[Note: Although originally written for the Master’s Programs for Autodidacts post, Dr. Forster has graciously agreed to let me use this piece for this week’s EW feature.]
Here’s my contribution for a do-it-yourself MA in political thought (I have a Ph.D. in political science from Yale). I should say as a disclaimer that graduate school in the liberal arts is not nearly so useless as MBA programs apparently are; you get a lot out of spending day after day discussing a liberal arts subject with other people who are studying it.
Most political thought programs start with Hackett’s The Trial and Death of Socrates, which collects four dialogues of Plato (the Apology, the Euthyphro, the Crito, and the Phaedo). This will give you an idea of 1) what philosophy is, and 2) why philosophy matters for the life of a political community.
Another good book to read at the outset, I think, would be G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. While it is not explicitly a work of political thought, it gives you a really valuable insight in to what paganism is (most Westerners just don’t have the first idea of how pagan people and societies actually think), what philosophy is (from the perspective of a critic rather than an insider, as with Plato), and what theism is, and how all three of these affect the way political communities think and act.
Then it’s time for the big plunge: Allan Bloom’s edition of Plato’s Republic. Make sure you get Bloom’s edition if you really want to read the book as Plato wrote it. Bloom’s interpretive essay is not required reading, but the textual notes in the back of the book are. You need to read this book with two bookmarks – one in the main text and one in the notes, which you should be following as you go along. The notes really should have been printed alongside the text, like a study Bible.
A common confusion about the Republic is that it is a plan for political reform. It is not that. Plato does not actually envision these proposals being enacted. Rather, the Republic is a meditation on the nature of human beings, specifically on what the root cause of the phenomenon we call “justice” is. What is it about human beings that cause them, and them alone among all natural creatures, to believe that their affairs must be governed by rules of right and wrong? Plato thinks the answer lies in the way human psychology is constructed, and the “ideal” political community he sketches in the Republic is intended to illustrate this.
For extra credit, you might want to read Plato’s Laws (a set of practical observations on the laws of Greek communities), the Protagoras (on the sources of virtue), and the Symposium (on the sources of sexual love).
Next up are Aristotle’s Ethics (sometimes called the Nicomachean Ethics in honor of Aristotle’s son Nicomachus, who collected and edited his father’s works for publication) and the Politics. I would recommend reading them in that order. Aristotle is such a precise and systematic writer that it doesn’t much matter which translation you use. If you find Aristotle to your taste, you might be interested in the Rhetoric as well, though it is a less profound book.
Optionally, if you are interested in pre-Christian Rome, you might want to read the Republic of Cicero and the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius. But no one will think you any less well-informed if you skip them. For a more lively portrait of political thought in Rome during its republican and imperial periods, read Shakespeare’s plays Coriolanus and Julius Caesar (for all Shakespeare plays I highly recommend The Complete Pelican Shakespeare).
Now you have a pretty solid overview of political thought in the pre-Christian world. The next big step is the cataclysmic encounter between Roman thought (both pagan and philosophic) and Christianity. If you really want to get the full story here, there’s no substitute for reading Augustine’s City of God. Yes, I know, it’s 1,100 pages long, but a lot of it is redundant and you have permission to skip whenever he starts belaboring a point. Make sure you get a modern translation (as opposed to the obsolete translations available on the Internet) in an annotated edition – Augustine spends a lot of time discussing things that were being said by other people, and you’re going to need footnotes to keep track.
As with the Republic, there is a common confusion of mind to avoid here. The Latin term traditionally translated “city” in the phrase “city of God” does not really mean “city” so much as “community”. Augustine does not envision the city of God and its opposite, the city of man, as distinct political entities. They are two communities that coexist within the larger political community of the city and interpenetrate one another.
Fast forward to the Middle Ages. The usual shortcut for covering this thousand-year period of history is to read Thomas Aquinas, who distilled the best thought of the scholastics – the school of thought that dominated until the rise of the nominalists at the end of the Middle Ages. The single most important thing to get here is the development of the idea of “natural law,” that is, the idea that God has revealed the moral law to all human beings through reason. While this idea was present in Christian thought from the early church, and also in much non-Christian philosophy, it was the medieval church that developed the full-fledged doctrine as we know it today. In Summa Theologica, in the “First Part of the Second Part,” read Questions 90-114. This section of the Summa is traditionally called the “Treatise on Law.” The influence of Aristotle – whose works had been recently reintroduced to the West after having been lost since ancient times – is clearly visible here. For extra credit, you can read Defensor Pacis by Marsilius of Padua, a 14th century thinker who took natural law in a more radically liberating direction.
If you want a more rounded idea of the political worldview of the scholastics, rather than just concentrating on the one aspect of their ideas that had a really lasting impact, there are quite a few editions of the collected political thought of Aquinas. These are generally arranged by subject, allowing you to check out whatever aspects you find interesting.
