Redstate

The greatest tragedy of liberal arts is that its teachers do not recognize the the value of a liberal arts education can only be properly appreciated as an act of cultural conservation, an act of discrimination and judgement. Now that that idea has been lost, the liberal arts themselves are in danger of extinction.

If I wasn't so busy with intro/service courses, I'd love to develop a course on conservative political theory--from Burke to Buckley (or maybe Bloom) or something along those lines. It would be great fun. I've taught Bloom and Oakeshott before, and if you consider Isaiah Berlin a conservative (I'm not sure I do, but he's surely anti-communist) I've taught him a lot as well. I've never done this in the interests of balance, since that's a terrible way to develop a syllabus (let's see, I've got two women, an African, a Latino, gee, is there an American Indian political theorist out there? Too bad, Mr. Hobbes, affirmative action don't you know.) I've selected these particular authors because I believed they offered a viewpoint that challenged student's prejudices. I love talking about Bloom's critique of rock music and try to get students to take the idea of "devil's music" seriously.

For me, the most interesting thinkers are those who cannot be easily pigeonholed into a conventional conservative/liberal dichotomy, as I believe our ways of thinking about politics have become extraordinarily rigid.

Part of this may have to do with the graduate program I attended--my two most important mentors could not easily be pigeonholed either. (one, a lifelong Democrat had among his admireres Karl Rove, the other mingles easily with ISI types as well as old hippie leftists) and I certainly read a lot more Tocqueville in graduate school than Foucault (not assigned by either of these scholars, of course).

I guess this is essence Bauerlein's point. A course like the one I envision would be valuable. But there are structural reasons why it will probably never be offered that are only indirectly a result of academia's political biases. Only a dedicated student who already had at least some familiarity with the canon could really benefit from such a course, and it's rare that political science undergrads ever get beyond that canon, if they take political philosophy at all.

Outside of a few prestigious universities and colleges, the liberal arts are a sideline, at best a pleasant diversion from the real business of acquiring employment skills. To get students interested in ideas, any ideas, is profoundly challenging. I do think the fashionable leftists are much to blame--they've done a good job of subverting themselves through preaching the relativism and nihilism so pervasive today.

The issue for me here, Pejman, which Mark touches on obliquely, is that neglecting von Hayek not only prevents students from learning his philosophy, it also prevents them from being exposed to his methodology. In many ways these courses are not so much about teaching students what to think about as they are teaching them how to think. Liberal thinking has been increasingly associated with a post-modern, theoretical methodology that has justly begun to get a bad name in the world at large because it has proven highly counter-productive--its insistance on subjectivity and considering historical texts and/or objects from an exclusively 20-21st century viewpoint have not provided any brilliant or lasting new insights to my knowledge. It is also highly politicized, in that its practitioners tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. The good news is that you don't have to be politically conservative to practice a conservative scholarly methodology--one based on contextualism and on trying to understand your subject on its own merits rather than as an illustration of or accessory to your theory--but you do at least need to know that such a methodology exists and while po-mo theory is king in academia, that's an uphill battle. When you're in this mindset you don't banish von Hayek because you disagree with his politics--you neglect him because it would never occur to you to include that stodgy old methodological stick-in-the-mud in your course. I mean, you don't want your students to actually think like that, do you? And that's the crux problem--academics are currently being encouraged to think in fundamentally the same way. Different theories are applied to the basic method, which give the veneer of intellectual diversity and provide a variety of topics for angels-dancing-on-pins debates in methodology seminars, but the basic tenets remain the same. That's what is becoming so sultifying about academia today, and what encouraging an expansion of standard sources would help to combat.

As a footnote, I agree that Berube is an interesting guy, but I'm not sure what Andrew Sullivan was doing in this article.

"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld

I was enjoying the article until the author went off the deep edge by siding with D’Souza that the left’s libertine ways caused the Islamic attacks of 9/11. I wrote about his bizarre notion that American conservatives should align with Islamic conservatives, here and here.

I appreciate the author’s central point about going beyond the issue-oriented popular writers and considering the men of letters: Hayek, Kirk, and of course, Burke. Even here I don’t think he goes far enough. At one time every educated student studied Cicero. Here’s a conservative hero that is a founding father of Western Civilization. I’d add Aristotle, who often gets second billing to the academy’s preference for Plato and his more utopian model. OK, while I'm at it add Aquinas.