Ugo Stornaiolo S., Associate Editor of the Miskatonian, had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Hörcher and covered topics such as prudence and moderation in the conservative mind, Hungarian constitutional history, and the spirit and aesthetic manifestation of Central European culture.

Ugo – Hello and welcome, Professor Hörcher, thanks for joining us today.

Ferenc – Thanks you Ugo, I’m happy to be with you today.

Ugo – My first question is usually to ask our interviewees to introduce themselves a little bit so our audience knows better who you are and why we’re talking today. As a heads up, I can tell them already that you’re an Hungarian professor, and that you’re well known in circles where the work of Roger Scruton, the famous British conservative political philosopher, is appreciated.

Ferenc – Sure, yes: I am a historian of political thought, a political philosopher, an historian of art and I’m also literary critic and a poet, so I’ve have got a number of interests and I have a long experience of teaching in higher education. For quarter of a century I taught at the Department of Aesthetics of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, here in Hungary, where I also established a Doctoral School in Political Theory. I then led for six years the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and right now, I am the head of a relatively small research unit at the University of Public Service, here in Budapest, and since this is a research professor’s position, I have the obligation to publish and to have occasions like this one to give an account of my research.

Ugo – Well, it seems you’re a very busy person, and I happen to know some of your academic contributions because you do publish a lot. I think I was first introduced to your body of work with a book you wrote on on the historical Hungarian constitutions, so from that, I was wondering if you have any legal training or if you are somehow connected to the legal profession.

Ferenc – That’s right: I also taught at the law school of the Catholic University and I got an master’s degree in Legal Theory from the Universities of Brussels and Louvain/Leuven, in Belgium, and I taught for some years legal philosophy and the history of legal thought. I don’t know if you are aware of another book of mine on those subjects, because my master’s thesis got reworked and edited into a book format. The title is Prudentia Iuris: Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Natural Law.

Ugo – Well no, I was not aware of it, so thanks for the heads up. I’ll get to check it soon for my own research, and speaking of which, I mean, I have been in Central Europe for around two years by now and when I first arrived I thought about getting in touch with some likeminded people in our common spheres, and I think I first found you through your book on the Hungarian historical constitution, but also because you have kind of an important presence in in social media, such as in Twitter/X, and there’s a lot of followers of the late sir Roger Scruton who are connected with you because of these links you have with, let’s say, the philosophy of conservatism and aesthetics, as many of your contributions have been in these two areas. My first question in that sense is how did you get involved in conservative political philosophy, where does your connection to Sir Roger Scruton comes from, and what’s your link with the philosophy of aesthetics.

Ferenc – Well, these are three independent questions, so I’ll try to answer them one by one:

First, I was born, you know as far as conservatism is concerned, in a communist country, in communist Hungary in the 60s, in 1964 in particular, so my conservatism is rooted into an anti-communist stance.

I guess it’s my family background which prepared me for that, so its was not a question that I was never really satisfied with my country being occupied by Russian communist tanks so, that’s the origins, but I did not prepare to become a conservative political philosopher per se because of that.

That came later, during my stay in Oxford, England, where I was a visiting graduate at Oral College and where I studied what I thought was a Third Way, beyond this duality of Communism and Western capitalism, but which turned out to be an investigation on conservatism, and in particular, on the work of Edmund Burke.

We could say, thus, that was my initiation into conservatism: through anti-communism and my research in Oxford into the work of Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and that’s not far away from Roger Scruton’s own interests, so that leads us to your second question.

Roger Scruton was a Cambridge-educated philosopher of art and political philosopher and he had a special interest in Central Europe, just like you, which is actually very rare, and very appreaciated by us Central Europeans, but basically Scruton was someone like that, and he came over beyond the Iron Curtain already in the late 70s and 80s so that was quite a courageous thing to do and, of course, I could have met him already then but I did not meet him until 1992 when it was already after the fall of the Berlin wall and the Iron Curtain but still decades ago and as I had always found his work relevant, we had a number of occasions to meet and participate in conferences and I even had the chance to respond to one of his lectures, at the University of Warsaw, so there were regular occasions to meet and discuss things.

I also worked as a journalist for some time in the 2000s and I made interviews with him as well, so we were well acquianted, and the result of that was that when he died in 2020, I decided to to write this book about him, Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy, which got published by Palgrave McMillan in 2022/2023, so that’s the connection to Roger and it also leads to your third question: the philosophy of art, which is also an interest I shared with with Roger, whose primary interest was also the philosophy of art, which is, according to the German tradition, aesthetics: the the study of the sensual perception and in particular the study of beauty, the sublime and other aesthetic qualities.

This plays well with my other interests, as I mentioned I am practicing poet, so I was always interested in literature and the arts and that’s why I gave some time to study the theory of it and as a result of that, I published a history of the of the French, English and German uh early modern aesthetic thought from 1650 to 1800, so from the court of Versailles and Louis XIV up to Immanuel Kant and Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) so that’s that’s that’s my my interest it’s partly historical but also theoretical.

I have a a theory that in fact an aesthetic judgment the ability to make decisions about what is beautiful and what is not is connected or has it the same operational pattern as the judgment that we need in politics or for that matter in legal decision-making: a kind of practical wisdom or practical judgment.

Ugo – The way they actually connected was quite interesting and especially because it creates a train of thought which explains how you ended up working in the topics and the spheres you are, and at the same time it really gives a background into into your work.

I also kind of project myself a little bit into you because we have a similar background at least in our professions and in our interests, so I do understand how that goes.

But I mean, in more practical aspects one of my questions would be what exactly you learned and what exactly made you really feel you know inclined about the political philosophy of conservatism instead of any of the other currents.

I mean we have the misconception that conservatism is just pretty much defending free markets capitalism and know the American version of conservatism, but in British and in Central European thought is something way different and closer to traditionalism actually, so my question, maybe for you to add up a little bit to the first part of of your answer, would be what really made you be interested interested in that instead of just anti-communism and the superficial promotion of free markets and democracy.

Ferenc – Anti-communism for me was not only about free market and and free speech, although these are important things, I would say, but my basic problem with communism was that it was, well, if you want to be kind you can say it was “mistaken”, but if you are stronger you would say it was based on a lie and that mistake or lie concerned its view of human nature: it had a false view of human nature.

I myself was brought up as a Christian, a Catholic, in particular, and that was actually something that was forbidden, or maybe, “not advised”, let’s put it this way, in a communist context, to bring your children up in Catholic doctrine, and of course in Catholic moral theology you are introduced to the idea of the sinfulness of human nature, which is the starting point, so to say, and that was what I was brought up in, and so I saw it very obviously, that the perfectionism and the utopian hopes and optimism that is part of the Marxist ideological smoke screen are not true, so that’s why I thought that I should dig deeper.

With Edmund Burke I found an author who could indeed show me that that there is a political tradition which is based on the assumption that if we take into account the real nature of the human being, then you have to be much more cautious in your politics and after the 20th century I think that lecture or that lesson was even more important than in the end of the 18th century. Of course, the French Revolution, which was the cause of Burke’s Reflections was terrible and the bloodshed together with actually some very nice and very optimistic hopes, but the 20th century was even worse: the totalitarian regimes (nazi, fascist and communist) showed us the most brutal face of politics and the killing machines that can come out of that.

Some of those totalitarian regimes were based on these nice utopian illusionary views of the human being, so I always felt that as a responsible person (and we intellectuals need to be responsible because we have got that privilege that we could spend our time in our youth studying instead of just working for survival) that means that we have to take care of what the public opinion is about or about how the public perception of reality turns, and therefore I always felt it my obligation to try to share that sort of wisdom which comes out from the tradition that I trace back to Aristotle and partly even to Plato and then through the Romans, like Cicero, and the others up to Christianity, such as Augustine and of course Aquinas in particular, then the Renaissance humanists and the early modern thinkers like the Spanish Jesuits and their Italian counterparts as well as the British tradition.

These are all important for me because they all trying to call our attention to the fact that the human being is full of uncontrollable passions, aggression, willpower, and therefore you have to be able to control those passions, and in particular, you have to take care of mass psychology because we are living in a mass democracy and within that context it’s even more important to be able to have the balance and to keep the heat low in order to avoid major outbreaks of violence and terror and war.

Ugo – Taking in particular your last point and before my next question, I have something to ask you because, as you may know, conservatism, at least for some authors and for some thinkers, you included, is a philosophy or a doctrine of prudence and moderation, so I would like you to expand a little bit on that statement and to explain to people who might not be very familiar with that what that means, especially what’s prudence, what’s moderation, how are these virtues, and why do they matter to keep a healthy and a stable society.

Ferenc – Mostly yes: you are right. That’s a very strong historical tradition but I also use those concepts and ideas in my own understanding of political conservatism. I published a volume with the title “The Political Philosophy of Conservatism” and the subtitle “Prudence, Moderation and Tradition“, and I found these three concepts important for me for the same reason our liberal friends tend to start out from the cardinal virtue of justice.

Think about John Rawls, for example, perhaps the most influential 20th century liberal thinker, and his most important book is called A Theory of Justice. And in fact, yes, it tries to work out the conditions for a just society.

But I thought that justice might be important, but there might be something before one can turn towards achieving justice in your society. You need to keep order and peace in your society. You have to find the minimum conditions of cooperation and cohabitation. And for that, justice is too far away. What you need is rather, as I mentioned, to keep down the passions and the uncontrollable motivations for violence and brutality and envy and all those things.

And to achieve that, we know from the Christian teaching that the cardinal virtue of prudence or practical wisdom is crucial because it does not give us a key of the metaphysical truth of our conditions or the human phenomenon, but it provides not simply a technique or a skill, but rather a virtue, a habitus, a kind of ingrained and internalized excellence, which is a virtue of a practical nature, which will help us to make decisions in difficult situations. I usually describe this with the following metaphor or allegory:

Imagine that you enter a Saloon somewhere in the American Wild West in the early 19th century as a cowboy. And you are thirsty, you want to have a drink. But this is a pub which you never entered before. And you have to be aware that there are certain risks when you enter a Saloon or a Pub. You have to be careful about who is in, what are the intentions of those in, and what are the possible risks for you to enter.

And that is, I think, the attitude of the one who has got practical wisdom. It’s an attitude of cautious foresight, of an effort to try to be able to get all the necessary information to make good decisions, what to do next. That’s the most important thing: it’s not necessarily to have long-term strategies, but more of a tactical thing. But you always have to keep in mind the telos, the goal of the whole thing, and it’s not simply survival, but the common good of the community, in fact.

You are not only, as the cowboy who enters the Saloon, interested to save your own life, but you want to have a good time for all of those in there. And that’s the sort of thing, what you need, a practical judgment, the ability to see potential dangers, and also the space for maneuver, and the ability to do good, or at least to avoid to do bad things.

Ugo – I’m going to connect this reply about the meaning of prudence, and of wisdom, and of practical knowledge, which is kind of a staple in conservatism. Empiricism somehow became very, very associated with conservatism, despite not being part of the same tradition at first. This links with both your legal training and maybe the idea of natural rights and natural law.

So I want to ask you, how do you see that in the realm of natural law, since there’s the issue that there’s a lot of thinkers of natural law are either only lawyers, and they just think about it on the legal sphere, or only philosophers, and they don’t really apply it to the legal sphere. So maybe you have the right amount of votes as both a legal scholar and as a political philosopher to explain this to a layman.

