The argon presidency

The political scientist,

in so far as he wishes to

remain a scientist, is lim-

ited to the study of tech-

niques. A good deal of what

is called political science,

I must confess, seems to me

a device, invented by aca-

demic persons, for avoiding

that dangerous subject pol-

itics, without achieving

science.

It is not premature to identify the

present Administration, historical-

ly, as the Argon presidency. It is 

not untinged by fetching traces of

Zinc, but these are laid on, pallid,

episodic, and ambivalent, as such

things always are with that reticent

element. The aloof element is not 

ungenuine, either; it simply cannot 

join in any stable compound. It has 

always been vexatious pseudoscience 

to imagine tactics for firing its 

inertness. Argon doesn't lack polar-

ity, it lacks affinity. 

As a repair for atrocity in office, 

which its genius is only to smother, 

it is content to afford a somnolent 

blanket of innocuous gas. The under-

lying turmoil, visibly rending the 

society it surveys, is beyond its 

reach, if it had one. But in truth

no force that brought it into pow-

er and none which resists it, be-

stirs its indifference. This is per-

fect for inhibiting degradation in

an opened wine, but equally so for

promoting it in an open society.

This appreciation, as one can guess,

is for the same reader who keeps the

place intractably disreputable. That

suspected dilettante, known as the

well rounded scholar, so exemplarily

embodied by every honourable school-

boy who ever lived, is never going 

to be an adherent of think-tank tru-

isms. To think with him is to learn 

with the best; we don't read Laski's 

The American Presidency these days, 

under that title; rather, we read

of it in his letters with Justice 

Holmes, in which they speak of get-

ting outdoors at Beverly. It's how 

these things are done. But scribes 

still saw away on lesser models, in 

a faux science which is less a dis-

cipline than a hermetic trade conceit. 

Restaurateurs, all. We know them. 

Today's liberation from the self in-

terested feed lot of political comment 

comes from the description of what it

was like to be living as a Jew in Pie-

monte in the 1930s and 1940s, or as 

many of those years as were allowed, 

before deportation or extermination

on the spot. It's not the story one

expects; it's authentic, in the first

person, brilliant, original, persua-

sive and, certainly, not provincial

in the slightest. I refer, don't I,

to Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.

It's not just revenge upon dry chem-

istry. It's a prophylactic against

fashionable formulas. For those to

whom such things may be a caution,

it's also imaginative and beautiful,

Socratic and satirical. It could be 

a ballet; I hope it will be. We may

wish, art were not diagnostic, but

we'd only have to invent it again.

We'd almost absolve it of useful-
ness, to rusticate the alchemists.
They write about what happens, and
talking-head about what happens, 
but they project margarine; and this
is because they can. They ignore, as
Professor Cobban was warning, above,
nature because they must, so that e-
ven their study of behaviour is dead.
Chemistry cannot afford such science. 

On arrival in office, Argon immediately
repudiated the go-go cohort that put it
there, precisely as Wilson had done; and
installed a lady from the Loop to make
sure its constituents were never heard.
That shining exile of muscular hope began
an atrophy conforming exquisitely with Ar-
gon's atomic structure.

This was not the usual extermination of
potential rivals, and it was not the usu-
al depopulation of the village. This was
Argon's helplessly candid resignation. I
recall being dazzled, and yet, to be fair,
I hadn't measured Argon's purity. I had
been brought by politics to think polit-
ically; and I had not read Primo Levi yet. 
I had thought, Argon is being curably ob-
tuse. But this is not true, because it 
cannot be true. It is not in Argon's rep-
ertoire to be stupid, only to be oblivi-
ous. The mirage of technique, meanwhile, 
enchanted our clerks, and caused us all
to struggle to reform an innocent element.

There is no doubt that they were inert

in their inner spirits, inclined to dis-

interested speculation, witty discourses,

elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous dis-

cussion. It can hardly be by chance that all

the deeds attributed to them, though quite

various, have in common a touch of the static,

an attitude of dignified abstention, of volun-

tary (or accepted) relegation to the margins of

the great river of life.

Argon comes with a self- inflicted price; but with this element Levi does not foretell the rejection we all know as Holocaust. He has in mind Argon's cost to its culture. He remem-bers, as a child, visiting his very aged paternal grandmother, against her own reluctance to be bothered, who would usher him into the disused "good" living room, and dig out of some recess the box of chocolates, always the same box, and offer me one. The chocolate was worm-eaten, and with great embarrassment I would quickly hide it away in my pocket.



























Alfred Cobban
University College, London
In Search of Humanity
  The Role of the Enlightenment
  in Modern History
  Lectures to Winthrop House,
  Harvard College
George Braziller, 1960©

Harold J. Laski
London School of Economics
University of London
The American Presidency,
  An Interpretation
Harper & Brothers, 1940©

Harold J. Laski and
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Holmes-Laski Letters, I and II
Mark DeWolfe Howe and
  Alger Hiss, editors
President and Fellows of Harvard College
1953
Atheneum, 1963©


Primo Levi
The Periodic Table
1975
Raymond Rosenthal
  translation
Schocken, 1984
Alfred A. Knopf, 1986©


George Adamson
1913-2005
Displaced Red Wine from Glass
  on Outside Table Becomes the
  Setting Sun