The trouble with complacency

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Seeing the Political in Romulo Neri’s Appointment as SSS Head.

I just read another news article last week about CHED (or former, I am not sure) chairman Romulo Neri. Apparently GMA has appointed him as the new Social Security System president, replacing Corazon dela Paz. As I was reading the article different, initially malicious, opinions came running through my mind. The name of Mr. Neri was after all a source of headline worthy news during the Lozada, Truth, and ZTE-NBN festival. And even though I was in Cagayan de Oro and missing out on all the “truth” parade in Manila, being updated was a sort of a hobby for me back there. And so I can’t help but attach the ZTE-NBN controversy to the face of Mr. Neri (well that’s the malicious part). However I also pondered on the other side, personality effaced, objective perspective on the issue. There is something politically disturbing about him taking on the as SSS head.

Well the good news is, vehemently speaking, I think Romulo Neri is a man of innumerable credentials for the job of being the new SSS president. He graduated Magna cum Laude in a Business and Finance degree at UP. He held countless positions like chair of National Economic Development Authority Achievements (NEDA). He was also former secretary of Department of Budget and Management (I didn’t know there was such). Ultimately having headed different executive positions in his field of expertise Mr. Neri is, professionally speaking fit to run SSS.

However there is one peculiar character of Mr. Neri that is of a particular interest to me as a Pol Sci Major (naks). If we go back to the ZTE NBN issue, it was not his testimony that made him a “star”. It was actually the opposite; it was his having “no testimony” at all that media and his fan club, the senate that made a frenzy of issue out of him. Sure he did mention some dealings with former COMELEC Benjamin Abalos, he did not give any substancial, juicy, information about the controversial contract itself. It all boil down, or should I say “out”, to him invoking executive privilege. And there was silence…

Now what can we see here? SSS is a public institution, it is owned by the government, and hence it answers to the public. His position is also that of a public official, even though SSS is a government owned corporation. And I think his knack for keeping mum over issues that concern the good of the public and quelling initiations for questions of accountability is a detriment to the our democratic way of governance and it questions and weaken the integrity of the government. For a public official to say that there is nothing to talk about, by invoking executive privilege, tells something about that official’s character as a public servant, moreover it tells something even disturbing about the character of the one who appointed him. The danger posted by this thought is that the check and a balance that enables our democratic system to function is compromised thereby turning our system of governance a joke, us insulted in the process.

I have other, more malicious opinions, on Mr. Neri’s appointment but that’s for another entry if I have time. Or if the issue is still hot. :)

Politics is public. Bow

Phillip Don Recentes
AB political Science

Sorry for grammatical errors. :)

Credit to
http://www.gmanews.tv/story/61990/Romulo-L-Neri
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Philippine Star

My Pos100 teacher for enriching my thoughts on this issue.

On the increase of gasoline

Gasoline prices will go up as high as 100 pesos by the end of the year, as most sources say.

Yes this is no joke.

And because of this topic, a lot of people are suffering from the drastic effects: Jeepney fares increasing, less cars, especially those American SUVs on the road, more expensive basic needs and a whole lot more.

We are all bothered by this problem, especially that we were hoping for a much better economy after the drop from 56 to 1 to 41 to 1 last January. All of us are bothered about this. Will this be a repeat of the Asian crisis of 1997? I hope not.

I myself has been feeling the effects, especially since I drive a car to school and given the horrendous prices in gasoline nowadays, I have to plan out my trips to save as much gas as possible. And that's despite I'm driving a diesel car; it would be much much worse with a gasoline car. A 10 peso per liter difference is already a big amount.

Upon reading the news bits about this issue, and by integrating what I have learned from other PolSci classes

with bits of economics (which I still remember despite taking them during 4th year HS). What bothers me is this: What if it is NOT because of scarce resources that keeps the rates high? What if there is someone manipulating things for their own benefit? How about the fate of third world countries like us?

One possible (well not guaranteed to be true) would be that maybe the USA is actually hoarding the oil from the Middle East (known for having abundant resources of oil). I've just noticed somehow that there is something fishy behind the current news. Like what my blockmate said about the rice issue, well it is possible that the USA is hoarding as much oil as it can so it can dominate the market on oil and thus, having control over the prices, leading to a possible monopoly. I know this may be somewhat impossible, but it can be one of the many causes of the increasing oil prices these days. This is just in my opinion.

Feel free to comment.