Now we come to the emergence of modernity in the 16th century. There are a lot of interrelated developments that happen at the same time. Here are the three most important for political thought, in no particular order:
1) Natural-law thought culminates in the idea of “natural rights,” that is, claims for certain kinds of political treatment (e.g. the protection of private property) to which a person is entitled under natural law. A history of how this idea emerged can be found in Brian Tierney’s The Idea of Natural Rights. While this is a history book rather than a work of political thought, it’s valuable because it establishes how “natural rights” grew out of “natural law” and remained an essentially religious idea. Lots of people have the wrong idea about this.
2) The breakdown of political order in much of Europe in the early 16th century, coupled with widespread fear that Europe was on the verge of being conquered by the Ottoman Empire, leads many people to think that the decorous moralism of natural-law thought just doesn’t cut the mustard in a harsh, cruel, and wicked world. Machiavelli is the major thinker here; while most people were revolted by the open amoralism of his book The Prince, that book’s powerful critique of natural-law thought was nonetheless widely influential. You don’t have to go all the way down the road to amoralism to get Machiavelli’s major point, which is that all other questions will be moot if you fail to secure the safety of the political order, which (he argues) natural-law thought fails to do. For extra credit, read the Discourses on Livy.
3) The Reformation fragments Europe into deeply hostile cultural groups. For a long time it was believed, for various reasons that were a lot more serious than most people assume, that Protestants and Catholics could not possibly share a common political community. The only thing for a ruler to do was to establish the dominance of one group and suppress or even completely stamp out the other group. A good summary statement of this kind of thinking can be found in Book IV, Chapter 20 of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion; much the same was being said in reverse on the other side. For an important dissenting view, see John Milton’s Areopagitica. Luther, interestingly, went back and forth on this question in a relatively short period; see the comparatively authoritarian Letter to the Christian Nobility of Germany and the (I think) comparatively libertarian Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed. In the former document he’s calling for German princes to ban the Catholic church and enforce the Reformation by law. When the princes failed to oblige, he wrote the latter document, in which he seems to have given up on enforcing religious conformity – though not everyone would read Secular Authority as being a real reversal of his previous position.
While these currents in political thought were taking shape, the facts on the ground were changing in another way. The printing press (which drastically increased the use of languages other than Latin), the fights over religion, and the increasing power of secular political authorities gradually led people to identify themselves more and more as members of larger political communities that we now call “nations.” It was during this period that people stopped thinking of themselves as Parisians or Nuremburgers or Londoners and started thinking of themselves as French or German or English. Over time, particularly in the 17th century, the boundaries of political units came to coincide with the nationalities of their peoples, producing the entity known as the “nation-state.” From here on in, the important political question is: how should the nation-state be governed?
The first really great political thinker whom you can unreservedly call “modern” is Thomas Hobbes. His Leviathan was written in reaction to the English Civil War, one of the bloodiest of the very bloody wars of religion that followed the Reformation. Hobbes wants to demystify politics – strip it of all the powerful religious and cultural ideas that people associate with it – and make it into a science. If people would stop investing politics with so much religious, moral, and cultural importance, then they would stop killing each other so much. Hobbes is an opponent of religion – though he was careful to claim otherwise, his hostility to Christianity is really quite obvious – and most of the arguments on the secularist side of our culture war are ultimately rooted in a Hobbesian view of the world. Hobbes takes the language of Christian natural-law thought and twists it into a wholly new shape. Make sure you read both halves of Leviathan, and not just the explicitly political first half; as you will see, the second half, which is a radically unorthodox interpretation of the Bible, is really just as important to what Hobbes is doing politically.
The next stop on our tour is John Locke, who also wrote in the context of England’s wars of religion (though during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as opposed to the earlier Civil War). Locke takes two major currents of thought that had been developing particularly in English thought, and gave them their fullest and most forceful expression. The first is the idea that there is a “natural right” to armed resistance against tyranny, and the second is the idea of religious toleration. The key texts here are the Two Treatises of Government and the Letter Concerning Toleration. Locke’s formulation of these ideas was transformative – the whole idea of natural rights takes on a completely different character when one of those rights is the right to defend all your other rights by force, even against your own government. And no one needs to be told how transformative the idea of religious toleration was.
There are two major confusions to avoid in reading the Two Treatises. First, Locke takes over Hobbes’s idea of a “state of nature,” which was a sort of thought experiment that Hobbes used to work out what the ultimate justification of government was. Do not think that this means Locke is following Hobbes’s thought. A few scholars do defend this view, but the overwhelming majority of Locke scholars (myself among them) agree that Locke is a Christian natural-law thinker who uses some of Hobbes’s ideas precisely in order to prove Hobbes wrong on all the really important points.
The other confusion to avoid is to think that the idea of a “divine right of kings,” which Locke argues against in the First Treatise, was the longstanding traditional political theory of the West. This is simply a myth. Divine right was a radical innovation introduced by power-hungry monarchs in the early modern period. At a time when kings were getting a lot more powerful than they used to be, some of them got greedy and tried to promote the idea that the king speaks with God’s direct authority. But this view was never the mainstream or majority view of the West; the mainstream view (as in Aquinas) was always that the king got his authority as a grant from the community. The catch was that this grant was traditionally held to be irrevocable; once the community set up a king, it couldn’t change its mind. Locke’s real innovation was to argue that the grant of authority from the community was revocable.
