Carl Trueman gave a good defense of reading old classic texts, and reading with appreciation: "To borrow from L. P. Hartley, the past—our past—is a foreign country. We should therefore visit it first to learn in all humility. To do otherwise might look just a wee bit, well, racist..."
The Cliffs Notes version of Leviathan doesn't really help you see the world through Hobbes' own eyes. When you read the actual text, you learn not just about how an alien mind worked, but about the times he lived in and the books he read (based on the texts he quoted from). There's a lot to learn from that.
In a previous life, I converted to Catholicism after reading theologians from the Early Church and Middle Ages, and discovering that they were not at all like the Evangelical caricatures I had been taught. I'm no longer a Catholic (at least in the sense of still practicing), so the conclusions of these theologians don't matter to me that much. But I still deeply appreciate the arguments they made and the cultures they were both immersed in and also created.
So I suspect there's a similar benefit to studying the classics of political theory. Firstly, you learn to distrust secondary sources, who are generally midwits writing for dimwits. Secondly, you better understand the people who helped create the modern world. Thirdly, you learn about the things they knew really well and you barely heard of. For example, in the case of Hobbes, there was an entire stream of theological work about the biblical meaning of Leviathan and about whether the ancient Hebrew Republic as described in the Bible ought to be the template for contemporary states. Reading an old text is an opportunity to go down such rabbit holes.
I'd also add that old political theory texts are extremely data-rich in terms of cause-and-effect. They contain observations from a world of many smaller polities, each under greater stress than our own. And their writers had greater familiarity with the deep past than we do today. So Montesquieu had more history at his fingertips when he wrote the The Spirit of the Laws than basically anyone today. We have an additional 250 years of data, but we've forgotten 2500 years of data. And there's so much more covariation, autocorrelation, and confounding (due to contemporary techno-economic acceleration) in our smaller dataset. So Montesquieu actually could build a better model of political action and societal consequences than almost any of us.
Yeah I totally agree. I considered writing more to this, but just added a line about it being useful to understand the history of the time. But read in this capacity I think it’s extremely valuable. Actually I might take it further and even say *research* on this dimension could be interesting. Like, given their information set at the time what was their prediction and what was their reasoning style that was correct in a cross validated sense.
I agree with everything said here. By both shako and Calvin. I think a similar role is played by literature tho in getting a "feel for the time."
But there are also trade offs and spending too much time on old texts can come at the expense of looking to the future. I guess another solution would be to see humanities people more as "stewards" of knowledge than people supposed to continuously innovate
Respectfully disagree. I hold a degree in Philosophy, and anyone resuming Marx in a paragraph like that would get zero points. Not because you're entirely wrong, but because you can't just spit out Marx's theory like that without context. For example, if you want to understand "worker alienation" (a central Marxist concept), you have to go through the difference between "work" (arbeit) and "profession" (beruf), which lead to distancing in the production means AND THEN creates a proletarian class. It's not just "Marx decreed there were proletariats and bourgeois", but how and why he got to it, and the implications... When you don't do Philosophy and ignore the Philosophical method, you get to those nonsense arguments, which aren't helpful. I mean, if you think Heidegger can be reduced to "don't worry, be happy" or Nietzsche to "worry and don't be happy", that's just not right... If I did the same thing in Economy, and said "Adam Smith said just exchange stuff between nations", or Keynes said, "controlling the economy is good", I'd be laughed out of the building...
I think it's probably a pretty reasonable criticism that overly grouping together all these thinkers into a bucket is bad. But taking the Smith/Ricardo/Keynes example here, definitely I agree you can't summarize them in a sentence. But PhDs in econ aren't assigned their texts. The relevant aspects of their work have been formalized into math and economic theory, and are taught now in micro/macro. If you actually try reading Keynes book on the General Theory, it's like goddamn near unreadable.
Now, if you are fascinated by economic and scientific history you should *absolutely* still read it. Same goes for Marx. But the useful critical bits have been taken out and put into math and theory.