Duey T. Guison

II AB PoS

*Cross posted on Discover the World

We Sing, We Dance, We Save the World

II: Assuncion, Martija, Maske, Matibag, Medrano, Omolida

Question: How do we solve poverty?

To answer this question, we begin by first defining the term “poverty”. For us, poverty can be seen under two perspectives that together form a whole. First, poverty is a way of life. It is a principle of complacency and acceptance of mediocrity, so long as the basic necessities of life are satisfied on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, it is a way of thinking, one that has kept the victims of poverty below. Second, objectively speaking, poverty is not having the adequate resources to maintain one’s standard of living. This does not go as far as saying that the term “resources” are constrained only to material things, but also to other necessities that society expects of its people (such as, education, job opportunities, jobs, moral upbringing, character development, work ethics, etc.) to avoid the trap of poverty.

Given this definition, our group proposes a regulation and rehabilitation program, designed for those who live below the poverty line. Informal settlements all over the country will be improved into suburban compounds, where everything will be improved; roads will be paved, a school and health centre will be built, and a local government official (like a barangay captain) will be installed to maintain peace and order. Their shanty houses will be reconstructed with sturdier and safer material. As for the rehabilitation part, there will be seminars and education programs to help the poor get on the right track in using their new community to their advantage. As for the job market, there will initially be a livelihood program, and the members of the community will be compensated for working to build their new and improved suburban settlements.

Title reference: We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things (2008 album of Jason Mraz)

Should GMA resign or be ousted? by: moran, vergara, guison, reyes, barroa, cupin

TO CHOOSE immediately from what the question poses seems to relegate all action and no thought. First of all, can the country's choices really only be either the forced removal or the voluntary removal of GMA from her seat? Are the two choices even so different in effect? The question automatically assumes that GMA is the cause of whatever political/economic/moral problems that are plaguing the Philippines, and that once she is removed from her seat, we are automatically better off. But the possibility is all too real that our country is distraught with far more complex and less obvious problems (flaws in the government system? the negative outlook of politics to most Filipinos? the political sphere becoming merely an arena for the powerful to maintain power?) of which GMA is only a symptom, and therefore will not and cannot go away even with the coming elections.

As much as we love the legacy of the 1st Edsa Revolution, the whole oust/resign thing is in danger of becoming a little too routine. Even if (or when?) we do decide that GMA must go, we need to consider what we'll do after she leaves before we up and take to the streets. Do we let Noli de Castro assume the role of president? Do we call for a change to the parliamentary system of government? Do we unite with the NPA to oust all our elected officials and instigate communist rule? Whatever the case, we think that what we need is to find the long-term solution to our problems, before we ever get to the luxury of choosing between the resignation of GMA or her ouster.

ALLEVIATION, NOT ELIMINATION

A Discourse on the Concept of “Solving Poverty” in the Philippines

Group II: Carlo (?), Philip D., Leo G., Faye G., Hansley J., Michelle N., Lars R.

Before answering the question of how to solve the presumed problem known to us as poverty, we felt the need to present a valid definition of it. We define poverty as “a state of deprivation of the things necessary in the determination of a person’s quality of life,” which includes physiological and ontological needs. As such, we are proposing a means of “alleviating poverty” not by the traditional idealistic (and unfortunately highly improbable) way of “supplying the needs of everyone,” but by “improving the conditions of the impoverished sectors of society.” This was done as we found the word "solving" rather inappropriate, for it entails the elimination of class distinctions (or structures) among the elite, the petty-bourgeois and the proletariat. At this point in time, it is very unlikely to achieve such a status; and the option of a Communist revolution is, in our opinion, counterproductive for the time-being due to its inapplicability (some would say obsolescence) in our country’s context. As an example, even the most developed nations (commonly referred as “First-World”) have a considerable amount of people living below the poverty line. In a structural-functionalist reading like the one proposed by Comte, these sectors are important in the division of labor, an important characteristic for a society to be able to function properly.

Thus, what solutions are we proposing in response to the question?