The modern renaissance of natural law came after the Second World War, for obvious reasons, i.e. that positivism could not help avoiding the most horrible, anti-human, inhuman decisions by decision makers.

But my problem with the tradition of natural law is that it claims to have those universal standards for once and for all. And I never knew how to make sense of it within the historical dimension of the human being. I thought that there is a learning process, perhaps, here.

And even if these standards are universal, I had the feeling that Adam and Eve in paradise surely were not aware of all of them at once. So my assumption is that human history is actually a learning process, a learning process which comes out of repeated trial and error procedures. Human societies try to solve their practical problems, and the better the solutions are, the longer the society can survive. 

This allows us, on the long run, to find out those standards which help the societies to survive for longer. And that means that my idea of natural law is quite close actually to the concept of common law in the British context, i.e. that we need to see the precedence, we see have to see earlier cases, earlier historical states of affairs and decision-making processes and the results.

And through that we can find those principles and standards which crystallized with time and which we can claim belong to what we traditionally call natural law. So that’s my own understanding of natural law: the principles are universal, but they need to be learned through human history.

Ugo – Speaking of common law, well, as an Hungarian jurist, you know that the history of the Hungarian constitution is quite similar to how Britain has retained an unwritten constitution, and if I’m not wrong, Hungary has not had a proper written, “single document” constitution until, I would say, around 10 years ago?

Ferenc – Well, mid-20th century, in 1946 was the first written version and then the communist constitution was introduced and that was already a written paper.

Ugo – Sure, but I mean a constitution that actually follows the Hungarian tradition, not the communist experiment, and you as a jurist, could take the Hungarian cas, and actually you did in your book (A History of the Hungarian Constitution: Law, Government and Political Culture in Central Europe), explaining how that developed from centuries of political experimentation and changes in Hungarian history.

I was wondering if there was some connection in your study about Hungarian legal and constitutional history and some of your conclusions about natural law and about conservatism.

Ferenc – Yes, yes, of course, you are on the right track. One’s historical investigations and one’s theoretical reflections should be in harmony. And indeed, although I call myself an Anglophile, someone who appreciates British culture in general and the English common law in particular, and the British parliamentary system and all that, I am a Hungarian, a loyal Hungarian citizen, and as such, I’m very proud to have this long-standing tradition of unwritten or better said, uncodified laws, because there were certain laws which were put down and they adapt that uncodified constitution which we are talking about.

Now, you are asking me about that tradition, which is a centuries-long tradition: Hungary got its state formation 1,000 years ago, or by now it’s a little bit longer, and those 1,000 years of Hungarian history were based on certain Christian and certain local jurisprudential principles, but the basic one which was usually referred to was a collection of customary laws as well as statutes which tried to bring together about 500 years of legal developments, the so-called Tripartitum, the three-part collection by István Verbőczy from the early 16th century.

That means that we had 500 years without such collections, or at least just smaller ones, and mind you, this is not an official collection, it never got the signature of the king for its authorization, but it was accepted as a correct collection of Hungarian laws, partly customary law, but also partly the laws given by our kings.

And the major idea behind that is a kind of an interaction between the country, between the community of the different orders of society, you have to keep in mind that this is a feudal social system, and both the country and the king are part of a higher unit which is called the crown, as the Hungarian crown is the sacred symbol which unifies the king and his country.

And all the procedures of creating new laws are like a dialogue between the country, between the different orders assembled in the national assembly, and the king. They are the two partners to it, and as a result of the dialogues, the laws are born.

And that is, I think, a very nice and early example of how to formalize procedures in a way to ensure that different interests will be taken into account, but also the general interest, i.e. the interest of the country as represented by the assembly, and also as embodied by the king, so the two parts of the discussion unite and through that dialogue comes these procedures resulting in the right decision. And all that centuries-long history of dialogue resulted in certain principles, like the principle that the king should always take into care the good of the country.

Of course in those days “the good of the country” basically meant the good of the nobility, one should be aware of that, but the interest of the general good was the legitimating force behind the activity of the king, and as soon as there was a recognition that that was not the case, the king lost his position quasi by the force of the law, because he did not take into account the interest of the common good, which was the first and the primary interest of his rule.

Ugo – I’m going to make a connection with the next topic, since there’s a lot of historical coincidences, as well as a lot of differences between the constitutional development in Hungary and the one in Poland, in particular the idea of the crown as separated from the figure of the monarch, and the “enfranchised people”, the nobility, with political power that kind of collaborate or are in tandem with the monarch in order to compose the crown.

However, there’s a key difference, and that is that Poland successfully established an electoral monarchy during the existence of its First Rzeczpospolita/Republic, and they had a wider range of foreign and local monarchs, whereas Hungary became part of the Habsburg realm pretty early on, and it stayed as part of their Danubian monarchy until around a 100 years ago, and had their struggles for independence as well quite a couple of times. I think the two most famous ones are Rákóczi’s War of Independence and the Revolution of 1848 that ended up in the compromise of the 1860s, so I was wondering what do you think made these differences in Hungarian constitutional history and in the Hungarian political tradition?

Ferenc – Well, of course, the geopolitical situation of the two countries is different, and that resulted in different turns of their history. Most importantly, the Turks came up from the east-south and south-southern parts of Europe up to take the middle part of Hungary for 150 years, which resulted in the country divided into three parts, and as a result, the Habsburgs could strengthen their power over one part of it, and that became the foundation of the kingdom later on as well.

But it’s not the right formulation to give an account of the Hungarian constitutional situation in the early modern period, is not that Hungary is part of the Habsburg monarchy, because Hungary was always ruled according to the Hungarian constitution, and so from a Hungarian perspective, it was rather the case that we happened to have the House of Habsburg as our kings, but we, the Hungarian kingdom, the geographic locality called the Hungarian kingdom was not part of any other monarchy like the Habsburg monarchy, because this part of the realm was ruled according to different rules than all the other parts of the realm, and it could not be ruled without the support of the orders, the feudal orders, and that meant that no king could be crowned without taking an oath and without being crowned in presence of certain people, by certain persons who were either from the secular or the religious established order of the country.

That means that for all these hundreds of years, when we had Habsburg kings, it was always the case that they could only rule according to the oath that they made, and with the condition that they were crowned in the right presence, by the right persons, at the right location actually. So a number of criteria had to be met, and in fact that was not the case for any other parts of the Habsburg  realm. And as for the settlement of 1867, that was indeed perhaps the high point of Hungarian political wisdom. 

Why? Because Hungary had to realize that by that time, a mid-sized country within the center of Europe, with the Habsburgs and the Germans on the one side, and the Russians and the Turks on the other side, they had to find a modus vivendi, how to rule themselves, and in this way how to save the basic sovereignty of the country, under whatever construction it can be saved.

And the settlement was a dual monarchy. Once again, Hungary is not part of the Austrian monarchy, it’s a construction of a dual monarchy with the same ruler, the same king, but that king was an emperor in the Austrian part, and a king in the Hungarian part, and the settlement was that Hungary will keep on ruling itself according to its own constitutional tradition, so again this dialogue between the Hungarian people, its elites and the king, but the foreign affairs and the military decisions as well as the treasury were to be held together for both Austria and Hungary.

So these are the areas that were not exclusively controlled by the Hungarian government, but that did not meant they gave up their participation in the decision-making process in those fields. And I think that was a very substantial compromise, or rather settlement, because it provided ample opportunity for development, and also to keep the traditions alive, and it defended Hungary from foreign invasions until the First World War.

Ugo – There are two questions I could make from this. The first will stay on this historical development, and if I may play little devil’s advocate in here, because there’s a certain tradition, legal theory, even jurisprudence going in the development of the historical spirit of the law and so on and so forth, but then you also have a more power-based understanding of law which is fairly associated with the thought of German jurist Carl Schmitt.

And I was going to ask you: do you think this constant state of warfare in which Hungary found itself during half of its existence was what really gave the necessity to have these foreign rulers from the House of Habsburg to be pretty much their main military commanders against every other invasion that could be around?

I might be reading too much in between lines, but there’s a certain idea that if you need these powerful figures, usually military commanders, to take the reins of government because the situation is so overwhelming that you need someone with extraordinary, exceptional powers to rule and restore order. And this also happened with Admiral Miklás Horthy later during the years between both world wars. In both cases, there’s the strongman that takes power because the country is in a situation of exception.

Do you think we could apply Carl Schmitt’s understanding of power politics and of the exception of laws as a situation that explains some of the Hungarian political and constitutional development.

Ferenc – We can, of course, but we should tell our audience that on this issue, we have different positions, for I go for a more Aristotelian understanding of the nature of politics, and you appreciate more Carl Schmitt on this point, but of course, Schmitt says that within a geopolitical context, we would call an international law or international relations. 

Nonetheless, my understanding of politics is more about internal affairs, because it’s the Aristotelian starting point where you have a political community and you have to organize the life of that community.That’s my basic assumption, and for that, you might have occasions when you have, you are in need of a strong military leader. These are, for example, the Roman dictators, but otherwise, what you need is practical wisdom and and just a good sense, a sensus comunis, the right understanding of what’s at stake. 

And in that respect, my example of a good ruler in Hungary is not Horthy, who was actually quite successful, I do not want to deny that, but my example is from his period, it’s István Bethlen from 1920 to 1930 roughly, and Gábor Bethlen, who was a prince of Transylvania in the 17th century. 

These two, both named Bethlen, so it’s easy to remember their names, illustrate the idea that to rule, in fact, you need to make compromises, and you sometimes even have to give up certain powers of sovereignty. For example, Gábor Bethlen had to make deals with the Ottoman Empire, as well as with the Habsburgs. But if you make those external compromises, then you can rule your own country within your own borders, according to your standards and your values. I think that’s something very important.

Both Bethlens were regarded quite highly by the European powers in those days because it’s always important for foreign powers, for the great powers, that there is peace in the smaller areas, which they don’t want to deal with.

In this sense, I think you can find a modus vivendi between the requirements or the demands of the great powers around you and your own people. These are the two sides that you have to keep in balance, and in that respect, I think it’s not enough to have powerful military leaders. You also nned t have men of practical wisdom.

Ugo – In the end, it all comes to the distinction between the politics of community and friendship, which would be more in the Aristotelian sense, and a certain politics of friend-enemy distinction and of conflict, which is more of the Schmittian understanding. We somewhat understand who were the historical enemies of the Hungarian polity in history, and there might be some remnants of that, at least in the way how Hungary deals in its affairs now.

Ferenc – Well, there is always a division line within, I guess, most of the countries, but in Hungary especially, and the division line can be drawn along religious or political values. For example, we talked about the Habsburg influence in Hungary, and there were groups who were pro-Habsburg and anti-Habsburgs, and that was a very powerful division line within Hungarian politics for centuries, whether you could accept the Habsburgs or whether you would never accept them as legitimate rulers.

Another division line is the Catholic-Protestant division line, which divided Hungary along the line of the Danube. That was basically the most important geographic division line within the Hungarian kingdom, traditionally, and even today.

And the western part belonged earlier to the Roman Empire and it became early Christianized, and then it became also Catholic and remained Catholic when Protestantism got its time, and the eastern part became Protestant and the Protestants were usually anti-Habsburg as well, so the religious division and your position about a foreign ruler went hand in hand.

Interestingly, I would say that the best parts of our history was when the two sides could play out their roles in a balance.