I think Marx's concept of alienation is also not that hard to grok to be honest. I'm not saying it's trivial, but I think I could explain it to someone in like a few minutes. Perhaps you disagree. But still! If you are fascinated by the history of philosophical thought you should *absolutely* read Marx! I just don't think you should read it hoping to get some deep insight that is missing anywhere but in the original text. But also, if you think reading is fun, you should read it anyway :)
Perhaps It didn't come across this way, but I don't think studying philosophy is a bad idea, I think it's a great field to study (assuming you study the Good Stuff). It's more the aspect of doing ongoing research in it that I think is overrated.
Sure. But my point was that almost all Philosophy from mid 20th century on has been dedicated to studying why language is inappropriate to objectify truth. After the school of analytic philosophy in the beginning of the XXth failed to produce an overarching language theory (Russell vs Wittgenstein, for example), Philosophy moved towards power structures in language (Foucault) and deconstruction (Derrida). So my point is, asking "why can't philosophy réduce it's axioms to a sentence" ignores blatantly all the philosophy produced for the last 70 years. It's that simple. Of course reading and studying the history of ideas is useful, but if we're talking about philosophical method, the current state of philosophy doesn't allow for these simplistic reductions for the reasons stated by said authors (Derrida's critique of Levi-Strauss, for example). I was just pointing this out and explaining the situation to non-philosophers. Yeah, maybe my Econ example wasn't good, I hope this clarifies it.
You would indeed be laughed out of the building. Adam Smith said "specialise and trade". You may be thinking of David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. Keynes said "People have work when there are buyers for the product of their work".
Your comment reads like a case of deformation professionelle, in which you think your own knowledge is more recondite and valuable than any other specialist's own knowledge of their field. It isn't so. Philosophy can, for the most part, be reduced to paragraphs in a undergrad textbook. Until it gets over itself, it won't get very far.
Can't say I understand your comment, except for the mean bit (ouch!). Please provide evidence on how you can reduce Nietzsche's Philosophy "in a paragraph" especially when he expressly rebels against language and resorts to "aphorisms" as a means to showing truth. Or try and reduce Wittgenstein's Tractatus to a paragraph, please. Or Husserl's Eidetic reduction, or... Well, you get the point.
No need to attack me, though. Just write your paragraph and I'll show you where you get it wrong. I'm such a nice guy I'll give you your first philosophy lesson for free!
Thank you for the offer, but I will decline. What Neitzsche, Witttgenstein and Husserl thought is just not that important in the scheme of things, and my free time is limited. I have to focus elsewhere.
I will claim however that Margaret Sanger and N's and H's compatriots Haber and Bosch have had a far greater impact on the trajectory of history and culture than any of your three heroes.
I find it to be a pain in the ass when people cite economic theory academically, as if academic economic theory contains actual answers to actual questions.
Most theory, e.g. in the field of economics, tries to answer the question "how would or should things work, in a set of ideal circumstances, with a set of ideally rational actors, and an ideal set of levers you could pull on to effect such and such precise changes?"
Which is just not a useful question. Because none of these variables are ideal. Multiply small errors in approximation across that many variables, and you end up with a model that is not only useless, but actively offensive to people's real-world ability to deal with the problems at hand.
Side note / personal opinion: the reason nobody can teach Marx is because nobody understands Marx. Because there’s so little there that can be distilled down into concrete principles and actually applied to reality.
In others words, Marx is by definition mostly not useful. I think it's about time we put his books down and never pick them back up.
Maybe it’s because Marx was not a scientist, but a political commentator, paid troll and provocateur. Alex Jones of his age, if you will. I honestly think Brits managed to bamboozle field of the “political economy” with Marx’s writings - they didn’t even translate these opiates to English until Marx’s death to prevent the contamination of their own discourse, those dregs were for French and Germans to waste their time on. And now it’s wasted on undergraduates 😂
I think you're mistaken in thinking that academics merely use classic texts in order to glean original insights, or speculate about what those thinkers would have thought about current events. That's hardly the point.
