A radical liberal would point out that philosophers in politics stand for a calamitous misfortune: starting with Plato, they either fail miserably or succeed… in supporting tyrants. The reason, so the story goes, is that philosophers try to impose their Notion on reality, violating it — no wonder that, from Plato to Heidegger, they are resolutely anti-democratic (with the exception of some empiricists and pragmatists), dismissing the crowd of “people” as the victim of sophists, and at the mercy of contingent plurality… So when the common wisdom hears of Marxists who defend Marx, claiming that his ideas were not faithfully realized in Stalinism, the reply: “Thank God! It would have been even worse to fully realize them!” Heidegger at least was willing to draw consequences of his catastrophic experience and conceded that those who think ontologically have to err ontologically, that the gap is irreducible, that there is no “philosophical politics” proper.

¶ 9:28 PM