Political Philosophy and the Question of Genre

Notes for a talk to be given at the Northeastern Political Science Association Annual Conference, Nov. 15th, about my paper "Theory, Practice, and Authority in Heidegger and Machiavelli."

I feel I might be reinventing the wheel. I mean an academic wheel, of course. One described in outline – it may or may not be round – that does not actually help anything go anywhere. But it responds to Scholar X's notion that a wheel could be a triangle and Scholar Y's assertion that it is actually a rhombus.

In this case, I read a chapter or two of Brian Harding's Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger, and it struck me that you could put Heidegger and Machiavelli into fruitful dialogue over a number of things. Harding's primary concern is violence and sacrifice. Machiavelli, he contends, wants to get the more or less Christian world he lives in to think about violence more seriously. Machiavelli doesn't want it to obsess over rulers with divine traits, whether those rulers aspire to sainthood or believe they wield a godly terror. He would like his age and those beyond to consider how the ancients used sacrificial rituals for civic purposes. In a parallel manner, Heidegger advances his "existential analytic" as violence, violence against a metaphysical tradition which covers up primordial, authentic confrontation with Being.

I found myself reflecting on other points of correspondence between Machiavelli and Heidegger. They both use ancient theoretical ideas to illustrate the scope of their project, the scope of their rhetorical task. It isn't enough, for example, to say "maybe we should consider using violence purposefully. Maybe that will lend itself to good civic practice." You have to show that the world has been taken over by ideas about peace and virtue which are unworkable. You have to show that these ideas dominate despite their lack of utility because power does not only come from weapons or even religion alone. Power, in Machiavelli's time, cannot be disassociated from a religion ruling an entire continent with a theology which has successfully declared philosophy its handmaiden. Introducing examples of ancient violence as useful requires no less than a complete reformation of what people believe human reason is.

Heidegger and Machiavelli can be used as mirrors to better clarify what the other means. This does not become a matter, say, of finding precise analogues in Heidegger to terms in Machiavelli like "arms" or "virtu." Even though my paper examines how they use certain themes–I look at how they use vocabulary from ancient philosophy as well as employ prophetic tones–I would not say the link between them is strictly thematic, either. The fact they can be put in dialogue rests with the peculiar authorial task of writing political philosophy. One might argue that Heidegger is anything but political philosophy, but if he can be productively read with Machiavelli, then the burden of proof for that argument rests with the person making it. (I believe this might be a helpful idea: just like people who don't want to be accountable for their actions say "I'm just joking," an absence of explicit political declarations can perform a similar function.)

So we have a question to deal with: What does it mean to write political philosophy? Why does it look like there are formal characteristics of the genre? One can accuse me of having rediscovered the wheel at this point, but let's think a moment. I primarily work in a Straussian vein, where it is held thinkers like Plato or Augustine or Locke or Nietzsche are all engaged, more or less, with either affirming or denying the theme of natural right. Is there anything right by nature? If there is, we may be led to philosophers and knowers of the law. Or those who invoke traditions which more or less work. If there isn't, we wonder about the malleability of people and whether history can be a guide for us. The trouble with the Straussian lens, obviously, is that it is too strict. It cannot really account for how authors may talk past each other or address things extremely specific to their own time. It can force an ahistorical, acontextual dialogue between thinkers.

The question of whether we can talk about genre relative to political philosophy, then, is a step away from a too strict method of reading. But what about other methods of reading? What if, to take just one example, I see texts as an attempt to establish relations of power or maintain an existing order? There's truth to that, of course, but looser methods of reading, as I will call them, may ask so many questions that we cannot track a particular thread. This doesn't mean we shouldn't use a relatively loose method, but it is possible to badly distort how something is actually working. For myself, I think too cynical a reading of the Declaration of Independence is leading people who could be thoughtful to believe that rights were never serious, that the promise of America was only meant for the few. This ignores the incredible work done by those who were not permitted to have a seat at the table to bring the language of the Declaration into prominence and push America into taking its own founding words seriously.

So I believe I have stumbled upon something worthwhile with the notion that we should inquire into the genre of political philosophy. That there are moves one makes as an author, that an audience has certain expectations, and there are unsaid themes or facts which can show the limits of the grandest thoughts. Charles Mills' work showing Kant's racism or Locke's writing of the constitution of the Carolinas is, to say the least, important to consider with the question of genre.

My hope is that we can ask tougher questions of ourselves as readers and writers, but also that with the identification of genre, we can work to expand what is considered political philosophy. I'm thinking of James Baldwin's "Letter to My Nephew," quite possibly the finest words written in the English language, telling his namesake that the only choice is love in the face of police brutality and an order meant to inflict it. Those words shouldn't be absent from our considerations of politics. They should be in every breath we take, if not written on our hearts.