And welcome back to the New Thinkery, and we have a special surprise. No, I haven't had about the surprise. Yeah, David's not here. Finally.
Yeah, very happy about that. And we're placing him as our third person. We're really auditioning to Joyce. The second time on the show.
I'm actually really just happy that I thought you'd meet with that. I thought off the show. Someone comes back. And he's the second time guest, Tom Cleveland.
Jack Miller. I'm very happy to be here. I'm the show. I just want to know you do.
Only the second guest we've had back twice. Right. I know they're being Charles, but it's me and Bert. They're all single.
And we're recording a few of these. So you're going to force her past. So I should say I'm the director of academic programs at the Jack Miller Center. I don't think we talked about that too much last time.
And we're here in Georgia at our annual Summer Institute in person with folks and Greg and Alex are here and we have the thought that they could report a couple of episodes. And that's what we're going to try to do. We're very happy that we have here one of our summer institute faculty, Professor Stephen Stenet from Yale University. So political theorists, these are non-straws and Isaiah Berlin and other folks.
His most recent book is Reclaiming Patriots as an age of extremes. And I think you guys want to ask me a little more questions, but welcome. We're very happy to have you here. I'm thrilled to be here.
Thank you. Thank you. That's great. So I'm going to begin with a little bit of your background with the argument to let it go in philosophy and maybe some of the other teachers and any revealing stories about them.
That's always fun. I got into political philosophy. How to say it's a long story, maybe a long story. I don't know.
I started college. I was interested in sociology. Maybe. Like most people I didn't know what I do.
And I'm in sociology. Like, who knows. Anyway, I took a class. A summer class.
So after my first, it was a summer class kind of introduction to Western thought. I forgot what I called exactly. And I remember in the first day, he instructed me in saying, describing himself as a social and political theorist. And I got, hmm, those were words or expressions.
I never really heard of them. I didn't know what social or political theorists was. I don't remember much about class particularly, but I remember that after the five or six weeks was over, I thought that's what I want to do. Wow.
I was a major in history, an intellectual history of history of ideas. And my interest was especially in the enlightenment of himself. And then one thing I do another, and history, it didn't seem the way I wanted to go. I see one of the books I had been reading.
And you went to the jacket of the book, you know, it's just a political political, in the political science department at X. But maybe that's what I should be doing in political science, whether it's in history. So after looking around a little bit, that's what I ended up doing with the little science. And I was in England for a while, maybe anticipating what I'm going to talk about later, and then eventually, University of Chicago.
And my teachers, the teachers who were most influential to me in my life were, I guess I would have to say my dissertation advisor was Joe Propsi, who advised a tremendous number of students. And he was just a great teacher, a wonderful teacher, a lovely man. And he guided me through all of my anxieties and neuroses about the dissertation and the job market. And I went back, I think his advice was really good at the time.
I was frustrated with it. And I think he was really tough telling me what I wanted to be here. But I was a little bad. And I think he gave it very good advice.
I think it's a wonderful teacher. But maybe that's, I don't want to do that. Do you have a member of the name of your instructor? Yeah, I do.
We are in contact with him. No, no. He's someone who left the academic field role together. Well, he left the teaching field.
And it's John Reidler. And John went on to become an admissions director at Stanford, who he spent many, many years. And then went on to the head of admissions at, I think it's called University High School in San Francisco. And he was a beloved administrator.
Many of the many, but some of the students he got into Yale, I've known. So, you know, we made a kind of, he's not retired from that and does that. I think he's got an education consultant business. But we even talk every so often.
And he had a child who went to Yale, so he kind of reconnected to that. It's quite a number of years. So, the student that shall take classes? No, okay.
Thank God. You know, I didn't want to be my friends. You know, it's certainly one company. It's a recording all year.
I mean, how many of us would version of it? I don't know, but we would have great tasks of children. Just like, they'll. Yeah, it'll be a long time.
Anyway, one thing I'll do another year on end today. So, you mentioned somebody sometimes in England, that's what we're talking about today. So, that's a good point to pin it on you, which is, oh, shut. But maybe start from the biographical.
I thought you didn't go to the present related to that. I was, see how I started that story. I had an undergrad at University of Chattanooga. And one of the actual, I forgot another teacher I had was many day cover.
There was a module, which he was going to ask on the scholar, which I know. But we're still in touch. And he was an intellectual historian. And he helped me think about intellectual literacy.
