Aurelian Craiutu On Moderation's Moment

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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Aurelian is a political scientist and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. His two most recent books are A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. His forthcoming book is Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals. If you think you know what moderation is, Aurelian will surprise you. Not mushy; not vague; not the median: it’s a political temperament and philosophy with its own distinctive heritage. We talk of Raymond Aron and George Orwell, Albert Camus and Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin and Adam Michnik. And why we need these kinds of thinkers today.

For two clips of our convo — on whether the right or left is more of a threat to moderates, and why moderates oppose the notion of salvation — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Aurelian growing up in communist Romania near Ukraine; his five key principles of moderation; the French philosopher Raymond Aron and his rivalry with Sartre; Camus and Orwell as men of the left whom leftists hated; Isaiah Berlin and pluralism; Tocqueville, Judith Shklar, and Montaigne; relativism vs. skepticism; Keynes, and how liberty and equality are not incompatible; Machiavelli and the role of luck in politics; Oakeshott, politics as the art of improvisation; Adam Michnik’s courage in dark times; Plato on when moderation is not a good thing; MLK’s critique of moderates, Flight 93 elections, the Benedict Option, the cancel culture of the right, Oscar Wilde and the need for relaxed humor in politics. Yes, it was a lot. But we had a lot of fun as well.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you.
0:03.0	I'm Hi there, and welcome to the pre-Lenton issue of the discast.
0:36.5	I'm all excited. It's Shrope Tuesday. Well, not excited, but awaiting the season.
0:43.0	And things are great. I actually, I am going to have a little bit, you can probably hear and
0:47.4	have heard over the years my nose, my nasal stuff. Well, I'm going in on Thursday for a quick
0:53.7	operation, well, I hope it's quick.
0:56.2	On my right, no, yeah, my right nostril, anyway. Wish me luck with that. Before that, however,
1:03.5	I also want to thank you all. We've had a big uptick in subscription since we put the
1:10.4	podcast behind the paywall. We are edging our
1:15.9	incredibly long-term goal of 20,000 paid subscribers, which we are very close to. So if you want to
1:24.2	help us get there, become a paid subscriber. We also now have around 135,000 people getting this every week, which is pretty wonderful.
1:34.6	And an amazing testament to the open minds of lots of people who are interested in having a no-holds-barred open platform for debate and argument in which we are not
1:47.8	attempting to suppress anything or anyone but try and figure out what on earth is going on
1:53.4	the world. Speaking of which, my guest today, oh, and coming up before I screw that,
1:59.4	we have John Gray, the great political
2:01.1	philosopher coming on. Next week, we have John Oberg, defending veganism. We have Kathy Young,
2:08.3	going at it with me over how we actually fix wokeness in the universities. Mark Liller,
2:13.9	the great liberal thinker, and James Allison, a really wonderful and original
2:18.6	Catholic theologian, who's coming on to talk about how we bring Christianity into
2:24.4	the present more effectively than we have. My guest today, however, is a political theorist,
2:32.7	Orelian Kriatsu, who, born in Romania, and has really created a career in examining the political thought of people he calls moderates, and indeed the entire political tradition of moderation, which I think is kind of one of the most critical
2:53.9	traditions of political thinking that is in eclipse right now. And part of the reason why it's
	...

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