Locke’s thought was the beginning of what came to be called political “liberalism.” Obviously we’re using “liberalism” in a very specific sense, not in the same way it’s used in modern American politics and not in the way it’s used in theology. Sometimes this ideology is called “classical liberalism.”
Two more major thinkers are necessary to get a complete introductory portrait of liberalism. First, for the economic thought that was a crucial element of liberalism, read Books I, III, and V of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Don’t miss the intriguing analysis in Book V of how the behavior of schools and churches is shaped by financial incentives. If you’re interested in the issue of trade you might also want to read Book IV.
The other major element is the development of what we might call “constitutional thought” in liberalism – working out what kinds of political institutions would best put liberalism into practice. One of the distinguishing characteristics of liberalism is its particular attention to the design of institutions. The Federalist Papers provide a concise statement of the basic elements of liberal constitutional thought; if you’re looking for more, you might want to tackle Baron Charles de Montesquieu’s much longer The Spirit of the Laws.
So much for sketching a portrait of liberalism. All that really remains is to go over the major reactions against liberalism that have sprung up since it became the dominant mode of political thought.
The first really large-scale reaction against liberalism was Romanticism, which had its origins almost entirely from the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It’s very hard to summarize Romanticism, but a good beginning of a summary is that seeks to replace theistic natural law with a deistic moral system built on the conscience. For me the real heart of Rousseau’s works has always been the book Emile, which is sort of Rousseau’s version of Plato’s Republic. But it is more common for people to read his “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences” (also known as the “First Discourse”), “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality” (a.k.a. the “Second Discourse”), and especially his book The Social Contract, which is as close as he came to laying out a political program. For extra credit, American Romantics included Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson (start with the essay “Self-Reliance”).
Another major reaction against liberalism is what we might call political traditionalism. This bursts on the scene rather dramatically with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. For extra credit, read Michael Oakeshott’s Radicalism in Politics and Other Essays and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.
Still another is utilitarianism. The hard-core version of utilitarianism was a passing intellectual phase in the 19th century that gained little traction. However, John Stuart Mill produced a more moderate version of utilitarianism that continues to be influential to this day. Start with the short book On Liberty; for extra credit read Utilitarianism. Mill’s most enduring idea is that people with ideas or ways of life that are unusual or unpopular need special protection against the overbearing pressure for conformity; here we find another major precursor of the secularist side of the culture war.
Tempted as we may be, we can’t leave out Marxism. Only the “Communist Manifesto” is required reading as far as primary sources go; the basic ideas of Marxism are already too familiar, and are turning out not to be lasting very long historically anyway. But two major analyses of Marxism and its weaknesses are definitely required reading, especially since they are important for more than just their analyses of Marxism: George Orwell’s 1984 and Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel, particularly, diagnosed Marxism’s fundamental immorality as the fatal flaw that would ultimately bring it down. Extra credit assignments include Orwell’s Animal Farm and “Politics and the English Language,” and Havel’s play “The Memorandum.”
We’ve saved the most powerful critique of liberalism for last. Quite a few people who share very little else in common believe that liberalism can’t work because it leads people to want nothing more than lives of comfort and conformity, for which they are eventually willing to sell their freedom, their minds, and their souls. Get ready, because I’m about to drop a pretty lengthy reading list on you: Alexis de Tocqueville’s huge but indispensable Democracy in America, Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” See also Havel’s play “The Unveiling” and his essay “A Sense of the Transcendent.”
Greg Forster is the author of John Locke's Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2005). When not studying political theory in his spare time, he conducts empirical research on school choice as a senior fellow at the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. His e-mail address is Greg_Forster[at]Hotmail.com.
Other posts in the series:
- Bill Wallo on Graphic Novels
- Kevin T. Keith on Consequentialist Ethics
- Nick Troester on Deontological Ethics
1
Great stuff! I've skipped Rousseau and haven't hunted down Oakeshott, yet, and a couple others have been skimmed or are on the shelf unread, but . . . that about covers it for me.
Thanks for the note about Locke being quite distinct from Hobbes in his use of "state of nature." I think a lot of critics often miss this one.
Cheers!
PGE
2
This post is quite literally a Godsend for me. I have a very strong desire to go back to school to continue my education in political thought (my B.A. is in Political Science), but it is financially impossible for me to do so, and will be for at least another 2 years. In the meantime, I know what I have to do: read these books. Thank you so much for this!
posted on 06.03.2005 1:36 AM3
You might also want to include Hugo Grotius on that list, particularly The Rights of War and Peace. He has been called "father of the law of nations" for a reason...
posted on 06.03.2005 2:37 AM5
QD,
Nietzsche wasn't missed, Mr Forster suggested On the Genealogy of Morals.
