Category: Blog Post

My research this semester has focused on Hobbes, so I’m a bit disposed to find him lurking around every corner and behind every thesis. With that caveat, an interview published this morning at The Atlantic with Yascha Mounk really resonates—in my eyes—with some big questions at the center of Hobbesian political thought without ever mentioning his name.

As he relates in the interview, Mounk’s earlier research presents a declining confidence in demoncracy among economically advanced, liberal nations:

I started to look at whether citizens really were as satisfied with democracy as everyone assumed. And the results were pretty shocking. In the United States, for example, over two-thirds of older Americans believed that it was absolutely essential to live in a democracy; among millennials, less than one-third did. Twenty years ago, one in 16 Americans thought that “army rule” was a good system of government. A few years ago one in six did. And the figures are similarly worrying for a whole range of countries in Western Europe.

On the one hand, part of this research documents shifting preferences toward authoritarian models of government. For example, Mounk points to an alarming rise in support for “a strongman leader who does not have to bother with politicians or elections.” One motivation for these shifts, he argues, is a broader reaction against distant, opaque, and ultimately unfair governance: “People aren’t just unhappy with particular parties or governments; they’re increasingly pissed off at the political system as a whole. That makes them much more open to populists, whose core claim is virtually always that the system is rigged.”

On the other hand, there’s an epistemic dimension to Mounk’s thesis that recalls some of the scholarship around Hobbes’ scientia civilis—his “civil science.” Often seen as attempts to provide demonstrative, unimpeachable knowledge about how to organize a society, Hobbes’ later works (like Elements of the Law, De Cive, and Leviathan) apply standards of natural science and mathematics to politics. There are right answers and wrong answers, things proven and things disproven. (This picture of Hobbes’ later writings is admittedly pretty reductive. For a fuller account, the introduction to Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric is a good place to start.)

This Hobbesian confidence in one’s political positions—that they have been almost-mathematically demonstrated and therefore merit if not demand the agreement of all others—seems to be an important but unstated component of Mounk’s view of contemporary populism:

The point of democracy is to empower people to hold elites accountable when they aren’t being sufficiently responsive to their interests. So lots of democratic politicians run on saying that elites have become remote and that they plan to serve the forgotten people.

But Carter never painted people who disagreed with him, or who wanted to vote for Gerald Ford, as illegitimate. He never claimed that media organizations who held him to account were traitors. He never said that courts that struck his favored policies down were enemies of the American people. So what defines populists—and makes them dangerous—is the claim that anybody who disagrees with them does not have a legitimate role to play in democratic politics.

Once some populist leader who considers himself especially brilliant—someone who went to “the best schools,” say—comes upon the demonstrably Correct Answers to policy problems, the possibilities for philosophical dialogue or justified opposition vanish. Courts, newspapers, and those across the aisle no longer have “a legitimate role to play in democratic politics” aside from their capacity to nod in agreement.

I’m thrilled to be one of this year’s judges for the New York Classical Club’s Contests for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin. Our orators will compete for cold, hard cash—it’s open to students of all ages and levels, from grade school to grad school.

The competition will take place at Columbia University on Saturday, April 7, and contestants must enter by April 1. See the official advertisement for more information.

In yesterday’s New York Times there was a frustrating write-up (“Arizona Republicans Inject Schools of Conservative Thought Into State Universities”) about the new “School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership” at Arizona State and the “Department of Political Economy and Moral Science” at the University of Arizona. Frustrating for a couple reasons, actually: not only does it suggest that “the study of Western civilization” is the exclusive purview of conservative reactionaries, but it also shows how political entities like legislators and donor groups are successfully propagating reductive, uninteresting, and even misleading interpretations of complex historical material:

Their creation reflects a cultural struggle within academia, one that some conservatives believe requires government intervention to counter a liberal professoriate. Their goal is to promote the study of Western civilization, once a core requirement at many colleges, contending that a well-educated society must understand its roots — the Delphic maxim “know thyself.”

The new courses at Arizona State focus on Western thinking from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers and beyond, with an emphasis on free-market philosophy. They draw heavily from original texts rather than modern interpretations.

“There is too much revisionism being taught in universities today,” said State Representative Jay Lawrence, a Republican from Scottsdale who backed the new programs. “It’s a big deal to those of us who feel very strongly about a more conservative education.”

But many liberal arts professors view these efforts as reviving an antiquated and Eurocentric version of history, one that they have tried to balance with viewpoints of women and racial minorities.

A number of longtime Arizona State faculty members, as well as Democrats in the Legislature, also complain that the millions appropriated for the new programs could have been better spent. Steady cuts left state universities with $390 million less in taxpayer support in 2017 than they had before the 2008 recession, requiring steep tuition increases. “Here you want to create these freedom schools for whatever reason, and there are so many other pressing needs,” said State Representative David Bradley, a Democrat from Tucson.

The initial debate over funding the Arizona State program broke along party lines, reflecting the increasing polarization around higher education nationwide.

Years ago I lamented in the Wall Street Journal a similar and unfortunate conflation of politics and course design, and I stand by my belief that “politics don’t have to dictate curriculum.” As then, I’m again struck by the way someone like Representative Lawrence seems to think that a course of study that includes Plato’s Republic, Thucydides, Smith, and Tocqueville is “a more conservative education.” In fact, it’s deeply, deeply misguided to view these texts as the backbone of some uncomplicated right-of-center political philosophy. For all its glorifying of man’s rational abilities, Plato’s social model is a broadly collectivist one. Even as he observes the economic benefits of productive labor, Smith (a complex thinker who wrote more than The Wealth of Nations) nevertheless says the desire for luxury goods often arises from a “base and selfish disposition.” And Tocqueville, while cautiously optimistic about the American experiment, has no shortage of critical words for American individualism.

If these authors had simple messages that mapped neatly onto twenty-first century political ideologies, we wouldn’t be reading them anymore. Their texts are complicated, paradoxical, revelatory, counterintuitive, and often just plain wrong. Figuring out when and how is (still) the task we pursue in the academy.

It’s not clear who is most to blame for this sloppy pairing of curriculum and party: either the Times for framing some new European history classes as “injecting conservative thought” into universities, or Arizona legislators for politicizing curricular development in the service of reactionary Republicanism. The Times rightly notes that the Arizona State program includes “contrasting approaches,” and a quick browse through its course catalog shows that readings include not just Smith but Piketty, not just free markets but inequality. (I do worry, however, that universities are becoming competive battlegrounds for powerful donor groups, a scenario hinted at in the Times article.)

More generally, people of various political dispositions continue to misunderstand the fundamental aims of the academic enterprise. State legislators evidently lust for a study of Aristotle and Cicero that leads into a teleological triumph of Randian conservatism. And the Times bolsters the suspicion that any study of old books can be nothing other than a kind of right-wing brainwashing. How unfortunate that the whole situation reflects “the increasing polarization around higher education nationwide.”