Anyway, one thing I'll do another. I mentioned I was interested in enlightenment. So, you know, I was doing a senior essay reading a lot of books about the enlightenment. And other things.
And one of the books was a book by now very largely forgotten, read to Justin for God, historian and Charles Berwick, written a book called 18th Century Optics. As a 20 year old, it made some different, one reason or another, made a great impression. Berwick had taught at Durham University. So, it was one of the places I applied to the school.
And you applied it, is everybody know? So, I was accepted there. And I was very thrilled because we got a fellowship. I was very thrilled.
The opportunity to go there. And I went to Durham. And, you know, Johnnie had a little bit about a month before I was going to Durham. I received a letter from Mr.
Berwick, whom I have never matched up until this day. I'm sure you've asked about it longer ago. Kelly made, he had decided to take, come into the decision to take retirement. He wasn't going to be there.
When I arrived, he was leaving Durham and going to go walk circle. But his colleague, Mr. Tudor, would be glad to take over. I'm kind of directing my smart divisor to my study.
So, it was kind of a moment of, you know, the reason, you know, the race on deck for going there was sort of my son not there. But I was committed, I was going in. I already told other places I was coming. So, I thought, well, we're going to be wonderful.
I'll try it in London. Interesting. Who knows what will happen? We'll see one thing like another.
I got there. And actually, the whole thing turned out to be blessing and disguise. Mr. Berwick was widely regarded as being an extremely problematic individual.
I was going into it. And Mr. Tudor was the lovely, lovely man. You know, it was a deep impression and a friendship that I've been doing over the years.
To connect to Oak Shot, completely unbeknownst to me, because I never heard of Michael Oak Shot. It was an undergraduate. I never heard of Michael Oak Shot. Durham was one of the universities in England, but three or four universities that was a kind of outpost of Oak Shot's influence.
Mr. Tudor and some of the other students of Oak Shot's at the LSA. So every year, so his influence was very much in politics about there. And every year, he would come up.
He was the external examiner for the MA dissertation. He was called the MA. He'd do the MA exams. And Oak Shot would come up.
He was the external examiner. So that was the first time I got to. You know, now it was there. I heard about Shot.
His name was prominent, sort of in the way that Strauss is in places that are influenced by Strauss's influence. And I got to meet Oak Shot then. And later, I would go down at a friend who was studying at LSE. And I would go down and say him sometimes.
We'd go to Oak Shot's seminar at the LSE. And got a chance to meet him. It was very nice. He was a very civilized man as he would think.
He would go out to the pub for drinks after the seminar. He would enjoy hanging with the students. You're going to say much. But he could see enjoy the young people.
And so I came away with a very favorable impression of the great man. Can I just, maybe a lot of our listeners might not know. Maybe just protect something and refer to Oak Shot. So he was also who he was and why he's such a seminal thinker for Brits.
Right. Oak Shot was a major figure of the post World War II period. His right is prominent, submerged in years after World War II. He was born around the turn of the century.
He had a solid career up then. But his breakthrough moment, you might say, it came in the early 50s. He had been a Cambridge Don who was appointed to the chair of objects of one school of economics. And that was a breakthrough not only because of prominence of position.
But because Oak Shot was a outspoken conservative at a university that was known for its commitment to British social and labor party. His inaugural address that we read this morning political education kind of laid down a gauntlet about what the role of education was. How it should be started into a largely historical point of view. And also for a controversy of you, what a philosophy role of philosophy in education.
Philosophy was for Oak Shot largely in descriptive activity. It was not about describing how the world ought to be. Philosophers were not people who were engaged in changing the world in a way that his predecessor to the lens school of economics had been. They were a vastly prominent labor party of electoral party debates about Oak Shot.
He had specifically wanted to withdraw philosophy all the time. So it was kind of almost aesthetic quality to his appreciation of philosophy. And he would go on to write a number of important books, probably the most famous one with the book of essays published I think in 1962 called Rationalism Politics. It included political education essay, but the lead essay of rationalism politics was an attack upon the ideology of planning, public planning, kind of coming to politics with a master plan and forcing, forcing, trying to shoehorn political reality to fit that, that plan.