6
Very good post excluding your comment concerning MBA programs. Your statement is understandable for someone in the liberal arts but there is nothing to say that discussing micro-finance loans for sub-saharan africa is a waste of time(which is what you may be discussing in and MBA program). Just wish you statement wasn't so emphatic...Everyone has divergent interests.
posted on 06.03.2005 7:53 AM7
1) MBA programs. I think your comment, in context, is a reference to previous discussions on this board. Don't rely on those. I have noticed an increasing tendency on liberal arts oriented boards (this is not a reference to your comment so much as an absolutely inane series of posts I caught on Matthew Yglesias's blog) to downplay both the intelligence of those in corporate leadership and high finance and the usefulness of MBA programs. Don't be fooled. Having been in a variety of public and private sector situations, I can say that liberal arts folks would do well to learn from those in the business world.
2) If you are going to read the Trial and Death of Socrates series, Aristophanes's "The Clouds" should be required, as well. "The Clouds" is a criticism of the historical figure Socrates from one of his friends and contemporaries (Aristophanes plays a central role in the "Symposium"). It is useful because the comic poet points out a lot about the character of "natural philosophy" and the philosopher that is obfuscated in Plato.
3) Where is Leo Strauss!? After reading the ancients I would suggest reading the works "Socrates and Aristophanes" and "Natural Right and History". The latter is hard to get through and Strauss references much that will be new to the reader (I didn't understand at least a third of it), but it is worth it. Strauss's connection with neo-conservatism has given him a bum rap in the liberal world. His interpretation of great philosophic works, however, is breathtaking and wildly insightful.
4) You briefly drop Nietzche and Tocqueville in at the end. Reemphasize those. Despite his popularity , Nietzche is still underrated. There are several wonderful essays in Tom Wolfe's "Hooking Up" that make wonderful use of Nietzche's uncanny prophetic prowess. Tocqueville is the simply the greatest social critic of the last two hundred years, anywhere. Pierre Manent and Peter Lawler have a few excellent books on Tocqueville that are worth a read, particulalarly for Americans.
5) Argh! Chesterton's "the Everlasting man"?! Why does everyone love that book?! I really, really, think "Orthodoxy" is a lot better:) It absolutely changed my vision of Christianity (though is serves a different purpose than the one sited above). Also good is "The Napoleon of Notting Hill".
6) A great translation of the Marcus Aurelius book mentioned above is "The Emperor's Handbook" by David Hicks and Scot Hicks. I think they nailed the essence of what Marcus was trying to accomplish (it is a translation, not a commentary).
7) Ok...I don't like him, but you cannot possibly leave off John Rawls--particularly if you want to be credible in liberal academic circles. "A Theory of Justice".
8) St. Thomas More's Utopia
9) Heidegger.
10) Hegel.
11) Nozick. "Anarchy, State & Utopia".
Neat list!
posted on 06.03.2005 8:51 AM8
-- Natural-law thought culminates in the idea of “natural rights,” that is, claims for certain kinds of political treatment (e.g. the protection of private property) to which a person is entitled under natural law. A history of how this idea emerged can be found in Brian Tierney’s The Idea of Natural Rights. While this is a history book rather than a work of political thought, it’s valuable because it establishes how “natural rights” grew out of “natural law” and remained an essentially religious idea. Lots of people have the wrong idea about this. --
Well I guess Allan Bloom, whom you laud earlier, is one of those people.
-- [Enlightenment] provides the structure for the key term of liberal democracy, the most successful and useful political notion of our world: rights. Government exists to protect the product of men's labor, their property, and therewith life and liberty. The notion that man possesses inalienable natural rights, that they belong to him as an individual prior, both in time and in sanctity, to any civil society, and that civil societies exist for and acquire their legitimacy from ensuring those rights, is an invention of modern philosophy. Rights...are new in modernity, not a part of the common-sense language of politics or of classical political philosophy. Hobbes initiated the notion of rights, and it was given its greatest respectability by Locke. --
Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 165.
posted on 06.03.2005 9:10 AM9
Thanks for your kind words. I'm glad to have been of service. A few responses:
PGE: I think the famous Locke scholar John Dunn put it best: for Hobbes the single most fundamental fact of the state of nature is that it has no enforceable moral law, while for Locke the single most fundamental fact about the state of nature is precisely the *presence* of an enforceable moral law. As for Rousseau: do not, I implore you, skip him entirely. Too much of subsequent history and political thought derives from him. If you find the explicitly political works unbearable, give Emile a try; it's a very different sort of book. I should also add that the real content of Rousseau's work is very different from what you may have heard.
J. Hagglund: Happy to have helped. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions once you get started.
David Marcoe: Thank you - Grotius is well worth mentioning, particularly since he applies medieval natural-law thought to the emergence of the nation-state in modernity. So he's an important transition figure; reading him shows you how natural-law thought adapted to changing political conditions in modernity. If I were to add a few more books, Grotius would probably be one of them.
