Political scientists (IV)
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 30, 2009 - 15 Comments
Isaiah Berlin’s consideration of political judgment.
The quality I am attempting to describe is that special understanding of public life (or for that matter private life) which successful statesmen have, whether they are wicked or virtuous—that which Bismarck had (surely a conspicuous example, in the last century, of a politician endowed with considerable political judgment), or Talleyrand or Franklin Roosevelt, or, for that matter, men such as Cavour or Disraeli, Gladstone or Ataturk, in common with the great psychological novelists, something which is conspicuously lacking in men of more purely theoretical genius such as Newton or Einstein or Russell, or even Freud. This is true even of Lenin, despite the huge weight of theory by which he burdened himself…
What is it that the Emperor Augustus or Bismarck knew and the Emperor Claudius or Joseph II did not? Very probably the Emperor Joseph was intellectually more distinguished and far better read than Bismarck, and Claudius may have known many more facts than Augustus. But Bismarck (or Augustus) had the power of integrating or synthesizing the fleeting, broken, infinitely various wisps and fragments that make up life at any level, just as every human being, to some extent, must integrate them (if he is to survive at all), without stopping to analyze how he does what he does, and whether there is a theoretical justification for his activity. Everyone must do it, but Bismarck did it over a much larger field, against a wider horizon of possible counts of action, with far greater power—to a degree, in fact, which is quite correctly described as that of genius. Moreover, the bits and pieces which require to be integrated—that is, seen as fitting with other bits and pieces, and not compatible with yet others, in the way in which, in fact, they do fit and fail to fit in reality—these basic ingredients of life are to a sense too familiar, we are too much with them, they are too close to us, they form the texture of the semiconscious and unconscious levels of our life, and for that reason they tend to resist tidy classification.
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Thoughts about thinking politicians
By John Geddes - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 11:18 AM - 7 Comments
Whenever we seriously consider a political leader—or, for that matter, any public figure—one of the inevitable problems is to try to reconcile what they do with what we imagine they think.
To put it another way, we wonder how public actions are derived from private reflection. So when, for example, Stephen Harper declares that Canadian troops should exit Afghanistan by 2011, we’re interested in the policy, but also in how he came to propose it.
Did the Prime Minister base his decision mainly on an assessment of the situation in Kandahar and the capacity of Canadian forces? Or did he mainly make a calculation about how much sacrifice the Canadian voting public can be expected to accept?
It’s not that one justification would be right and the other wrong, or one motivation honourable and the other crass. It’s that the way he comes to his decisions, how he weighs the various factors, tells us something about the inner man. Partly, we want to know about what makes a leader tick out of sheer curiosity; partly we hope to gain insights into where we might be led next.
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'I'm not sure how much people know about what he's gone on to do'
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, July 11, 2009 at 9:21 AM - 50 Comments
Elizabeth Renzetti sketches Michael Ignatieff’s return to England this week.
Not many of Mr. Ignatieff’s former London associates would have pictured him on a podium, engaged in partisan debate. “I don’t think anyone foresaw him strutting across the stage of international politics,” said Mr. Loader, who was one of the creators, 20 years ago, of the BBC’s live culture program The Late Show . He hired Mr. Ignatieff as one of the four hosts, and the former academic quickly “became the good-looking intellectual one. He was quite well-known, he had a reputation as something of a cultural polymath.”
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'Liberalism is not a bloodless breviary for rootless cosmopolitans'
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 4:05 PM - 23 Comments
The text of Michael Ignatieff’s speech—for the annual Isaiah Berlin lecture—in London, England this evening.
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Apropos of nothing (III)
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 6:00 PM - 44 Comments
A very rough—and not entirely chronological—sketch of Michael Ignatieff’s time abroad.
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Michael Ignatieff Eyebrow Watch
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 3:26 PM - 14 Comments
Distressing news. As reported elsewhere, the Liberal leader, Mr. Ignatieff, has apparently resolved to spend more time trimming his formidable eyebrows in the new year. For shame. Once more, politics is forcing compromise on this man.
Surely the great philosopher Isaiah Berlin, he of great influence on Mr. Ignatieff, never put scissors to his eyebrows. (Just as Mr. Ignatieff should never have put clippers to his once-flowing locks.) As evidence, consider this archival footage of the two in conversation, presented via YouTube in six parts.
Berlin v. Ignatieff Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI.
