Comments on: Teaching Political Philosophy Right

By: Stephen Fetchit

Stephen Fetchit — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 03:24:10 +0000

“Are you kidding? I cut him from my last political philosophy syllabus because he wasn’t black enough.” Sho nuf, Boss, We done gonna get you some real black folks, ya sir, some real ones, with rythim.

By: PrestoPundit

PrestoPundit — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 06:47:43 +0000

Or, for more on Hayek, click here.

By: PrestoPundit

PrestoPundit — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 06:44:40 +0000

Let me try again. Find more on hayek here: http://www.hayekcenter.org/friedrichhayek/hayek.html

By: PrestoPundit

PrestoPundit — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 06:42:28 +0000

Why no Hayek? Let me take a stab at that onr. No Hayek because Hayek doesn’t fit into the simple (minded) boxes of contemporary analytic philosophy. No Hayek because nearly universally philosophers are Democrats and/or folks on the left, and they have little personal interest in things non-left—and no competitive incentive to acquire such knowledge. No Hayek because Hayek requires multi-disciplinary understanding and scholarship, which is not rewarded in academia, and therefore widely lacking. No Hayek because Hayek opposed and argued against almost all of the great fallacies adopted by philosophers in the last 50 years—e.g. positivism, logicism, justificationism, socialism, behaviorism, scientism, naive rationalism and naive empiricism, and on an on. No Hayek because work on Hayek won’t advance your career, there is no “Hayek fashion” to drive Hayek research—and work which is taught is usually work which helps with generating publications. Well, that’s a start. Find more on Hayek here.

By: harry

harry — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 15:04:16 +0000

You mean Liberalism Beyond Justice. Yes, that’s great, and I like a lot of Tomasi’s stuff. And so Schmidtz’s first book on public goods justifications of authority—which I used a couple of times, but then went out of print too quickly. I didn’t know he had another in the works, so I’ll look forward to that. bq. using Friedman is nice, but a bit on the straw-mannish side as far as showing the students an actual coherent philosophical case for libertarianism Well, there are straw men and straw men, no? I tend to use Lomasky too, so I feel I am covered, but the think Friedman does is interesting because he shares with egalitarians a view about why it matters that people have freedom over their own decision-making, but then departs on his conception of freedom. I guess I probably do a lot of the philosophical work in presenting him to make the view as plausible as possible, but I don’t feel (when I do so) that I am misrepresenting the text—just adding to it. And the reason I like it so much is that those first couple of chapters are followed by real institutional discussions, some of which have had real impact (negative income tax, school vouchers, etc).

By: Jeremy Pierce

Jeremy Pierce — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 03:20:06 +0000

I suspect the fact that he is a black, conservative who was trained as an economist means that he will almost never be taught in a philosophy course. I taught Sowell’s response to The Bell Curve just this morning, though I didn’t assign any reading by him. On race issues in general, at least in an introductory course, there’s not a lot by analytical philosophers that I see focusing on the main issues important to me.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 21:45:20 +0000

I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest the two political philosophers on the faculty of the seminar I run for Grad students each summer at UVA: I recommend Arizona’s David Schmidtz… The Limits of Government and his point/counterpoint with Robert Goodin, Individual Resposibility and Social Welfare. His forthcoming Elements of Justice should be very good. Or at least I’m very much looking forward to it. And John Tomasi’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Of course, neither is conservative, but I think with Lomasky they are the most sophisticated libertarians out there.

By: Aeon J. Skoble

Aeon J. Skoble — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 19:20:53 +0000

Also, Harry, using Friedman is nice, but a bit on the straw-mannish side as far as showing the students an actual coherent philosophical case for libertarianism. Besides the neo-Aristotelians I mentioned above, your students would find much richer an analysis, this time from a contractarian perspective, from Jan Narveson’s book The Libertarian Idea. That’s in print too.

By: Aeon J. Skoble

Aeon J. Skoble — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 19:15:11 +0000

Baa says: “I don’t know if anyone’s bringing virtue ethics and Aristotle into political philosophy, but that seems like a good one to start with.” Um, yes. There is a whole cadre arguing that an Aristotelian moral framework can coherently ground (classical) liberal politics. Doug Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl have co-authored several comprehensive books arguing this in rigorous detail. Liberty and Nature is sort-of out-of-print, though when I ordered it for my class this semester I discovered that it’s available-on-demand, and their new book, Norms of Liberty should be out next season. Others working in the same general direction include F. Miller, T. Machan, R. Long, T. Smith, my humble self, and others I’m too sleep-deprived to think of but ought to.

By: Nate Oman

Nate Oman — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 17:42:45 +0000

I actually think that this is one reason why legal theory can be—in some ways—a better place for thinking and learning about political theory than political philosophy courses. The theoretical and disciplinary anarchy of the legal academy since the collapse of pure doctrinal scholarship has led to a proliferation of badly done and half baked attempts by legal academics to do philosophy, economics, or the like. On the other hand, top notch legal theorists are, I think, more likely to be aware of developments in cognate disciplines than are philosophers. Disciplinary focus has the advantage of providing methodological sophistication, but it can also breed insularity. For example, I was recently having a discussion with a very smart philosophy professor who stopped to ask what Pareto optimality was. I was a bit shocked. Even those who subscribe to the law-and-economics-is-a-vast-right-wing-boon-doggle wing of the legal academy cannot afford to be ignorant of basic concepts in welfare economics. You can’t make sense of most of the upper level discussions in the legal literature without having at least a simple working knowledge of political philosophy and economics. This means that legal scholars are much less inhibited about transgressing disciplinary boundaries to find a broad spectrum of ideological perspectives. The draw back, of course, is that pedgogically most law students are uninterested in looking at the theoretical or normative foundations of the law, which is where the kind of discussion bearing a resemblence to political philosophy is likely to occur. On the other hand, at top law schools, I think that the students are interested in such discussions and they benefit from the permeability and anarchy of their chosen discipline.

