The failure of success

...Then again, I suppose the typical pastor gets little light from the Bible on how to run his parish on a day-to-day basis...

...I never completed my doctorate, and I've published only a handful of articles in scholarly journals...

...It's quite a wonderful book, but it is difficult to see what guidance it can provide to an American politician living in an almost totally non-revolutionary society...

...so I actually do operate out of a room that is filled with smoke half the time...

...My start in politics came with the Gene McCarthy-for-president campaign of 1968...

...If your magnifying glass is not powerful enough to allow you to find Rhode Island on the map, you may think this is no big deal...

...But unfortunately for my peace of mind, I still consider the intellectual life superior to the political life (a conviction that results, no doubt, from my early Aristotelian training), so I consider my success to be a kind of failure...

...The dissertation I never finished (at Notre Dame) had to do with the political theory of Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher who, more than any other writer, taught Catholicism how to speak the language of liberalism and human rights...

...Considered from a physical point of view, it is of course disgusting...

...With its emphasis on natural law, it lies at the bottom, I suspect, of much of my dissatisfaction with the virtually antinomian basis of contemporary American liberalism...

...I have an eighteen-year-old son who is interested in politics...

...I was so green politically that I didn't realize this sort of thing is almost impossible to pull off...

...I didn't make it to the legislature until twelve years later, on my fourth try, all of them against incumbents...

...but regarded as a piece of nostalgia, it has its charm...

...I began as a total outsider, a maverick, almost a malcontent...

...But satisfying though it may be theoretically, it provides little help in the burdensome business of day-to-day politics...

...But look what's happened to me...

...About a month ago, a few weeks after the November election, I was chosen majority leader of the Rhode Island Senate, the top post in that chamber...

...I don't think I did much to help McCarthy, but I did a lot to help myself become addicted to politics...

...We managed to keep busy nonetheless, so busy that we deluded ourselves into believing that our running around in circles constituted a valuable contribution to the cause...

...Man and the State, written at the midpoint of Maritain's twenty-year sojourn in the United States (not counting the time he spent as French ambassador to the Vatican in the late 1940s), is much closer to the mark...

...As I scurry along the corridors of power, I carry with me the secret shame of not having achieved my doctorate, of not having written any books, of not having won a university professorship...

...My long study of Maritain left me marked for life, I'm sure, but it has never been clear to me how the lessons I learned from him could be applied to practical politics, at least at the level at which I play the game...

...At the time Rhode Island didn't hold presidential primaries, so we couldn't actually ask anyone to vote for McCarthy...

...A few months ago, just before he went off to college for the first time, I took him aside and spoke with him, the way Polonius did with the departing Laertes, giving him in capsule form the substance of the wisdom I had gained from a lifetime of experience: "This above all: wait for an open seat," My road to politics passed through the realm of theory as well as the realm of practice...

...Man is the animal who regrets his choices, no matter how well they may have been made.have been made...

...On the other hand, is there anyone who is not alienated, more or less, from his or her true self...

...Even in politics things didn't turn out the way I had expected...

...Integral Humanism bears the strengths and limitations of the critical period in which it was written...

...At the time I had an interest in politics, but it was the interest of a spectator, not a participant...

...This makes me, after the governor and on a par with the speaker of the house, one of the three most influential elected officials in the state government...

...I hope this is only a feeling, not a genuine insight, for in my new position I'll have to sink all (he way to rock bottom...

...Later that year I ran for the state senate in a Democratic primary against a well-entrenched incumbent who had been in office for many years...

...My teaching career carried me no further than a few small colleges before I settled down to earning an indifferent living at a state community college...

...I sometimes have the feeling that the further I sink into politics the more alienated I become from my true self...

...To my regret, a number of my top lieutenants, otherwise fine people, are cigar smokers...

...I'm pleased with my new-found eminence...

...and I liked it that way...

...Reduced to essentials, the question it poses is this: What kind of social-cultural revolution shall we have-a Communist-humanist revolution or a Christian-humanist revolution...

...Maritain's two great books on politics are Integral Humanism (1936) and Man and the State (1951...

...But I've turned out to be a success in politics-at least as these things are measured in Rhode Island...

...Years later I have turned out to be a bust at scholarship...

...A senate majority leader is the ultimate insider, the guy who wheels and deals behind closed doors in what used to be, before the anti-tobacco revolution, smoke-filled rooms...

...and for those of us who think it is the center of the earth, being numero uno in its senate counts as having made it...

...It's a small state, true, but there are those who love it...

...Years ago I set out to become a scholar and academic...