Regarding reading recommendations, if you want to know what's gone wrong with the United States, try "America Is Headed Toward Collapse: History shows how to stave it off," a short article by Peter Turchin, from The Atlantic. It's adapted from his new book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. It's a simple thesis, simply stated, and, in my view, obviously correct.
Another short book I read recently was On The Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil, from NYRB Books. If you don't know Simone Weil, time to catch up. She worked as a teacher of philosophy (pace Aaron James) at a school for girls, but was important primarily as a highly original thinker and a formidable public intellectual. Talented in physics and mathematics (her brother was the formidable French mathematician André Weil), she mastered many languages; she "read and reread her beloved Plato" in Greek. Raised without religion and coming to religiously-inflected mysticism on her own, she wrote on political subjects, and, like Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, put her ideas into action personally, sometimes (also like Orwell) putting her safety at risk. Personally she was peculiar, a "neat freak" who disliked physical contact with either men or women; yet it was said that she was one of a rare few who could hold her own in a face-to-face debate with Leon Trotsky. She died at only 34, leaving behind a scattered corpus of writings on many subjects. None of her books, and only a smattering of her articles, were published in her lifetime.
On The Abolition of All Political Parties, written 80 years ago in the middle of the Second World War, just before her death, is only 28 pages long. Notes by the translator and an essay by Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz plump the book up to an extravagant 48 pages. It's remarkable in at least one way: reading it, you see a superior intellect striving to be as lucid, clear, and communicative as possible, rather than trying to impress us with obscurantism, jargon, and signalings of its author's merit. It's only the rarest minds that have the assurance to be egoless.
Milosz says, "her work has found admirers all over the world, yet because of its austerity it attracts only a limited number of readers in every country." So: not for everybody. I found the ideas in her essay relevant to today. However, one sentence made me nostalgic and sad: "In the Anglo-Saxon world, political parties have an element of game, of sport, which is only conceivable in an institution of aristocratic origin...." If only. No more. Our parties today act like they would rather to see the other destroyed than the country preserved. I first knew we were in deep trouble when, many years ago, I heard that Democrats and Republicans would no longer look each other in the eye in the halls of Congress....
Recommended.
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Chris Bertram: "Some posts are serendipitous. I'm in Poland at the moment and may also be TOP's only reader who is also a professional political philosopher. Surprised to read about Simone Weil here, but also was looking yesterday at pictures of Milosz as part of the Gdansk permanent exhibition on the history of Solidarnosc. Not what I come to TOP for, but I'm enjoying the intersection with my own interests."
Joseph L. Kashi: "In George Washington's famous but all-too-infrequently read 1796 Farewell to the Nation, Washington urged Americans to resist the impulse to form political parties. Washington observed that it was human nature to confound one's personal interests and the partisan interests of the party with the best interests of the nation. Washington also urged Americans to avoid making politics a career rather than short-term selfless service and to resist any purely local interests that damaged hard-won national unity.
"His successors Jefferson and John Adams, along with Hamilton, failed to heed this wise advice, derived from Washington's observations of how the UK lost the Revolutionary War, and started us upon our current path."
Aaron: "I think of Milosz’s poem 'Encounter' as something of a canticle for photography."