And the essays in the volume in different ways, pursued that thought, that said, rather than to independent as well, sure. And then, you know, he was not, his corpus is not vast. He wrote other short books. The one that I'll end up with with this, the one which I think in many ways is the greatest book, sort of underappreciated, I think, in the end of his life could be thought of as a kind of opus called Unhuman Conduct, which consists really of three interconnected essays, which probably about 100 pages each, which is about a three-year page book, where I think it is a, in many ways, a kind of more systematic study of political philosophy, his view of the modern state, his view of contemporary politics, as well, more un-purely philosophical questions of understanding.
There was a, a epistemological side to the picture. He was always interested in what we can know and what we can't know, as you apologize, sort of followed from what he regarded as a skeptical view of human knowledge, what we can't know. And as he was a public man followed from that, and in Unhuman Conduct, in many ways, built an edifice on some of those things. It's actually a great transition to what you want to ask.
Yeah, I'm just going to make the same transition you're making, I think, which is that you briefly mentioned that we had a discussion this morning, as part of our Summer Institute, the theme of the Summer Institute this year's Pacific Education and the American Republic, and we discussed political education. And so, yes, let's talk about the text. Yes, Greg, I wanted to talk about his understanding of politics. Yes, you're all sort of, yes, you're all sort of with Will from the essay that you had three-odd political education, where he seems to have defined, and to tell him to our attention to this morning actually, where he seems to define what politics is, and maybe you can just say, how that relates to his understanding of education.
What does the ocean think political education is? I guess not ought to be, since he's just scripted and not restricted, but here's oceanism, the first part of the essay. Politics, I take to be the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people who chance for choice have brought together. In this sense, families, clubs, and learned societies have politics, but the communities in which this manner of activity is preeminent, or the hereditary cooperative groups, many of them of ancient lineage, all of them were past, present, and the future, which we call states.
Can we take a time off in the show for a second? What's the confession to make? Not really, I mean, I've been passing myself off for more than two decades as a Plato expert. I don't know anything about some essential platonic works, like the Ospodys-Won, the Citias, the office, the statesman, for example.
I just don't know anything about them, I'm too ashamed to go anywhere in person to show my face in the flesh, and just put it. That's only their way. Greg, your days of shameful ignorance are over. It's not an in-hall.
Where's Dan? It's online, it's not a real hall. It's a place you like podcasts, you like important thinkers in classical texts, but you can study with them online. They're teaching a Plato seminar.
Get out of here. Yeah, they're doing the alzabites. Shut the front door. Yeah, the alzabites, the Citias office, the statesman, and some shorter dialogues.
Those are the ones I just mentioned, and more. Yes, they are, and more. And you will grasp from this course the essence, the essence of Plato's own thought. First hand.
That sounds great, Alex, but I gotta admit, you know, like a... I mean, it's not first hand, first hand is from Plato himself, but it's first hand from a good folkist, Evan Hall. This sounds exciting, but I'm not a confession to make. What's the question?
You're a guy. I've been living beyond my means, so I don't have a lot of cash on here. So I'm sure I can't afford a full semester at Dan and Hall. Well, you're probably thinking this costs upwards of $750,000.
I was thinking that. Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't cost $750,000. Well, later on, how much would come to be bones and we have to shell out?
$149. I mean, it seems pretty... When you think it's $750,000, it's only $149. You think, well, that's not so bad after all that.
It's not so bad. Yeah. It sounds worth it. On Zoom, you don't have to go to Dan and Hall, like I said, it's not an actual hall.
And it's all seminar style. It's live instruction, though. You can talk to them, but also if you can't attend, you can download the conversation after the fact and listen at your leisure. What about it?
You have to register by mid-September. That's when the registration ends, but it's open until then, and it runs from 927 until 1210. So where are you? That's a first semester for just one of these classes.
Take one of these classes at a university, and this guy teaches at a university. You would have to have three thousands of dollars. You have to subsidize the sports team. You'd have to subsidize the lazy pool, the rock wall, all the administrators.
The bloat. They get away with it for $149. Mark's just woke professors, all of them. But in this place, you don't have to.
Where would I go if I want to do this? Well, you go to Davenant Hall dot com, Greg. And they have other things besides play there. They have ancient languages, other great thinkers, but it's spelled D-A-V-E as in Dave, N-A-N-T as in Nant, and then a hall, which is spelled like Hall of Spell if you can't spell Hall.
Don't take this course. H-A-L-O. H-A-L-O. No, H-A-L-O.
Not Hall. Not Hall. Not Hall. Not Hall.
Go check them out, folks. Go back to the show. So maybe just think a little bit about how Ochod understands politics and what he thinks education looks like. Right.