JDM: Some context is necessary for my MBA comment. I was referring to an earlier discussion here on EO in which it was claimed that an MBA program is less valuable than two years of work experience combined with the careful reading of about 30 books. That claim was the origin of this essay, since EO invited do-it-yourself Master's programs in other fields. So the claim was not that the subject matter of an MBA was useless, but that the programs themselves added nothing that one could not get from studying the subject on one's own. My day job is at a pro-market think tank and I put a big dose of Adam Smith in my reading list, so I think my credentials are well established in terms of giving practical economic knowledge its proper dignity. I would like to be able to add that I did not intend to endorse EO's negative view of MBA programs, but I can't say that, because my brother did an MBA at a famous and highly-regarded business school just a few years ago and he reported exactly the same thing about its usefulness, as have others of my aquaintence.
posted on 06.03.2005 9:25 AM10
Well, two more posts came up while I was composing my responses - I'll have to go faster this time or I'll be sitting here all day!
See my previous post on MBAs.
I do love Aristophanes, and I guess since I assigned a critique of philosophy from the theists I should have assigned one from the pagans as well. Great suggestion!
I think the reason we love The Everlasting Man so much is that it transforms not only one's view of Christianity but of all human history - that was, as I indicated, the reason I assigned it.
As for Strauss, I'm sympathetic to many of his insights (Jon, it was Bloom's Closing of the American Mind as much as anything else that really cemented my love for political thought) but along with the good there are a lot of fundamental misunderstandings, particularly in "Natural Right and History," which contains some really abominable mistakes. This was one of the reasons I assigned Tierney's history book - he shows why the whole Straussian view of modernity is simply mistaken.
Nietzsche certainly is underrated, and on top of that most of his stuff is so hard to get a firm grasp of that most people are afraid to assign it. But On the Geneaology of Morals should be well within most people's reach.
As for Rawls, when I drew up this list credibility in academia was not one of my concerns - in a do-it-yourself education you don't want to waste your time with stuff that isn't really helpful simply because it's what everyone in academia has read. Allan Bloom's review of A Theory of Justice, which is in the essay collection Giants and Dwarfs, exposes just a few of Rawls's major deficiencies.
Similarly, More, Heidegger, and Hegel are valuable for historical insight into the intellectual currents of the times they lived in (like Rawls, I guess), but I didn't include them because I was focusing on works that I think are of continuing importance, and I just don't see them as making that cut (hardly anyone outside history departments reads them even now).
posted on 06.03.2005 9:39 AM11
OK, OK, I spoke to hastily when I said that hardly anyone outside history departments reads Hegel and Heidegger (I do think you can say that about More, however). That was too strong. But you get my point - their presence in political thought curricula is vestigal, like the appendix.
posted on 06.03.2005 9:44 AM12
Greg,
Thanks for the response. My concern with credibility in academia was not purely, well, academic.
Rawls is important because every serious student of justice eventually cites Rawls, and relying on secondary interpretations of Rawls, while easier, leaves one a bit handicapped in interacting with the works of his students. As a student of Locke I am surprised you do not accord his work more significance. In many ways, his theory is an assault on Locke.
The same with Hegel (Heidegger I will drop for the moment, though there is some utility in reading the smartest philosopher of the 20th century regardless of his ongoing significance). I am not sure how someone could read Marx without reading Hegel. More important to ongoing significance, contemporary philosophers, policy makers, and polemicists like Francis Fukyama and Richard Rorty are of ongoing importance, and their work is fundamentally related to Hegelian formulations of history. The distinction between historical man, natural man, and Natural Man is probably the foundational split among modern political philosophers. Aquinas, Hegel, and Darwin (or Carl Sagan, etc) are essential to this discussion. Maybe reading tons of Hegel is unimportant, but reviewing worthy pieces of his writings might at least give the self-taught political philosopher a primary source for historical views of man.
posted on 06.03.2005 9:51 AM13
Someone once asked William F. Buckley why he delighted in exposing the hypocrisy of leftists. He replied, "I delight in that which is delightful." Similarly, I don't accord much significance to A Theory of Justice simply because A Theory of Justice is not very significant. Even Rawls himself eventually realized how futile the whole project of that book was; if I were going to assign anything of Rawls, it would be Political Liberalism, a book for which I have much more respect.
I do not understand what you can mean by the statement "every serious student of justice eventually cites Rawls," unless by "serious" you mean "Rawlsian." Even among the political left there is a large population of theorists who do not take Rawls seriously. And of course outside the left Rawls is held in even lower esteem.
I agree that Hegel is indispensible if you want to know where Marxism came from historically. But you will notice that I included very little Marx in my list, and if Marxism is not worth in-depth study then you can't justify reading Hegel on grounds that it paved the way for Marx.
Fukuyama is greatly underrated; in fact, I think you yourself are underrating him - calling him a "polemicist" is unfair. If I were to round out the readings with more from the 20th century I would add his The End of History and the Last Man. But that book does not assume prior knowledge of Hegelian thought, and lays out for the reader basically everything he needs to know about it. Indeed, the book is useful as a basic introduction to the Hegelian view of history even independent of its merits as an analysis of democracy's role in history.