I am currently taking a class in social theory and it was made clear from the outset that theory is a toolbox, a set of concepts, a lens through which to analyse the world. For example, one might ask: what can we learn about Trump's presidency if we applied Weber's idea of charismatic leadership? Tocqueville? Marx? Some theory in the psychology department? In order to deploy these theories effectively, you need more than a surface level understanding. Take Darwin for example -- in order to explain why there are no half-monkey half-men, you need more than the idea of "survival of the fittest". The same goes for explaining, say, alienation in Marx, which is a concept he builds up from pages and pages of groundwork.
As an aside, I believe classic texts are especially important in the humanities because there are inherent indeterminacies and complexities in language, which mean that secondary material will never be fully representative of the real author, so it may be best to just engage with their work directly, as opposed to, say, in mathematics where lengthy papers can eventually be shortened into a few formulas without losing any insight.
Is there another aspect to it where Political Theory is just a convenient framework for talking about ideas?
Like in your Hobbes example, the claim "you shouldn't defect against the sovereign" might be a simple idea. But then there could be all sorts of questions like:
"are there exceptions to this?" and "is this a purely utilitarian calculation or does it hold for systems of deontological ethics?" and "who is defined as the sovereign in a power struggle" etc.
And having a well known book that maybe talks about these issues or takes a position on these or other issues kind of creates a point to center a conversation?
Like if someone wants to give there own position on all these topics like its maybe easier to say:
"About X I agree with soandso. About Y I agree with whathisface about Z I disagree with Hobbes because of XYZ"
I'm wondering if what's wrong with the academic biography you posted is just jargon, and if that would make sense to those who speak the language.
That entire domain or paradigm could, of course, be wrong, but careers bet on wrong theories are prob unavoidable. eg, I asked ChatGPT to create an equivalent for a junk DNA proponent. This probably won't make any sense to people outside genomics or biology.
"My dissertation investigates the role of non-coding DNA in genome architecture, focusing on repetitive and non-protein-coding sequences. I explore genetic redundancy, genomic self-organization, and neutral evolution. I am particularly interested in transposable elements, pseudogenes, and satellite DNA as largely non-functional remnants of genomic evolution, providing evidence to support the "junk DNA" hypothesis. Prior to joining Stanford, I worked as a computational biologist in evolutionary genetics and remain active in advocating for academic freedom in genomics research."
I hated reading Marx, but it gave me a glimpse of the power of his words and where his sleight of hand lay. Some of my classmates were bewitched, and they started to feel the injustice of the "capitalists" stealing their "surplus value." If I had not read him directly, I would not have engaged with his labor theory of value, which seems to be the foundation of the entire paradigm. I'm not sure yet if it is wrong in the sense that it goes against the nature of the universe or of human nature or if it is simply hard to implement: you need coercion to impose this theory of value (which is what led to the tragedies that eventually happened!)
Part of Marx's rhetorical power seems to lie in his speaking directly to you, as a member of a special group. Nietzsche also does this. I'm definitely stealing this.
Remixing old theories with new approaches has also been an interesting experience, but this requires a lack of reverence for the text, which is the opposite of what I notice from most academics I've met. Eg, viewing Durkheim's theories through an animist lens resulted in something interesting (at least for me) https://www.explorations.ph/p/durkheim-on-the-nature-of-psychic
Since you have ‘meta’ in your name I’ll posit a different perspective.
There are very few things which have been described in the universe which cannot be contradicted. The second law of thermodynamics, relating to entropy, cannot be contradicted.
Hobbes and “Leviathan” are an example of a position which seems to assumes elements of a system are not subject to entropy.
The meta position is to consider how do such political philosophy systems expend energy to maintain partitioned coherence in the context of other political systems which evolve to be more relevant and beneficial to the substrates which maintain them - people. (Extrapolated Red Queen Problem).
Reading past descriptions of political philosophy, a kind of archaeology, don’t really reveal the flow of structural information maintaining the system, they only reveal the structure. DNA sequencing doesn’t articulate evolution, it only looks at a species.
We lack language to look at the elements of a homeostatic political and economic system, and understand their typologies. As that becomes more established, we will better understand what makes for a locally beneficial system. Our focus becomes more on the parameters of the Frison Free-Energy principal model which is in place.
