What Do You Desire? What Do You Fear?

These are the first two questions I asked students to answer in writing. At the beginning of the semester, I invited students to write simple lists of their fears and desires —without prompting them to focus on political significance—then share those items they felt comfortable revealing to the group. The political questions began as soon as we recognized patterns of fears and desires. Very early in our discussion students commented on the temporal asymmetry between the two terms. In fear they saw the anticipation of the loss of the present (and familiar), the inevitable fulfillment of our basic fears about life and death. By contrast, they underlined how desire more often than not takes a hypothetical future as its point of reference and thus does not command the same power ascribed to fear. As we returned to our lists over the course of the semester, we reconsidered the political salience of our fears and desires through the lens of our texts. Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan catalyzed this concern for the various politically ordering and disordering effects of the desires and fears of the subject: How do our fears become productive or disruptive? How do we imagine and enact political order for subjects with limitless desires?

My opening questions have roots in the proliferation of claims about fear in contemporary political discourse after the events of September 11^th. But they also originate in the belief that we need ideas of something better than what exists, i.e., that we should take certain kinds of desires seriously. The point of these questions is to accelerate a process of insight regarding investments in political thought and practice. The answers help us to identify and sometimes revise our motivations for studying political theory. After all, desires and fears are lenses through which we read political texts and the political world. Lenses themselves must come into focus in order to move beyond the naïve realism many students bring to the study of politics. Ultimately, these questions are strategically related to the final project of this course; they are the starting point from which students begin to develop their own original political vision.

I consciously give legitimacy to students' desires and fears at the outset of this course. Everyone has to begin his or her inquiry somewhere. And, isn't it too easy to use the term “utopian” to silence political arguments and suggestions that one either regards as naïve, declines to engage, or outright wants to suppress? To say someone's argument is utopian is akin to an ad hominem attack that denies the accused the very ability to think politically. Yet utopian thinking, by definition relating to critical distance, achieved in classic utopias in the character who reports on his travels, and dangerous honesty, the carefully framed and veiled statement about one's own society's deficiencies, can be critical political thinking at its best when it forces consideration of justifications, motivating ideals, and the possibility of change. Utopian thinking prompts students to examine the intimate connection between the normative (why?) and practical (how?) questions of political order. Moreover, students engaged in utopian thinking must find ways to outwit internalized practices of censorship, to push beyond the familiar, and to take a stand. On a personal note, as a political theorist with a Lebanese last name teaching again for the first time after September 11th, I was thinking a lot about my own self-censorship in the classroom, or, more specifically, about how to avoid it.

After September 11th, there was a dearth of voices willing to forcefully put forth alternative visions. Most of the students I have worked with since then have come to political awareness in the age of the Patriot Act and with the framing of oppositional voices and actions as punishable as terrorist transgressions or condemned as unpatriotic. At the same time they have been treated to a diet of sometimes absurd political discourse that breeds a disabling cynicism. What better moment than now to take the skills of visionary political writers seriously? If utopian writing has been a site of criticism in times of crisis, why not return to the discourse that holds open a space of political speculation and argumentation? I have come to consider utopian thinking not as marginal to critical political theory but as its very core.

The Interdisciplinary Space of Composition and the Non-Space of Utopia

I have had two opportunities to explore this claim: once as a fellow at the Gayle Morris Sweetland Writing Center at the University of Michigan where I taught a composition course, and once as an assistant professor of political science at Moravian College when I taught a special topics course in political theory.

Because political theory courses are traditionally reading-intensive as opposed to writing-intensive, I was faced with the challenge of making the process of writing itself meaningful to the study of political theory. While wrestling with my dissertation edits I had been thinking about the importance of writing to political theorists and about the work of political theorists as writers. My fellowship at the Sweetland Writing Center helped me develop these thoughts and prepare a syllabus and assignments for a writing-intensive political theory class. During the first semester of my fellowship, I attended a regular seminar with advanced graduate students and faculty at which we discussed the literature of composition studies and digested presentations by noted composition scholars from across the country, including Andrea Lunsford (Stanford University), author of The New St. Martin's Handbook, and Keith Hjortshoj (Cornell University), the author of Transition to College Writing. Although I had taught political theory as a graduate student instructor and as an independent lecturer, the range of theories, methods, and insights that have been developed in composition studies came to me as a great surprise. Just as I was leaving graduate school, just as I seemed at the end of my formal training, the Sweetland seminar provided me a new conceptual vocabulary to think about not just teaching writing, but teaching in general.

Besides an introduction to the “Writing Across the Curriculum” movement and its interdisciplinary quest, we learned how to resist “grading rage” (Keith Hjortshoj, 2001) through better assignments and different approaches to evaluation, how to support rather than suppress “alternative literacies” students bring to the classroom (Beverly Moss, Ohio State University), and how to think more carefully about the relationship between writing and reading as processes (Andrea Lunsford, 1999). “Writing has become a discipline in itself,” writes David Hamilton in his essay in College English (1980), “Beyond the obvious craft of it, we concern ourselves with how writing is learned, with the psychological and physiological activity of writing, and how it could be taught.” I can't do justice to the depth and breadth of pedagogical insight in this area here. For those interested in a bibliography of articles related to teaching writing, please visit Sweetland online: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/swc/pedagogy/swcresources.html.