Rorty is also a good suggestion; I don't expect his view of things to go on being very influential for much longer, but his stuff is still a cogent statement of the case against transcendant morality. It's the modern American parallel to Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals. The book Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity is a good starting point.
I think you and I are aiming at different purposes - you want to convey the history of ideas, but I'm trying to give the reader what I think is of the most enduring importance. Rawls and Heidegger are certainly very important if your goal is to understand what was being written about political thought by academics in the 20th century, but if what you're looking for is enlightenment on the lasting questions of man's political situation, I don't see much of that stuff as relevant.
posted on 06.03.2005 10:22 AM14
Greg,
Thanks, again, for the response. You are obviously a really bright guy, and you are inevitably busy, so I will let your last word stand as far as my arguments go.
I maintain my previous position while acknowledging that you probably know a lot more about this stuff than I do. Have a good weekend.
15
Nah, I could do this all day. What's the point of a comment thread if not to keep it going?
(I see that I said above that I didn't want to be sitting here all day. Well, since I brought up Emerson before, how about "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"? Anybody here seen Next Stop Wonderland?)
And really I doubt that I know more than you do. I just think we have two different kinds of lists in mind.
posted on 06.03.2005 11:21 AM16
Thanks for the clarification. I just need to take part in more discussions to catch the carryover!
posted on 06.03.2005 11:47 AM17
-- As for Rawls, when I drew up this list credibility in academia was not one of my concerns - in a do-it-yourself education you don't want to waste your time with stuff that isn't really helpful simply because it's what everyone in academia has read. Allan Bloom's review of A Theory of Justice, which is in the essay collection Giants and Dwarfs, exposes just a few of Rawls's major deficiencies. --
That should be coming in the mail, hopefully today.
posted on 06.03.2005 11:54 AM18
This list could continue to burgeon but why not include some of Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum? This is somewhat of a compliment to what Marx deals with excepting Leo is using the language of the Church. Although Centesimus Annus takes some of the sting out of Rerum's clear devotion to workers rights and rejection of liberal capitalism it still gives us insight.
We could then move on to Abraham Kuyper but I digress...
19
Jon Rowe: You know, it's been a while since I read anything from Giants and Dwarfs. I'll have to pull that back out and remind myself what's in it. I do remember that the Harvard speech ("My fellow elitists...") is very good.
JDM: I must admit that it is a failing of mine that I have difficulty taking critiques of liberal economics with adequate seriousness. To my mind, the only one that has any real power is the one Smith himself presents in Book V of The Wealth of Nations - namely, the danger that in a commercial society people will cease to think. That's the purpose of his discussion of schools and churches, to which I alluded in my list.
posted on 06.03.2005 12:28 PM20
An astonishing post that leaves me debt to both our host and Mr. Forster.
There is so much here that is so, so good. I dearly love Augustine's take on the pagan religions in City...; I perhaps would raise up Marcus Aurelius a notch more, if only because his Stoicism seems to be one of those underlying themes in early American Civic Republicanism (not to mention that Calvin began with a commentary on that other Stoic, Seneca).
posted on 06.03.2005 12:28 PM21
Sorry to miss the Nietzsche reference. Blogging is bad for reading comprehension, I guess.
I would say that Hegel is important, but it's not so clear that it's so easy to get. I often find it bewildering, and I'm supposed to be an expert in those sorts of things.
If you were going to round out the 20th century, you'd also have to include MacIntyre's _After Virtue_ and Taylor's _Sources of the Self_.
posted on 06.03.2005 1:07 PM22
Please elaborate on the connection you percieve between Roman stoicism and early American thought. What do you have in mind? Is it that the stoics advise us to lower our expectations of what politics and other worldly endeavors can achieve?
Your remark about Augustine also moves me to clarify that when I talk about "paganism" I mean real paganism, such as was practiced in pre-Christian Greece and Rome, and is practiced today in much of Asia and Africa. It is unfortunate that American evangelicals have started using "pagan" to mean simply "non-Christian"; as I said, I think few people today really understand what paganism is for those who believe in it. (And I should also say that I don't use the word "pagan" as a term of abuse, but simply as the best available descriptive term for a certain type of belief.)
posted on 06.03.2005 1:12 PM23
Did I say Hegel was easy to get? If so, I certainly didn't mean that! Like you, I find much of his stuff incomprehensible.
If it was my remark about Fukuyama that prompted your comment, what I meant was that Fukuyama gives you just enough information about Hegel's theory of history so you can understand his (Fukuyama's) argument. In other words, it is not necessary to read Hegel before you can read Fukuyama. And let's all give thanks for that!
