Bob Schwartz

I’ve been reading Hannah Arendt today, as I have again and again in recent times. She is, as I’ve pointed out before, possibly the preeminent political philosopher of the twentieth century.

I’ve called for philosophers to force themselves into the difficult public discussions we have been having. They are rarely to be found, for example, on news media. That may be because their thinking is not conducive to digestible and understandable sound bites.

Their absence is too bad. We haven’t ended up in an admittedly difficult moment just because of some strategic political errors or because of some simple emotional dimension of the electorate, though those may be the case. It’s a lot deeper and broader than that. To use a worn cliché, many—not all—of the talking heads you hear opining, smart as they may be, are playing high level checkers, while a political philosopher like Arendt is playing, sorry again for the cliché, three-dimensional chess. It may be true that some of that sophisticated analysis may have little to actual tell us. Some of it, though, may tell us some things essential to understanding what happened, what is happening and what will happen.