In 2019, I was lucky enough to visit London, England twice. During my first visit, I watched in awe as I witnessed the ceremonial changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. To think that such a traditional practice is continued in modernity is quite astonishing, and I am grateful to have seen in real life the existence of the remnants of the monarchical political structure that defined the human experience for thousands of years.
To be able to relate this seemingly arcane tradition with the study of political theory, particularly in the comparative study of the English monarchy in modernity in relation to Thomas Hobbes’s ideal vision of the Leviathan and Aristotle’s parallel viewpoint as illustrated in The Politics, at once I felt a tremendous sense of connectivity to a sort of archaeological lineage of political development as experienced by the Western world.
Perhaps my most inspirational experience in England was that my second visit coincided with the 100th anniversary of Remembrance Day on November 11th, 2019. As I boarded numerous trains on my pilgrimage to visit Stonehenge, I was blessed with the opportunity to don one of the iconic red poppy buttons worn to symbolize the gratitude of the English population for the tremendous sacrifice of the servicemen that protected their homeland during the First World War.
While I have learned much about the dangerous conditions of trench warfare on the continental battleground, to see in person the stark division between the elderly English who seemingly all wore such attire and the droves of young and seemingly ignorant Londoners who either knew not or cared not about that shared history of perseverance and triumph reminded me to never act in such a callous manner toward the traditional values of a nation with which I am but an unacquainted visitor.
American Political Theorist 