Setting up a website like this is a new venture for me. It has been a long time since I have had a blog. I did blog while a PhD student, but that whole idea seems very 2009. I am not quite sure what this site is or will be, but at the moment, I am largely thinking of it as a journal of ideas and thoughts, a place to articulate some ideas as they occur to me and store them away for future use.
The title of this blog alludes to two political visions, both of which I find attractive and vital. Max Weber referred to politics as the “slow boring of hard boards” in Politics as a Vocation (1919). His argument for a methodical, dedicated process to the business of political change is spectacularly impressive, given that when he gave the lecture on which the book was based in 1918 in Munich, there was an actual revolution taking place outside the University where he was speaking.
The idea of the crooked timber comes from Immanuel Kant via Isaiah Berlin. Kant’s quote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”. Berlin adored the quote and used it when discussing his version of liberalism, value pluralism. Unlike traditions of liberalism which emphasise universal rationalism, Berlin was more interested in different value systems that people held and what this meant for coexistence.
Why these thinkers and these ideas at this time? It won’t have escaped readers attentions that a further philosopher is haunting in the title of this post: Carl Schmidt, who was Hitler’s court political theorist in the 1930s (at least for a brief period before he was cast out of the Nazi inner circle). Schmidt’s most famous formulation is that politics is about defining friends and enemies, and, while deeply unattractive, his ideas can explain a lot about contemporary political practice and communication.
Weber and Berlin offer an alternative vision, at odds with the politics of friends and enemies, and the rampant populism it generates. While it might not be the only thing I write about on here, thinking about what that politics might look like is the intellectual project at the core of this site. Hopefully, these ideas will turn into something more refined in the future. As is so often the case for academics, when I have finished the various projects that are closer to the front of the queue. That said, this is also quite different to the type of things I have attempted before, as it is more political theory heavy, so I think it will benefit from some time to gestate and develop.
I can’t promise I will post a lot, but I will attempt to record ideas as they occur to me.