I’m happy to join a collection of lawyers, historians, and literary theorists in Literature and the Legal Imaginary: Knowing Justice, a new book in the Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature series based out of Cambridge University. My own chapter (“The Common Consent of Words: An Aristotelian Element of Hobbesian Legal Rhetoric”) shows how a 1637 summary of Aristotle’s Rhetoric paradoxically draws out some important developments in Hobbes “scientific phase,” during which he reportedly turned away from the rhetorical and humanist texts of his early career and tried to ground his political philosophy in demonstrable proof.
Category: Education
learning to be fair
My book Learning to Be Fair: Equity from Classical Philosophy to Contemporary Politics will arrive on bookstore and library shelves on December 10, and it’s now available for pre-order at your favorite retailers, including Bookshop.org and Amazon. Here’s the jacket blurb for a quick overview:
The language of “equity” saturates our contemporary culture. Human-resources departments lead workshops on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Progressive politicians advocate for “equity” in novel programs for housing and healthcare while their conservative counterparts decry “equity” as a revolutionary rejection of traditional notions of equality and freedom. By excavating texts from antiquity to the modern age, Learning to Be Fair undercuts the supposed novelty of “equity” and anchors it in the foundations of Western philosophy. Despite its newfound popularity (or infamy), in fact, the concept of equity stands as one of the oldest, most durable, and often most paradoxical principles of ethical and political thought. In Learning to Be Fair, Charles McNamara draws out the ancient origins of equity in classical Greek and Roman authors and traces their influence on lawyers, philosophers, America’s Founding Fathers, and even our contemporary culture. He shows how this history connects current debates about the role of equity to long-standing, unsettled questions about equality before the law and the possibility of teaching people to be good.
I’m happy to have had the opportunity to dig into this contentious terminology and provide some clarity about how and why we struggle with the ancient and modern ideas of fairness, equality, and the law. Here’s what some early readers have said:
This marvelously balanced, penetrating, and eminently readable interdisciplinary study of “equity” deftly grapples with the historical and linguistic complexity in the use of the word, and brings much-needed light into overheated contemporary debates about how to foster equity and equality in various cultural settings. The volume would be a welcome guide and companion not just for academics and students seeking to better understand the concept, but also for administrators, policymakers and legal professionals grappling with practical questions of when and how to bend the rules and for what purpose.
—Amy Uelmen, director for mission and ministry, Georgetown University Law Center, and lecturer in religion and professional life, Georgetown University
With impressive historical knowledge and moral insight, McNamara helps us move beyond the narrow confines of procedural justice to consider questions of substantive fairness. He shows us how the venerable concept of equity can provide guidance not only for today, but also for the future of our diverse and pluralistic societies.
—Cathleen Kaveny, Libby Professor of Law and Theology, Boston College
With Learning to Be Fair, Charles McNamara offers timely assistance to readers at every level who are struggling to understand the roots and sources of our present-day conversations about equity in the workplace, on our campuses, and in public life. Written in an accessible way that spares no effort to explore the richness of how our civilization came to understand and value equity, McNamara’s book belongs in the board room as much as the classroom. Every reader could profit from Learning to Be Fair as a guide to navigate these challenging conversations today–conversations McNamara assures us are as ancient as they are contemporary.
—Steven P. Millies, professor of public theology and director of the Bernardin Center, Catholic Theological Union
course correction at nyt
We’re in a tumultuous time in higher ed, so it’s as important as ever to keep facts straight about campus life and classroom culture. I’m happy to have had an opportunity to help with that effort—at least as much as one can in 200 tightly edited words—in the New York Times this weekend by giving some first-hand perspective on how undergraduates are taught at Columbia, where student protests have been especially contentious.
Ross Douthat recently argued that undergraduates at Columbia cultivate a “narrow list of outlets for [their] world-changing energy” through superficial, blinkered coursework in the school’s Core Curriculum. Amazingly, his column includes no accounts from flesh-and-blood instructors or students or … anyone. It’s instead built upon a glance at a reading list and an imagined method of indoctrination where students are compelled to agree with a course’s required texts.
I taught twenty semesters of Contemporary Civilzation (or “CC”) during my years at the Columbia Core, and my students were almost universally hard-working, independent-thinking, insightful, creative adults. They did not (and instructors did not), as Ross alleges, use the course as an opportunity to “simplify and flatten history” around the platitudes of contemporary political culture.
In Ross’s view, students in CC are brainwashed into marching in the streets for “decolonization” and “liberation” and “climate justice” and so on. Simply put, his view of undergraduate education is a fabrication—one I never encountered in Columbia’s Core. In my vast experience, students would use our authors as tools for interrogating the ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For instance, they would regularly criticize Frantz Fanon’s call for anticolonial, revolutionary violence as an echo of earlier justifications for bloodshed. Some would see it as a new version of Plato’s arguments for infanticide in The Republic in the name of “justice”; or perhaps as a new version of Machiavelli’s apology for self-serving assassinations in The Prince in the name of virtù; or perhaps as a new version of European conquistadors’ slaughter of Mesoamericans in the name of “civilization”; or perhaps as a new version of Robespierre’s defense of executions during the French Revolution in the name of “equality.” The list goes on and on and on.
Of course, some students—perhaps building on the American Revolutionary documents we read together—would find something compelling in Fanon’s call to meet violence with violence and to use any means necessary for the goals of national liberation and autonomy. Those conversations entailed productive disagreements about when, why, and against whom violence is (ever) justified in the pursuit of desired political ends. Perhaps in light of our own increasingly violent politics in the US, we should all be considering these questions more urgently. But to maintain that undergraduates thoughtlessly parrot propaganda that has been ideologically curated for them by the faculty—it’s simply unmoored from reality.
In the same column, Ross asks why students aren’t reading books about the “technological or spiritual aspects of the present,” but if he had talked to just one CC instructor, he would have found that dozens teach Freud’s critiques of technological progress in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” If he had picked up the phone only once, he would have discovered that Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism was a required text in the previous iteration of the CC reading list. (Hardly a monolith of “progressive preoccupations,” that reading list also included Carl Schmitt!) Over and above its fundamental mischaracterization of how undergraduate seminars are run, the column is based on sloppy reporting.
As someone who teaches occasional classes at Yale, which draws from a similar student population, Ross certainly grasps that Columbia’s undergraduates are—by and large—sharp, intellectually honest grown-ups. They are not indoctrinated political operatives as they are regularly portrayed in the media. Instead of pushing bad-faith caricatures of people like his students and colleagues in New Haven, he should entertain the possibility that it’s his views that have been simplified and flattened around the unhistorical preoccupations of his own political wing.