Findings: Political Practices
Plus -- Constant, Nietzsche, and Polanyi and their readers; reforming education
Welcome to many new subscribers this week! Pose Ponder publishes daily three weeks on, one week off. This is week three. On Mondays I share what I’ve been reading. It’s an eclectic mix.
P.S. Substack is telling me this post will be too long for email. Click to read online, or consider reading in the Substack app.
Classics
I want to try something a little different this week by offering two short(ish) modern classic texts along with attention-grabbing responses to them. This is Great Conversation in action. A classic, Polanyi’s Great Transformation, receives an important review. Polanyi’s book, published in 1944, is an economics classic which I read — struggled through —last year and has been in my mind every since. Polanyi features centrally, along with Hayek, in
’s Slouching Toward Utopia.The first classic text is Benjamin Constant’s 1819 “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns.” I had never heard of it before, and then it hit my radar three times in the span of a week. The first place it showed up is the opening of ch. 3 of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition on labor. (p. 79) She borrows Constant’s demurral in criticizing Rousseau to say that she won’t (over-) criticize Marx. I can’t help but think there is much more going on here. For a start, she is borrowing much more from this text, namely, Constant’s discussion between two kinds of liberty. He features a dynamic between individual and collective, which maps to Arendt’s private and social/public, yet which Arendt seems to read quite differently.
A second modern classic came to my attention while reading a Note (follow up here) from the
announcing a forthcoming reading course on ancient history (Xenophon, Thucydides, Plato, etc) — motivating the study with a striking metaphor from Nietzsche’s “On the use and Abuse of History for Life.”How to study history: Do you eat to live, or live to eat?
Nietzsche wants us to place history in the same conceptual framework as food. He claims that much like food, history carries the capacity to nourish life and enliven our activity. Yet, at the same time, he asks us to adopt an “eat for fuel” attitute towards it, as opposed to a “gorge yourself” attitude or an “eat sparsely” attitude. In other words, Nietzsche wants us to focus on the quality of the history “meat” and not its quantity.
If that’s not a tempting lead-in to a course on ancient history, I don’t know what is.
Here is the post by
on Polanyi. It’s dense, but helpfully gets at the fundamental issue at stake: the (false) commoditization of labor, land, and money. The malaise continues.Our time is indeed one of malaise, provoked precisely by the same forces that readers of Polanyi would easily recognize: expanding commercialization of many areas that were never subject to market, and thus social dislocation, and ultimately political discontent. Polanyi should be read again, today with the background of precarious labor, commercialization of land, climate change (which is directly related to the latter), and monetary manipulations by the banks and bourses, the three fictitious commodities that determine people’s income and livelihood and that, according to Polanyi, cannot be left unregulated.
Lifelong learning
Two important posts came from
this week as he continues to wrestle with problems of education beyond contemporary higher ed. The first responds to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that has both curricular and political implications. Dan responds to the article’s survey of a number of new programs in civic education and the humanities, initiated by Republican forces. The second post asks about teachers and students and how the former can best meet the shifting needs of the latter, given teachers’ own insecure circumstances in the present academic landscape.
Findings
I’m torn lately whether to wade into roiling political waters or try to remain “safely” above the fray. I am genuinely an independent, and I genuinely want to grasp whatever good and compelling points are made from all sides — especially cross-partisan points made by careful thinkers of any persuasion, regardless of whether the points sit comfortably or not. Several findings this week delve deeply into matters of political practice.
First I want to pair an old TED talk by Jonathan Haidt that seems particularly apropos at the moment with a post shared with me about gratitude. The latter is written by
, an author of a book on gratitude, in which she goes beyond personal and private practices to consider the social aspects — and then asks the political question: how is that Republican/conservative candidates seem to “demand” gratitude? Is this a power play, or a variant of some sort of virtue-ethics?
Speaking of personality-driven (?) political practices, a post/podcast by Persuasion’s
with Eitan Hersh tackles the apparent divide between political “hobbyists” and politically active local citizens who must practice “strategic political action.” It turns out there are fundamentally different skills involved.
Finally, two constituencies I keep an eye on are Anthropocene-related scientists (not just climate) and the Church. (I know, I know… strange bedfellows. That has to be a story for another day.) What’s with the politicization of science? Isn’t science supposed to be neutral, “just the facts”? And what’s with the politicization of the pulpit? People traditionally used to worry about the Church affecting politics (that’s why we practice separation Church and state!), but what if politics is strategically infiltrating the Church?!
What are your preferred political practices?
Thanks for this engaging post. So much to consider! As to Nietzsche’s essay on the use & abuse of history, I’ll say that I’ve read it a couple of times and I’m still not sure what to make of it. But then, that applies to much of what I’ve read by Nietzsche. As to your political stance, despite my recent posts challenging some of your contentions, I’ve a good deal of sympathy for your position, even if I don’t find it ultimately persuasive, at least not in our current atmosphere. This comes from one who is conservative by temperament, Republican by family, liberal by education, pragmatic by experience, and radical in perspective (or so I aspire). But while I understand the risks and dangers, especially of self-deceit and warped judgment, I do see us (the US and much of the world) in a Manichaean light. There are “children of light” and “children of darkness” (Reinhold Niebuhr) in this age, at this time. This isn’t good politically, but it’s real. On the other hand, all but a few—yes, him—surely aren’t beyond redemption. And, despite the threats that I perceive, I remain fundamentally committed to politics, to speech, to persuasion, to the ballot box, and to reasoned argument. And I aim to keep it that way.
Thanks for prompting me and your readers sharpen our thinking!
I like your initiative of having classic modern texts. Good to give attention to Benjamin Constant. Not so sure on Nietzsche on history as food. But have you read Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's history of food?