Almost everyone thinks political theory is boring nonsense. But when a political theory catches on (e.g., Marxism, wokeness, "democracy", ...) it has immense effects on the world. Hence, I think it is underrated. This doesn't mean that everyone studying it or writing about it can have great influence.
Yeah, I think understanding why these ideas grip peoples brains is super important. I actually think that's probably *why* I read e.g. Marx. I had to get to the source of what it was about this that influenced the world. I think from that angle, you're right, it is underrated.
I think a good parallel here might be theoretical math or physics. There you likewise have a game played within axiomatic constraints that has no immediate relevance. Yet in the modern scientistic age, few people think of these topics as really just a pointless language game. This is because there is an uncanny tendency for some experimental physics result to end up depending on a concept from physics or math theory that no one ever imagined would be relevant in such a way.
To me this is basically what political theory aims at. The idea is that when there are path breaking political events, the ideas of a political theorist will be helpful to re-systematize our understanding of the poltiical world. I certainly saw a lot of substack and Twitter folks referencing political theory after Jan 6, for example, and plenty of other times where normal politics was disrupted.
Another key significance is that, to paraphrase Keynes, "every politician walks around with the ideas of some long dead economist floating around in his head." Ideas in political theory slowly trickle down into popular politics. Often what people actually operating in politics say is incoherent in itself, but the theory that started the chain of telephone makes more sense.
Also, like math and physics theory, theory in the humanities has an inherent truth and beauty that have value in and of themselves, even if it isn't useful.
Carl Trueman gave a good defense of reading old classic texts, and reading with appreciation: "To borrow from L. P. Hartley, the past—our past—is a foreign country. We should therefore visit it first to learn in all humility. To do otherwise might look just a wee bit, well, racist..."
The Cliffs Notes version of Leviathan doesn't really help you see the world through Hobbes' own eyes. When you read the actual text, you learn not just about how an alien mind worked, but about the times he lived in and the books he read (based on the texts he quoted from). There's a lot to learn from that.
In a previous life, I converted to Catholicism after reading theologians from the Early Church and Middle Ages, and discovering that they were not at all like the Evangelical caricatures I had been taught. I'm no longer a Catholic (at least in the sense of still practicing), so the conclusions of these theologians don't matter to me that much. But I still deeply appreciate the arguments they made and the cultures they were both immersed in and also created.
So I suspect there's a similar benefit to studying the classics of political theory. Firstly, you learn to distrust secondary sources, who are generally midwits writing for dimwits. Secondly, you better understand the people who helped create the modern world. Thirdly, you learn about the things they knew really well and you barely heard of. For example, in the case of Hobbes, there was an entire stream of theological work about the biblical meaning of Leviathan and about whether the ancient Hebrew Republic as described in the Bible ought to be the template for contemporary states. Reading an old text is an opportunity to go down such rabbit holes.
I'd also add that old political theory texts are extremely data-rich in terms of cause-and-effect. They contain observations from a world of many smaller polities, each under greater stress than our own. And their writers had greater familiarity with the deep past than we do today. So Montesquieu had more history at his fingertips when he wrote the The Spirit of the Laws than basically anyone today. We have an additional 250 years of data, but we've forgotten 2500 years of data. And there's so much more covariation, autocorrelation, and confounding (due to contemporary techno-economic acceleration) in our smaller dataset. So Montesquieu actually could build a better model of political action and societal consequences than almost any of us.
Yeah I totally agree. I considered writing more to this, but just added a line about it being useful to understand the history of the time. But read in this capacity I think it’s extremely valuable. Actually I might take it further and even say *research* on this dimension could be interesting. Like, given their information set at the time what was their prediction and what was their reasoning style that was correct in a cross validated sense.
I agree with everything said here. By both shako and Calvin. I think a similar role is played by literature tho in getting a "feel for the time."