Well, there's that passage, which is a good one. I mean, it includes two thoughts that I think are important, very important to Ochod. In historical communities that are called states, Ochod did believe the stage was the basic unit of political life, the modern state, that really formed the focus of what he understood. And so small, the D-A-V, so like the fullest was the ancient political thing, such as this and the historical thing, but then the state is the modern state.
And in the second, he says he built into history, and eventually he's the past, the present, of future. He was not all like, Strauss in the sense that for Ochod, I know that she's a distinction between the ancient and modern, so he's not necessarily contrasting the polis to the modern state. So he does see the state, but he just sees something, the state of modern, about the state. He's got a lineage of it that he supplies elsewhere, human conduct in particular.
So the question is, I'm trying to remember what was the question. Sure. I was asking the science and I couldn't be off here, but how does politics and how does understanding politics shapes what he holds political education? Or maybe he just what was the wrap about his understanding of political education that's entraced with the surveys?
Good, good, good. Because it is very much embedded in the politics, which is called the political education, as he understood it. As to the education of and with the ancient, specific political tradition. To understand a tradition, a state's tradition of people's tradition is to understand their behavior, particularly as I was thinking about it in constitutional and institutional forms of life.
His advocacy for political education was directed in part against, again, the kind of normative claims of what the state should be or what is the best way of life and that's not raised while he was returning. Some of us even think that political theory should be teaching the best way of life. I didn't think that. Maybe that was part of the skepticism.
He didn't claim to have a key to the best way of life. He wanted us to, he was a conservative in the sense that he wanted people to find a kind of appreciation for the world that they lived in, the world that exists, not the world they imagined to be or want to be. So it was an earthiness in that way about it, kind of down to earth quality. And his focus on tradition and this idea that a tradition consists of multiple voices.
A tradition isn't just one thing. It's a multi-glot of voices, but sometimes just talks in terms of voices. Sometimes in this essay, it's an intonation. There are intonation, intonation, and that politics is different groups of different people pursuing those intonations, but the state should not, it's not the business of the state to tell people or to impose on them any specific picture of the good life or which of the dimensions of tradition should be given some kind of priority.
The state is there to provide a kind of background apparatus in which different groups and individuals in order to pursue their ways of life. There's a kind of libertarian side and exceptional Schatz philosophy. One of the things you mentioned a little bit earlier is his opposition to grand social engineering plans or what he generally groups as ideology, which is actually in a way quick, broader, I think he suggests that in kind of any kind of sort of granty theology or goal for politics in favor of this tradition and its innovations which, as you mentioned, has gone. But all these various elements of it, I mean we do talk a little bit about that distinction to the tradition of the tradition.
He was the one, I mean, the term ideology is a background, a long background, tend to associate Marx, the German ideology. Ideologies where as they can be called forms of false consciousness, people believing things about the world they live in that are systematically false in some way. Marx provided a whole sociology of knowledge for how these laws believe it's come to be held by people. The term actually goes back before Marx.
It's something we don't need to pursue. Oh, shut up. Where is the term? The term goes back to the Napoleonic direct, and it was coined by Manic, the student of trustee, who used the term ideology as a neutral term of science, idea, ideology meant really being the study of ideas.
Marx turned it into that we often use the term, Marx, but it does go back to the French term, it goes back to the Napoleonic period. I say, you know, I assume to use ideology as just any idea that they have is your own ideologies. Again, it's going to use it in utterly neutral term, a sentence rather. Oh, shut up.
I mean, the term ideology came to have a kind of central role for him. It was kind of a bogeyman for the idea of an ideology was connected. It wasn't an ideology, an African forms of false consciousness or false belief. But they are plants.
It's a form of social planning. He's got an idea, but people think of ideologies, think of them as something that in a way precedes actual political activity. So to take an example, maybe it's sort of unfair when I was thinking of the other day, the most famous book of English language political philosophy of the post-20s of those technical journals. It's a bit of a role that begins the book with a theory about what justice is based on rational actors choosing behind a veil of ignorance, completely extracted from the world of politics.
It's based on hypothetical kind of game situations of how people would act under conditions. So it started to be, and after constructing this elaborate idea, then the question is, all you have to do is sort of deduce the political arrangements that best perform that idea. That would be an ideology in exactly the way Oaxxan gives us. It seems like for at least what I have out of the Oaxxan, is that a lot of this is retroactively sort of rationalizing stuff that the tradition made.
