Political Thought Today

Here’s my rough description of my new course that I have to start teaching next week. It’s obviously too much stuff, and perhaps “the whole” only makes sense to me. So your comments are so welcome that I might even take them into account:

This course is an examination of contemporary currents in political thought. It begins with Richard Rorty’s vision of the achievement of our country, followed by Allan Bloom’s more negative and today’s libertarians’ different and more positive and productive spin on roughly the same understanding of today’s psychological facts. Next comes some searching criticisms of our displaced meritocracy from more traditionally American countercultural views, those inspired by Wendell Berry. For some distance and detachment, we turn to the deeper cultural and philosophical analyses of our friendly European critics Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton. For a more (but, of course, not exclusively) homegrown kind of critical detachment, we turn to Harvey Mansfield’s interpretation of American greatness as found in Tocqueville and even to the neglected tradition of American Stoicism (as described by Walker Percy and found in Tom Wolfe and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, for example). We return to foundations through an analysis of our situation from the perspectives of Cartesian, Darwinian (including both Darwinian conservatism and Marilynne’s Robinson authentically neo-Puritanical criticism of our Darwinism), and Lockean science, and we think about dismissing foundations (including Rorty’s allegedly antifoundational Christianity without Christ) through a consideration of Nietzsche’s BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. The goals of this course are to view critically and sympathetically multiple perspectives on who we are and what we’re supposed to do and to overcome indifference to the answers to the crucial “who” and “what” questions.