First, the present administration should achieve the state of balance between immediate relief and a stable economy. We are saying this because, as everyone knows, the leaders of this administration are adamantly claiming that our economy is doing well whereas the supposed “fruits” of this progress does not reach the grassroots (and what little trickles down to them is not even a valid sign). In talking about immediate relief, basic needs such as quality education, adequate food and proper health care should be the priority provisions. It is necessary to provide the populace with immediate relief in order to ensure that the conditions of our people will be better in the long run. If one will look at the law of economic determinism attributed to Marx’s historical materialism, we will see that it is emphasized that the supreme instinct in man is self-preservation and the whole behavioral pattern of human actions must have been governed by the fundamental law concerning survival. As such, self-preservation affects all of the possible solutions to alleviate poverty and by saying that we need immediate relief to ensure that people’s living conditions will improve in the long run, which is in conjunction to Marx’s assertion that self-preservation is a fundamental law that will affect the cultural, legal and political structures of that particular society.

Second is to cater to the need of establishing a credible and able set of political leaders. To achieve this, we are obliged to fix, adjust, improve or, in some cases, do a complete overhaul of the existing systems. Starting with the educational system (in the guiding principle that “education is a right of all and never the privilege of the few”) and completely obliterating the idea of education as a means of employment (rather, we must consider education as a tool for pioneering), we are likely to produce a polity with politically-sound minds that will make them wise voters. We must be careful, however, of preserving the individual right to suffrage. What we are saying is that we must instill among the people the proper criteria of evaluation and teach them to vote for someone not just because of external attractions (which translates to popularity and the all-too familiar Guns, Goons and Gold) but with his/her clear program of action. This involves Marx’s hierarchy of structure which states that the fundamental is the economic structure and next to it is the political system which controls over other systems (such as education and the government) and power-related issues present in a particular society.

Finally, by finishing an overhaul of our present systems, we can instigate an improvement in the “outlook or idea” of the general population. In a sense, we are “psyching up” the people to have a more optimistic view of their surroundings, which is definitely essential considering the highly fatalist and pessimistic view of the impoverished sectors in their capability of transforming their own lives, that it will not happen because the government officials who are supposed to be serving us will always remain "corrupt" and "deceitful." It is precisely because of these mindsets that we give room for the “traditional politicians” (deridingly called “trapos” and, quite rightfully, have this moniker given to a kind of dirt rag) to remain and allow them to continue living luxurious lifestyles at the expense of the public revenues. In changing this perspective and ensuring the delivery of immediate relief, we may ensure a progressive and stable economic growth, as well as functioning and satisfactory educational and political systems. These sorts of developments can improve the general outlook of the populace to promote productivity. We can improve their condition not by showering them with basic needs alone (like dole-outs for disaster victims) but more importantly by reforming their perspectives positively that they may not return to their previous impoverished state.

We were reminded of a certain conversation in Manix Abrera’s comic strip “KikoMachineKomix” from the Philippine Daily Inquirer where the characters were apprehensive that the day will come that we will claim that no one in our country is getting hungry because none of us know what it feels to be full anymore. In relation to this, why not, instead of worrying about the situation, take this concept of “killing the idea,”doing away with it? In “killing the idea” of poverty in this society, we are going to instill a more optimistic view of our surroundings which can translate to productivity, and possibly allow us to achieve the ever-elusive progress.

In summary of our points, we propose a hierarchy of solutions by which poverty could be alleviated. Starting from the fundamental which is the economic structure by achieving balance between immediate relief and stable economy, we can proceed to fixing our society's systems and institutions. The educational system should be given first priority as it will catalyze a "domino effect" among the other systems such as the political sphere. Lastly, we promote a more positive and dedicated ideology and outlook of people towards our lives and our community. By attaining all these, we would likely achieve not the existence of a classless society but one in which people meet their needs while maintaining the established balance in the division of labor which is vital for organic solidarity.

In ending , we would like to share a statement of Karl Marx from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "It is not consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

~o~o~o~

ANNEX: Enumeration of Some Key Result Areas and Concrete Measures

Immediate Relief:

1. Provide basic needs through lowering costs of living (provide subsidies)
2. Generate jobs (lower the unemployment rate)
3. Remove the Expanded Value-Added tax (E-VAT) and government royalties from energy sources
4. Search for alternative energy sources and support their development (so as to lessen fossil fuel dependence; after all, they’re about to run out in 75 years and prices are skyrocketing)

Economic Stability:

1. Improve production (which is to say, build MANUFACTURING FIRMS and not COMMERCIAL ESTABLISHMENTS)
2. Support FILIPINO entrepreneurs and pioneers by lending them capital (do not allow them to go the way of the fluorescent lamp and the yo-yo)
3. Improve highways and other infrastructures.
4. PESO must stand competitively against the DOLLAR (let’s not delude ourselves with merely relying on OFW remittances; concentrate on improving production so we may be at par with other countries)

