Reason and Politics: The Nature of Political Phenomena

Abstract

In the opening paragraph of Reason and Politics, Mark Blitz announces the work’s scope, presupposition, and purpose: to explore “the nature of basic political phenomena,” in accord with “the classical view that the political phenomena are the heart of human affairs,” in order to illuminate human nature. This formulation of the project’s intention is helpfully supplemented by a concluding retrospective description of the work as the defense of a philosophic standpoint “which tries to understand practical and theoretical activity by linking what we project in advance and take for granted with the nature of things seen primarily in classical terms.” Blitz’s account of human activity as the pursuit of the good shaped, informed, and inflected (but not wholly determined) by the particular regime in which one lives aims to account for the two conspicuous phenomena that might appear to justify alternative philosophical approaches, namely “the possibility of novelty and of the difference between human things and what we can see through modern physical science.” The simplicity of the introductory formulation of the book’s aim thus belies the magnitude of the work’s ambition: a defense of classical philosophy that confronts and refutes (by accounting for) the rival theories of the human being offered by modern philosophy and by historicism. In the course of this remarkable study, we learn that self-knowledge in our “post-modern” condition requires seeing ourselves in light of both ancient politics and ancient philosophy; the former is the historical moment that provides the essential touchstone for serious trans-historical comparison of human experience and the latter is the way of seeing and thinking most suited to grasping the nature of things. What was first politically and philosophically proves to be not merely a temporal beginning but an archē—“classical” because exemplary, exemplary because architectonic. In Blitz’s estimation, the historically oldest forms of politics and political philosophy provide the trans-historical standard for judging all historical phenomena: “The understanding of goodness, justice, and virtue that forms the best classical lives and regimes is the standard by which the other regimes should be measured.” Contrary to the prevailing prejudice in favor of the new, modern, or up-to-date, therefore, Blitz contends that “what is first is fullest and broadest, and is the ground of proper experience and understanding of the just, virtuous, beautiful, free, powerful, and so on.” By beginning “with the classics” or by working “one’s way back to them so that one can begin with them,” one is able to arrive “at the root experiences that are the clue to the fullest experience” and that are therefore most illustrative of human nature, which must be seen in light of both what is common to all and what is rare, namely the outstanding excellence exhibited by a few. Accordingly, engaging in “historical discussion” is necessary to disclose the full range of human possibilities, which show themselves through “comparing each step from the classics to the moderns,” as well as the subsequent dialogue amongst modern thinkers. While Blitz does not lay out a sustained methodological argument for this approach, his entire work is an exercise in starting “with today’s meanings” of “basic phenomena” and probing their present manifestations through comparisons with their past instantiations. Attending to the variegated connotations of similar terms and the resonances between different yet overlapping idioms reveals that our experiences today, though different from the past (even substantially so) are not quite so novel and unprecedented as we are often “taught to believe.”1 Only through historical studies aimed at recovering the classical experience—both practical and theoretical— can we think rationally about the nature of politics. Reason and Politics is thus a profoundly historical work for the sake of seeing beyond history—beyond the historicity of particulars to the enduring universality of what is natural. Yet only careful attention to what is actually peculiar about the parochial can illuminate what is cosmopolitan and common.