But there are also trade offs and spending too much time on old texts can come at the expense of looking to the future. I guess another solution would be to see humanities people more as "stewards" of knowledge than people supposed to continuously innovate
In which case immersing yourself in old texts makes sense
Respectfully disagree. I hold a degree in Philosophy, and anyone resuming Marx in a paragraph like that would get zero points. Not because you're entirely wrong, but because you can't just spit out Marx's theory like that without context. For example, if you want to understand "worker alienation" (a central Marxist concept), you have to go through the difference between "work" (arbeit) and "profession" (beruf), which lead to distancing in the production means AND THEN creates a proletarian class. It's not just "Marx decreed there were proletariats and bourgeois", but how and why he got to it, and the implications... When you don't do Philosophy and ignore the Philosophical method, you get to those nonsense arguments, which aren't helpful. I mean, if you think Heidegger can be reduced to "don't worry, be happy" or Nietzsche to "worry and don't be happy", that's just not right... If I did the same thing in Economy, and said "Adam Smith said just exchange stuff between nations", or Keynes said, "controlling the economy is good", I'd be laughed out of the building...
Interesting read, though!
Cheers
I think it's probably a pretty reasonable criticism that overly grouping together all these thinkers into a bucket is bad. But taking the Smith/Ricardo/Keynes example here, definitely I agree you can't summarize them in a sentence. But PhDs in econ aren't assigned their texts. The relevant aspects of their work have been formalized into math and economic theory, and are taught now in micro/macro. If you actually try reading Keynes book on the General Theory, it's like goddamn near unreadable.
Now, if you are fascinated by economic and scientific history you should *absolutely* still read it. Same goes for Marx. But the useful critical bits have been taken out and put into math and theory.
I think Marx's concept of alienation is also not that hard to grok to be honest. I'm not saying it's trivial, but I think I could explain it to someone in like a few minutes. Perhaps you disagree. But still! If you are fascinated by the history of philosophical thought you should *absolutely* read Marx! I just don't think you should read it hoping to get some deep insight that is missing anywhere but in the original text. But also, if you think reading is fun, you should read it anyway :)
Perhaps It didn't come across this way, but I don't think studying philosophy is a bad idea, I think it's a great field to study (assuming you study the Good Stuff). It's more the aspect of doing ongoing research in it that I think is overrated.
Sure. But my point was that almost all Philosophy from mid 20th century on has been dedicated to studying why language is inappropriate to objectify truth. After the school of analytic philosophy in the beginning of the XXth failed to produce an overarching language theory (Russell vs Wittgenstein, for example), Philosophy moved towards power structures in language (Foucault) and deconstruction (Derrida). So my point is, asking "why can't philosophy réduce it's axioms to a sentence" ignores blatantly all the philosophy produced for the last 70 years. It's that simple. Of course reading and studying the history of ideas is useful, but if we're talking about philosophical method, the current state of philosophy doesn't allow for these simplistic reductions for the reasons stated by said authors (Derrida's critique of Levi-Strauss, for example). I was just pointing this out and explaining the situation to non-philosophers. Yeah, maybe my Econ example wasn't good, I hope this clarifies it.
Cheers
You would indeed be laughed out of the building. Adam Smith said "specialise and trade". You may be thinking of David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. Keynes said "People have work when there are buyers for the product of their work".
Your comment reads like a case of deformation professionelle, in which you think your own knowledge is more recondite and valuable than any other specialist's own knowledge of their field. It isn't so. Philosophy can, for the most part, be reduced to paragraphs in a undergrad textbook. Until it gets over itself, it won't get very far.
Can't say I understand your comment, except for the mean bit (ouch!). Please provide evidence on how you can reduce Nietzsche's Philosophy "in a paragraph" especially when he expressly rebels against language and resorts to "aphorisms" as a means to showing truth. Or try and reduce Wittgenstein's Tractatus to a paragraph, please. Or Husserl's Eidetic reduction, or... Well, you get the point.
No need to attack me, though. Just write your paragraph and I'll show you where you get it wrong. I'm such a nice guy I'll give you your first philosophy lesson for free!
