Political Philosophy

Utopia has been a word which evokes increasing fear in modernity, and yet, it seems unavoidable that some sort of utopian ideal guides our political actions. The revolutions incredibly important in the West for the establishment of liberal democracy would have not occurred were it not for utopian thinking, and at the same time, the definition of utopia signifies a state of affairs completely exempt from critique or improvement. If we are indeed living in a utopia, or at least living in a society which only has left to implement the utopian ideal of liberal democracy more fully, then how can it be said that intellectualism serves any role whatever? This is the fundamental paradox of utopian thinking and modernity, since our core liberal values encourage this sort of critical engagement in human affairs. ...

If we are to engage in inquiry from a purely practical view on the function of politicians, we might say that politicians serve, at least from a democratic standpoint, as buffers between the general public and the demanding vocation of the administration of a political body. If we remove ourselves from democracy, we can say much the same thing, all except the idea that the politician rules by permission, and selection, of their constituents. The point is that politicians are seen as experts of a particular kind, experts of statesmanship, a view held over from as early as the Greeks. In our modern democratic paradigm, this seems strange. After all, is not the fabric of democracy the idea that the people themselves give permission to their rulers to rule? How is it that the simple act of selecting an expert to rule entails some sort of permission or control any more than a contracted employee is selected as an expert to perform a task—a task, mind you, that the employer will exercise little real control over, given they hired the expert for their τέχνη, a techne they themselves do not possess. ...