For love of the game:
Jr, David R Carlin
David R. Carlin, Jr. FOR LOVE OF THE GAME POLITICIANS & THEIR SECRET A few months ago I was inattentively watching a PBS program on Robert Lowell when a remark caught my ear. Someone was saying...
...But if you can't take politics out of politics, you can at least take it out of political philosophy...
...but that's not really why people practice it...
...You can't take the politics out of politics," someone once said...
...Like trucking and bartering, politics too has wonderful (and terrible) consequences...
...that is what the children of Plato-most political philosophers in the Western tradition-have tended to do for the past 2,300 years...
...Ditto politicians and politics...
...A contemporary exception to the rule is Hannah Arendt's fine book, On Revolution, the best part of which is her dispute with the American Founding Fathers, where she proves that they loved politics for its own sake, despite all their protestations that they engaged in it only as a kind of necessary evil...
...Politicians themselves know better, but they rarely say what they know...
...and a few cynics tell you they are in it to feather their own nests...
...Because, a practicing politician myself, now in my twenty-first year of playing the game, I have just finished a totally exhausting five-month session in the Rhode Island legislature...
...I really and truly disapprove of Machiavelli...
...The idealists say that politics gives them a chance to contribute to the well-being of society...
...he was exactly what his and later ages accused him of being, namely, a teacher of evil...
...not understand and those inside rarely reflect on...
...At the same time, unfortunately, it is the most influential book on politics ever written-the fount and origin of our whole European tradition of political philosophy and political science...
...but when they do, they find that it omits the essential thing, the thing that addicts politicians to their calling...
...This is a truth that people outside of politics usually do...
...Oh, they are in it for the other reasons, too-the idealistic, realistic, and cynical reasons...
...I don't know many practicing politicians who spend much time reading political philosophy...
...Moderns like Adam Smith, living in a predominantly commercial civilization, understand that humans are trading animals...
...It is an inhuman life...
...I hate to say it, but there is one great exception to this rule-Machiavelli...
...In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues that the division of labor arose accidentally from "a certain propensity in human nature...
...the price paid to participate in it is all out of proportion to any goals realized through it...
...Plato's Republic is without question the most anti-political book on politics ever written...
...The same line can be said about pojitics...
...Why have these thoughts occurred to me...
...You cannot read his pages, especially the Discourses, without realizing that you are in the presence of the real thing...
...Yet I know that once I have recovered my strength and put some distance between myself and the exhaustion of the session, my hatred for politics will pass...
...But the truth is that politicians are in politics for the same reason athletes are in sports...
...The main reason people play basketball is that they like playing basketball...
...the realists say they enjoy the feeling of power they get from politics...
...My old addiction will once again seize me by the throat...
...My books have gone unread...
...folks trade because it's fun to trade...
...But for all his wickedness, and despite the perverse delight he took in being wicked, Machiavelli had a feel for the essence of politics...
...Who would believe basketball players who said their principal motive for playing their hearts out was to build character or to get some physical exercise...
...Quite simply, they enjoy the game...
...At the moment I hate politics...
...There was at least one ancient, however, who did not understand the nature of politics...
...For months I have visited home only, it seems, to sleep and eat breakfast...
...but the main reason is the sheer fun of the game...
...This is a distressing truth for those who believe, like Plato, that politics is not an end in itself but simply a means to some far nobler end...
...Politics is about two things: it's about whatever it is about, and it is also about politics...
...in its more cynical moods, it believes politics is about protecting and enhancing the material interests of politicians and their friends...
...Nothing in Plato explains why this should be so...
...to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another...
...Plato believed that politics existed, or at least ought to exist, not for its own sake but for the sake of certain nonpolitical ends: speculative truth and moral goodness...
...Ancients like Aristotle, living in a predominantly political civilization, understood that humans are political animals, that human nature has a "certain propensity" to politics...
...Trade, though it may have the wonderful consequence of creating and ramifying the division of labor, is not engaged in for that purpose...
...Rarely have I seen my wife and children, even more rarely talked with them...
...In its more idealistic moods, the public thinks politics is about world...
...or if he understood it, he objected to it so strenuously that he was determined to transform that nature utterly...
...When asked off the record why they devote themselves to a crazy game like politics, they usually say one of three things...
...Someone was saying that a poem is about two things: it's about whatever it is about, and it's also about words...
Vol. 115 • July 1988 • No. 13