For example, we had the Rákóczi’s War of Independence in the early first decade of the 18th century, and they failed. They were anti-Habsburg, and in that sense, the revolutionary ones. But then a very good peace treaty was drawn, and as a result, the 18th century is actually quite peaceful and quite dynamically developing in Hungary, which is not something that you learn in school, because in the school you learn your great struggles for liberty and your tragic falls. You don’t learn about the ordinary normal decades of human or national history when things went well, because there are no news in it.

You need to fight for liberty in order to get the settlement, but also you have to get the settlement to get out the best what that fight was for. So the successful periods are when the two things can go hand in hand. And I think that after 1990 with the newly born freedom again, there is a need for balance.

There is a need for those who fight and there’s a need for those who can make the compromises and the settlements. That also points to international relations, and there has always been this link with other countries around.

Ugo – Talking about Austria would be self-explanatory in the Hungarian historical context with the relationship with the Habsburgs, but what about other countries? Hungary has very brotherly relationships with other countries close by, Poland, in particular, or Croatia, maybe.

But I think that there is here also a kind of inferiority complex. Hungary used to be at least a mid-sized country and the country which had very powerful kings for centuries, and at some moment, our kingdom was as big as it was bordered by three seas, so it was quite a huge one. Sometimes Poland and Hungary were even under the same king as well.

But it has a good influence on a public mentality if a country was big and then it becomes small but it has some bad aspects as well. And that bad aspect of this Hungarian historical tradition is that we always complain. We complain that the world is conspiring against us, that we are the underdogs and we are not taken as equal or we are not dealt with in a fair manner. These are the complaints that I think can add up to a kind of an inferiority complex if it’s done without kind of moderation and tact.

So that’s my answer to it: sometimes Hungarians have this feeling that they only have friends in the Poles and perhaps sometimes the Croatians but that’s all. With Italy as well, there were good relations, but that’s it.

And you also have to take into account culture: the Hungarian language is not belonging to the Slavic or the Romance language families, so in that sense, it’s something very exceptional. Nobody else connects to it. The same way, Hungarian culture, in which literature has a very powerful position, is not understood by others, because they don’t speak the language. This means that a lot of things that are important in the Hungarian public mentality are not available for our Western friends, and therefore, they cannot make sense what is actually happening here with these strange guys, these Hungarians.

Ugo – Since you mentioned culture at last, my last question might be about it, and especially coming back to aesthetics, because Central Europe has a very defined identity when it comes to aesthetics. When you come to Central Europe, you feel everything is different, but at the same time, every major city, like Kraków, Budapest, even Zagreb, Prague, Vienna, in some extent as well, they’re very similar. They have like the same vibe. 

It also extends a little bit to the people, and you mentioned that there’s a certain way that Hungarians are, that they complain about a lot and they don’t feel they belong that much to the West. My experience in Poland has been quite similar. And mind you, those are two very different nations, but they’re still, they’re very close and they have always been close and they have very friendly relations in history.

So maybe my last question is about that, about the spirit and the aesthetic expression of that Central European identity.

Ferenc – Yes, that’s crucial for Hungary that we don’t regard ourselves as part of Eastern Europe, but rather Central Europe. And of course, Central Europe is a concept which is much discussed in historical literature. 

I tend to go with those who claim that it’s basically the Central European Habsburg powers, the Habsburg realm in this part of the world that defined this culture. But I also would call attention to this Hungarian historian named Jenő Szűcs, who had this not very novel idea that there are three historical regions in Europe: Western, Central and Eastern, but also claimed that there were different historical trajectories for these regions.

The Eastern model is a kind of monopoly of power or even a tyranny, the Western model is democratization even to the extremes like a mass democracy, and Central Europe is somehow a compromise between the two, like a constitutional monarchy or something like that.

Of course, there is an idealization in this scheme, but there is truth to it as well, that Central Europe could learn from both sides and could appreciate both sides. And in that sense, it has got a certain function in Europe even today, I would say. That’s why the Visegrad Group is an important political initiative.

Ugo – This also shows the aesthetics of the region. Whereas in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe, you have like these grandiose monuments to both mass democracy, like if you go to Brussels or if you go to any other big city in Western Europe, you will see how they try to say “oh, we are the people and this is how the people hold power.” And then in Eastern Europe, you have these monuments to the power of the state, and usually, to the power of the ruler as well. But in Central Europe, you have something that goes in between. You still have big buildings, big churches, big palaces, but they are not massive.

Do you feel the connection between the people and the ruler, between community and those who belong to it and those who run it? This is something that doesn’t happen too much in both East and West, so maybe the aesthetic expression of that idea is something that we could take as a giveaway of how Central Europe really feels and thinks about itself and about its governance.

Ferenc – Yes, I would put it this way, because I’m not in favor of powerful rulers or very strong states because they need their control. That’s the idea of the rule of law. But I think that you have a point if you say that mass democracy, as Tocqueville teaches us, destroys hierarchy and destroys differences. It creates homogeneity and it creates gray areas. Grayness or dullness or a sort of flat and undistinguished landscape.

And in this respect, this is indeed a region of transitions, a region of meeting places, it has got its aesthetic, and by aesthetics, we also mean a certain ethos and a certain way of life, which is so important for conservatives like us.

Ugo – All right. Thank you very much for that, it’s been a pleasure sharing with you. Would you like to say one final message or one final comment to our readers?

Ferenc – I would really like that, and I hope it was not too far-fetched and not something without major interest, but my point is that indeed we Hungarians, we have a long history, have a lot of faults and mistakes, but we are quite friendly people, and all the visitors who come to Hungary usually say that they like to stay here. And we are happy if people are interested in our country and in our region, so Ugo, I’m really grateful for your interest as well.

The post Interview with Ferenc Hörcher appeared first on The Miskatonian.

This essay will examine Lefort’s understanding of the “political form” and its significance for grasping the nature of political regimes. It will also explore Lefort’s engagement with Strauss’s concept of Natural Right, analyzing how Lefort’s critique of modern political systems, especially totalitarianism, resonates with Strauss’s philosophical concerns. Although Lefort is not a direct disciple of Strauss, their intellectual engagement offers a fascinating dialogue about modernity’s moral and political conditions. Through this, the essay will highlight Lefort’s contributions to contemporary political theory and his subtle indebtedness to Strauss’s critique of modern relativism.

Political Forms in Lefort’s Thought

Lefort’s notion of the “political form” is central to his political philosophy. By political form, Lefort refers to the symbolic structure that underlies any given society, shaping its institutions, modes of governance, and the relationship between rulers and the ruled. This concept extends beyond the mere institutional framework of a political system; it addresses the deeper symbolic order that defines the nature of authority, legitimacy, and participation within a society.

In The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (1986), Lefort argues that the political form of a society is crucial to understanding how power operates within it. In pre-modern societies, political power was embodied in a monarch or sovereign who claimed divine authority and symbolized the unity of the people and the state. This symbolic unity was mirrored in the hierarchical structure of society, with the king or emperor at the apex, representing a direct connection to a transcendent order.

With the advent of modernity, however, the political form of society underwent a radical transformation. The emergence of democratic regimes signaled the end of the symbolic unity of power, as a sovereign ruler no longer filled the place of power. Instead, power became “empty,” open to contestation, and subject to the will of the people. Lefort describes this as the “empty place of power,” a concept central to his understanding of democracy.

The Empty Place of Power and Democratic Society

In democratic societies, Claude Lefort argues that power is no longer concentrated in the hands of a single ruler or institution, as it often was in pre-modern or monarchical regimes. This shift represents a radical break from the earlier conception of sovereignty, where power was personified by a king, emperor, or ruling figure believed to derive their authority from divine or transcendent sources. Instead, in modern democratic regimes, power becomes depersonalized and abstracted—no longer embodied in any individual or institution. Lefort introduces the idea of the “empty place of power,” a central concept in his political thought. This idea suggests that in a democracy, power is not fixed or owned by any one party or figure but remains open to contestation and constant redefinition. Power in democratic societies is thus continually renegotiated through public debate, political competition, and the active participation of citizens. It is a space where authority is never fully stabilized, creating a dynamic and fluid political landscape.

The “empty place of power” signifies a departure from the traditional notion of political legitimacy, where authority was seen as permanent and derived from a higher, often divine, order. In contrast, Lefort argues that democratic authority is contingent, subject to the ongoing negotiation processes between citizens and their representatives. In this sense, power is never absolute or unquestionable; its legitimacy is always provisional, dependent on the people’s political will and collective actions. This continuous contestation makes democratic systems inherently unstable but also profoundly adaptable. For Lefort, this openness is not a weakness but a defining strength of democratic regimes. It allows for expressing diverse viewpoints and the possibility of institutional transformation, ensuring that no individual or group can monopolize political power indefinitely.

In Democracy and Political Theory (1989), Lefort emphasizes that the defining characteristic of democracy is its institutionalization of division, uncertainty, and pluralism. Unlike totalitarian regimes, which claim to embody the people’s singular will or possess the ultimate truth about society, democratic regimes acknowledge the inherent diversity of opinions, interests, and values within the political community. They recognize that no political authority can fully represent the totality of society or embody an unchanging truth. This acknowledgment of plurality makes democracy a dynamic and open-ended political form. It creates a space for contestation, where individuals and groups can challenge existing power structures, propose alternative political visions, and engage in political transformation processes. In this way, democracy institutionalizes conflict and change as essential features of political life.

For Lefort, the continuous possibility of conflict and change distinguishes democracy from more authoritarian or totalitarian forms of government. Totalitarian regimes, by contrast, attempt to erase political divisions and suppress dissent, presenting themselves as the complete and unquestionable embodiment of the people’s will. They seek to eliminate uncertainty by asserting absolute control over both the political and social realms, denying any possibility of opposition or pluralism. Democracy, on the other hand, thrives on uncertainty and division, making it a more resilient and adaptive political system. It is the capacity for change and renewal, fostered by the openness of the “empty place of power,” that allows democracy to remain responsive to the shifting needs and desires of its citizens. Democracy is not a static regime but an ongoing political process that continuously reshapes itself through conflict, contestation, and negotiation.

Totalitarianism: The Closure of the Political Space

Claude Lefort’s political theory draws a sharp contrast between the open, contested nature of democratic regimes and the closure of political space in totalitarian regimes. For Lefort, democracy is defined as the “empty place of power,” where political authority is constantly in flux, open to debate, and never fully possessed by any individual or institution. This openness allows for pluralism, contestation, and the ongoing renegotiation of power. Totalitarian regimes, by contrast, represent the antithesis of this dynamic. In totalitarian systems, power is no longer open or contested. Instead, it is fully embodied by the state, which claims to represent the totality of society and its interests. The totalitarian state presents itself as the absolute authority, collapsing any distinction between the state and society and asserting control over every aspect of social, cultural, and political life.

Lefort argues that totalitarianism fundamentally alters the symbolic structure of political life. In democratic regimes, the symbolic space remains open, allowing for the expression of dissent and the contestation of political authority. This openness enables democracy to be flexible, adaptive, and responsive to the evolving needs of its citizens. In totalitarian regimes, however, the symbolic space is closed off entirely. The state claims to embody the will of the people in its entirety, eliminating the need for political debate or alternative viewpoints. This totalization of political authority means that the state no longer allows for any meaningful distinction between rulers and the ruled, between the public and the private, or between political and non-political spheres of life.