One thing that has helped me grasp some of Hegel's ideas is the section of C.S. Lewis's book The Pilgrim's Regress where John and Virtue are in the house of Wisdom. Remember, in Lewis's intellectual circle in the 1920s Hegelianism was the major antagonist to Christianity, so Lewis's "allegorical defense of Christianity" culminates with Hegeliansim.
posted on 06.03.2005 1:20 PM24
I do intend to go back for Rousseau, but in my teenage years of avid political-theory reading I downed my Locke and Bastiat and Tocqueville in huge gobbets, and found Rousseau seemed kinda thin and pale and unappealling by comparison. His influence makes it worth having read him, rather than knowing him only from secondaries, as I currently do, though.
Thanks for interacting profitably in the comments! I have learned as much again from that as from the list above.
I enjoyed the Lewis-Hegelian interaction quite a bit in my reading of Lewis. There's something of the quaint about it, these days, but as the Fukuyama connection (and I haven't read Fukuyama, probably should) makes clear, it ain't dead yet.
As for Heidegger et al, well, over here on the lit scholar side of things we're still having to take those guys more seriously. You're right that a "history of ideas" approach and a "touchstones" approach will come up with different lists.
What happened to, say, Hayek and von Mises?
Cheers,
PGE
25
PGE and Greg,
I didn't mention it earlier, but Peter Lawler's Aliens in America is one of the best reviews of Fukyama (whom he calls a "teacher of evil"), Hegel, Rorty, et al and the historicism / nature debate that I have ever read. If you are unfamiliar with novelist Walker Percy, James Caesar, or William Galston it is a great introduction to them as well. The whole theme is our "alien" or homeless nature (fitting that Lawler's middle name is "Augustine"). It is also a nice introduction to Lawler who is one of the lesser known members of the President's Council on Bioethics, but one of the two primary Tocqueville scholars on the planet and a darling of the conservative philosophy circles (with Mansfield, Scruton, etc.).
"What happened to, say, Hayek and von Mises?"
Hayek should definitely be on there. While they have dwindled in importance since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mises and Hayek could be a perennial intellectual guard against the dangers of collectivism and big government. That is one of the reasons I mentioned Nozick (a more recent scholar) above; but I wonder if a little subsection on modern economic thought (Smith and Marx not withstanding) would be appropriate. A little Keynes (very practically applicable), Friedman, and maybe even Gordon Tullock (Public Choice is THE best way to understand practical politics). I wish more theorists would read James Buchanan, Friedman, and Tullock. They have changed the world as much as anyone in the last century.
To be honest, one reader was also right that a study of the Popes would be useful (1 billion followers). Evangelium Vitae and a few other documents are really accessible, and though I haven't read any yet, I've heard that Ratzinger is prolific.
I agree. This has been a wonderful, civil, and enlightening discussion, Mr. Forster (and everyone else!). Thanks to you all!
posted on 06.03.2005 10:18 PM26
Great post Greg, Joe. I think I'll keep this around as a good reference for what I should be reading.
I'm hoping to be able to start a MS-IS and MS-ISA at GMU in about a year or so if my employer will let me and then maybe a few years later go for a poly sci MA just for fun.
posted on 06.03.2005 11:43 PM27
Great post and discussion.
I've bookmarked this page to use as a reference both for reviewing old favorites and starting new reading assignments.
Thanks!
posted on 06.04.2005 12:03 AM28
Thanks, John. I'm a Walker Percy reader and I have the publications from the Bioethics council, as well as an occasional interest in Hegel, so Aliens in America has just jumped into the "No, REALLY, you gotta read this" category, for me.
Again, Joe, Greg et al, thanks for a first-rate profitable talk on this!
Cheers,
PGE
29
Greg, great post. As soon as I finish my other multi-dozen book reading projects, I'll start in on this one! :D
BTW - I'm still wondering if there's such a list for the equivalent of a Master's of Divinity.
posted on 06.04.2005 4:02 PM30
Hey Mr. Carter, ever hear of SpamLookup? It's a really sweet plugin for MovableType that blocks all comment and trackback spam; or at least, it has not failed to do so in my 2 months or so of using it. It's not terribly hard to install either: if you can install MovableType, you can install SpamLookup. Download it here.
posted on 06.05.2005 3:04 PM31
Greg, thanks for that post which gives the essentials of legacy political science.
Yet, if we share the belief that even the masters of the past can be surpassed, I would suggest René Girard's "Violence and the Sacred" (even more than his celebrated "Scapegoat").
32
PGE: Rousseau, thin and pale? When I first read Rousseau it was like getting struck by lightning! Of course, I wasn't a Christian then; I didn't catch a lot of the blind spots in his discussion of religion because I shared those blind spots myself. For someone who knows what being in Christ is really like, Rousseau might not be so thrilling.
John: Fukuyama a teacher of evil? He's not Christian, but I don't think he merits that label. And if we're going to call Fukuyama a teacher of evil, what will we say about Hayek (see below)?
