Fellow Feeling? Political Essays

Thomas Nagel found history a useful opening to what he called ‘the view from nowhere’. This insight seeks to transcend our own place and look at the world as the world itself might glance in a mirror.  You project yourself into the past facing the judgement of the present while at the same time look into the future reckoning the present as past.  The problem is that nowhere is not somewhere you can stay for long as inevitably it will concede ground to all the views from here and now. That is what being a bystander in history means with its bursts of irritating moral illumination breaching the colourless and generally unknown normality of people’s lives. These essays were written and revised over the last fifty years but they, I feel, remain relevant in looking at the current crises we face from the tensions between nationalistic populism and a liberal democracy increasingly seen as failing to respond to the needs of society as a whole rather than simply the needs of a globally-oriented progressive economic and social elite.  They reconsider the relationship between politics, authority and association through looking at political philosophers from Plato through to Orwell and Habermas and the diverse ways in which their ideas impacted on their own societies and on us today. 

The writers whom I consider reflect my own preferences for classical, medieval and early-modern writers. I do include revolutionary women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie de Condorcet (1764-1822) and Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793) who shamelessly attempted to extend democratic principles to women and a brief chapter on Hannah Arendt whom I met when she was in the UK in the late 60s.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, George Orwell and Jurgen Habermas reflect my interest in modern literary and philosophical thinking.  The book ends with a consideration of some of the problems that those trying to explain modern thinking have to address, namely ‘green capitalism’, ‘net zero’ and the nature of ‘woke’ ideas.