The statesman is a rare beast. Who among them come readily to mind? Pericles, Cicero, Bruni, More, Madison, Disraeli, de Gaulle. Surely there are more. But even an intensive study of statesmanship treats the genuine statesman as the exception, not the rule. This raises a fundamental question for statesmanship in our own and any age: What is it? And how do we educate genuine statesmen?
Answering these questions is the focus of a new volume of essays, The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom. The editors, Khalil Habib and L. Joseph Hebert Jr., make a striking and important argument, one that works against our own technocratic age of public administration degrees and cable news pundits. They argue that poets are teachers of statesmen. The poet of concern in this volume is, of course, Shakespeare. This review will define two key terms—statesmanship and poetry—before focusing on two of the essays here that illuminate their relationship .
Although it is a book on statesmanship, the volume leaves the term mostly undefined, though obviously not unexplored. Yet a definition of the term will be useful for understanding how Shakespeare intends to educate statesmen, both in his plays and in the real world.
For Cicero, the principal virtue of the statesman was honestas, or honorableness. In De Officiis, Cicero defines the four parts of honorableness: “the perception of truth … , preserving fellowship among men … , the greatness and strength of a lofty and unconquered spirit … , [and] order and limit in everything that is said and done.” A statesman is that person of sociability, virtue, and self-restraint who sees reality clearly and promotes fellowship and the common good among the citizens.
But why is poetry the prerequisite for genuine statesmanship, and why is the poet his most important tutor? The editors suggest that “the chapters in this volume support and illuminate this connection between Shakespearean drama and politics by examining a matter of central concern in both domains: the human soul. Since man is defined by his intellect and passions, no coherent account of human action is possible without careful consideration of the complex relations of thoughts, beliefs, desires, and habits to the decisions leading to success and failure in the personal and political spheres.”
According to Bl. John Henry Newman, poetry teaches one how to love in the midst of the complexity of the human soul: “Poetry,” he writes, “does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, love. The vague, the uncertain, the irregular, the sudden, are among its attributes or sources.” Poetry draws on the complexity of human life and points us, in the midst of its vague uncertainty, to love it nonetheless. Thus, a poetic education is an education in loving the reality of things as they are, including the often “complex relations of thoughts, beliefs, desires, and habits” that define human life.
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