So it's also like a perfect example. It's a wall-out list. This is in the Amazon's out of this theory of justice. It's like, yeah, our own.
Yeah, exactly. No, that's exactly right. That's really what I've shown is that despite these times, there's simply deeply parasitic on the world in which they grow out, which purport to be, from which they purport to be independent. So he does have a kind of theory of how these ideologies arise.
But for him, these are, and I think here I think he's profoundly true, I think these are gross simplifications of the world in which we live in. They're attempts to show horn from reality, political reality into their view. And you could say this is true for so much of contemporary political thought that I use as well as as an example, knows it from the authoritarian side. It's the same thing.
What we use is a theory of human rights or theory of property or theory of liberty. And then it's a kind of top-down moral theory. Every follow-up politics is simply deducible from that. And oh, he pushed back against this kind of politics of the book because it, and he traces it back, we talked a little bit about modernity, but he traces it back to Machiavelli, which is the prince, is a kind of early example of the politics of the book.
He thought, lots, lots of different ways. He can have a great deal of respect for a lot, by the way. But he got out of the century, there's something like this, communist manifesto. They're all examples, not just ideological powers, but the whole political philosophy.
It's not like he's got a lot of sort of, I remember I just stated recently that black seems very self-conscious that he's trying to draw from the English tradition, so it's not media. It becomes much more, yeah, there's an actual right theory. There is a lot of really interesting. The theorists, and I've always thought this was something I like to ask Ochok, about if I get a time machine to go down.
The philosopher with whom Ochok is the deepest of his house, and you would think he always has his exhibit A of this kind of a project, which again, politics, by better emotion, right? He figured what he's human being, and again, politics seems to be deduced from that. But yet he does think that Hobbes, in a way, got it right, not maybe in the metaphysics of this, but in his understanding. I wonder in the Hobbes connection, whether the denial of a sumon bono is a very strong connection for him, because from a certain point of view that puts some very strong limits on what he would go for.
Absolutely. Yeah, no, I think that's right. So that's the particular y'all's assignment. There's the tradition side where you have various factors that are operating so totally in our history and influence us now.
And this is where he talks about the pursuit of intimations. And a lot of this will sound sort of odd language, but some of the intimations of tradition. At one point there's a footnote where he says, one of my critics says, this sounds like a misdable idea with the term. It's not accurate to me, but I think it's much to be recommended about this.
I like to talk about politics as you're confronted with a kind of confusion or contradiction and try to work it out. There's a conversation that emerges from that that makes much more sense of how actual sort of political hashing out works on the grounds that, oh, we have a disagreement about voting rights, let me go pull out my lock and I'll figure out what I'm going to do. Maybe they're operating in a subtle way, but maybe we could talk a little bit about the pursuit of education. And what do you mean?
Right. In this essay, it was a very controversial phrase. I see in the test, he actually intended to a later edition of it, in appendix, where he responds to his critics on the pursuit of intimations. And from an early time, the attack on the oak shot was that there was something mystical in this idea of how we might be irrational about it, how we just give us a roadmap.
We doesn't give us criteria or standards for how do we, which dimension of the tradition, equality or liberty takes? Which should we pursue? Which should we pursue? He doesn't give us a roadmap.
He was always accused of this. And it was kind of an accusation that stuck. I have a good friend in English today, an historian who likes work I admire. And he hasn't just, he can't break it.
He's got to ingrained prejudice against oak shot. And it always focuses back on this. He's very mystical. And oak shot did often like to speak in metaphors.
He has a famous essay called Tower of Babel using that biblical image as a way of talking about politics. I mean, every political flop, it's a metaphor, obviously. A political theorist, he's a metaphor. But oak shot seems to have been a chat.
And he does have, he does have the great, he has one great disadvantage from a philosophical appeal. And that disadvantage is he's an elegant, beautiful stylist. Philosophers hate that. You know, the two great stylists theorists of this period rise, I remember, and Michael Oak shot.
The Lillian writers, millions, very different ways. They dislike each other intensely. But they were both, and they're both attacked for in a way, right into well. Do you imagine just really calling him mystical, though, and he's not entirely.
Yeah, exactly. No, it's preposterous. It's preposterous. It's not about pursuit of intimations, which I would think is why he would be angry about.
It sounds like I feel like that. Tom wanted to feel an objection or some questions. Do you have any questions? How do you say, Tom?
