Are politics grounded on metaphysics?

The answer to this seems to me: no. Or at best, hardly ever.

Here at the SCT at Cornell when I asked Leela Gandhi why she chose the ethical position of what she calls philophusikia (i.e. (renouncing the self and celebrating the world) over phusikaphobia (i.e. renouncing the world and celebrating the self) she said it was because she preferred the former's metaphysics. (This in a paper in which she argues (somewhat problematically?) that the choice between these ethico-political positions is important to (almost definitive of) early 20thc English non-state socialism.)

Leela's followed a paper by Brian Massumi in which he claimed that a radical pragmatic/Deleuzian ontology presupposes a certain kind of radically democratic and localist politics.

Bill Connolly and many others also believe there's an essential link between metaphysical beliefs and political orientation. (In private conversation, Bill has said to me recently that he doesn't actually believe this, but that metaphysics and political thought constantly act as figures of each other, so I may be misreading him). And so it comes about that a Deleuzian ontology can ground a politics (and the same is true for Nancy, for Badiou etc). At the end of this line of thought stand Aristotle and Plato, each with their metaphysics, each with their related politics. With Aristotle being pointed towards immanentism, pragmatism and process; and Plato towards transcendence and authority.

In this account liberalism becomes that politics which refuses metaphysical commitment of either kind.

But just think about Nietzsche, to think otherwise.....In the end, for him, becoming is ontologically prior to being (as it is for the radical pragmatists and Deleuze), but his politics head us to the right, surely.

Disraeli, Burke and the novel

Could it be that after Burke it becomes possible to insert an individual's life into a history which is no longer to be thought of as constituted in discrete traditions (a la Alasdair Macintyre for instance) but as political in the sense that two fundamentally opposed parties have two interpretations of it? And that individuals can make a choice between enlightened modernity, on the one side, and inherited culture on the other?\

That Burke first divides history politically in this way is clear enough. But how does he conceive of the individual's relation to history? Not explicitly at all. But still: his thickening of tradition into a concept of prejudice which can stand against rationalist disordering does move in the direction I'm suggesting With it, Burke begins to treat society as a historically-given scene in which ethical choices are also political choices.

Walter Scott takes advantage of this imagining characters who choose between historical forces, and thereby grants the novel genre the weight that will make it the 19thc's priveged form. And in the 1840s, Disraeli and others (notably Charlotte Bronte) will imagine the present as a historical moment in these terms.