicit partisan bent. It is not my intention to get embroiled in the scandalous affairs that constitute the particulars of policy, but of comments in a more abstract vein.

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I owe a certain intellectual debt to Aristotle, ‘Tully,’ St. Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt, Michael Baxandall, Isaiah Berlin, and Michael Oakeshott, and if at times I show a fond liking — implicit or explicit — in the works of these philosophers and writers, I must ask you to forgive me.

Sir Isaiah Berlin begins his essay on Tolstoy’s theory of history, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox,’ as follows: “There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’.” ⁵ It is my ambition to be a fox, one of “those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.” ⁶ Though common threads run through my thought — an appreciation of the classics, and of Western civilisation in general — it is the result of an inalienable curiosity, an infinite series of rabbit holes that absolutely must be followed all the way through.

Of Edmund Burke I am unusually fond of: Burke was, in many ways, the hypostatisation of some of the lineages of intellectual inquiry that I hold dear. Peter J. Stanlis, in his revolutionary study of Burke, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, redeemed Burke from damnation as a utilitarian, emphasising, through a close reading, Burke’s frequent and consistent usage of natural law — and that Burke “took his stand on the ground of Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the traditional conception of the Natural Law.” ⁷ Burke combined his keen interests in aesthetics with his interest in politics — his first major publications were the satirical Vindication of Natural Society and The Sublime and the Beautiful, and he was never more than an arm’s length away from launching into a carefully considered, eloquent speech, of which brevity was rarely a worthy epithet.

From Edward Gibbon, I hope to draw my discipline and rigour. At the end of his sixth and final volume of The Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire, he notes: “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.” ⁸ For twenty years, Gibbon laboured to produce a remarkable history of Rome, one that combined eloquence and erudition in good measure to produce a book for all times.

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