The Politics of Heaven and Hell by Schall James V.;

Author:Schall, James V.; [Schall, James V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642291391
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2020-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

LIVING WELL AS MEN

The crisis of contemporary political theory is, then, “What is the best form of government?” The abundant middle-class state is now open to all men. But, to recall Professor Minogue’s comment on Professor Galbraith, the reason it may not now be achieved is still a question of issues about the nature of man, of those issues in classical and Christian political thought.44 Many have argued that American loss of confidence in itself, its misconception of its own potential, will have catastrophic effects on the rest of men. Noblesse oblige is still a real principle in political theory. It means, essentially, not the reduction of the best to the mean and the mean to the worst on some theory of absolute equality, but the retention of the best in the confrontation with the normal and the worst. In a sense, then, Americans have been largely talked out of their own political theory because they have not understood its broader import in the evolution of modern man.

Nevertheless, this improvement that is indeed possible to men is a fallible process involving men’s control of their greed and envy rather than statistical poverty. Furthermore, the end of the process of poverty elimination and the establishing of public freedom is the state of leisure, Aristotle’s highest life for man qua man, the area in which the active fuses with the contemplative life to put both in their place. And the leisure of our future involves more than this very extraordinary planet in which the race of men find themselves already formed as men, as Aristotle said. The vision of the human race is undoubtedly inclusive of more than the human space of our planet, something that seems already contained in a way in Genesis.45 Yet, as Hannah Arendt had argued in The Human Condition, it is our condition as men here on this earth that determines the quality of our politics.

The political choices about the best form of regime necessarily involve the retention of man in an environment of full abundance, in true public freedom. Indeed, it is necessary to suggest that the problem of the best and the second-best state for a creature that transcends politics can, in a sense, be found in the same actual state. This is probably the ultimate theoretical significance of American theory at its best. That all men remain sinful and finite in themselves is the fact, even the value, that we must begin with. It is not the project of politics to create another creature, but to enable men to live well as men. The undoubted locus of totalitarian thought—that is, of the worst form of rule—during the next century will lie in the attempt to “restructure” man himself, to remove his sinfulness and his finiteness by biological, psychological, and social means, as if this will somehow produce the “good man”, that man who has stood at the center of classical theory from the beginning.

But, man, good and sinful, has a project, a freedom within his mortality.

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