Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Political Science and the Irrational
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goods. Thus understood, Western society, which is and has been by and large
a great agora for the enlightened and self-interested pursuit of privately determined
goods according to public rules of sound fairness, can be studied in
economic and institutional terms and so, more often than not, scientifically
by political scientists and economists alike.
And yet, no one can deny the troubling evidence that,
though presented from different quarters and spoken with dissimilar voices,
is likewise derived from our modern project’s attempted subordination of the
importance of the question of the highest good. For today we find, on the one
hand, a financial crisis perpetrated by those whose highest good seemingly
resides in the pursuit of their own private ones, and, on the other, the rise
of religious fundamentalism and its call for the subordination of all private
concerns to the just and universal will of God.
As for the first problem, it is interesting for at least two
reasons. First, it points to the difficulty in limiting (but also in realizing)
the pursuit of the perhaps last highest good that remains for the ambitious
when society has metaphysically neutralized or tacitly undermined all others.
Second, it raises a potentially intriguing though hypothetical question.
That is, could such greedy pursuits be consistent with enlightened principles
if the men who perpetrated them could somehow have lied to and cheated
others without any personal or institutional damage noticeably occurring
both during and after their morally questionable behavior? It is not impossible
to imagine such a situation, so that here the pursuit of the former’s own
good could nevertheless occur peacefully or in tandem with the pursuit of
the good by the latter. But is it not arguably the case that, if the latter (or
indeed anyone) were to subsequently find out that they had indeed been
taken advantage of, they would in all likelihood become indignant? At issue
here is the principle of the act rather than its overall economic effect so that
what comes to the fore is the question, not of “damage” to one’s privately held
good, but rather the otherwise latent question of the violation of something
higher, namely, justice. As conceivable as this possibility is, at least in principle,
it is almost equally as inconceivable that those who have inadvertently
revealed their financially unscrupulous ways would now openly declare that
they merely regret that those who were hoodwinked by them—for example,
the European Union by Goldman Sachs’ involvement with, among others,
the Greek government, investors by Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, etc.—did
not simply remain unaware of and unnoticeably damaged by this process. In
other words, it would seem that what often appears as the naked pursuit of