By: DJW

DJW — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:37:14 +0000

What a wonderful discussion. I, like Russell Arben Fox, tend to do more historical teaching than contemporary, so it’s easy to just use Burke. And this as a compliment that students really seem to enjoy: http://homepages.luc.edu/~mparks1/Revolution/FR/docs/VillagePolitics.html Teaching conservative thought against the backdrop of the French Revolution is both a good and bad. Good, because a quick glance at history suggests the conservatives were really on to something. Bad, though, because it seems a bit dated, and some of the less sharp students get the idea in their heads that all reforms are fine with conservatives as long as they’re done gradually and peacefully. The one contemporary political theory course I’ve done was even more contemporary than Harry’s Rawls-Nozick-Dworkin-feminist approach. I began with IM Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference and from there we read commentaries that extended or critiqued various arguments/issues from that book (Fraser, Taylor, Okin and respondents, Tully, Kymlicka, Jacob Levy). I didn’t have a proper conservative in the course, but it became clear that with respect to multiculturalism, there was a tentative alliance between a conservative and a certain kind of ‘left’ position that cultures have some kind of value in themselves, beyond providing resources for individuals, and a strongly individualist liberal position (Okin). But I’d love to add a proper conservative to the reading list if I ever do it again. On John Kekes—has anyone used him in the classroom? Is he any good?

By: harry

harry — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:02:55 +0000

If anyone looks at this again (so much has happened, and I was busy from the moment after I made the original post yesterday), thanks. I do use Hayek, and should have mentioned that—and agree with whoever said that he feels ahead of his time—more contemporary in some ways that Friedman or 1971 Rawls. He’s not an analytic philosopher, nor is Sowell, but that’s one of my points really—that I have learened the need to look beyond my narrow discipline to get this stuff. I’ve also used Sowell, in a contemporary moral issues course, on affirmative action—but dropped the issue because I found both the pro and anti AA literature so unsatsifactory (as opposed to the pro- and anti- abortion literature, both of which have terrific instances). baa’s point is very interesting. I teach a contemporary political philosophy course as part of a division of labour—when AL teaches the coourse it’s historical, and when I teach it it’s contemporary, which works out well. IF we had a better structured major (one in which there was an incentive to take more than one couorse in political philosophy, or in metaphysics, or whatever), we’d sequence them. Jimmy, not to embarrass your colleague, but he has quite a fan club here in Madison—4 of us each harboured an independently-arrived-at admiration for that book, and we only found out by accident. He might not want it revealed since among the 4 one is a Marxist, two are extreme left liberals, and one is a left liberal… Oh, and I agree with all CB’s points (including the joke). I suppose the insight about distributive justice versus the problem of obligation explains part of what I do—I get away from issues of distributive justice when introducing conservative ideas. The left-right communitarian issue is interesting. It is also the case that lots of left or liberal thinkers have particular conservative ideas—I think that’s true of Raz, eg, and Kymlicka—so its not as if in teaching them we neglect conservtive ideas, its just that we neglect conservatives.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 23:00:14 +0000

I’m not at all an academic, but I’ve thought that, if “normative political philosophy” has to do with the elaboration of theories of rights or right, when it comes to any actual application of such concepts, they prove to be rather under-determined- “epistemic illusion” is how I term this-, not just because real politics is a down-and-dirty business, but because of the complexity of matters, with the intrusion of economic and legalistic considerations as well as other institutional, organizational and contextual matters. And as a commenter already noted, conservatives tend to concern themselves less with rights as a starting point in political matters, taking their bearings variously from the likes of “authority”, “tradition”, or functional considerations in defending and upholding the status quo or status quo ante. And in political arguments, not only do people routinely argue past one another, the the crucial “burden of proof” criterion becomes a volleyball. Furthermore, if the proper task of philosophy is the generalized elucidation of matters, shouldn’t “political philosophy” concern itself with elucidating the scope and nature or constitution of the political realm and of political speech and action? In that case, it would not be a matter of a commitment to a particular position, although extra-philosophically or existentially such commitments are perfectly allowable, but of situating various positions within the political realm, in relation to each other, but also in terms of how various positions themselves construe the political realm and its stakes and thus the implications of this latter for the political realm. And any full consideration of politics would have to concern itself not just with “rights” and “legitimate authority”, but also crucially with the virtually unfathomable question of the nature and operations of power, which may or may not have much to do with any thematic question of “legitimacy”. As for recommendations, what of the work of Hannah Arendt? She wrote copiously in English, no? And she does not map readily onto any conventional spectrum of conservative, liberal or leftist, nor, for that matter, of individualist or communitarian. How about “The Human Condition” and her essay on the Pentagon Papers, “On Political Lying”? This latter is still topical, eh?

By: bza

bza — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 22:05:55 +0000

sebastian holdsclaw: But I suspect the fact that he is a black, conservative who was trained as an economist means that he will almost never be taught in a philosophy course. Are you kidding? I cut him from my last political philosophy syllabus because he wasn't black enough.

By: Chirag Kasbekar

Chirag Kasbekar — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 21:11:17 +0000

Sorry—“Why I am not a conservative”…