Political Rationalism in Unlikely Places.

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine depictions of political rationalism – a concept I borrow from Michael Oakeshott – in works of literature and film. In these “unlikely places,” I find compelling presentations of the consequences of a rationalist approach to politics in widely divergent political communities imagined in a variety of fictional forms. Exploring these presentations allows me to raise significant questions about a rationalist approach to politics, and to make an original contribution to debates about the relationship between political knowledge and political life. To frame my exploration, I contrast a rationalist approach to politics with Aristotle’s notion of prudence or phronēsis, which is an excellence in choosing amidst an environment characterized by imprecision and uncertainty. For the political rationalist, politics can be reduced to a set of technical problems amenable to technical solutions; an excellence in choice-making is superfluous, since uncertainty can be surmounted by dealing in technical precision rather than variable opinion. These two approaches to politics offer two different views of the kind of education and knowledge most appropriate to political life, and to illuminate this contrast as sharply as possible, I turn to works of fiction: Aristophanes’ The Clouds, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis. In depicting particular contexts in which particular characters make particular choices, and in inviting us to evaluate these choices and place them alongside our own intuitions, these works prompt us to examine the promise of political rationalism – that politics can be approached as a matter of precise technique rather than imprecise choice-making – as it plays out in (imaginary) practice.