Why Volodymyr Zelensky Is the World’s Only Living Statesman: Steven B. Smith on the Leadership America Lacks

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. The Odyssey and Odysseus is all the rage these days. Hard to get into the movie at the moment. Everyone's going to see it. Last week, we did a show with Joel Christensen, a professor of Homeric studies at Cooney, distinguished professor about the movie and Odysseus.
His new book is called Why Odysseus, Survivor Scoundrel Anti-Hero. And when I saw the film, it seemed to me as if maybe Odysseus was in some ways, at least in the Nolan version of the movie, a kind of statesman and that subject of statesman and statesmanship is the subject of our conversation today with another very distinguished professor, this one of political science at Yale University, Steven B. Smith, and he has a new book out, appropriately enough, called On Statesmanship. Steven hasn't yet, we talked just before we went live, Steven hasn't yet seen Nolan's Odysseus, The Odyssey. So, Steven, before we begin talking about your book On Statesmanship, you haven't seen the movie. Do you think that there's a case to be made that Odysseus should be viewed as a kind of statesman? Is that a legitimate argument?

**Steven B. Smith** (1:55)
It's a good question to start with, Andrew. Thank you for the question and thank you for having me on your show.
Right, I have not seen the film. I'm in New York now and it's impossible to get in, although I'm hoping to see it next week. I think there is a case for Odysseus. He's not a statesman in any technical sense of the term.
He didn't found a state. We don't see him in any way as a head of state in any way. And yet Odysseus is known, famously known, as a wily character. The famous word associated with him in the opening sentence of the book is polytropos. A word that has been, there's a lot of controversy about how that word should be translated. I believe one contemporary version of it is it's complex. He's a complex man. But the version I prefer, the translation I prefer of polytropic is many-sided. He's got different dimensions to him. And I think that is, as I talk about in my book, in a different context, it is this quality of adaptability that is essential to statesmanship. Machiavelli is another one who certainly employs this notion of being able to adapt to circumstances, adapt to the times, as Machiavelli says. You cannot allow yourself to be locked in to a frigid or a rigid framework, but you have to understand your situation and context. And in that way, I think Odysseus is, in many ways, a model, a certain kind of model for what statesmen need to do.

**Andrew Keen** (3:51)
Yeah, you mentioned Machiavelli, of course. Machiavelli famously wrote about fortune being a woman and needed to be ridden. I'm not quite sure what the Italian translation or the Latin translation is, firmly. And Odysseus, of course, is also a leader of men. And I know you haven't seen the movie yet, but in some ways, the movie is about Odysseus as a leader of men, although he's not always the ideal leader. Is that what statesmen are supposed to do?
Steven, lead men, is statesmanship all about leadership? Is that what you argue in your new book?

**Steven B. Smith** (4:30)
Of course, it's about leadership, centrally. And yet, I do want to make a distinction in the book, as I do, between statesmen and leaders.
Every state has a leader. There's something like 195 states in the world, I believe. I believe that's the right number. Every one of them has some kind of leader, but not every leader is a statesman. Statesmen is our kind of ideal of what leadership aspires to be. It goes back, the concept of the statesman, it goes, since we started with Odysseus, it goes back to ancient Greece. Most famously, it's associated with Plato. Plato writes a dialogue called the statesman, Politikos in Greek.
His most, probably his most famous account of the statesman is the idea of the philosopher king and the republic. So statesman is a leader, but it is a kind of ideal of what leadership is.

**Andrew Keen** (5:32)
It's interesting you bring up Plato and his ideal of the leader in the republic. How rooted in politics is the idea or should the idea of statesmanship be? Because of course Plato's definition of the leader in the republic was almost anti-political.

**Steven B. Smith** (5:59)
In some ways, I mean Plato of course in many ways gets that conversation about this started. And he had a very, this idea that the statesman must not just be a leader, but must be a philosopher as well. And of course trying to find someone who can combine the qualities of leading a state, leading a people, and having the qualities of a philosopher that's very, very, very rare, very rarefied, if not, if not to say impossible to achieve.