This closure of symbolic space in totalitarianism has profound consequences for society. Lefort explains that totalitarian regimes seek to homogenize society by erasing all forms of difference, diversity, and plurality. In such a system, there is no room for independent thought, dissent, or political action because the state claims to possess the ultimate truth about society, history, and the human condition. The totalitarian state positions itself as the final arbiter of meaning, dictating political life and cultural and social norms. This leads to a complete absorption of society into the political domain, where every aspect of life is subject to state control and manipulation. The result is eliminating the symbolic distinctions crucial to political freedom and the flourishing of a pluralistic society.

Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism is deeply rooted in this symbolic closure. He argues that totalitarianism represents the ultimate denial of the political in the sense that it collapses the space where political action, disagreement, and debate can occur. In a democratic regime, power is never wholly owned; it is always in question and contested. However, in a totalitarian system, the state assumes complete authority, leaving no room for individuals or groups to challenge its legitimacy or propose alternative visions for society. This erasure of political contestation leads to the erasure of political freedom itself. Therefore, totalitarianism does not merely restrict political activity; it eradicates the conditions that make politics possible by absorbing society into the state’s vision of absolute truth.

The symbolic closure of totalitarian regimes also underscores Lefort’s broader concern with the relationship between power and society. In democratic regimes, power exists in an open and contested space, which allows for the ongoing reconfiguration of social and political relations. In totalitarian systems, by contrast, power can no longer be negotiated or challenged—it is absolute, embodied in the state, and inseparable from its authority. This obliteration of symbolic space results in the homogenization of society, where all forms of difference are subsumed under the state’s control. For Lefort, this is the ultimate danger of totalitarianism: it extinguishes the possibility of political life by eliminating the very distinctions that allow for freedom, plurality, and the ongoing negotiation of power within society. In his view, maintaining symbolic openness in democratic regimes is essential to preserving political freedom and resisting the totalizing tendencies of authoritarianism.

Bureaucracy and Democracy

Claude Lefort examines the inherent tension between bureaucracy and democracy, particularly in modern liberal democracies. In Lefort’s analysis, bureaucracy involves the depersonalization and routinization of political power. It functions through a rigid framework of rules, regulations, and procedures that, while essential for managing complex societies, often remove the immediacy and vibrancy of direct political contestation. As power becomes more bureaucratically managed, it also becomes less visible and more abstract, distancing itself from the dynamic interactions that are central to the political process in a democratic regime. Lefort acknowledges that bureaucracy is crucial in maintaining order and efficiency, especially in large and highly structured societies. Still, he is deeply concerned with the implications this has for the vitality of democratic life.

The central problem Lefort identifies is that the rise of bureaucracy in democratic societies can lead to the ossification of political institutions. Over time, these institutions become more rigid and less adaptable to the changing needs and desires of the people they are meant to serve. Bureaucratic systems tend to prioritize procedural correctness and the maintenance of existing structures over responsiveness to the political will of the populace. As a result, citizens may feel alienated from the political process, as their ability to meaningfully participate in decision-making is diminished. This alienation arises from the complexity and impersonality of bureaucratic procedures and the perception that political institutions are becoming less open to public input and debate. Lefort views this disconnection as a significant threat to the democratic principle of active political engagement.

Lefort argues that the health of a democratic society depends on maintaining a delicate balance between bureaucratic efficiency and the openness of political contestation. While some level of bureaucracy is necessary to ensure the smooth functioning of governmental operations, it should never be allowed to dominate or stifle the broader political sphere. For Lefort, the danger lies in bureaucracy’s tendency to solidify into a self-perpetuating system that operates with little accountability or transparency. When bureaucratic systems become too insulated from political contestation, they undermine the democratic ideal of power, constantly subjected to scrutiny and challenge by the people. This is particularly concerning because democracy, as Lefort understands it, thrives on the uncertainty and flux of political life—where power is always contestable. The institutions of power must remain flexible enough to adapt to new challenges.

To counterbalance the risks posed by bureaucratic rigidity, Lefort emphasizes the need to preserve spaces for political debate and engagement within democratic societies. Democratic politics, in Lefort’s view, requires ongoing participation, the constant questioning of authority, and the active involvement of citizens in shaping the direction of their government. This participatory aspect of democracy is essential for preventing bureaucracy from becoming an entrenched and unresponsive force. For Lefort, the challenge lies in ensuring that democratic institutions do not become mere administrative mechanisms, disconnected from the vibrant and open-ended political contestation crucial for democratic life. In sum, Lefort calls for a vigilant approach to safeguarding democracy from the encroachments of bureaucracy, advocating for a political environment where openness, responsiveness, and contestation remain central.

Political Regimes and Natural Right

Claude Lefort’s exploration of political regimes indirectly engages with the concept of Natural Right, a central theme in the work of Leo Strauss. Strauss, a German-American political philosopher, devoted much of his intellectual energy to critiquing the decline of natural right in modern political thought. For Strauss, Natural Right refers to a universal moral order inherent in nature and can be accessed through reason. This concept stands in stark opposition to the relativistic and historicist trends that have come to dominate modern conceptions of justice, which Strauss believed had eroded the possibility of establishing objective moral and political standards. In Strauss’s view, the loss of this grounding opened the door to political instability and, more dangerously, to totalitarian ideologies that impose their own arbitrary conception of truth.

Lefort does not directly reference Strauss’s specific arguments about Natural Right. Still, his critique of modernity and totalitarianism reveals a shared concern with contemporary societies’ moral and political crises. Lefort’s work addresses how totalitarian regimes eliminate the symbolic structures that allow for distinction between law, politics, and morality. In doing so, totalitarianism erases the space for individual moral judgment or dissent, subsuming all aspects of human life under the state’s authority. In this sense, totalitarianism denies any notion of a moral order outside the political, reflecting Strauss’s critique of regimes that sever the connection between politics and universal ethical principles. Lefort’s concept of the collapse of symbolic space in totalitarian regimes aligns with Strauss’s argument that without a transcendent moral framework like Natural Right, political regimes are at risk of total domination by a single authority.

For Lefort, totalitarian regimes represent the ultimate denial of both political freedom and moral autonomy precisely because they claim to embody the totality of society fully. In such regimes, there is no external space from which individuals can judge or critique the state. This symbolic and moral closure resonates with Strauss’s critique of modern relativism, which he argued leads to nihilism or the imposition of arbitrary power without objective moral standards. Strauss viewed the decline of Natural Right as creating fertile ground for totalitarian regimes, which fill the vacuum left by the erosion of universal ethical principles with ideologies that claim to offer a complete and absolute truth.

While Lefort does not advocate for a return to Natural Right as Strauss does, he shares Strauss’s concerns about the dangers of relativism and the collapse of moral distinctions in modern politics. Lefort’s focus on the symbolic nature of power in democratic regimes offers an alternative framework for thinking about how societies can resist totalitarianism without needing a fixed moral order. Lefort believes that democratic societies, by keeping the “empty place of power” open and allowing for contestation and debate, can maintain a space for political and moral plurality. This openness prevents the state from claiming total authority and allows individuals to engage in ethical and political judgment. In this way, Lefort’s thought offers a different, though complementary, approach to the problem of relativism that Strauss critiques.

Both Lefort and Strauss are concerned with how modern political regimes grapple with the loss of transcendent moral authority and the rise of ideologies that claim to embody the totality of truth. Strauss’s response calls for a revival of Natural Right, a return to a universal moral order grounded in nature. Conversely, Lefort emphasizes the importance of symbolic openness in democratic regimes, where power is always subject to contestation and no authority can claim absolute truth. While their solutions differ, Lefort and Strauss offer valuable insights into the challenges of modern political life, particularly in their critiques of totalitarianism and their shared belief in the necessity of maintaining a space for moral and political judgment outside of state authority.

Lefort’s Intellectual Engagement with Strauss

Although Lefort and Strauss approach political theory from different perspectives, they have a clear intellectual resonance. Both thinkers are concerned with the crisis of modernity, particularly the dangers of totalitarianism and the relativism that characterizes much of modern political thought. Strauss critiques modernity for its rejection of natural right and its embrace of relativism, arguing that this has eroded objective moral and political standards.

Lefort, while not advocating a return to natural right in the same way as Strauss, shares Strauss’s concern about the dangers of relativism. In totalitarian regimes, the collapse of symbolic distinctions leads to a form of political absolutism, where the state claims to represent the truth in its entirety. This is similar to Strauss’s critique of modern relativism, where the absence of objective moral standards leads to the rise of totalitarian ideologies that claim to embody the truth.

For Strauss, Natural Right serves as a safeguard against the dangers of relativism and totalitarianism. By grounding political life in objective moral standards, Strauss argues, we can prevent the rise of political systems that claim to represent the totality of society. Strauss advocates a return to classical natural right, particularly the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who grounded their political thought in a conception of nature and reason.

While not a natural right theorist in the same sense, Lefort acknowledges the importance of symbolic structures that maintain the distinction between power and society. In democratic regimes, the “empty place of power” represents the recognition that no political authority can fully embody the people’s truth or will. In Lefort’s view, this openness to contestation and pluralism is essential for preventing the rise of totalitarian ideologies.

Writing and Political Symbolism

In his later work, particularly in Writing: The Political Test (2000), Claude Lefort focuses on the role of culture and symbolism in shaping political life. For Lefort, political power is not confined to formal institutions like governments, laws, or constitutions. Instead, it extends to the symbolic practices that structure our understanding of society and influence how we interact with power. In this sense, writing becomes a central site for expressing political ideas and struggles. Through writing, individuals and groups can engage with the fundamental issues of power, authority, and legitimacy. Writing becomes a way of testing and challenging the boundaries of political thought, serving as a medium where the political is constantly negotiated and redefined.

For Lefort, writing and language are not neutral communication tools but are imbued with political significance. They are symbolic practices that both reflect and shape the social order. In democratic societies, writing is of special importance because it embodies the principles of openness, debate, and contestation that define democratic life. In this context, writing becomes a form of political action, a way of engaging with and potentially transforming the political landscape. Lefort emphasizes that the symbolic nature of writing allows for a multiplicity of voices and perspectives to be heard, contributing to the pluralism and diversity that are essential to the functioning of a democratic society.

One of the critical insights Lefort provides in Writing: The Political Test is that symbolic practices like writing serve as a means of challenging established power structures. In totalitarian regimes, where power seeks to close off all avenues of dissent and contestation, the symbolic space for political action is severely restricted. In contrast, democratic societies thrive on the ongoing negotiation of power relations, where writing plays a crucial role in keeping the space of political contestation open. Through the act of writing, individuals can resist the closure of the political space by questioning authority, expressing dissent, and proposing alternative visions of society. Lefort sees writing as a vital mechanism through which the symbolic openness of democracy is maintained.

Moreover, Lefort’s analysis of writing as a “political test” emphasizes the idea that political thought is never settled or finalized. Just as political power in a democracy is never fully possessed by any one individual or group, political thought is never complete. Writing, therefore, becomes a continuous process of engagement, a way of testing the limits of political theory and practice. Lefort views writing as an ongoing political experiment that allows for articulating new ideas, the revision of existing norms, and creating spaces for alternative forms of political engagement. This dynamic process reflects Lefort’s broader understanding of democracy as a regime that institutionalizes uncertainty and embraces contestation.