Well, I told him I'm going to Washington to pursue some intimations. What exactly? I was a great woman. I was a great woman.
I was a great woman. I was a great woman. No, I actually had there were many, many stories of shop. One of his paramors was the great English novel of service burdock.
Wow. And Olim burdock was someone far on the left. I had no idea what the conversations were like, but they did. Yeah, she was one of these conquests.
Olim burdock. Or maybe I should put it, he was one of hers. Yeah, I know. I'll just attract all of his comments.
Okay, all right. All right. That's a serious business. Yeah, so I think we just had some questions.
There's attractive things about this way of viewing politics and the attack on these ideological planning exercises that seem questionable, but there's also questions about whether his account of politics can account for all political phenomena. So we have an example here. I'll read a bit about whether he can give a proper account of religion. He says, to suppose a collection of people that recognize traditions of behavior or one which enjoyed arrangements, which intimated no direction per change, and needed no attention, is to suppose a people incapable of politics.
And then, and the footnote, he says, e.g. society in which law was believed to be a divine gate. So according to him, it seems, you know, divinely order political communities are not political communities at all. And there's no politics there.
And I wonder if that's an adequate understanding of politics. As you said earlier, Tom, as you said earlier today, for example, I'm saying politics that would be the sort of the pique or the highest levels, right? Or I could take it even further step. Last time I was with you guys, we were talking to the mean us and he says, law wishes to be the discovery of being and it seemed like, oh, I would say, you know, wishes to be the discovery of being the ultimate.
And it already does wish to do this every day and it's not more or it isn't politics. Or it makes me think, right? Yeah, how would you say? Well, that's a true thing.
That's a strong basis. When I was listening, when I was listening to it, of course, the example I was thinking of the place that can trace its law to divine law, is Israel. One of the place claims not every Israeli believes this, but certainly, but it's basic outwind, it's basic law comes from from description of the reveal. God, is Israel not here politics?
No, it's crazy. And I think Oakeshot might. I'm not sure how deeply committed that is. It is was a very worldly and secular view of politics.
He thinks of law, what comes is a human arrangement in how we attend to our business. And he thinks that it's a word. I think maybe this is what he's getting at there, attempts to appeal to a transcendent standard, something beyond the human sphere, something beyond our arrangements, something beyond politics, really, is always an invitation to derange our relationships. It's a dangerous mode, whether it's to say there's not politics, is a strong thesis.
And I don't know that I would agree with him on that, but I think I understand what he's driving at when he wants to reject a theological ground for our beliefs, which might include things like natural law and other theological theories or substitutes. I wonder if that connects to your earlier comments about how he's not distinguishing between state and Polish and the modern state. I wonder if this is part of the personal focus on the history of tradition of the Darn, so that this is no longer a politics option. It's really, in some ways, it's very modern in every time, in some ways, I suppose.
And one of the most moving, it was a brilliant festering for Oak Shon, that was put together by two of his students. And one of those moving attributes is by one of his students, a woman named Dorothea Crook, who was a student of literature. I think she wrote a lot about Henry James. And she began her essay talking about working, reading Oak Shon at a book, to issue this video.
You never know where Oak Shon is, but the tradition part would be very much in line with his role. It would be very much in line with his role. It would be very much in line with his role. But another point that we thought maybe, again, his idea is as much as they have to, as much as they have.
Another place where it seems not to have, or maybe two places, I'll just introduce them at the same time. As much currency as one of that I brought myself over, talked earlier about Founditz. It's one of the great themes of political philosophy, starting with the likes of the law and giving politics, sovereignty, and speech, and all the way to Machiaelli, so, I mean, there's Founditz, but for him, politics always goes back to tradition. And it would be interesting to see how he would talk about that phenomenon.
The other one was when he was talking about ideologies, he mentions this on page 40 of yesterday, he says, the simplest sort of political ideology is the single abstract ideas, which is freedom, quality, maximum productivity, racial purity, or happiness, which I'm starting to shock. Because I like to think of my pursuit of happiness. That's different than happiness. That's different than happiness.
Oh my God. Okay. So we can start there. Because when I wrote this in the margin, why not just happiness?
Why doesn't happiness sort of end to which our sort of pursuit of these intonations is trying to get out. Why is this one singled out? But yeah, where's when it seems like there's certain levels now that don't exactly fit into theory. I mean, nobody asks us.
