Friday, June 23, 2017

A helpful primer …

… Shakespeare’s Politics - The American Interest. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



Much has changed, but not everything. Order is still better than chaos … The destruction of a regime—the modern equivalent of regicide—is still likely to bring chaos or civil war … The biggest change, perhaps, is that ambition, once a sin against order, is now a prerequisite for office. Shakespeare would be astonished to find we have invented a system of choosing leaders that is so arduous and unpleasant that only those with overwhelming personal ambition will think of submitting themselves to it.

2 comments:

  1. Yet how very, very odd that The American Interest should run a piece called "Shakespeare's Politics" that does not once reference Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa's not exactly obscure 1964 book "Shakespeare's Politics."

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  2. We invented it? Good old Yankee ingenuity at it's best, I say. But then Disraeli noted in his diary something along the lines of "Well, I have climbed the greasy pole to the top." It is well enough to say "Nolo episcopari", but how many of the unambitious ever have the opportunity to do so.

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