Finally, Lefort’s exploration of political symbolism through writing also connects to his broader concern with how societies represent and understand themselves. In democratic societies, writing and other symbolic practices contribute to the ongoing construction of collective identities. These identities are never fixed or predetermined but are constantly reshaped through political discourse and symbolic representation. In totalitarian regimes, on the other hand, the state seeks to impose a single, unified identity on society, closing off the possibility for pluralism and dissent. Writing, for Lefort, becomes a critical tool in resisting such totalizing tendencies by keeping the space for political contestation and diversity of identity open. Through writing, individuals and groups can imagine and articulate alternative futures, challenging the dominant narratives imposed by those in power.

Thus, Writing: The Political Test highlights the importance of symbolic practices in political life, particularly in democratic societies where openness, contestation, and pluralism are fundamental. For Lefort, writing is not merely a reflection of political thought but an active participant in shaping the political realm. It is a way of testing the boundaries of political possibility, engaging in the ongoing process of political action, and resisting the closure of political space by authoritarian regimes. Through writing, individuals and societies can continually redefine their political futures, keeping the space of democracy alive and vibrant.

Conclusion: Political Forms, Regimes, and Natural Right

Claude Lefort’s work offers a profound and multifaceted exploration of political forms, regimes, and the symbolic structures that undergird them. Central to his analysis is the concept of the “empty place of power” in democratic societies, a notion that symbolizes the radical openness and fluidity that characterize democratic politics. Lefort’s insight that power in a democracy is never fully possessed but remains open to contestation captures the unique nature of democratic regimes. This starkly contrasts the closed and totalizing nature of totalitarianism, where power is embodied in the state, which claims to represent the totality of society. Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism, which suppresses political plurality and symbolic openness, reflects his broader concern with preserving the space for political contestation and change—essential elements of a vibrant democracy.

Lefort’s analysis of totalitarianism, particularly its symbolic closure, resonates with concerns raised by Leo Strauss regarding modern political thought. Strauss warned against the dangers of relativism and the erosion of natural right in modernity, arguing that the absence of a fixed, transcendent moral order opened the door to totalitarian ideologies that claim to embody absolute truth. While Lefort does not share Strauss’s commitment to recovering classical natural right, he is similarly concerned with the political dangers that arise when power becomes absolute and incontestable. For Lefort and Strauss, the suppression of plurality and the elimination of political space—whether through totalitarianism or relativism—pose severe threats to political freedom and human dignity.

However, Lefort’s vision of political freedom diverges significantly from Strauss’s. While Strauss advocates for a return to natural right to ground political life in objective moral principles, Lefort embraces the indeterminacy and contestation that define modern democracy. Lefort’s emphasis on the symbolic openness of democratic regimes provides an alternative path to safeguarding political freedom that does not rely on recovering a fixed moral order. Instead, Lefort argues that the absence of such a grounding—the “empty place of power”—allows for the continuous negotiation and redefinition of political authority. This openness makes democracy resilient and adaptable, capable of withstanding the pressures of absolutism and ideological closure.

Lefort’s thought also provides a compelling response to the challenges of modern political life without resorting to the fixed foundations of natural right. By emphasizing the symbolic nature of political power, Lefort demonstrates how democratic societies can maintain their pluralism and openness without descending into relativism or nihilism. In Lefort’s framework, political freedom is preserved by maintaining symbolic spaces that allow for debate, contestation, and the continual re-articulation of collective identities. This ongoing negotiation process, rather than a return to natural right, sustains the vitality of democratic life. For Lefort, democracy is not a system that needs to be anchored in eternal truths but a political form that thrives on the uncertainty and fluidity of the political arena.

While not directly indebted to Strauss, Lefort’s work shares significant concerns with Strauss’s critique of modernity, particularly the dangers posed by political absolutism and the loss of moral and political standards. Yet Lefort offers an alternative vision of political life that embraces the indeterminacy of modern democracy while safeguarding political freedom through the symbolic openness of power. This vision provides a powerful critique of totalitarianism and a robust defense of democratic pluralism, illustrating how political freedom can be maintained without needing a fixed, transcendent moral order. Lefort’s contribution to political theory thus offers a compelling vision of a political life that is open, contested, and constantly evolving, free from the dangers of both political absolutism and moral relativism.

The post Claude Lefort on The Political Form, Political Regime, and Natural Right appeared first on The Miskatonian.

“We live in a first world civilized society and people are actively choosing to consume milk riddled with E. coli and listeria”, he said. Pasteurisation “is not some evil sorcery” for it “just kills the dangerous bacteria you morons”.

He was criticized by those he ridiculed, who argued that the pasteurization process removes valuable nutrients and countless probiotics, making raw milk by far the superior product. Raw milk enjoyers are among those who generally emphasize the benefits of a radically organic lifestyle. This usually involves beliefs about how the human metabolism is optimized to absorb unfiltered and natural animal products and how detrimental ultra-processed foods are by comparison.

In this there is said to be something of a Lindy Effect, a theorem itself named after a New York Delicatessen. The human metabolism has had millennia of adjustment to optimise the absorption of beneficial nutrients from naturally produced foodstuffs, but only a few years of consuming industrial chemicals like the canola oil, sulphates, nitrates and emulsifiers that are now ubiquitous in pre-packaged food.

There is a deep suspicion of big business and government at play here, of a sort of industrial-eat-bugs complex that grew around tobacco companies moving into factory food processing to replace lost cigarette revenue and the food industry’s cynical pivot to demonizing the consumption of fat in relation to high cholesterol to shield consumers from the dangers of excessive sugar.

Without rehashing debates about dietary regimens, it is interesting that Walsh accused raw milk enjoyers of magical thinking. “Evil sorcery” suggests there are hidden forces at work conspiring to bring about the ruin of souls through industrial-scale mechanized food production.

This brought with it some more serious accusations from others. Inferring from the fact that aficionados of the current dietary trends code right-wing, it was suggested there is some link to the racism inherent within it. In trying to deduce what such detractors might mean, one can presume they suspect a sort of fixation on biological purity at work, along with a certain physiological supremacism being apportioned to the pre-industrial Western European diet. I’m not convinced there’s anything inherent about this lifestyle trend and the darker forces being alleged to reside within it. This is not to say there isn’t an adjacent relation, but this is something accidental. What interests me is what the new nutritional purism might mean symbolically.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, even the most patently absurd conspiracy theories are hermeneutically valuable, being interpretations of the human world. Criticisms of online ‘disinformation’ thus wholly miss the point; in the same way, a philistine philologist misses the point by condemning the Book of Genesis or the Iliad for not being true. Mythical pictures explain aspects of reality within their symbolic idiom. There are aspects of reality explained by those blaming 5G for SARS-2 or those subscribing to Pizzagate or QAnon. Interpreted symbolically, such theories bespeak an intuitive sense that our cultural atmosphere is increasingly permeated with unsanitary and harmful things and that those in power are more culpable for this fact than they care to admit.

Plato comes to mind in this connection. In the Republic, we learn that most people simply won’t live according to logos, philosophical conclusions, and reasoned arguments, but they can and should be edified as appropriate by mythos. The myths could provide a narrative idiom for enabling the apprehension, ultimately, of goodness, truth, and beauty. Whether we can present a similarly generous hermeneutical approach to today’s widespread phenomenon of conspiratorial thinking remains to be seen – but it is clear enough that railing about ‘disinformation’ alone will not suffice because we’re not dealing here with information alone.

Now, the appreciation of raw milk and its lifestyle has much more logos than mythos – even Matt Walsh should admit some probiotic and nutritional deficit results from pasteurization. The honest debate surrounds whether this deficit outweighs the risk of consuming harmful bacteria and whether that which is lost can’t simply be replaced through other, safer means. Nonetheless, Walsh accused the pro-raw milk faction of succumbing to wrongheaded mythos in the shape of “evil sorcery”, mythos disassociated from the true.

That said, Walsh’s ridicule wasn’t entirely unjustified. Many of us will know someone who has taken it all a bit too far. I mean someone who, while enjoying a night out with friends, won’t eat anything in a particular restaurant because they cook with rapeseed oil. Or the guy who brings their pre-cooked-in-grassfed-cattle-butter ground beef to eat from a Tupperware box during the family’s Christmas dinner. There is, in extreme cases of any dietary purism, a move toward the sort of obsessive control around eating/not eating that would ordinarily be associated with eating disorders.

The fact that the element of control in such disorders is a form of transference is broadly accepted. Uncontrollable emotional trauma or personality defects are transferred into a different idiom of sorts, a realm of choice-making where a sometimes-deadly level of control is mercilessly adhered to. What might such traumas and defects be in the case of the latter-day nutritional purist? We’re back to that intuitive sense I mentioned above: that our cultural atmosphere is increasingly permeated with unsanitary and deleterious things and that government and big business are more culpable for this fact than they care to admit.

Unsavory cultural expressions are almost impossible to avoid in a digital age – and even when they can be avoided, the language and sentiments they express gradually filter into everyday interaction anyway. Culture is formed by contagion. The society we portray becomes the society portrayed. Like theories, consuming soy increases estrogen, which enters the water supply and ends up saturating everything – the good, the true, and the beautiful drowning in an onslaught of their opposites.

Plato’s Republic describes how unsanitary and deleterious cultural expressions harm those who encounter them. For Plato, that which is genuinely true is, of course, the Forms, which spring forth directly from the mind of the creator. The world of nature, which we perceive with our senses, is one step removed from the ideational reality and hence subject to myriad forms of unreliability. Objects formed by human beings are then even more ambiguous, being formed from nature they are thus two-steps removed from the realm of the true. Hence, human artifice is a dissident species of representation – of mimesis. This is a problem not only in terms of truth but also goodness and beauty, and thus ethics and aesthetics.
Hence Plato’s distrust of artists. The mimetic dissidence of art in relation to ultimate reality means the sort of character exhibited by those formed by human representative constructions – by art or poetry – will be mired in illusion, improper conduct, untruth, and relative ugliness. As he writes, a “low-grade mother like mimesis”, will “produce low-grade children”.
Yet it is not as simple as just opting instead for edifying representation, for manipulating mimesis for noble ends. In his more radical moments, Plato maintains that mimesis itself is inherently problematic. There is something about it that will always drag people down. We will be carried away by base feelings due to the intensity of artistic representation, as opposed to the calmer and more measured business of philosophical contemplation. And because, in stories, we’re beholding lives so far removed from our own, we can’t help but take a perverse delight in “the sight of the kind of person we’d regret and deplore being ourselves”. Moreover, because the artist or poet will always be in need of an audience, he will deliberately play to the “petulant and varied side of our characters” to evoke the most impassioned responses.

I’ve taught these elements from the Republic numerous times – and I’ve never fully agreed with him on this. I believe in the nobility and worth of art and poetry. But in recent years, certain passages from the Republic have developed a compelling sense of vindication. I wonder if there isn’t much in today’s world that is proving him right after all. Digital images mediated through internet technology inherently tend to be the lowest common denominator far more than any medium in prior history. One can point obviously to pornography, which accounts for an estimated 10% of internet traffic, but increasingly to the sheer slop of most social media content – particularly the short-form video bequeathed to us from TikTok, which is to the nurturing of attention what fentanyl is to wakeful consciousness. As put memorably by Mark Fisher, we live in a “superficial frenzy of newness, of perpetual movement,” a sort of permanent “recombinational delirium” constantly overrun by images that enact a dreadful “besieging of attention.” Algorithmic reasoning vividly demonstrates Plato’s concerns. The infuriating, appalling, tempting, lascivious, or just utterly stupid representations emerge triumphant from the fray by clocking millions upon millions of likes.

