Politics is not morals, any more than mathematics is, and yet while few would be congratulated for being foolish enough to confuse morals and mathematics there is no end to the self-congratulation of those fools who would confuse politics with morals.
PS: Just to be clear, moralizing is what you get from that particular confusion, and as it happens moralizing distorts both what morals are sometimes good for and what politics are sometimes good for, too, usually in the most disastrous ways imaginable.
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While recognizing our irreducible differences concerning matters of policy, I hope I have dialed down the snark just enough for you to engage me on these questions: Does Arendt not remind us that "morals" derive from mores, a word which, as the translation for ethos, bespeaks both habit and habitation? I ask: what could the polis be without habitation? While not asserting their isomorphism, can politics and habitation simply be divorced and one discarded like a useless marzipan dildo? Isn't the problem not the confusion of morality and the political as such but the oblivion of the originary sense of the polis itself?
Thank you.
I elaborate more where I am coming from here, if you are interested in the topic. Arendt treated mores and ethos as roughly synonymous, but I would argue that one of the crucial effects of the quarrel of the ancients and moderns is the fraught demarcation of these domains -- in my view, under the various modern assertions (and I include among these assertions romanticism, post-modernism, post-post-modernism, alter-modernism, a-modernism, among many others) mores becomes we-intentions while ethos conjures, probably via puclic-ation, an imaginary audience including more than we-as-we-are-now, with certain extraordinary results (among them the modern Nation-State). I think this sheds light on some of the questions about the role of judgment that preoccupied Arendt's last theoretical works -- but you are right that this is a departure from Arendt, strictly speaking. I would say the assertions of modern created agon denominated the cultural (which is defined by normative contestations between the work of morals and ethics unintelligible to the ancients) and the social (which is defined by consensual contestations between the work of science and politics likewise unintelligible to the ancients). This is the sort of discussion that really sets me on fire, but which almost never finds its way to the blog, I must say.
Also: I do not concede that a marzipan dildo would be useless. Off the top of my head I can think of any number of uses for one. Damn, I want a marzipan dildo!
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