Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

“When the President's got an embassy surrounded in Haiti, or a keyhole photograph of a heavy water reactor, or any of the fifty life-and-death matters that walk across his desk every day, I don't know if he's thinking about Immanuel Kant or not. I doubt it, but if he does, I am comforted at least in my certainty that he is doing his best to reach for all of it and not just the McNuggets."  - Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman in “The West Wing” by Aaron Sorkin. Jed Bartlet, the fictional economist who became president on “The West Wing,” presented a modern fantasy version of Plato’s “philosopher king,” an ideal ruler with a philosopher's capacity for complex thought and moral wisdom. A hankering for a leader who not only quoted Kant’s soundbites but understood the full context of his intellectual contributions was in the air in the early 2000s, when the TV show aired. In 2008, when we selected Barack Obama, a college professor who went on to annually post a lon...

“The morning brought us the sight of the grand Acroceraunian range: with brilliant sun & mild air,” wrote William Ewart Gladstone in his diary of November 24, 1858 as he sailed into the Ionian Islands for his strange new job as the Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary of the tiny British colonies, an assignment that led to ridicule from enemies and embarrassment from friends. “Then Corfu: which I do not think is like a ῥινόν from the North: but Homer probably meant a mirage.” The footnotes to Gladstone’s diary explain that ῥινόν in The Odyssey is variously translated as “ox-skin, hence shield, or mist, hence, in Gladstone’s view, mirage.” Gladstone was thinking of Odysseus’s trip into what is now the island of Corfu in Book Five of The Odyssey : “Full seventeen nights he cut the foaming way: The distant land appear'd the following day: Then swell'd to sight Phaeacia's dusky coast, And woody mountains, half in vapours lost; That lay before him indistinct and vast, ...