Abstract

An apolitical dimension is highlighted within the philosophies of Plato, St. Paul, and Rousseau. Each thinker articulates different experiential and theoretical grounds for a withdrawal from existing political life. These differences are elucidated through comparative analysis of the ideals of ethical community that are structured by the individual thinkers. It is argued that each imaginative ideal of unified order is engendered through a reaction against the diversity and conflict of political life. The domain of the common good and the means to its realization are thereby placed outside the arena of competing interests. ;In Plato and Rousseau, different phenomenologies engender different ideals of the unified state. But, in each, an antitraditional founding by the theorist, supplemented by a regimen of comprehensive education, is designed to prevent the problem of organized social disagreements and group oppositions--the political problem--from ever arising. Through an elevation of the unity and universality of reason to a social ideal, Plato would displace the traditional interplay of political proprieties. In Rousseau, a purely imaginary unity in self and society is created as an ethical standard against which political life is seen as an arena of corruption. From the perspective of St. Paul's eschatology of divine power and human powerlessness, the ambitions and divisions of worldly politics are also considerably devalued. ;In each form of apoliticism, the ethical self or society is envisioned as a unity in reserve from political engagement. But the ethical self-in-reserve is composed differently by Plato, St. Paul, and Rousseau--as a rational, religious, and imaginary unity, respectively. Each of these ideals are examined and critically assessed as ways of avoiding the interplay of particularity, plurality, and willfulness through which the morality of human action is constituted. To the extent that each ideal engenders a withdrawal from "dirty" politics there is a corresponding elevation of an imaginary regimen of social supervision. In this elevation apoliticism harbors its own ambition--a wish to supplant historical politics with an imaginary unity of power