PGE and John: Actually, most political thought programs don't contain even as much economic theory as I've included in my list, because they don't have you read 3/5ths of Smith. So I was kind of pushing to include economics as it is. If you want even more, Hayek's book The Mirage of Social Justice (which is vol. 2 of a three-volume set that has a different title, I forget what it is) is definitely worth reading. Although the main reason I would assign it would not be as a guard against big government (I already have Locke, Smith, and Madison to do that) but to illustrate how the libertarianism of our time grew not out of Christian natural-law thinkers like Locke, as many people think, but rather out of the secularists, especially Hobbes and Mill. For Hayek, freedom is good because (and only because) people find it useful; it maximizes preference satisfaction.
And, for the record, I think everyone should read Milton Friedman, because he's my boss!
MikeT: If GMU is George Mason University, say hello to my friend Colleen Shogan, who teaches the presidency there. Her dissertation was on moral rhetoric and the presidency.
FC: From what I can tell based on a few mintues on the web, it looks like Girard's theory is an attempt to explain religion as the psychological legacy of prehistoric social processes - like evolutionary biology, but in this case with a different set of concerns. Now, I don't object to this on grounds that religion is true, because religion could be both a legacy of prehistoric social processes and true. However, I'm with Chesterton in The Everlasting Man: our only serious evidence about prehistory is what we know from early history; any attempt to reconstruct it on other grounds is only speculation, and is totally non-falsifiable. And what we know from early history does not suggest that religion is the result of social processes - just the reverse, in fact.
posted on 06.06.2005 9:16 AM33
Greg,
Lawler calls him a teacher of evil in his book. From what I understand this is some kind of Straussian inside joke, though the argument he forwards is interesting. In actuality, Lawler and Fukyama are friends.
posted on 06.06.2005 10:02 AM34
Oh. I didn't catch that it was a joke - that makes a lot more sense.
But you can hardly blame me for missing an inside joke made by *Straussians*. I mean, imagine what their inside jokes must be like!
Leo: "Hey, Allan, did you see Harvey's review of Harry's new book? Talk about a picke telephone screaming ice-cream oxygen station-wagon blue chicken!"
Allan: "Ha, ha! Good one!"
Speaking of which, the Weekly Standard had the best spoof of Straussianism I've ever seen. It's the Straussian Weight Loss Plan: "We teach you how to create the impression that you've lost weight!"
Since I've criticized Straussians above, I should say that I like Straussians - one of them was my dissertation advisor - and this is all meant in the spirit of good humor.
posted on 06.06.2005 10:28 AM35
Greg,
Sorry to say that there is a lot more in Girard than the prehistorical and biological explanation of religion. In fact it's all about sacrifice as a compulsion of mankind when things go wrong and the way it temporatily soothes a situation ; then it goes on to explaining both religion and social organization in the same move ; finally it ends on the ultimate sacrifice (Jesus Christ's) as the Way to end violence (and civilization ?).
But, never mind.
Thanks anyway for your time.
36
Leo Strauss opens his Thoughts on Machiavelli by calling him a "teacher of evil," so that's the joke.
CS Lewis' The Abolition of Man remains my personal touchstone and is available free in its entirety here.
Thanks so much for this post, Greg. I'm autodidacting on philosophy meself, and it seems I'm in the ballpark. Have enjoyed Strauss' Platonism tremendously, but Aquinas is next. Just have to put up with Thomas' love of the USA Today (lists, piecharts) of philosophy, Aristotle.
Will get to Oakeshott someday, I promise.
(Enjoyed tremendously Adam Smith's other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is also free
here.)
Again, thanks.
posted on 06.06.2005 9:14 PM37
CLEAR!
[*buh-whump*]
[*gasp!*]
Whew! Pardon me while I catch my breath after using the defibrulator to restart my heart; I went into cardiac arrest when you compared Aristotle to USA Today.
OK, that's better. Dude, you should warn a guy before you do that.
Those Straussians must have jokes even more esoteric than I thought, because (I think) I know what Strauss meant calling Machiavelli a teacher of evil, but I don't get how that would apply to Fukuyama even as a joke.
Beware of falling too easily into the Straussian interpretation of things. It becomes self-justifying and circular very quickly. One innuendo suggesting Plato doesn't believe a word of what he says would look silly, but a thousand innuendos, carefully constructed and with references to the original Greek, seem much more plausible. The innuendos then come off more like a "body of evidence". But when you examine any one of the thousand "pieces of evidence", you discover it's just innuendo. What's more, when confronted with evidence that the author is sincere, the Straussian just thinks, "that's exactly what we would expect if he were faking."
As I've said, I think the Straussians have some real insights. But be careful never to let any hypothesis become self-justifying; I think they do this more often than they realize.
Since you're a Lewis fan, just remember the line in the friendship chapter of The Four Loves about invisible cats.
I must admit I've never read the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and I should have. I'm given to understand that it's influenced by Rousseau's moral psychology (dividing the soul into reason, compassion, and appetites) but that Smith's theory is at least compatible with Christianity - not to say that Smith is necessarily a Christian, which I think the historical record doesn't decisively tell us one way or the other, but that his theory is one that Christians can believe without self-contradiction.
posted on 06.07.2005 9:01 AM