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December 13, 2007
In a response to Paul Kelly's cover story in the October Australian Literary Review, 'The Lucky Country (but not why you think)', where Kelly argued that Australia's second-rate public intellectuals failed the country, particularly during the Howard years, Riamond Giata says that:
The truth, though, is that it is misleading to talk about the relations between morality and politics. There are different and seriously competing conceptions of politics that deliver different conclusions about the nature and extent of the conflict between them and even about whether there is conflict. Throughout my Quarterly Essay I argued for an understanding of politics as a distinctive realm of value, importantly connected with moral value but not reducible to it, nor reducible to anything like running an enterprise (or a country conceived as such) to further interests that could be described independently of distinctively political values.
He adds:
Putting it simply, I advanced a conception of politics as sui generis. In this respect it is a conception shared by thinkers as diverse as conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the left-leaning Hannah Arendt. It sometimes finds expression in the renewed concern for the values of civil society; civil in a sense that connects with civility and also with the civitas, a realm constituted by people's mindfulness of the fact that some of their obligations to one another derive not from their relations as individuals or as fellow human beings but from their understanding of what it means to be a citizen. It lies behind the calls for an apology to indigenous people.
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