Cheers
Thank you for the offer, but I will decline. What Neitzsche, Witttgenstein and Husserl thought is just not that important in the scheme of things, and my free time is limited. I have to focus elsewhere.
I will claim however that Margaret Sanger and N's and H's compatriots Haber and Bosch have had a far greater impact on the trajectory of history and culture than any of your three heroes.
> Your comment reads like....
Perhaps you should have a read:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/
I find it to be a pain in the ass when people cite economic theory academically, as if academic economic theory contains actual answers to actual questions.
Most theory, e.g. in the field of economics, tries to answer the question "how would or should things work, in a set of ideal circumstances, with a set of ideally rational actors, and an ideal set of levers you could pull on to effect such and such precise changes?"
Which is just not a useful question. Because none of these variables are ideal. Multiply small errors in approximation across that many variables, and you end up with a model that is not only useless, but actively offensive to people's real-world ability to deal with the problems at hand.
Side note / personal opinion: the reason nobody can teach Marx is because nobody understands Marx. Because there’s so little there that can be distilled down into concrete principles and actually applied to reality.
In others words, Marx is by definition mostly not useful. I think it's about time we put his books down and never pick them back up.
Maybe it’s because Marx was not a scientist, but a political commentator, paid troll and provocateur. Alex Jones of his age, if you will. I honestly think Brits managed to bamboozle field of the “political economy” with Marx’s writings - they didn’t even translate these opiates to English until Marx’s death to prevent the contamination of their own discourse, those dregs were for French and Germans to waste their time on. And now it’s wasted on undergraduates 😂
Also helpful for escaping presentism
I liek the poast
I think you're mistaken in thinking that academics merely use classic texts in order to glean original insights, or speculate about what those thinkers would have thought about current events. That's hardly the point.
I am currently taking a class in social theory and it was made clear from the outset that theory is a toolbox, a set of concepts, a lens through which to analyse the world. For example, one might ask: what can we learn about Trump's presidency if we applied Weber's idea of charismatic leadership? Tocqueville? Marx? Some theory in the psychology department? In order to deploy these theories effectively, you need more than a surface level understanding. Take Darwin for example -- in order to explain why there are no half-monkey half-men, you need more than the idea of "survival of the fittest". The same goes for explaining, say, alienation in Marx, which is a concept he builds up from pages and pages of groundwork.
As an aside, I believe classic texts are especially important in the humanities because there are inherent indeterminacies and complexities in language, which mean that secondary material will never be fully representative of the real author, so it may be best to just engage with their work directly, as opposed to, say, in mathematics where lengthy papers can eventually be shortened into a few formulas without losing any insight.
Is there another aspect to it where Political Theory is just a convenient framework for talking about ideas?
Like in your Hobbes example, the claim "you shouldn't defect against the sovereign" might be a simple idea. But then there could be all sorts of questions like:
"are there exceptions to this?" and "is this a purely utilitarian calculation or does it hold for systems of deontological ethics?" and "who is defined as the sovereign in a power struggle" etc.
And having a well known book that maybe talks about these issues or takes a position on these or other issues kind of creates a point to center a conversation?
Like if someone wants to give there own position on all these topics like its maybe easier to say:
"About X I agree with soandso. About Y I agree with whathisface about Z I disagree with Hobbes because of XYZ"
I'm wondering if what's wrong with the academic biography you posted is just jargon, and if that would make sense to those who speak the language.
That entire domain or paradigm could, of course, be wrong, but careers bet on wrong theories are prob unavoidable. eg, I asked ChatGPT to create an equivalent for a junk DNA proponent. This probably won't make any sense to people outside genomics or biology.
"My dissertation investigates the role of non-coding DNA in genome architecture, focusing on repetitive and non-protein-coding sequences. I explore genetic redundancy, genomic self-organization, and neutral evolution. I am particularly interested in transposable elements, pseudogenes, and satellite DNA as largely non-functional remnants of genomic evolution, providing evidence to support the "junk DNA" hypothesis. Prior to joining Stanford, I worked as a computational biologist in evolutionary genetics and remain active in advocating for academic freedom in genomics research."
