Ah, yes. I was temporarily flashing back to undergrad days when people around me were all going to be philosophers (ah, youth). I had one friend at Catholic U’s School of Philosophy who wanted to be philosopher king. He went to law school.
Of course, it follows, I suppose, that Washington today (occupied by a crowd of more than a few lawyers who don’t think like Ed Whelan and Shannen Coffin) seems a little like it’s run by a philosophy student on a foggy Platonic trip. They don’t have a love of wisdom, though, because they don’t quite accept truth. But they do feel comfortable making it up as they go along, typically in legislation. The wisdom is only fully revealed after the bill becomes law. The tendency is a bit more king than philosopher.
UPDATE:
A philosopher e-mails:
#more#
One pairing of classes I took as a graduate student at CUA (around the same time you were an undergrad, I believe) was Msgr. Robert Sokolowski’s “Aristotle’s Politics” and “Hobbes Leviathan.” Besides being an excellent study in contrasts, it drove home to me just how all-powerful, idealistic, and arbitrary the modern state can be. Anyhow, what you describe as the philosophy prevalent in Washington today smacks more to me of Hobbes than Plato.
Besides the very term “Leviathan” aptly describing our bloated (and growing) federal government, it often seems that its enlightened ministers see themselves as the only thing keeping the seething masses from destroying each other in a war of all against all. To keep this from happening, theirs is to command, and ours is to obey.
Plato’s philosopher king, idealistic though he may have been, at the end of the day did not want to be king. Who can say that of Leviathan’s manifold deputies?