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Introducing Political Science: What is Politics?

In my last post, I outlined some of the challenges in teaching an introductory class in political science.  In this and the next few posts, I shall describe what I have learned to do in addressing these challenges.  I have also posted the syllabus on the LASC website if you want more information.

One of the biggest challenges in this day and age is providing a unifying thread that enables students to consider some essential attributes of politics.  Borrowing a point I think Harry Jaffa once made, I tell students that just as athletics is what athletes do, politics is what the polis (or nation-states or other entities) does.  But this description does not go very far because first-year students need a way of assessing what that activity is.

I like to teach my introductory class by assigning a “great text” from each of the different subfields of political science.  In order to give students a sense of what unites these subfields, I also assign a novel, play, or general treatment of politics that raises fundamental questions of political order.  The text should not be too long, it should be relatively entertaining, and it should speak to the concerns of contemporary students.

For the past two iterations of my class, I have started out by assigning Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopian story about a society guided by the principles of biological reductionism and technology.  I tell my students that Brave New World is more interesting than its dystopian counterpart, 1984, because while 1984 portrays a society based upon what we fear, Brave New World portrays a society based upon what we desire.  As a result, the novel gives students a clearer window not only into some of the political currents of modernity and technology  (e.g., consumerism, a society based on a Hobbesian pains-pleasures calculus), but it also provides a window into their souls.  All of the students can identify the role that light entertainment plays in maintaining social control.  They can all identify with the forms of “shallow” affection and manipulation displayed by the characters, and with the frustrations of those characters who rebel against the system.  But the book also challenges them to reflect upon what a thoughtful and moral response to these disorders would have to look like.

Brave New World focuses on two characters, Bernard Marx and John the Savage, who dissent from their society’s political ideals.  The drama of the book consists in their endeavor to understand what they do not understand.  They understand that their civic education has been inadequate to their humanity, but their education has failed to provide them with a means of understanding what it is they lack.  Their problem is not only the problem of a spiritually shallow but frustrated subject of a benevolent tyranny.

Their problem is also the problem of Socratic ignorance and of education in general.  The prisoner of the cave in Plato’s Republic knows he is in chains, and knows he is being transformed.  But he is bewildered because he does not understand what he is experiencing and how even to describe this experience.  Kierkegaard, reflecting upon Plato’s Meno, concisely states the paradox of education:  “a person cannot possibly seek what he knows, and, just as impossibly, he cannot seek what he does not know, for what he knows he cannot seek, because after all, he does not even know what he is supposed to seek” (Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus, trans., Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1985), 9).

Their first reading for their introductory Political Science class introduces them to the problem of liberal education. As they follow the drama of Bernard Marx and John the Savage groping in the dark toward what they think is the light, the students look within to consider their own condition.  As they recognize the similarities between the benevolent tyranny in Brave New World and their society, they also recognize the similarities between the characters and themselves.  Their next reading will be in political philosophy (e.g., Plato’s Apology of Socrates).  Before I discuss that in a subsequent post, a few more reflections about the pedagogic value of Brave New World are necessary.

In addition to the central Socratic paradox, students of my introductory political science class are invited to consider how and why the political ideals of this dystopia shape the social and personal mores of the characters. Most students expect political science to be about institutions, laws, and current events.  They gain an appreciation of how the commands of the Controller filter down into the private lives of the characters from as early as the conception of each individual and into the education of children and in their lives as “productive” adults.  The students learn the devices the Controller uses to control society and also why control is necessary.  They learn how, especially in an unfree society like this one, the line between public and private is porous.  But they also recognize it is porous in a liberal democratic society, and are invited to consider how this line might differ between the two types of regimes.

The impasse in which Bernard Marx and John the Savage find themselves is illustrative in a political sense in addition to the Socratic sense.  John loves Shakespeare.  The benevolent tyranny ensures knowledge of the past is nonexistent in order to reinforce its own ideals and to ensure subjects are not tempted to pursue intimations of something nobler in their humanity than comfort.

John the Savage, by accident, has a copy of Shakespeare’s works and finds it speaks to his situation and to his soul.  He despises the benevolent tyranny as infantile and he seeks a life of nobility and goodness, even if it means risking all he has.  Students are unsure what to make of John. They appreciate how he despises his society, but Shakespeare has not (yet?) spoken to them as he has to them.  Like Bernard and John, they understand that human existence entails something nobler and more beautiful than comfort, but they know not what.  They read about John’s awkward attempts at self-education through Shakespeare.  They see his progress, but also the tragedy that awaits him.

I ask them to consider whether John’s violence is the result of something Shakespeare told him to love, or whether, in not yet succeeding to love the noble and beautiful, John can only know what he despises, which is his society. Does his periagoge, the term Socrates uses describe the turning-around of the soul from darkness to light, misfire because, in not understanding what he turns toward, he can only understand his experience as a violent rejection of from what he turns away?  Does he understand his turning toward only in terms of a nihilistic turning away?

Students love Brave New World and it “hooks” them for the class.  Many love it simply because it enables them to read a fun novel instead of a boring textbook.  Many love it because it helps them understand the deformities in their own society (and possibly to despise it).  And a few, if not more, love it because it provides them with some ways of understanding what it is they are turning towards.

In order to understand what politics is, it is helpful to understand what it is not.  Just as reading a dystopia can help us see the goodness of humanity in the negative, reading and perhaps experiencing periagoge help us to see the realm of politics, which Plato seems to have symbolized as the cave, from the perspective of the realm of human freedom that resides beyond politics and what we call liberal education.  Aristotle says a polis should be surveyable, meaning that one should be able to see all of it, perhaps by standing on a nearby hill.  Brave New World gives students a nearby hill from which to survey their polis and the art of politics in general.

There are many other great texts or even good texts that can introduce students to the study of politics. Any of Shakespeare’s plays, but especially one like Macbeth or Richard II, would work.  Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which describes the genesis of justice, is another example.  The “Grand Inquisitor” section of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov describes many of the same paradoxes of freedom as Brave New World (this section has also been published as a stand alone book).

Nonfiction works as well.  Thoughtful journalists have written interesting reflections upon politics that give students a general sense of deeper issues.  David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise is one example.  Another example of nonfiction is Stephen Miller’s Conversation:  A History of a Declining Art.  Serious conversation is the essence of what it means to be a rational animal, and Miller’s book is a highly readable reflection upon it.  It illuminates the nature of politics as well as the nature of our humanity.

These are just some examples of readable works of fiction and nonfiction that introduce students to the essence of politics and their humanity.  Readers will have their own favorites.  I would love to hear which ones readers have like to use and why they work for them.

 

Also see “Ditching the Textbook,” Political Philosophy,” “Canadian Politics,” “International Politics,” “Comparative Politics,” and “Big Questions for Contemporary Politics.”

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John von Heyking is a Board Member and Book Review Editor of VoegelinView as well as a Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. He is author and editor of several books, including The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (McGill-Queen’s, 2016) and Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship (St. Augustine’s, 2018).

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