Greatness, Goodness, and the Tragic Body Politic

(with Shakespeare’s ghost looking on)

Greatness is not goodness.

This ought to be obvious, and once stated plainly it usually is — yet modern politics repeatedly collapses the two, either moralising power or shrinking it into harmlessness. Tragedy never made this mistake. Shakespeare, in particular, understood that greatness is a matter of scale and consequence, not virtue, and that the body — frail, foolish, mortal — always waits beneath the robes.

Tragedy asks a simple, brutal question:

What happens when a human flaw is given enormous reach?

In King Lear, Lear begins convinced that authority entitles him to love. He stages a performance of affection and mistakes words for truth. Power, here, destroys perception before it destroys anything else. The Fool — the only figure permitted to speak honestly — tells him bluntly:

> “See better, Lear.”

It is the play’s moral command. Lear cannot see while power cushions him. Only when stripped of crown, shelter, and dignity does knowledge arrive — and it arrives too late:

> “I did her wrong.”

Lear is not good. He is vain, cruel, and foolish. But he is great, because his error cannot be contained. His learning costs him everything. Tragedy grants him no redemption, only clarity.

In Macbeth, greatness takes a darker form. Macbeth is not blind to his wrongdoing; he names it precisely:

> “I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition.”

He acts anyway. Macbeth’s greatness lies in decisiveness without conscience. Once he steps across the line, return becomes impossible:

> “I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far…”

This is tragic greatness as irreversibility. Action creates a world that cannot be undone. When meaning finally collapses, all that remains is exhaustion:

> “Life’s but a walking shadow…”

Again, greatness is not goodness. It is magnitude.

By contrast, Hamlet marks a thinning of tragedy. Hamlet is intelligent, articulate, morally sensitive — and stalled. He diagnoses his own condition with painful accuracy:

> “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.”

But diagnosis does not cure him. Hamlet mistakes reflection for responsibility and delay for depth. There is no Fool in Hamlet to speak truth to power. Wit turns inward. Language replaces action. Hamlet anticipates the modern middle-class politician: endlessly thoughtful, rhetorically adept, and structurally incapable of commitment. He is tragic only in a diluted sense — a figure of paralysis rather than consequence.

If tragedy weakens here, it disappears entirely in Richard II. Richard believes legitimacy itself will protect him:

> “Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm from an anointed king.”

He mistakes office for power, form for force. Authority drains away while he continues to speak it into being. Only at the end does recognition arrive:

> “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

Richard is not evil; he is empty. His greatness evaporates because it was never anchored in belief or action.

These tragic distinctions matter when we turn to modern politics. Adolf Hitler was not good — not in any meaningful sense — but he was great in the tragic definition: his actions reshaped history at catastrophic scale. Attempts to soften this by pointing to private habits (vegetarianism, affection for dogs) are morally irrelevant. Private decency does not mitigate public annihilation. Hitler’s fatal flaw was belief without doubt — destiny thinking that removed the last human brake: the possibility of being wrong. This is tragedy without learning, horror without consolation.

Modern politics, however, has not corrected this by embracing goodness. Instead, it has largely abandoned greatness. Leaders fear belief more than error. They manage, calibrate, and drift. Where conviction once risked catastrophe, caution now risks emptiness.

Some figures exploit this vacuum. Boris Johnson used buffoonery as anaesthetic, laughter as cover. Donald Trump represents something different again: not tragic greatness but farce with consequences — appetite without reflection, certainty without self-knowledge. He is no Lear, because Lear learns. No Macbeth, because Macbeth knows he is crossing a line. Trump is not tragic at all; he is loud, fearless, and immune to doubt.

Others barely register. Procedural, careful figures resemble Richard II: mistaking correctness of form for authority, discovering too late that legitimacy without belief commands nothing.

What tragedy teaches — and modern politics resists — is this:

Greatness without goodness is dangerous.

But the absence of greatness is not goodness either.

A humane politics would not seek tragic figures. But neither can it survive on management alone. Leadership requires standing somewhere, risking error, and remaining answerable when wrong.

Shakespeare’s ghost would remind us of one final thing.

However great, however evil, however crowned — every ruler is still embodied. Even Hitler had to eat breakfast. Even kings must sit on the privy. Tragedy never forgets the body. It is the last defence against false grandeur.

Power pretends to float.

Tragedy drags it back down.

And that — between the windowsill at dawn and the £4.99 breakfast — is where thinking stays honest.