I hated reading Marx, but it gave me a glimpse of the power of his words and where his sleight of hand lay. Some of my classmates were bewitched, and they started to feel the injustice of the "capitalists" stealing their "surplus value." If I had not read him directly, I would not have engaged with his labor theory of value, which seems to be the foundation of the entire paradigm. I'm not sure yet if it is wrong in the sense that it goes against the nature of the universe or of human nature or if it is simply hard to implement: you need coercion to impose this theory of value (which is what led to the tragedies that eventually happened!)
Part of Marx's rhetorical power seems to lie in his speaking directly to you, as a member of a special group. Nietzsche also does this. I'm definitely stealing this.
Remixing old theories with new approaches has also been an interesting experience, but this requires a lack of reverence for the text, which is the opposite of what I notice from most academics I've met. Eg, viewing Durkheim's theories through an animist lens resulted in something interesting (at least for me) https://www.explorations.ph/p/durkheim-on-the-nature-of-psychic
Since you have ‘meta’ in your name I’ll posit a different perspective.
There are very few things which have been described in the universe which cannot be contradicted. The second law of thermodynamics, relating to entropy, cannot be contradicted.
Hobbes and “Leviathan” are an example of a position which seems to assumes elements of a system are not subject to entropy.
The meta position is to consider how do such political philosophy systems expend energy to maintain partitioned coherence in the context of other political systems which evolve to be more relevant and beneficial to the substrates which maintain them - people. (Extrapolated Red Queen Problem).
Reading past descriptions of political philosophy, a kind of archaeology, don’t really reveal the flow of structural information maintaining the system, they only reveal the structure. DNA sequencing doesn’t articulate evolution, it only looks at a species.
We lack language to look at the elements of a homeostatic political and economic system, and understand their typologies. As that becomes more established, we will better understand what makes for a locally beneficial system. Our focus becomes more on the parameters of the Frison Free-Energy principal model which is in place.
This post perfectly captures the scholarly decline that happens in times of general decline - political, economic, social, and so on.
"We don't need the classics, we can make do with the Cliff Notes. Or maybe even less. They were just dudes like us, anyway"
Filed under "category mistakes"
Almost everyone thinks political theory is boring nonsense. But when a political theory catches on (e.g., Marxism, wokeness, "democracy", ...) it has immense effects on the world. Hence, I think it is underrated. This doesn't mean that everyone studying it or writing about it can have great influence.
Yeah, I think understanding why these ideas grip peoples brains is super important. I actually think that's probably *why* I read e.g. Marx. I had to get to the source of what it was about this that influenced the world. I think from that angle, you're right, it is underrated.
Your reply appears contradict the thrust of your post.
I think a good parallel here might be theoretical math or physics. There you likewise have a game played within axiomatic constraints that has no immediate relevance. Yet in the modern scientistic age, few people think of these topics as really just a pointless language game. This is because there is an uncanny tendency for some experimental physics result to end up depending on a concept from physics or math theory that no one ever imagined would be relevant in such a way.
To me this is basically what political theory aims at. The idea is that when there are path breaking political events, the ideas of a political theorist will be helpful to re-systematize our understanding of the poltiical world. I certainly saw a lot of substack and Twitter folks referencing political theory after Jan 6, for example, and plenty of other times where normal politics was disrupted.
Another key significance is that, to paraphrase Keynes, "every politician walks around with the ideas of some long dead economist floating around in his head." Ideas in political theory slowly trickle down into popular politics. Often what people actually operating in politics say is incoherent in itself, but the theory that started the chain of telephone makes more sense.
Also, like math and physics theory, theory in the humanities has an inherent truth and beauty that have value in and of themselves, even if it isn't useful.
This is brilliant. I will link to this essay on my homepage and a couple other webpages.
Bad article
🫡
Specifically you should actually substantiate your assertion that classic texts can be reduced to a page. You could start with providing an example.
It's helpful when a man proudly proclaims his ignorance.
Nice article. I read philosophy because many of the ideas are very beautiful. I'm not too worried by whether they're 'true' or not.