The State of American Liberal Education These Days
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written…
We Can Measure Educational Value in Words
E.D. Hirsch (the cultural literacy guy) has, I think, written the most important article on educational “outcomes” in a long time. The great benefit of education, “the…
Scientific Higher Education in America
So it is characteristic of us professors of political philosophy to neglect what is really going in the “hard” sciences. I remember, for example, being astonished that…
Should a Liberal Education Include the Study of Law?
So here’s my contribution to a symposium on “originalism” as the mode of interpreting the Constitution that facilitates the maximization of the libertarian value of “negative liberty.”…
Funding the Forecasting Failures of Political Science
There’s a distinguished political scientist—Jacqueline Stevens—who agrees with me that the National Science Foundation (NSF) ought to cut the funding for political science. The Republicans in Congress…
On Classical Studies
A reflection on classical studies, their purpose and prospects, will properly start from Wolf’s definition of classic philology as the study of man’s nature as it has…
Eric Voegelin as a Master Teacher
1. Voegelin presented himself as someone who knew his business and based on a solid conviction that Greek philosophy is the foundation of political science: the lecture…
Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities
Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. The crisis of the humanities…
Flattering the Demos: Fiction and Democratic Education
Storytelling is universal; a constitutive, definitive part of human nature.[1] We imagine our earliest ancestors sitting around the fire telling tales of heroic adventures and otherworldly interventions.…
Review of Flattering the Demos: Fiction and Democratic Education
Flattering the Demos: Fiction and Democratic Education. Marlene K. Sokolon and Travis D. Smith, eds. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. This edited compilation by Marlene Sokolon and…
The Mystery of History and Place: Radical Preservation Revisited
"We forget . . . that there is a natural history of souls, nay, even of man himself, which can be learned only from the symbolism inherent…
The Political Thought of Asia: A Contextual Pedagogical Essay”
The purpose of this course (and convention paper) is to call attention to the fact that political theory is rich in Asia, despite its heavy religious content…
On Being Educated
A friend of mine recently asked me how he should go about reading Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century English lexicographer, a man of many parts. I…
On the Reading of Books
On Thursday, May 1, 1783, with “the young Mr. (Edmund) Burke” present, Samuel Johnson remarked: “It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world…
Learning’s Legal Spirit: Montesquieu on Education as the Study of Law
The history of political philosophy is the history of education. Its content, its prospects, its goals—all receive copious attention, from Plato’s Republic to the Scholastics, from Locke…