Fixing Present Systems:

1. EDUCATION FOR ALL
2. IMPROVE BASIC CURRICULUM (PROMOTE HIGH STANDARDS)
3. VOTER EDUCATION SHOULD BE PROPER AND SENSIBLE
4. AMEND LAWS FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL
5. PROVIDE EFFECTIVE AND GENUINE AGRARIAN REFORM

Between Founding and Ordering: Towards a Properly

Transcript of Session 1

Let me begin with a reading of our contemporary political existence. It seems to me that we modern men are possessed by an excessively arrogant compulsion to collapse and breakdown animating sources of tradition. This is evident not just in what appears to be the fad of modern men which is stirred by the rejection of anything passed on to us by authority but more so in our unquestioned and uncritical trust in the progressive hope of an unknown future whose contours are unavailable for scrutiny and public validation. Hannah Arendt writes: “This double perspective into infinity, which corresponds most closely to our newly found historical consciousness, not only somehow contradicts the biblical myth of creation, but also eliminates the much older and more general question as to whether historical time itself can have a beginning. In its very chronology, the modern age has established a kind of earthly immortality for mankind.” While I find some kind of hope in the former, which in fact, proves that we are still thinking beings with the ability to begin something new, I am quite terrified by the latter tendency, because it rids our thinking of any politics and reifies the notion that politics does not need thinking – everything is just a “thrownness” into the present/future.

In this lecture, I hope to retrieve the deep bond and close association between the two activities which are the subject matter of our present preoccupation: that of thinking and acting politically. I shall do this by highlighting the role of tradition in providing an analytical framework for thinking and as such and rather surprisingly animate a rich and radical resistance to the pervasive currency of the formless stylistic of thinking and acting that has gained preeminence in our modern context. In what follows, I first give an exegetical discussion of the role of tradition in political theory expounded by Hannah Arendt in the essay, “The Tradition of Political Thought”, then give a more detailed appreciation of the contours of this “tradition” through a summary of its elements elegantly constructed by Sheldon Wolin and simplified in Mark Warren’s article. Third, I analyze the relation between thinking and acting in James Tully’s “Political Philosophy as Practical Activity”

1. From Finding Tradition to a Tradition of Founding

A wrong way of interpreting tradition is to understand it in the imagery of ruling and being ruled, which is the pervasive imagery of human relations in our modern socio-political consciousness: where tradition is the ruler and we, its practitioners and consumers are the passive ruled. Hannah Arendt makes this unequivocal point in the passage:

The transformation of action into ruling and being ruled – that is, into those who command and those who execute commands – is the unavoidable result when the model for understanding action is taken form the private realm of household life and transposed to the public-political realm where action, properly speaking, as an activity that goes on only between persons, takes place (Kohn 2005, 52).

The problem with making tradition equivalent to the metaphor of ruling and being ruled is its relegation into the private sphere whose model is precisely the life of the household, simplistically put, the danger in this conceptualization is the radical privatization of tradition, dialectically, the colonization of tradition by the private. This privatization of tradition, however, is not something totally new or modern. Its origins according to Arendt, were in fact, found in the Greek, typically, Platonian and Aristotelian inversions of the hierarchy of human activities, namely, the radical polarization between the bios theoretikos and the bios politikus which became the foundational principle of Western political theory. The culmination of this tension between the political and theoretical life was discovered by the Greeks and acquired by the Romans in the figure of the lawgiver and his triumph over the war hero as the penultimate source of authority, memory and imagination. Hence, our modern understanding of tradition is derived from the private experience of ruling, which has, in the pre-polis, that is pre-Platonic philosophy of the Greeks, had no place in public and political life.

A greater danger, however, in the privatization of tradition lies in the positivist, behavioralist compulsion to prove. Once, tradition has been relegated into the realm of private judgment, it becomes a matter to be proven, hence to find out whether its aims are efficiently and productively matched with its means. Tradition becomes reduced to our modern preoccupation with means and ends. One, as it were, needs to find tradition.