What does he think about yourself? Let me just say what about happiness? Do we need to bring that up? It reminds me of a passage, a very sharp passage from Unhuman Conduct where he says, no man pursues happiness.
We desire to idle in Avignon or to hear kuruso sing. But happiness, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, abstract term. Yeah. We pursue individual desires, not happiness.
That would be our kuruso. Yeah. Would have been nice. Yeah.
He could have done it too. But I think the question where I think he is, this theory is vulnerable is on this question of founding, political founders. And it goes back to something we talked about in seminar earlier today. There's something in many ways very English about Oksha.
And England was not founded in a way. You know, isn't it about founded? The Americans founded, the Greeks and the Americans seem to be the two great examples of founded societies in a certain way. Most societies aren't.
They evolve, they don't have a founding moment, a founding document. So it's a little bit outside of Oksha's conception. And I'm not sure he really quite has a language for dealing with it. That's why when he talks about the American founding, although he does so very briefly, it's for him again as an example of kind of ideological, the text-based politics.
He got a lot of the new, deduce it, deduce it from there somehow. And the same is true for the problem of revolutions, which he talks briefly about in political education. I mean, he wanted, how can my view in tradition, he asks account for political crises and revolutions. And his answer is, maybe it's not altogether satisfying.
The revolutions are never exactly what they claim to be. For one thing, they're always based, the resources that they use are already within the tradition that they claim to be overthrowing. And the part that they overthrow, the part of society, they may present themselves as total reworking of society. But in fact, he wants to say the vast majority of society is sort of untouched by the continues to go on more or less in the traditional way and that the revolutionary sort of misstates their goal.
And maybe it's one of the examples of what I think about the French Revolution. Burke, for example, famously thinks of the French Revolution as he accepts the ideology of the revolutions. They're breaking time. It's a totally new thing.
It's something we've never seen before. It's creating, he accepts the view it is creating in the world. And when Tofil writes about the revolution, you know, 60 years later, he says, no, there's not really revolutionary about the revolution. It brought to a violent completion processes that were long at work.
So we're not going back for centuries. And we can't just take the revolutionaries at their work for this. And I think although Tofil is not a source for Ochia, I think his view is something of the same. There's never really a break in tradition, which is why ancients in modernism is not a general.
It presumes a break, some kind of fundamental break. And Ochia is more of a conduiting. He sees history. Yes, of course, there are moments of crisis and so on.
But he does seem to think of it more as a glacial process of small incremental changes over time. I mean, this is the secret to me that almost all change is in the mental, most of the sides don't have boundaries in the way. Like you just mentioned, we had Jim Caesar on. He even said his arguments that Madison is trying to resurrect this idea of founders that sort of gone away.
And so in that regard, again, I wonder if there's a sort of a storm movement, right? We move away from this and that things are incremental and they're changing. But I do think I'm trying to defend a little bit. So that's my first attempt I do see this kind of new business he's already about.
Then also he says, he does talk about crises, global crises. But he says, and this is to your point, I guess, the question that these global crises that arise always appear to arise within a traditional political activity. So it's easy to see in case of the United States even. I'm not ultimately persuaded by D.C.
How there's an argument that there was just a continuation of English law, English common law, right? But the French that's very exempt. It's hard to think. The other one I have a great deal of difficulty with and understanding is that there's a couple of cases of German law.
What resources or what possibilities in the German tradition led to that to me seems much more tenuous, much more tenuous. Where's that strong speech on German? I was being helped. That would be interesting.
It would be interesting to put those two together. I mean, of course, many writers would go back and you can always do a kind of retro-dividing thing where you said something. If you looked at Germany in 1900 and you looked at France in 1900 and you said in which of these countries was an anti-submitted maniac more likely, sorry, I think the answer was for us. Yeah, that's right.
Well, the question I have to ask is which country would there be a very determined and organized? I don't know if I can see where you're watching another topic, but I'm wondering if you know what we're talking about. So before we wrap up, we're going to be writing around. But before we do that, I was wondering if you were talking about the education.
So if you get listeners and folks at home just like what country, what country, what on the ground, what does this, I know he's not prescribing, but what does it look like? What's your folks do if they want to receive a bullet? Or are they already sort of just receiving a diagnosis living in the society? No, I don't think so.
I mean, O'Shott wants to bring our lived experience to the jargon. He wants to bring it to a kind of higher level of consciousness. And I think his answer to the question of what people should do is the short answer is history, history, history. O'Shott thought largely that study of political philosophy was historical study.