Now, of course, one could argue that, just as Plato went a step too far in condemning mimesis to court, we can use digital communications in a modified fashion, exercising control and intention in what we occupy our minds with and when and why. The trick is to be always mindful of not giving free reign to base emotion, or what Plato called “the petulant and varied side of our characters”. In some of my more reactionary moments, however, I’m not so sure. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t something inherently detrimental about photographic representation itself, mediated digitally, that constitutes a form of mimesis carrying its own “evil sorcery.”

Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses the original genesis of mechanical image reproduction in relation to the development of Renaissance art. He mentions how medieval art was shot through with human conception, not just perception. This is best demonstrated by the early medieval religious icon. Here, “depiction was routed through the human sphere, meaning the human being’s inner world of images, thoughts, feelings, notions, intuition and experience” was “transposed and objectified in the form of colours on a canvas”. This is shown by the formalized and decidedly non-representative tendencies of, say, a saint’s face or an angel’s body, with not a trace of the painter’s world present therein. This meant what was portrayed seemed not to belong “to any definitie moment” but rather “to all moments, to eternity”. During the Renaissance, artists increasingly prioritized earthly sight over transcendent conception.

It is precisely this trajectory that mechanical image reproduction emerges. Knausgaard writes that the “mechanization of the lens…liberates our attention from the soul”. It offers the promise of a “soulless eye” – a reality without the sort of principled goods that human souls ever bring to bear on that which they encounter, a glimpse of reality seen through the eyes of a ruined soul, a world purged of heaven, by freeze-framing a split-second moment or looping it through endless replay – a foundational condition for the development of human character is destroyed: temporality. In this sense, Geoff Dyer is right to call photography “the negation of chronology”. Digital communication brings with it a radical solitude in how such images are viewed, combined with a negation of space – you don’t need to go anywhere to see the image, and it is viewed by people everywhere more or less simultaneously.

Shorn of space, time, and interdependence limitations, the soulless eye takes over and mounts the throne of a pseudo-divine vantage point. People go out less; they lose hours at a time and increasingly spend their lives alone. On a journey in the Americas in 1924, D. H. Lawrence wrote about using his Kodak that photographers “see as the All-Seeing Eye sees” and that humanity could inhabit a non-human perspective and “see ourselves as the sun sees us.” But myths and legends are full of warnings about what this entails.

In this sense, the current age can sometimes seem inextricable from magic and sorcery – from the tale of Dr Faustus, from the fate of Prometheus, and also from Icarus. The solitary smartphone viewer losing hour after hour to short-form video is disappearing into what Shakespeare called “the vasty deep” from whence gruesome spirits are conjured, bringing about the ruin of souls. The great question of the age is, therefore, whether our consumption of these representations can sanitized by something like pasteurization, by the gentle heat of noble intentions and the pursuit of virtue. Or it might be that the reproductive process itself is so detrimental to natural goods that we’d do better to submit to Plato’s revenge and somehow try to begin again.

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The political reason for the public sphere is explained here as the medium of the political. Habermas’s political constitution of philosophy opens and substantiates the next thesis: “Political philosophy is a dispute about the good.” This can become a standard of action. In his later work, Habermas attempts to define the notion of communicative reason as a reflection of philosophy.

Communication and rationality gradually become the basis of social relationships and displace the position of transcendental consciousness. Once we abandon the idea that the actor is the source of meaning in the world, we can see that the actor is just one Understanding comes from rational communication and norms of understanding in the space of reasons.”

The basic principles of rationalized communication are to move away from the subject as a constituent of society and to preserve the possibility of criticism. The subject has been replaced by an understanding of the living world as an integral part of society. Despite this, the requirements of the validity of communication retain the possibility of criticism. They are based on two broad aspects. One can criticize strategic action based on the action of understanding the lifeworld. Second, the traditions of everyday communication are not exempt from their criticism. Because they could conflict with the claims of the validity of communication that they condition as contingent traditions. The grounding and critique of society thus become equally possible. In this article, we primarily focus on the second aspect, the possibility of social critique, which is examined here from the perspective of J. Habermas as well as that of Hannah Arndt.

When it is rooted in the source of legitimacy of human unity, an act has the communicative structure of the lifeworld. When rooted in the source of political legitimacy, which is the formation of human unity, it is legitimate. Recent contemporary thought has repeatedly emphasized that sovereignty is the legal title of political legitimacy. According to Arendt, a functional and federal separation of powers should not limit democracy, but rather facilitate it and strengthen and increase the power of the people to create their law. The system of checks and balances is supposed to ensure that state authorities don’t abuse their power.” Abstraction action always emanates from the experience of the lifeworld. “The appropriation of traditions, the renewal of solidarity, the socialization of the individual require a natural hermeneutic of everyday communication”.

THE ACTIVITY-THEORETIC CONCEPTION OF POWER

However, according to Hannah Arendt, communicative power is impermanent. It exists only in the “fleeting moment of joint action (5)” and “disappears” as soon as those gathered “disperse again. However, Arendt does not only have this singular, negative, and activity-theoretic conception of power, which she first develops in Vita Activa. In “On Revolution” she supplements it with a second, constructive, and structural conception of power. In doing so, she not only takes up the constitutional-theoretical legacy of the Declaration of Independence but also, in a radical counter-movement, taps into the third concept of power she had used earlier in her study of totalitarianism, to develop an alternative to both bureaucratic, imperial and totalitarian power and the negative evanescence of performative communicative power on the example of the revolutionary constitution. However, the question remains open as to whether communicative power can be reasonable.

How can communicative power be maintained, stabilized, and increased in the long term? How can the reflexive mechanism that generates street power be institutionalized? The answer, which Arendt finally found after a careful study of the American Revolution in the chapter “Constitutio Libertatis” of her book On Revolution, is this: through a constitution that establishes rule. This constitution must be constructed in such a way that it can make permanent the communicative power of the constitutional law unleashed by the revolution. This idea leads Arendt to a fundamental critique of the “constitutionalism” of the English rule of law and the German constitutional state, which only limits power. She calls it, which she opened in the final section of The Origins of Totalitarianism as the last lifeline of Western civilization, now a “counterrevolutionary” project, created only to “break the revolutionary power of the people” and sow “deep distrust of the people” to provide “a relatively small group of technical specialists” with the means “in the class struggle (6).”

Habermas, on the other hand, talks more about procedural popular sovereignty. The difference with Arendt lies in his understanding of autonomy. Whereas Arendt, like Carl Schmitt, identifies political autonomy with a specific public space in which citizens confront each other face to face, for Habermas, Kelsen, and Luhmann autonomy is a characteristic of a specific form of communication that can take place anywhere and anytime and is separated from law only by claims of validity (Habermas), specialization (Luhmann) and method (Kelsen)(7). However, the main difference between Habermas and Arendt is not in the concept of power, but in the concept of rationality, which for Habermas is closely linked to power in all its manifestations. The broad communicative conception of rationality allows Habermas to hold to the claim of the truth of political legitimacy and democratic self-legitimacy. 30

Thus, he acts in line with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, whereas Arendt sharply and historically ontologically demarcates politics and truth from each other and thus inevitably moves in line with Hobbes, Austen, and Schmitt, whom she abhors. Unlike Habermas (and Hobbes), Arendt does not understand the formation of political power as a purely social phenomenon, but clearly distinguishes it (like Hegel and Schmitt) from social “violence,” which for her includes administrative power. She thus moves the political, separated from truth, society, and violence, into the neighborhood of the poetic, which in turn links her to Heidegger, Nietzsche, and some poststructuralists(8). A critique needs the argumentation, which normally grows up on the moral life experience of a community. The life-world itself accommodates the discourse principle to connect it with the knowledge of the existential claims of moral norms – and at the same time, in turn, to recognize in it the ground of the procedure of gaining moral knowledge(9). Both concepts, Arendt’s notion of communicative power and Habermas’s notion of communicative reason mark a clear distance from liberalism. Power cannot be limited by law from the outside, but it can be constituted, enabled, and established by law.

THE LITHOGRAPHY:

1. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 277

2. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 273-295 Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handels , IV

3. Arendt, H. (1960): Vita activa, S. 194. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution, München 1974, S.96, S 198, S.222, S.218,S.228

4. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution; S. 196; S.200

5. Arendt, H. (1960): Vita activa, S. 195.

6. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution, S. 187, S. 379.

7. Brunkhorst, H. (2011): Affinität wieder Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W.Adorno und die Frankfurter Schule; Fritz Bauer Institut, Liliane Weissberg (HG.), Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/New York, 2011

8. Vgl. Brunkhorst, H. (1999): Hannah Arendt, München, 1999, S. 107 ff.

9. Vgl. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 27

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Every time you make yourself a cup of coffee, maybe while standing nearly lifeless (or half dead) in front of that coffee pot on a particularly dismal Monday morning, it is not difficult to take it for granted that the coffee is there. It’s so obviously there, so how could it be otherwise? But in its thereness, the metaphysical question of being applies. Being is. But how come? However, maybe that coffee is not so very obvious after all. All effects obscure their causes, although, yes, sometimes causes obscure their effects. The truth is, we get used to things, and when we do, it gets easier to take them for granted without gratitude.

I don’t need to tell you, but I will anyway, that coffee is a popular drink. Every year, nearly two and a half billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, and at least half of those are by my brother-in-law. But this wasn’t always the case, especially before my brother-in-law turned five. If history had worked out a little differently, maybe we’d all be obsessed with something else entirely, like, say, mint tea. At one point in history, coffee was thought of as a “bitter invention of Satan.” It was shunned in the West because no one wants to end up demonically possessed by a beverage.

Legend has it that coffee was discovered around the year 850 A. D. by a poetically inclined Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. Kaldi saw that his goats would all gravitate towards a kind of cherry tree and that, after eating its berries, the goats would be noticeably more energetic. Kaldi tried the cherries himself, and he felt just heck-gosh-darn-it marvelous. Poetry flowed out of him, and his eyes widened to a world of wonders in a new way. He began waxing Heideggerian about how man is not the lord of being, but the shepherd of being, and that was long before Heidegger showed up to confuse philosophy undergraduates.

Kaldi brought the cherries to an Islamic monastery where its devout dwellers experimented until the first form of coffee came into existence. As you would expect, when such a miracle is discovered, it spreads quickly. Not everyone was a fan, but, in general, coffee began to trend. When the West caught a whiff of the stuff, this ambivalent stance towards it continued. A mix of fascination and terror. The criticism seemed to outweigh praise until Pope Clement the 8th tried coffee and said these great words: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

Well, thank Clement for that. But all of this brings me to the horrible realization I had today that my coffee had cooled down while I was reflecting on the history of coffee. I realized as that cold coffee touched my lips and as I shuddered at the brutality of that experience that we are often so busy getting caught in the vortex of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or the details of the history of some or other beverage that we forget that just by contemplating coffee long enough, we might end up proving the existence of God and better understanding something of modern politics. It’s easier to do so, in fact, when you notice how your coffee changes. So, let’s contemplate change for a moment, shall we? We’ll get to the theology and politics of it in a moment.

Everything changes, you know. Things that are once were not, and will one day not be again. You and I are included in this, I’m afraid. And change can happen in different ways. Filling my cup: a quantitative change. Spilling my coffee: a location change. Coffee cooling down: qualitative change. Digesting the coffee: substantial change to the coffee and, although debatable, to me. Change would occur even if we lived in a simulation, and for that reason, it would need to be explained.