It seems to me then, that for Arendt, the proper way to understand tradition is to situate it in the public realm of human affairs, beyond the calculus of ruling and being ruled, and embedded in the necessarily public nature of human thought: “it lies in the nature of a tradition to be accepted and absorbed as it were, by common sense, which fits the particular and idiosyncratic data of our other senses into a world we inhabit together and share in common” (41, emphases mine). By inscribing tradition into the realm of common sense, Arendt is hardly making a concession to private judgment here, instead, her idea of common sense is one that “obviously operates chiefly in the public realm of politics and morals, and it is that realm which must suffer when common sense and its matter-of-course judgments no longer function, no longer make sense” (42). This is something very different from how we understand common sense nowadays, where “sense” in a very individualized way is the emphasis rather than the common.

As such, for Arendt, tradition is linked to the human capacities to a) remember the greatness of human action; and b) forgive the contingency and frailty of human relations. Allow me to discuss each.

Human Action

Human action, for the Greeks was considered the human activity proper to the realm of living in a political community. Human deeds “were supposed to possess and make apparent a specific greatness of their own, so that no end, no ultimate telos, was needed or could even be used for their justification” (46) and were the only activities available to man that afforded him the possibility of immortalization. But the immortalization of human action necessitated some form of remembering, practices of praising – which can only be achieved through words and the replication of such great deeds. Arendt writes, “the hero, the ‘doer of great deeds and speaker of great words’ as Achilles was called, needed the poet – whose divine gift sees in the past what is worth telling in the present and the future” (45). Thus, the greatness of human action depended so much and exclusively on men talking about it and praising its glory, and therefore on the preservation of a public space where the very essence of action - archein and prattein (beginning and completing) – can be attained. I think this is a crucial point, because it disturbs our contemporary dichotomization between thinking and acting: the need to preserve the episodic and fleeting moments of human glory demands that these two spheres of human life not be seen as opposing each other. Acting, if it has to be meaningful then, must require thinking men. In the same, way, thinking if it has to have any substance at all must depend upon the capacity of men to act. This is what we mean by the tradition of political thought.

The Romans articulated this need to preserve human glory through the use of a much interesting metaphor: the foundation of a civitas. Arendt writes, “the whole of Roman history is based on this foundation as a beginning for eternity. Founded for eternity, Rome has remained even for us, the only Eternal City” (49). What is interesting in Roman political consciousness is the role of religion as a transmitter of the tradition of acting and thinking. Obviously, religious tradition here does not refer to some form of private encounter with God as we nowadays conceive it, but as a bearer of the political community’s esteemed stories of greatness, “handed down from the ancestors, the maiores or greater ones” (ibid). Thus, Arendt writes, “religion, authority and tradition, thus became inseparable from one another, expressing the sacred binding force of an authoritative beginning to which one remained bound through the strength of tradition” (50).

What opposed acting and thinking from each other was therefore some thing or some things other than these two. Arendt identifies two: 1) the Platonic/Aristotelian misunderstanding of the relationship between acting and thinking and its modern realization in the conception of human nature as homo rational (60) ; and 2) the modern equation of action to fabrication, making and labor or the theorization of man as homo faber (ibid). The first, Arendt says is Plato’s radical individualization of the human activity of thinking as thaumadzein – the philosophical marvel and wonder which makes philosophy, “wherever and whenever it reached true greatness, had to break even its own tradition” (55). The second, is more modern. By equating acting with making, modern theorists removed the human capacity to act from the realm of the public and transported it into the realm of the private. But the reverse could also be held true: that the realm of the private invaded the realm of the public thus making it unable for human action to be viewed other than the opposite of human thinking. The isolated nature of these two ascendant activities – laboring and philosophical wonder – it seems to me, is the greatest factor which contributed to the abandonment of the tradition of foundation and preservation which stands as the central principles of political life. Without the guidance of tradition, theory left man to his own devices – figuratively but also literally.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness, according to the political theorist, Hannah Arendt, is what makes politics possible. For Arendt, the ability to forgive releases human action from “the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done” (Arendt 1958, 237) and allows men to come together anew and begin, because “without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (ibid). The human faculty to forgive then makes it possible for political actors not to be enslaved to the past and consequently makes sure that the task of politics is not abandoned.