In the seminar, we built our classes together with the help and structure offered by the Sweetland staff. It's hard to describe the excitement of a group of passionate teachers encouraged to spend an entire semester developing dream classes together. In the second semester, we were each given a section of English composition to move from theory to practice. I have often thought about the significance of the genesis of my course in terms of the interdisciplinary space of the writing center, a space apart from our respective disciplines and their imperatives. Utopia is of course also about a special space apart from a known and taken-for-granted world. Building on this shared spatial alterity, I also encouraged students to approach theorizing as a space apart but not disconnected from what exists, a space in which new ideas could emerge with fewer obstacles. Although developing all ideas is neither necessary nor desirable, too many ideas never see the light of day. Writing teachers must ask: How can we help the student delay the internal censor or editor who suppresses an idea before it ever takes verbal form on the page? Conversely, in mainstream political discourse too many bad and flat ideas get airtime. Their legitimacy seems to stem from the sheer familiarity of their repetition. In such a climate, one has to go far out, or even to the non-space of utopia, to figure out where one stands. And what mind space does one need to inhabit to produce a vision?

Like the political theorists of the 17^th century who hypothesized a “state of nature” in order to illustrate their notions of government's origins and purposes, the study and development of visionary writing promised students permission to speak more freely and to imagine a best or worst humanly possible society. Looking back, I realize that I wanted them to begin the process of theorizing by generating not just criticisms and reactions to the political writings of others, but instead by emphasizing their own potential to conceptualize, and perhaps even systematize, a political account of the world. Instead of simply choosing between political option A and B, I wanted them to give shape to the unknown option C in their writing.

At the Sweetland Writing Center, I taught in what I can only think of as a truly interdisciplinary space informed but not constrained by my home discipline. Disciplines, and especially political theory, stand in for various pasts, including the past of scholarly work. Further, they require that students pass through that past in order to be certified, in order to be able to speak within a tradition. Planning a composition course, I felt freer to put together quite a mixed reading list unified neither by period nor genre. Of course, we focused on utopias, dystopias, and manifestos, but we also opened up those definitions.

In the case of utopia, for example, we considered Theodore Herzl's The Jewish State (1895) as a political theory about a non-place at the time it was written. We read Batman—The Dark Knight Returns (1986) as a multimodal text (the textual and visual narratives of the comic book/graphic novel) about a nowhere place in which two concepts of justice, substantive and procedural, were battling it out. And I taught Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) as a 20^th-century separatist socialist utopian vision, driven by feminist thought, as a freer space to contemplate the social construction of gender.

English 125.42, University of Michigan, Winter 2003

I was lucky. My section of First-Year Writing attracted 18 smart and open-minded students, most of whom carried a motivating grudge or inspiration to envision another world. So we began to think of political theorists as writers and of writers as political theorists. In the process of building worlds with the help of questions, categories, and concepts we developed in readings and discussions, we also thought about how to best communicate in sentences and vocabularies.

Formal aspects of utopian writing came to our aid: genre illuminates rules. For example, it turns out that the passive voice is hell for utopias because a utopia, in the tradition inspired by the work of the same name by Thomas More, is by definition about human agency, about an ordered world given neither by God nor by history. Who does what and why is the sine qua non of utopian models of social order; the cost of losing the subject is too high to fathom for this genre of thought. And while using the active voice may not be a rule per se, expert writers and guides recommend it in many kinds of writing as the more effective, exciting, and energetic option. This energy matters to utopian thinking: in the active voice, the subject pushes the verb forward into the sentence much as in the creation of utopia the subject pushes action forward into a new world with new possibilities. The moment of creation or foundation is not the moment of refined, muted reflection the passive voice expresses by pushing the energy of the sentence back to the subject while emphasizing the object.

The emphasis on writing, and visionary writing in particular, also threw into starker relief the role of the imagination in political theory. I consciously blurred the line between fiction and non-fiction to highlight the political necessity of the imagination in conceptualizing the new or unprecedented. Consider, for example, how Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) emphasizes the importance of conceptualizing unprecedented aspects of political life: the unimaginability of both the Final Solution and an international court of law capable of responding to it is in her account a profound political failure. The court failed, Arendt claims, to understand a new kind of crime and a new kind of criminal because it relied on the categories of the law inherited from the past. Here understanding history itself requires the ability to give shape to new concepts and not to force new events into old categories at all costs. Writers of utopian visions model this skill by boldly giving shape to (as of yet) illegitimate desires or (as of yet again, perhaps) suppressed or derided fears and thereby offer their readers a new perspective on social and political reality.

