We’ve drawn up a prospectus for a new series on political diplomacy – case studies from history of new parties having quickly come to power, and/or formed creative pacts that have allowed their rise to a position of dominance.
This sounds like a fantastic project. The value it will hold for politicians is manifest, and we’re lucky to have people like you working on it.
I’m coming at this as a historian/philosopher, so my thoughts about it are academic/wanky, please excuse that. But I’m interested in what you could call the methodology behind the project – which I guess really means, how the history side of things here connects up to the political side. My question, fundamentally, is what role do we envisage this kind of knowledge having for political leaders?
In some ways my question was best explored by Shakespeare 400 years ago. You can see several of his great tragedies as stories about political leaders failing to orient themselves properly in relation to knowledge: Hamlet wants to know everything before he acts; Othello acts before knowing enough; Macbeth knows his fate too literally. All three results in political tragedy. The question, then, is what position should our leaders have with respect to what they know, in this case about history?
Two further questions I’d ask in particular are:
1) How should we understand Thucydides’s assumption about historical repetition? In particular, we might very seriously ask whether it is still the case today that ‘men are men’. After the scientific and industrial revolutions, when man has traversed the limits set on him by nature for all of history – when he can heal himself, transform his body, traverse the heavens, and even destroy the world itself – what does he have in common with what Thucydides understood man to be? What remains fixed about human life after these Promethean breaks?
2) More broadly, what kind of place would work like this have in a curriculum of political education? Cummings dreams of a kind of Bismarckian academy, but what is the difference between being a scholar of history, and being an active participant in shaping the future? These are psychological questions, but we do have tools we can use to start to approach them.
Again, thanks very much for starting this project, which I’m very excited to see develop. I’d also be very glad to contribute to it wherever I can, if helpful.
This sounds like a fantastic project. The value it will hold for politicians is manifest, and we’re lucky to have people like you working on it.
I’m coming at this as a historian/philosopher, so my thoughts about it are academic/wanky, please excuse that. But I’m interested in what you could call the methodology behind the project – which I guess really means, how the history side of things here connects up to the political side. My question, fundamentally, is what role do we envisage this kind of knowledge having for political leaders?
In some ways my question was best explored by Shakespeare 400 years ago. You can see several of his great tragedies as stories about political leaders failing to orient themselves properly in relation to knowledge: Hamlet wants to know everything before he acts; Othello acts before knowing enough; Macbeth knows his fate too literally. All three results in political tragedy. The question, then, is what position should our leaders have with respect to what they know, in this case about history?
Two further questions I’d ask in particular are:
1) How should we understand Thucydides’s assumption about historical repetition? In particular, we might very seriously ask whether it is still the case today that ‘men are men’. After the scientific and industrial revolutions, when man has traversed the limits set on him by nature for all of history – when he can heal himself, transform his body, traverse the heavens, and even destroy the world itself – what does he have in common with what Thucydides understood man to be? What remains fixed about human life after these Promethean breaks?
2) More broadly, what kind of place would work like this have in a curriculum of political education? Cummings dreams of a kind of Bismarckian academy, but what is the difference between being a scholar of history, and being an active participant in shaping the future? These are psychological questions, but we do have tools we can use to start to approach them.
Again, thanks very much for starting this project, which I’m very excited to see develop. I’d also be very glad to contribute to it wherever I can, if helpful.