If I were drinking my coffee with Aristotle or St. Thomas, they would remind me that change involves the actualization of a potential. It involves making real what could be real. Coffee has the potential to get cold. I can heat it up again, too, but I’m too busy writing this thing to do that. All created beings are a mixture of actuality and potentiality, and these facets of being interact with each other. They interactualise. For a potential to be made real, something that possesses a certain actualizing power has to impart that actuality to what doesn’t have it, as when the room’s temperature cools the coffee down. Everything needs a real changer for change to happen.

Now, to make this very straightforward fact more interesting, let’s think of an isolated moment in the life of some coffee. The coffee is on my desk, next to me. It is approximately three feet off the ground because of the desk. The desk is approximately three meters from the ground because my house is on the first floor of a block of flats, and the block of flats is supported by a foundation, which is supported by the ground, under which is the turbulence and tormenting heat of lava, and so on. I’m thinking vertically here about the fact that the coffee is where it is in space and not just in time because it is dependent on other things, which are dependent on other things, which are dependent on yet other things. And so on. The coffee has no power on its own to be where it is. The coffee can only be where it is because it depends on the desk, and the desk can only be where it is because it depends on the floor.

I mention this more vertical way of thinking, from cup to table to floor to building to foundation to ground, and so on, because I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that we require something like an initial starting point, like a big bang, for all of this to exist as it does. Aristotle, for instance, believed in the Carl-Saganancity of a universe that always ways and will always be, as if time itself is not a creature, although I think it is.

An atemporal or vertical way of thinking about coffee helps us consider how various actualities depend on other actualities, which depend on other actualities in turn. Change cannot happen apart from this atemporal dependence. Moreover, each thing, which depends on other things at any given moment, clearly is not self-sustaining and self-supporting and so requires something else, which in turn is not self-sustaining or self-supporting. This is true at the microscopic and subatomic levels, too, as we dive into the coffee, its water and caffeine, molecules and atoms and quarks and gluons, and so on.

The obvious contingency of the thing—the fact that it is not self-supporting—doesn’t disappear but becomes increasingly glaringly apparent the more you look at things. Not only does nothing fully account for itself, but nothing self-actualizes itself, including the subjects of Maslowian psychology. All potentials are actualized by things that are not the thing itself, even quite apart from some historical-temporal explanation. The potential of my coffee cup to be there, feet off the ground, is actualized, for instance, by the table it is on.

Now think, as much as you are able to, about everything. Think about the sum total of everything that exists. Metaphysically, we are asking about all of that, all of us included. If I am walking in a forest and I happen to come across a giant cup of coffee floating inexplicably in the middle of a beautiful clearing without apparent reason or support, I would be likely to ask the question of how it got there. Well, while that is no doubt disturbingly inexplicable, it is no less strange that there is anything at all here rather than nothing. It would be weird for a giant, unsupported coffee cup to be in the middle of a clearing in the forest, but it is far weirder that there is a giant, unsupported universe right in the middle of—well, in the middle of what exactly?

Here we are, and here everything is, and when you really think about it, rather than just taking it for granted, you discover that it is rather strange that anything exists at all, especially since everything in the system of the entire universe is clearly not a self-supporting thing. And it isn’t good enough to merely state the fact of everything’s self-evident presence, as scientistic atheists do, because the description in itself is not an explanation. If someone dies drinking poisoned coffee, as someone does in Keigo Higashino’s thoroughly enjoyable novel Salvation of a Saint, merely describing the crime scene is not sufficient to solve the question of who poisoned the victim and why. In other words, answering any question at one level is hard to answer on the required levels for the answer to be sufficient.

Nothing we know of in the universe is self-supporting, so why would the universe itself be self-supporting? It will also not do to constantly point to causes of change that are themselves open to change because then you have to simply point to another cause for change, which is itself also changing and changeable because, in that case, we are dealing not just with infinite regress but with the silly idea that just because you add yet another level to your hierarchy of being that you have in fact solved the problem—because you really haven’t. All you have done is defer it. This is why mechanical explanations don’t ultimately destroy mystery. Just because you know how a machine works doesn’t mean you have properly understood the mystical presence of the machine itself.

My point is this. We’re not just interested in what changes our coffee from warm to cold coffee. We are interested in why coffee exists in this very moment, as isolated from all other moments. We’re also not just asking about the chemical composition of coffee because that doesn’t answer the question; it merely rephrases it. We’re not thinking about history because that’s just another way to defer the question of being. We are asking the metaphysical question: Why is there coffee instead of nothing?

What actualizes the potential of the sum total of everything in the coffee as well as everything that is the universe? We’re interested in what actualizes the universe itself (and the coffee): what actualizes anything’s potential to be, given that everything is so obviously loaded with potential? We don’t really need to ask about the whole universe at all and how it came to be, of course. We need only ask about any simple, everyday thing, like a cup of coffee. Its thereness is astonishing, isn’t it?

To avoid infinite regress, we can now posit that there must be an Unactualised Actualiser, or what Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover. We need something that is so actual that it does not have any potential at all. As soon as something has a potential, after all, it would require something else to actualize that potential, and that would merely put us on the cosmic infinite regress path all over again. Thus, the Unactualised Actualiser would have to be absolutely unchangeable. It would need to have no parts because if it had parts, it would be dependent upon those parts for its existence, and we’d end up with yet more regress. It must be so real that it does not require anything else to explain its own reality.

If we’re taking the natural order of things as seriously as I’m trying to, then this is the only logical explanation available to any of us regarding why there is something rather than nothing, at least insofar as change is our main consideration. If you decide to contest this logic, your own logic would need to be on the basis of a more logical possibility.

We can, of course, simply settle for the fact that everything just is. We, at least most of us, can believe our senses and accept that they are not lying to us. But if we want an explanation and if we trust the basic inferential logic of how things depend on other things and that the sum total of all dependent things must require something singular and independent upon which everything can rest, it is not just possible but necessary to trust that an Unmoved Mover is the only possible answer. It is a logical necessity.

There are myriad ways to fine-tune the above argument, which is really the shortest version of it I could give without risking boring you. But I have another reason for bringing this up. And that reason is political. Because politics always rests on some or other metaphysics. This metaphysical division of being into actuality, the technical name being act, and potentiality, the technical name being potency, suggests a fantastic array of powers of actualization and potentiality.

Even in our most basic understanding of the world, we know that there are harmonious and inharmonious ways that act and potency can interact. Here’s a harmonious interactualisation: I drink the coffee, which ignites a little spark in me, and I move on to enjoy my day. Here’s an inharmonious version of this: I drink several cups of coffee in a row, and soon enough, I feel insanely anxious, become restless, get a headache, get dizzy, and my heart rate goes nuts. The political dimension of this simple interaction with coffee would be that my interactions with others, as now affected by my interaction with coffee, could be better or worse, depending on the proportion between actuality and potentiality in this specific interaction. Harmony, which is what we should be aiming for and which the ancients described in terms of the life of virtue, involves difficulties in our interactions, too, such as the difficulty of getting out of bed and making coffee. Why does it not make itself? Ah, yes, I’ve already implied an explanation for that.

Well, politics is much more complicated than this, of course. But you get the idea. It’s a matter not just of what interacts but also of a certain proportion between the things that interact. In some places and times, there has been harmony. As suggested in the Genesis story in the bible, harmony is achievable in terms of how certain aspects of creation allow for and limit each other. In her marvelous book, The Need for Roots, Simone Weil uses this principle to discuss certain needs for the soul, noting that “needs are arranged in antithetical pairs and have to combine together to form a balance. Man requires food but also an interval between his meals; he requires warmth and coolness, rest, and exercise. Likewise, in the case of the soul’s needs.” She notes our soul needs a political order that balances liberty and responsibility, equality and hierarchism, honor and punishment, truth and freedom of opinion, security, and risk, as well as private property and collective property.

Arguably, there are reasonable ways to consider all such things. But, in our time, something glaringly bothersome makes even reasonable consideration close to impossible.

It’s worth noting that there are also things that have a certain kind of existence that are completely imaginary. Let’s imagine, say, coffee that tastes exactly like tea. I can throw these antithetical ideas together quite easily to create a pure logical possibility. This is not a real potential, of course, because it is not grounded in the nature of real things. It is fiction, which, even to be a fiction, must exist somewhere—that is, in my mind—even if it isn’t truly realizable. If my coffee really tasted like tea, it would actually be tea and not coffee. Just because it is thinkable does not mean it is actualisable.

Technically, then, we are dealing here with something that has so little actuality that it is nearly completely all potentiality. If a person were to believe that one can really actualize something that has no being, he would essentially be equating himself with the ultimate actuality. He would quite literally be thinking of himself as equal to God, who is not a mere logical potential but a logical necessity. While I grant that you may not accept the existence of God on the basis of anything like what I have said, even so, the vast majority of people would agree, given the degrees of actualizing power readily and even obviously perceptible in the world, that to assume the ability to call a new nature into existence by what amounts to sheer will is a rather astonishing sort of hubris.

But it is this very hubris that is at the heart of the entire liberal political project.  To look at our current political moment both metaphysically and historically, we start to see that alarmingly far back, even before Sartre inverted essence and existence, the modern project was already obsessively concerned with falsification. The idea that we can only determine what is true after antagonizing being, which is what modern science does, is already to place actuality at the service of potentiality. But this idea leaked into everything, including theology, philosophy, and culture.

Way back, the conception of personhood in the heads of nominalists, even before Descartes, was already tending to think of logical possibility—meaning a pure object of thought without any material being—as superior in a way to potency proper. The conception of personhood at play was one of pure thought imaginatively but not actually cut off from reality. It was a blank slate before Locke and Rousseau. It was, in short, a fiction. Its reality was rooted not in being and its natural division of act and potency but in the mind, which can easily invert that division without even noticing that it is an inversion.

Politics, for a long time now, has been de-ontologized. It’s why it’s so easy to get caught up in political discussions that have almost nothing to do with actual political concerns; that is, with what it means to live well in the world, given that we interact with and intellectualize each other, and given that we even have the potential to denigrate each other if we cannot perceive harmonious interactions wisely. Theoretical relations are now more commonly entertained than real relations.

Sure, you could look at this lengthy meditation and accuse me of doing the same. But, part of why I have traversed the whole universe, from my coffee cup to God to the realm of the political, is because I ultimately have a very simple point to make. The political has to be, in the richest sense, universal. But the truly universal is not a false universal absolutely ripped from context. It is intimate as well. It pertains to various actualities and how they play off each other and give of themselves to each other. It pertains to the lives we really live. And the truth is that where the so-called political yanks us away from concrete particulars, it is no longer really political. It destroys the tensions between those antithetical pairs that Weil mentions without even considering what they mean, we cannot figure out what it means to live together, and we cannot possibly encounter wholeness. Right now, what is being sacrificed for the sake of so many fictions, the absolute fiction of money included, is everything from families to nations to harmonious geopolitical solutions, all in the name of reconceptualizing the world as a realm of pure artificiality.

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Socrates calls this moment of choice “the greatest danger of all” because, here, each soul determines the whole fate of its next cycle of incarnation (618b). This is why, he says, it is so important to study philosophy in this life. By learning which kinds of life are better and worse for our souls, we will be in a position to avoid the common error of choosing an evil life on the basis of surface appearances. The philosopher “will be able, by considering the nature of the soul, to reason out which life is better and which worse and to choose accordingly, calling a life worse if it leads the soul to become more unjust, better if it leads the soul to become more just, and ignoring everything else” (618d–e).

