It seems to be the fashion nowadays to decry á la Lord Parekh the nonexistence of an Indian Hobbes, or generally speaking, a tradition of political philosophy that is truly and inalienable Indian. Yet, studies of Indian political philosophy in recent years have focused almost exclusively on modern Indian thinkers, particularly those of a certain bent — Ram Mohan Roy, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru. Ancient India is even more forlorn, marked by a desert whose glory may be occasionally acknowledged and more often commemorated through fantastical and absurd defences of the sort that claim nuclear weaponry finds its origins in texts of vintage, or in the positivism of Kautilya and the works of Manu, whose original meaning is more or less transformed into some species of a reductio ad absurdum to reflect the revolutionary and progressive pieties of the present.
A Reaffirmation
Perhaps, ever so often, it becomes essential to one’s readers, however select their ranks may be, and to oneself, to affirm both the importance and the value of the enterprise I have in mind: the studia humanitatis. It is my thought now that one must not assume a priori the importance of such studies and their centrality, but that these values and efforts are in constant need of reaffirmation. This is not a major change of stance from my earlier position, namely that the humanities must not be affirmed in relation to present events, but that the humanities must be valued because they lay bare to the dedicated student the human condition itself; this is as close to thought, thinking itself as one can come without staring precariously into the domain of the otherworldly.
The Moral Obligations of a Voluntary Association
There exists a species of voluntary associations that most students think is confined to the boundaries of an educational institution, and is often named through a trite and tedious process of random selection from the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, but share almost nothing in common with the Lyceum or the Academy. They often seek to justify their existence through an advocacy of fraternal bonds or the like, but deep inside their basements, prove to be dens of licentiousness and hedonism, the sort that is unrestrained and can only lead to a sordid Epicureanism. But this belief –– the belief that such associations are unique –– or that they lack any moral responsiblity for the actions of their members, is at once a grave fallacy that reinforces the Epicurean overtones of the entire enterprise in its present form. Their overtures to conserving their status exist not for the love of their original aims, the telos of the association, but for the pursuit of license, of the sort of brotherly love that seeks to protect those in the wrong, only because it casts doubt, if wrongdoing is ever admitted, on the entire enterprise itself. Such is the nature of a certain form of association, commonly found concentrated on a particular avenue at the College on the Hill. On occasion, members of these associations have been accused, like clockwork, of heinous acts, and then nothing happens, for the association itself does not hold that it is responsible to ensure the application and enforcement of propriety norms of conduct.
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The Image of A New Barbarism
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.
The Cursed Impasse
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.
A Critical Distance
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.
On Crito and Lawlessness
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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- 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. ↩
- All quotes from Plato are from: Plato, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). ↩
- Ann Congleton, ‘Two Kinds of Lawlessness: Plato’s Crito’, Political Theory 2, no. 4 (1974): 432–46. ↩
On Augustine’s Letter to Nectarius
I shall use this opportunity to reconsider the compatibility of Christianity and Politics through Letter 91, which forms part of a series of prolonged correspondences exchanged between the two in 408 AD. Nectarius, a pagan and civil servant, wrote to Augustine in search of mercy for those responsible for stoning and setting fire to a church in Calama, which is in present day Algeria.1 The letter deals largely with what Atkins and Dodaro describe as “the clash between traditional Roman patriotism (love for one’s own hometown or patria), rooted in civil theology, and Augustinian Christian civic ideals” (242).
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- All quotes and references from: Augustine, Political Writings, ed. and trans. E.M. Atkins and Robert Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ↩
Gibbon and Active Citizenship
Gibbon’s work on the dying years of the Roman Empire — well, all 1480 of them, from the day Augustus took the reins of the empire to the day the Ottomans sacked Constantinople — is as much a work of complex social science and of political philosophy as it is a work of history. Of major interest, however, are his short sentences, masterfully inserted in the midst of expansive discussions on minutiae of the functioning of the Empire, such as this one:
“In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was preserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.”1
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- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. 1, § Military Establishment of the Roman Emperors. ↩
In Praise of Edmund Burke’s Speech on Fox’s East India Bill
Burke’s fascination with France was rather fleeting when compared to the time he spent on Indian affairs. Almost a decade and a half of his parliamentary career was dedicated to the affairs of Warren Hastings, the re-chartering of the East India Company, and in general the subject of what is just in politics. It is from Burke’s speech on Fox’s East India Bill (1783) that we get this familiar and wrenching description of the East India Company’s affairs of a region that Burke defines in a manner not dissimilar to Gibbon’s opening salvo describing the spread of the Roman Empire:
“… an oppressive, irregular, capricious, unsteady, rapacious, and peculating despotism, with a direct disavowal of obedience to any authority at home, and without any fixed maxim, principle, or rule of proceeding ….”.1
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- Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Fox’s East India Bill,’ in On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 282–370, 345. ↩