Obama was a philosopher king. Trump is not.

Claire Dwyer

            President Barack Obama was a “philosopher king.” So was the medieval king that I study, Alfonso X. Trump is obviously nota philosopher king. But this platonic ideal, which comes directly from The Republic, gets infused into our peculiar sense of western idealism, I think because the philosopher king is who we would like to imagine ourselves to be. Strong, fit, kind, well-spoken, intelligent in all matters, studious, athletic—and the list goes on. The philosopher king is such a powerful ideal for us as Americans because he represents two very important things that the capitalist American patriarchy holds dear—power and intelligence.

            Despite my widely known obsession with the philosopher king Alfonso X, I do not idealize the ideal. I don’t pretend that my own particular desire to have a philosopher king at the helm of our nation is not a product of the culture and environment in which I have been raised, and that there aren’t a number of problems with how much I idealize the “scholar.” In my thesis, I also argue that Alfonso X’s “intellectualism” is a product of his particular political situation in thirteenth-century Castile. In fact, it is clear that Alfonso X manipulates this “philosopher king” ideal to a certain extent within his legal codes in order to legitimate his own sovereignty in an era of feudalism and custom law. 

            Now, having been deprived of a philosopher king for so long, my thoughts drift frequently to how nice it would be if our president did fit this classical ideal. But make no mistake. There is a very big difference between the philosopher/scholar (what my chosen career path is) and the philosopher king, and that is one simple concept: power. 

            Alfonso X was not a true intellectual, at least in the way that we today might conceive of an intellectual as a professor or academic invested in her students and attempting to understand her discipline first and foremost as knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Alfonso X was a philosopher king, and I’ll argue that philosopher kings are actually invested in knowledge not for the sake of knowing it, but for the political ends which come from it. There is of course a complex political dynamic within academia as well, so I can’t claim that our quest for knowledge quest isn’t at all political. In that sense, a truer intellectual might be a hermit, because even a cloistered monk is likely to have some politics attached to his interactions with his confreres.However, there is something different about portraying oneself as a powerful intellectual in the explicitly political world because of the immense amount of power over others that you simultaneously possess. Alfonso X does this by emphasizing in his legal codes the importance of education for a wide range of individuals in his society, and to shape the most perfect version of the institution of the king. His intention in promoting education though his legal code is not because he so values intellectual conversations, but because he wishes to use the intellectual ideal to maintain the perception that the king should have power and sovereignty over all in an era in which this was not a given. President Obama does this in his behavior within all his public appearances in the American political arena—in his relations with others it is easy to tell that he is well-read and well-educated. This is intellectualism, but it is intellectualism with focused ends attached to it. It is intellectualism as part of an image.  

The ideal of the philosopher king is a beautiful one. And it is one that I like very much. But when you add “king” to “scholar,” the value of the scholarship will nearly always be corrupted by power.