Guest post by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY
“Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive
To make a Great and honest Hive.
T’enjoy the World’s Conveniences,
Be famed in War, yet live in Ease
Without great Vices, is a vain
Eutopia seated in the Brain.”Bernard Mandeville (The Grumbling Hive, 1705)
Salutary falsehoods for a promising end, anyone? Try telling this to the ever righteous Anna Hazare or to the followers of Vaclav Havel, whose campaign assurance to ‘live in truth’ in the year 1989 so moved his virtuous flock. There is a politics of virtue and then there is realpolitik – or so we are told. Or is virtue above politics and vice below? What the deuce marks the ambiguous space in between?! That is what has been relentlessly, and ruthlessly, scanned by two masterful recent additions to the canons of contemporary Western political philosophy: Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity: on Lying in Politics and David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy: the Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond.
At one level, both scholars acknowledge and emphasize the dangers of the ‘ethical turn’ in political studies.
Continue reading Of Cloaking, Colouring and Varnishing: Prasanta Chakravarty