I have no special wisdom.
If I have tried to teach students anything about politics for twenty years, it is to begin with intellectual humility and to maintain intellectual humility. Hubris is what brings politics to crisis.
So I make no special claims about being right. But I have had experiences and I do have a perspective that may be of some help while the world navigates the crisis not begun but clarified by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
For decades, I have studied political theory. I began to study at a time when it seemed as though the Cold War could not end. I matured in this study when it seemed that history had ended. And now, I am mature as events have brought us to a new moment of history that needs some new clarification.
While I was training to be a political theorist, a few stray things my professors said stayed with me. One was—
It seems that the best political theory gets written while the world looks like it is falling apart.
Think of the end of the Roman Empire, the English Civil War, or the Nazi and Stalinist convulsions of the twentieth century. We seem to have entered such a moment now, in our time. As in those other times, what we thought we knew about politics no longer really seems applicable. We need to re-frame our questions. That is a job for political theorists. Theorists are called to action by crisis.
Another thing I heard as a graduate student from my mentor—
Nobody in political theory ever wrote anything worth a damn before they were 50.
That birthday comes this year for me, and I understand what he meant. The political literature and the history one has to master is so vast, it takes most of a lifetime to develop a perspective and the ability to say something that amounts to a contribution. Now, with the requisite gray in my hair, our present moment leaves me feeling obligated to say something. And so, that is why I am here.
I do not propose here to write a book. (Though, I may work one out as I go.) Neither can I say that everything I say here will be correct. I am as prone to errors as anyone else. What I do intend is to try to respond in real time to unfolding events as one trying to re-frame our political questions—to think in public as a theorist.
A model for this is Hannah Arendt, of course. But no less, the Athenian philosophers who thought in public, too.
For many years, I began teaching my Introduction to Political Theory with Plato’s Gorgias. I ended it with Arendt. My purpose was not subtle. I wanted to present theorists thinking in public and as having public responsibilities.
In the Gorgias, Socrates encounters Gorgias, a rhetorician who offers himself as a teacher to the sons of Athens’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. Gorgias offers to teach them “pleasing speech” so as to win the crowd and to get what they want from the city. This is a presentation of politics as the art of getting what one wants, the exercise of power.
A critical exchange then takes place that sets the terms of the dialogue. Gorgias has offered to demonstrate his skill by answering whatever question anyone asks him, when Socrates pipes up—
Ask him who he is.
Unsurprisingly, the question is a trap. Socrates has a different idea about what politics is. The rest is history.
Yet, history is not the past. History is the present and the future, too. History is alive. And, our living in living history is the subject of politics. We are, as Pope Francis reminds us, the “creators of history.” What we create as much as what we destroy today becomes the history we leave to others. Our living choices today become their living realities tomorrow, and in this way we are part of a continuous political community that stretches from past to present into future. We need, therefore, to take our custodianship seriously. And, that means all of us. With that as a central conviction, I come here to share what I can share of how I see our politics right now. I do not hope to tell anyone how to create history. I mean mostly to remind everyone that we are creating history.
The invasion of Ukraine has clarified the political crisis developing since the ending of the Cold War. The end of history was a mirage. The neoliberal settlement was a hollow and incomplete statement of something too important to be left unsaid. While too much went unsaid, we have watched ethnic, religious, and nationalist tribalisms re-assert themselves and stand up unchallenged by better ideas. We have given no substantive defense to a politics about something better than force and power. Spending three decades sure that all of the most important questions had obvious answers, we never asked the most important question—
Ask him who he is.
The question is not about Gorgias. The question is about what Gorgias really wants. The question is about what Gorgias says politics really is. And, the question always matters.
In Gorgias, as throughout Plato’s dialogues, Socrates points toward a purpose of politics beyond the political moment. Truth matters most. And here, because we are modern women and men living in the 21st century, we should say we do not mean the particular truth claims of religious groups or ideological partisans. We mean something more open. We mean the appeal to truth, the search for truth, the hope for truth.
Our hope for truth is the purpose of political life, and that hope always is opposed to a politics that only is about manipulation and power. The hope for truth always must be opposed to the use of force because truth has no need of force. Truth has a power all its own. It is something entirely unlike manipulation or rhetoric. Truth wins a free response from us because we must respond to truth.
In an open society, free people hope for truth together. In a closed society, a frightened and misled people are subjected to someone else’s ambition to dominate by obscuring what is true.
And, the crisis now clarified by Mr. Putin is simply about that. The crisis has unfolded in Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary, Britain, here in the U.S., and—everywhere. It has taken different shapes, moved in fits and starts. But everywhere the crisis asks the same question: Can we defend the open society? Maybe better, the crisis asks whether we know the right question: will we “Ask him who he is”?
To explore that in real time here, now, is my purpose. I hope you’ll follow along.
Thanks very much if you’ve read this far.