The justification for the necessity of forgiveness rests on two Arendtian accounts of human life: 1) her characterization of political action as unpredictable; and 2) her understanding of history as irreversible. Central to Arendt’s political theory is the capacity of man for action which she likens to a miraculous disruption of natural processes. For Arendt, it is action and its disruptive nature that engenders the political space. Action transcends the futile “natural rhythm of coming to be and passing away” of human biological processes by disclosing not just the what-ness but more importantly the who-ness that distinguishes man from animals acting merely out of instinct. The novelty in Arendt’s conception of action is that for her, it is a beginning that has no end in sight – existing outside the established categories of means/ends and exhausted by the unique and multiple forms of its sheer performance. Arendt’s theory of action can therefore be frustrating and vulnerable to moral haphazardness (Weiner 2005, 154). She writes:

Men have known that he who acts never quite knows what he is doing, that he always becomes guilty of consequences he never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of his deed he can never undo it, that the process he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who himself does not act.

It is only by forgiving, if we follow Arendt’s thought, that man can be redeemed from the moral and tragic consequences of human political action.

2. Thinking About Politics or the Politics of Thinking

The public nature of political thought and its derivation from tradition links Arendt and Sheldon Wolin’s work closely together. According to Wolin, the inquiry of political philosophy is a tradition concerned with “the continuity of preoccupations not the unanimity of response” (1960, 3). Drawing from this definition, we already get an idea that political philosophy is concerned with matters that are of common preoccupations, by that, public, and because of its public nature, it is also concerned with power. In what follows, I will highlight how Wolin’s characterizations of the form, substance, matter, vision and task of political philosophy can be described as one that seeks to make public the relations of power that underpin human relations and thinking about human relations.
a. Political philosophy as a form of inquiry. Wolin argues that “ever since Plato first perceived that the inquiry into the nature of the good life of the individual was necessarily associated with a converging inquiry into the nature of the good community, a close and continuing association has persisted between political philosophy and philosophy in general.”
b. Form and substance. The task of political theory and philosophy for Wolin is to identify where the political begins and the non-political leaves off. But in answering this question, he argues that the articulation of what constitutes the political has always been a matter of conflict and tension. Unlike the natural sciences, the substance of the political is never self-evident, it is rather, defined. This makes games of power central to the analysis of political philosophy. The political theorist gives meaning, he does not prescribe political actions.
c. Political thought and institutions. Wolin’s discussions of political institutions is very instructive. For him, institutions are not process-oriented mechanical systems but “they serve to define, so to speak, political space or the locus wherein the tensional forces of society are related.”
d. Political philosophy and the political. When Wolin says that “no political theorist has ever advocated a disordered society, and no political theorist has ever proposed a permanent revolution as a way of life” he is not asking us to accept that the order of society is a natural order, but rather inviting us to reflect that what we identify as political is a result of an ordering. The task of political philosophy is to unmask this process of ordering, that is to take “politics as one reflection of this phenomenon has come to be an activity expressive of society’s need for constant readjustment.” Simply put, political philosophy’s task is to characterize how one historical age has defined the space of politics and therefore to allow us the opportunity to challenge and contest what we mean by the political, to open new possibilities for the political.
e. The vocabulary of political philosophy. Political theory uses specific languages to describe human realities. It can come in the form of a dark prediction or an opening up of spaces for political imagination. In the process of revealing the specific and systematized linguistic significations underlying political theorizing, Wolin seems to me to be insinuating that political theory advances a specific understanding of the world through the use of language. This is what we mean by the line, “theory does not exist in a vacuum”: theory is laden with a political objective. There is no value-free theory.
f. Vision and political imagination. Political philosophy allows us to understand that a vision of politics is always relative to where the theorist stands. The end result of this envisioning can come in two ways, according to Wolin: on the one hand, descriptive, on the other hand, normative. The aim of political imagining or envisioning is not to cast a finite depiction of an ideal situation. The political theorist must avoid understanding utopia in the wrong manner: that utopia must be realized. On the contrary, a properly political understanding utopic visions is that “precisely because political theory pictured society in an exaggerated, unreal, (unrealizable utopia), it opens an entire sphere of political possibilities.
g. A Tradition of Discourse. The discursive tradition of political theorizing means that theory and thinking is never done alone. It is always shared, it links the past and the present, and therefore historical. As such, it requires a public space in order for it to exist.

All of these aims of political theory are not suspended in some abstract field of thought. Rather, they provide us with a proper understanding of what “practical” means. Certainly, the definition of practical that we are adopting here does not refer to pragmatic, nor realistic. In fact, the very basis of the practicality of political theory and philosophy is the impracticality of its depictions of the world in the commonsensical understanding of the term practical.