And just to study the constitutional and political history of other people in America today, I mean people like Gordon Wood. And of course it would be a wonderful example of the kind of history that O'Shott might have admired. The book, the recent book by my colleague in Yale Law School, Kielomar, his book on his new book on constitutional history would be the kind of thing perhaps that O'Shott would have liked. They're both in a way intellectual history.
So O'Shott also wants to, one of O'Shott's heroes is the two great British constitutional historians, Dyson and Maitland. And so he kind of common law history. So he likes histories that may be just as canned in story. I've never read these histories.
I've never read these histories. But no, histories real close to the ground constitutional histories that, because it's in those histories, they seem tradition. You know, his law is the, not just the stories, but it's the embodiment with a certain kind of tradition. If he'd been Jewish, he would have said he would have written to her.
Yeah, if he'd written to her, that's what he's saying. I'm seeing a link between your interests and O'Shott's for those. So she'll move on to the lady room. Yeah, that's it.
Right. That's my daily team. Yeah. So, just so you know, I'm not serious, it's the lightning room.
I just want to let you know that most of your peers, most of the established professors cannot need a lady room. They just, it turns into molasses room. Very slowly. Something about the profession of your professor, you just talk a lot.
Yeah. Also, you can say past you can answer any of these questions, answer what you like when you like. All right. It'll start easy.
Who's your favorite philosopher? Spinos. What's your favorite work of philosophy? Play this with a great light.
That's the best. That's the best. That's the best. Your direct, that's right.
What's your favorite work not by philosopher? Just that we don't have to do this as the principal. I mean, I mean, I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. That's right.
I don't know. I don't know. Who will go into it? Who will go into it?
Who will go into it? Who is the best politician in your lifetime? JFK. Who's the best person in your lifetime?
JFK. Who's the best person in your lifetime? JFK. Who's the best person in your lifetime?
JFK. Who's the best person in your lifetime? Who's the best person in your lifetime? It was a Chevy Camaro.
Get out of here. Who's my parents? Wow. I mean, I was the first guy I drove.
Yeah. Yeah. I know it was a 67. That's right.
That's right. That's right. What's your favorite swiss team? Oh, that's an easy one.
You're a Yankees. Very nice. What do you read right now? Kafka is a triumph.
Why did you read Lucas? That's fine. I got it. You know, I'm so proud of us.
You know, I'm so proud of you. It was my pleasure. It was great. And we were able to get him into a complicated story for what it's called.
A Masters T. He was a guest at the house. He spoke to our students. And it's how I get to know that.
I spent couple of hours a year. That was nice. Very, very, I knew that. Very impressive.
He is a musician, is an entrepreneur. He gets entrepreneurial mind and very smart articulate and very smart. Wow. There's a few more.
How was your first job? My first job, I worked, I had a John in fact, give a favorite movie or song. My favorite movie is probably the Godfather. I can say probably I have others.
Let me also mention the third man, because third man, Godfather, and two films have probably watched more than, I haven't seen the third man, like a check out. It's the third one. Really? No, I haven't seen that.
I haven't seen that. I haven't seen that. I'm just doing more. Give me this.
No. Okay. And last question, what would you be doing right now if you had not become a professor? I'll tell you what I would, since I would not be a professor, I'd have to have a very different, very different life from the one I have.
But what I tell students, who sometimes ask me what else I would like to have done, I'd like to have been a policeman. Really? Yeah. That's very cool.
I wanted to help people. Yeah. I wanted to help people. I wanted to help students now.
I wanted to help students now. I'm not the guy. So maybe it just went into just, I think Tom, for getting all four of us together to ask conversation. This is the first one we've done in person.
It's much we're. I enjoy it. I wore the next one. I was trying to shoot my dog.
That's really cool. It was my pleasure. Yeah, thanks for the great, great time. Thanks so much.
What's the great part? Give me a little mention also that you and me were both just came out that we mentioned in the past, which you probably mentioned. It's called Reclaiming Patretsism and the Age and An Age of Extremes with the Elia Regis Press. Maybe at some point you come on, podcasting and talk about this new book.
But God, it's been a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. And thanks to the Jack Miller's Center for the New Museum.
Thank you for listening. And thank you for listening. Thanks for the victory. Thank you.
The Front is Stary on. The Front is Stary on. The Front is Stary on. The Front is Stary on.