Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Or any other single good. As Eric Voegelin wrote: "The political interplay of [every functioning society] is patrician. It is based on the fact that one thinks a lot about what the others do, but does not say it; that one is always aware that in the society there is more than one good to achieve, not only the good of freedom, but also the good of security, the good of welfare, and that if I specialized in one or other of these goods, I could thereby bring the whole society into disorder, because I could destroy the balance between the realization of goods on which the society is based. . . . If I harden myself with a particular idea and pursue only this goal, this one good, then in reaction there arises the counterstasis, the counter-hardening, and with this the impossibility of social cooperation."

Following up on our discussion of the " three languages of politics ," let's explore the difference between an approach to politics focused on the common good versus one focused on individual rights. Imagine a new Hitler is rising to power in some imaginary polity where governance is still understood in the classical style, as the enterprise that is concerned with the common good. The leaders of that polity will be concerned chiefly with shutting this threat down, by whatever means prove necessary to do so. Now, preserving the common good requires the leaders to use the least disruptive means possible for overachieving that aim. Perhaps having him quietly meet in accident when evening will be for the best, or somehow insuring that his access to media outlets is blocked. Perhaps his party can simply be outlawed. On the other hand, in a liberal polity fully committed to "individual rights," there will be great concern for the new Hitler's "right to f...

“[t]he common good, and not the person and liberty, [is] the very principle of all law, of all rights, of all justice and of all liberty[.]” -- Charles De Koninck ( quoted here ) The idea of the common good is really not that hard to grasp. Consider the Detroit Pistons, a group of fourteen basketball players, a few coaches, trainers, many office personnel, and so on. And let's imagine the Pistons are having an off-year, and, as a result, every single person in the organization decides to spend their time hunting for a new job instead of doing their current one. (So each of the players, for instance, just looks to pad their stats, and stops worrying about winning games.) As a result, the organization falls apart. Although every individual in the group attended to (what he thought of as) his own good, none of them paid heed to the common good of the organization. Now, given the idea is so simple, why do so many people so strenuously deny any such thing exists? Well, if it ex...

I've been reading a great (as yet) unpublished paper by David Corey . He gave me permission to quote it: Ultimately, the problem with the first postulate—that the abstract [in politics] is better than the embedded—is that it is simply false. In mathematics, if someone can latch onto one truth, he can often use it to find others. For example if one element of a complex equation can be solved, it may be used to solve the rest. But moral and political “truths” are not like this. We cannot focus on one aspect of the human political terrain, abstracted from the overall context, and expect this to point the way to social harmony. This is because (to put it bluntly) humans are not numbers, and our affairs admit of irreducible contingency. No doubt, we are frustrated by contingency. We wish for a degree of simplicity and universality that human moral claims do not actually possess. But to allow such frustrations to overwhelm us, to insist that the abstract is superior to the em...

There is nothing essential in the theory of the state that requires a "political class" to exist or requires that this class exploits a "productive class." Nonetheless, it must be said that, in practice, this structure may arise. And the (possible) existence of this structure seems to be a major brief in the case people like Tom Knapp make against the state. So here is a question for Tom, and others in his position: let us say we had a state very like ones we see around us today, but where political office was assigned by pure sortition, i.e., a lottery or something of the sort. In that circumstance, there could not be anything like a "political class": everyone has an equal shot at office, and will rotate in and out of politics as his or her name is drawn. There are no lobbyists throwing around cash to finance elections, because there are no elections. Would that state be OK?

Except at the price of civil war. Contrary to the claims of someone like Anthony de Jasay in Against Politics , eliminating the state does not in the least eliminate the need for politics. Witness this blog discussion -- if I have misread someone's view, excuse me, but the point stands: if the real Tom and Curt don't have exactly these views, there are plenty of others who do have them: Curt: "'Not taking' is exactly what [Tom] is supporting." Gene: "Who is Tom to use force to prevent these workers from taking over the factory that they believe is rightly theirs?"

Tom: "What makes you think I would do, or advocate, any such thing?" Curt, an anarchist, believes that workers taking over a factory would be stealing it, and it is legitimate to use force to stop them. Tom, an anarchist, believes the factory really belongs to the workers already, and it would be criminal to stop them from taking what is rightfully theirs. So, eliminating the st...

"Each city has its manners and its gods; the very life of the city depends on this particularism: to live, it must defend its ancestral way, which is a combination of human accidents and special institutions adapted to the here and now. Good citizenship implies a devotion to those ways; a universality, a cosmopolitanism that devoted itself to the essence of man as he is eternally, would destroy those roots of affection which are necessary to political life." -- Allan Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics , p. 46 As I begin to study this topic, I am gobsmacked by how I had missed just how political a writer Shakespeare really is: which of his plays don't concern politics in some way? And, of the major plays, which of them do not have politics at its center?