This story has puzzled commentators because it at once seems to give us near-absolute freedom to choose everything about ourselves and simultaneously bind us to an iron fate once chosen.² By this account, the only freedom we have apparently lies outside the experience of this life. Although radical, it is a freedom that we cannot actually experience here and now.

I make no pretense here to give anything like an adequate interpretation of this passage within Plato’s whole philosophy. What matters for our purposes is simply the apparent conception of freedom that is present at the surface level of the text. The careful reader must, of course, account for the fact that the passage is a myth, found in a fictional dialogue, and couched in the hedgy terms of a narrative told by a friend of a friend. In fact, I think this is not the best representation of Plato’s considered views, and as Socrates himself says, there is a “longer way” of inquiry into the true nature of the soul that he does not undertake in the Republic (435c). Independent of the best interpretation of what Plato really meant, however, the indelible image of the myth remains in the minds of later generations and stands as one of the principal founts of inspiration for Western ideas of freedom.

Conceding that much of the imagery is stage-setting brought in to make a deeper point about the the radical responsibility we have for our lives, the nature of the choice itself is also a puzzling kind of freedom. All of the models are given. We are not told who makes them or where they come from. They are just there. Socrates does mention that the number of models is so large that even if someone is the last to choose, he will still be able to choose a good life, but the range of options is a finite, unalterable set nonetheless. The goodness or badness of these options is also objectively given. Some of the models are objectively the right choice (i.e., the “just” and the “mean”), and some of the models are objectively the wrong choice (i.e., the “unjust” and the “extreme”). The main point of the whole myth is that most souls will make the wrong choice because they choose quickly based on surface features and will later come to regret their choice. If there is any difference between the suitability of different lives to different souls, this is left unstated. Finally, choice is here construed as a mere act of selection. There is no sense that souls can interact with or modify the models, although the act of choice modifies the soul.

Leaving aside the text itself and the trappings of the myth, something like this image underlies much of our thinking about freedom. Versions of our future are “out there,” a set of determinate options, some objectively better and some objectively worse. We have the freedom to select from among the cards in the deck, but we can do nothing about the deck itself. Nothing about the cards comes from us, only the act of selection. This freedom-as-selection way of thinking may adequately characterize certain limited scenarios in our daily lives, such as ordering food from a menu or choosing to go to one college out of ten possibilities. It fails, however, to capture much about the way we experience the deeper moments of freedom, and it does not merit the near-universal prevalence that this way of thinking has among philosophical theories of freedom. This conceptual image leaves out any sense that the object of choice, the shape of my life, proceeds from me along with the act of choice.

In a future essay, I hope to develop more fully an alternative to freedom-as-selection, but for now, I will simply suggest that we think of free choice by analogy with artistic creation. A painter does not merely select a painting from a set of possible paintings. (Even if we construe that set as the infinite set of possible arrangements of pigments, picking the arrangement is simply not what the painter does.) Instead, the painting proceeds from within the painter’s own soul, although he must also account for and work with the objective limitations of canvas, oil, and pigment. He may have some conception within his mind before he begins, but as he proceeds, the concrete painting begins to take on a life of its own, and the painter’s internal conception perpetually shifts in conversation with the work that has already been done. The painter freely produced the end result, but he could not have known exactly what it would be before he began the process, and it certainly wasn’t a determinate “option” that he merely selected from a range of other options.

Imagine, therefore, an alternative to the Myth of Er. Imagine that the souls are not confronted with a number of models lying on the floor but instead presented with a block of wet clay. I believe this comes closer to the way we experience freedom and responsibility.

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Aristotle says that the politeia as a thing not only refers to the ruling part or body (the politeuma) that actually held ruler or control over the given political community but also the very way of life and overall political culture that shapes that given political community. The polis—which was the form of the political community at the time of the Ancient Greeks—was understood to be an aggregation of the various households (oikoi) who shared the same space or territory and in doing so generally shared a common life together as a single community. Thus given the household (oikos) itself was an aggregation of different relationships that are found living within it (i.e., the husband-wife, parent-child, sibling-sibling, and master-slave/servant relationships). The nature of the polis needs to be understood as an aggregation of discrete parts whose only real unity arises out of their common shared life together in that shared space. And the political is the inter-arrangement, structure, or order of which part of the polis rules (that is to say has authority and control) over the whole community and thus to rule for the benefit of the whole community and not merely themselves or their friends and family.

Aristotle at first suggests that the politeia could be understood to be defined by two characteristics—(1) the number of rulers and (2) the justice of the ruler’s rule. As to the characteristic of the number of rulers (1), he presents us with a very common-sense division between the one, the few, or the many. As to the characteristic of the justice of the ruler’s rule (2), it is divided between the rulers ruling for the benefit or utility or good of themselves or for the sake of the whole community. Here Aristotle does not insist as Plato had that justice would require that rulers rule only for the sake of the ruled, but that that they ought to rule for the sake and benefit of the whole community and not some particular part. And if the rulers ruled for their own interest at the sake of the others in the community such rule would resemble in character despotic rule or mastery—which is understood to be rule over slaves/servants where the rule is for the sake of the rulers and not the ruled.

Out of the juxtaposition of these two categories, Aristotle presents the first typology of politeias:

What is interesting in this first typology of politeia is the name given for the politeia of the rule of the many for the common advantage is the same word for the thing he is trying to classify—politeia.  Thus, Aristotle uses the same word to signify one particular type or variety that he uses to label the whole class of things he is trying to describe.  It would be like if he had given a list of species or one of the specie was called specie. 

Aristotle in doing this had many commentators and translators perplexed about what to do with this politeia called politeia.  And using politeia to refer to a specific variety of politeia was rather unique to Aristotle, as neither Thucydides, Hesiod, Xenophon, or Plato did this.  Plato speaks of the timocracy, the rule of the warriors or honor lovers—Aristotle is wholly about such a regime in his Politics.  And because of this most translators and commentators opt to call this particular form of politeia a polity or something like a constitutional rule or a republic (but that would be problematic as the Latin for politeia is res publica).

            Yet right after Aristotle presented this six-fold typology in his Politics, he immediately challenges the validity of this just presented typology by making the claim that what truly defines the nature of an oligarchy is not the fact that its rulers are few but that they are the rich, the wealthy.  He argues that even if the ruling rich or wealthy were many (and the largest and most numerous part—even the majority) and not few its rule would remain oligarchic rather than democratic.   And this is as true about the rule of the poor or the vulgar (the demos)—that if the few poor or vulgar ruled over a political community its rule would be democratic in character.   Thus, the number of rulers seems to be accidental to the character of the given politeia.  What is more important and more critical is what exactly is the group that is ruling—who are they? Are they the wealthy/rich or the poor?  Aristotle suggests that what defines and distinguishes one politeia from another is the claim made by each group on who should rule and why. Thus, each politeia advances a specific claim about the justice and justification of its rule over the political community.  

            At Politics 3.10 Aristotle allows each form of politeia to put forward their individual claim (or justification) to rule.  In this particular presentation, Aristotle only does not let two of the six types of politeia present their claim as the other four are allowed to—one is tyranny and the other the politeia called politeia.   Whereas the claim of tyranny is obvious—might makes right—the claim of the politeia named politeia is not.  And given the very strangeness in its very name—one would expect some clarification would be given—but in Book 3 of the Politics, none is given.  So, at the end we have five claims—four explicitly presented in the text, one only implied and they are the following:

In Politics the claim of justice makes by each politeia seems to be what truly defines it.  Yet where we turn to Politics we not only return to the original six-fold typology of politeia of Politics but we once again see Aristotle drop it with the claim that a politeia with a much more complex one that not only has politeia varying across types but there is also variation within each type as well.  Thus, Aristotle suggests that there is a high degree of variation within a specific form of politeia than there is variance among them. 

            Yet what is shocking in Aristotle’s treatment of politeia in Book 4 is that he focuses more clearly on the politieas of democracy and oligarchy.  He says he has already discussed kingship and aristocracy already and argues that what remains is to discuss what has yet to be discussed from the original six forms of politeia—oligarchy, democracy, politeia called politeia, and tyranny, but what happens is somewhat different than promised. Instead, he spends the first three chapters going once again over what the politeia is and what is it composed of, and then he fleshes out the various parts of multitudes (the many) and notables (the few) that exist within and forms most political communities only then and there to give an account of the variations within the democratic politeia.

            After the account of the variations of the democratic politeia, the next chapter he then presents the variations of the oligarchic politeia.  One would expect for him to now turn to the next politeia—either tyranny or the politeia called politeia—but he does not, rather he represented both the account of the variations of democratic politeias and then oligarchic politeias.  Only after this representation of the variations of democratic (which slightly differs from the earlier account) and oligarchic politeias he then gives a blurred account of both aristocracy (which he said he had already discussed) and the politeia called politeia—which unlike the account of the varieties of democratic and oligarchic politeias does not offer clear cut variations for each he seems to all too often blur them both with either oligarchy or democracy.  These two chapters are some of the most confusing and difficult to read and understand in Aristotle’s Politics and remain an endless source of controversy over what exactly he is trying to argue here remains with us till today.

            It is in this more complex form of the politeia that we just mentioned above that Aristotle clearly distinguishes his teaching from that of Plato and Xenophon, as well as Thucydides and Herodotus. In fact, later writers like Plutarch and Polybius—Greeks who are writing and living at the time after Rome has conquered Greece and ruled over it—speak of the politeia as more akin to Plato than to Aristotle, especially Aristotle’s account of Politics book 4, 5, and 6.  The fact that so little is mentioned of Aristotle’s account about politeia among the Roman and early Christian authors it is commonly believed that these authors either did not bother to read or even have access to Aristotle’s Politics.

            Aristotle’s account of the politeia also fundamentally differs from that of Plato’s and Polybius’s accounts by his underscoring that change of politeia will occur between politeia but also within variations as well.  Both Plato and Polybius have a narrow understanding of politeia and thus present change or politeia as of a cyclical path.  In fact, their use of this cyclical change from one form of politeia to the next, in a particular path from kingship to aristocracy, to timocracy (which for Plato is the rule by the warriors), to oligarchy, to democracy, to tyranny.  This circular motion of the cycle of politeia change is one of the reasons such change of a politeia would be called a revolution.  Hence the power of this cyclical vision of political change.  But Aristotle’s account of this change of one type of politeia was radically at odds with his teacher Plato.  Aristotle held that that change could not only occur from one type to another as well as within type from one variation to other but also that there was no one clear set pattern or cycle that political change of politeia would take.  Aristotle would argue that yes some changes were more likely and others less likely but others changes were possible.  He also argues that the cycle did not necessarily repeat in the way Plato presented it.

When we look at what Aristotle shows us about the way political change can emerge and occur from one form of politeia to another, either a change within or among types, we see that he offers a model of political change that is not only as dynamic as many contemporary models of political systems/regimes, but we also find in today’s social scientific study of politics, what we call political science.  Yet Aristotle’s treatment of politeia differs from most if not all contemporary models found in today’s political science because his approach allows both strong quantitative and qualitative characteristics (not requiring the sacrificing of one for the other that is common in most contemporary approaches) that also are highly empirical in character yet offering great prescriptive richness that much empirical political typically lacks.

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