Abstrak

Kembali

The year 2015 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Anthony Trollope. Though often overshadowed by his Victorian contemporaries, Trollope was an insightful analyst of social and political life. Focusing on his six Palliser novels, I argue that Trollope’s account of politics is framed by important questions of classical political philosophy, especially Aristotle’s question of whether the good man and the good citizen are the same. Yet Trollope takes up this question in the context of modern liberal democracy and modifies it accordingly. We see this illustrated in his treatment of partisanship, the virtue of prudence, and the relation between public and private. The resulting ideal of a politic reasonableness offers a model of public virtue that is needed but often lacking in our own world.