Politics: Opportunity or Annoyance?

On Bryan Caplan, Machiavelli, and Arendt

I enjoyed this ode to hating politics by Bryan Caplan. My favorite line was:

I’d loathe politics even if my policy views matched Clinton’s or Trump’s word-for-word.  Indeed, I’d loathe politics even if I thought prevailing policies were the pinnacle of wisdom.  Why?  Because I hate the way people think about politics, independent of the ultimate outcome.

For Caplan, as for many libertarians, politics, at least in a liberal society, is a distraction, an annoyance, a waste of time. It feeds our worser angels.

Contrast this view with Aristotle, who said “Man is a political animal,” and thought ethics to be a sub-discipline of politics.

Heraclitus writes that “conflict (polemos) is the father of all things,” implying that there is no escape from the political.

Machiavelli acknowledged that political virtue and private virtue were moral worlds apart. But in a democracy, where everyone is a “prince,” perhaps the line between private citizen and public ruler is blurry. If so, Caplan might be heard as saying that most of us should not accept our status as Machiavellian princes, but should remain concerned with old-school, private virtue.

Leo Strauss argued that politics and philosophy are incommensurate goods. You have to pick one, but you can’t have both.

Hannah Arendt, following the example of Ancient Greece, thought political life, at its best, was a way of revealing who we are. Fukuyama and Hegel share this “agonistic” model of political life. For them, politics matters not because it is about achieving technocratic outcomes, but because it is a way of “struggling for recognition.” It’s a category error to judge political life according to the economic rubric of “efficiency.”

How one values politics depends on how one defines it. What does politics means for you? Where do you fall on the spectrum from the libertarian hatred of politics to the agonistic view that says political life is at the heart of the human condition?

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