Similarly, anyone who has read Niccolo Machiavelli's description of his own life of the mind encounters the interesting tension between his putative hardnosed realism and the power of imagination in his own analytic practice. In his letter to Francesco Vettori of December 10, 1513, Machiavelli (1985, 106) describes his retreat from the “malignity of this fate of mine” to “the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for.” Machiavelli, the theorist known for ends-over-means pragmatic arguments from within a worldview that derides attachments to static values and imagined kingdoms or republics, exits his humble existence, strips out of his muddy garb, dons dignified robes, and channels the ancients in order to distill his political insight. Isn't he a utopian thinker? He leaves his time and place to find his theory.

Think also of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who begins his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men with the following specification:

This is an old trick of the political theorist: “Oh, never mind me and what I say, I am just speculating!” These are the freer nowhere spaces of creative political thinkers. To reconsider our own present conditions and potential futures, we needed to get there.

That nowhere would also be a good location and vantage point for the study of the craft of theorizing, an aspect of political thought that gets short shrift in traditional political theory classes. Writing-intensive teaching draws attention to the processes through which political theorists give shape to concepts and arguments: How does the theorist notice things about the world—in the world or through the mediation of another text—and move beyond the initial impression to a theory? This double step of noticing and theorizing also corresponds to what many courses ask of students: to notice the previously ignored or unknown, to become conscious of oneself as the noticer, and to move on to a more differentiated perspective that sets one into relationship with others.

Writing Exercises: Three Kinds of Questions

Each class began with an in-class writing exercise designed to help students reflect on or shape a particular aspect of their vision. Typically, we reserved 15 minutes out of a 70-minute class for writing. Students collected their writings in journals that also included the required reading notes composed of three text passages and three questions for each discussion. By the time students started to concentrate on writing their own visions, they had compiled a significant portfolio of essays (often fragments of larger visions), quotations, and questions. I reviewed these journals occasionally.

Three kinds of writing exercise questions fueled the dialogue between existing and emerging texts: classic political theory questions, genre-based questions, and questions that surfaced in discussion. An example of the first type of question would be the following: What is justice? In Socratic dialogue, it is the question that is more important than the answer. Arguably, the role of a good introduction to political theory course is to supply an abundance of fundamental political questions that will remain with students long after the specifics of the texts have faded. Because utopian thinking requires a “from scratch” approach to political order, such fundamental questions are critical to setting an agenda and creating a visionary “to do” list of this kind: “We'll need to think about the structure of government, but also about how we imagine the political subject, and what the nature of the relationship between the two should be.”

Thinking through the freedom and constraints of a particular tradition or drafting a formal component of utopias, dystopias, or manifestos summarizes the second category of questions. On one occasion, students composed the framing statement that distances the author from her vision, just as More safely distances himself from the political vision and socio-economic criticism at the center of Utopia by introducing Raphael Hythloday, a sailor on a voyage with Amerigo Vespucci, as the always dubious source of the account of the ideal island community. The frame allows the author to speak to the deficiencies of his own world without speaking directly to power. At another time, we focused on the kinds of subjects an imagined political order would require or the audience students were writing for.

Finally, the class spontaneously generated its own writing exercises from meeting to meeting. This third category of questions ensured productive continuity between meetings. Whatever surfaced at the end of class—or in the sometimes even more fruitful discussions that occur about five minutes later, when insight starts to set in—could be picked up in the next class in the form of a writing question. One of the most productive questions was: What aspect of someone else's liberty would you sacrifice in pursuit of your own ideals?

Questions also focused dilemmas: students recoiled in fear from the collective discipline of More's Utopia and simultaneously were drawn to its promise of collective care and productive order. Until the very end of our work together, students struggled with the comparative merits of individualism and a more collective orientation. In their writings, they often sought new articulations of the space between the extremes.

New Words for New Worlds, New Senses for New Stories

Writing a utopia, like writing a constitution, is the creation of a new world through language. In this vein, we borrowed the lexicon, grammar, and rhetoric of our texts and wondered whether it was possible to say new things with old words. The point was to think about the challenge of deploying a familiar vocabulary to try to imagine the new, the challenge of bridging the gap between existing words and non-existing worlds. In addition, such questions forced considerations of the costs of political vocabularies—for example, how certain words can lock you into a discourse you would otherwise avoid. To what extent does the charge of a word reside in that word itself as opposed to in a given context or in a particular deployment? Examining the grammar of effective political rhetoric, we mined texts, such as the “Port Huron Statement” with its bounty of bumper sticker-ripe formulations, for structures that convey power and generate the energy necessary to inspire political action. In all exercises, I challenged students to send me running for my dictionary.

We took time in class to make lists of unusual and unusually helpful verbs, adjectives, and nouns in a given text. We read them aloud to each other to get them into our ears and to expand our vocabularies. Then we spoke about the overtones of a term, why it stood out to us, and what we could imagine doing with it. Next, we tried to write short statements relating to our own visions using this borrowed vocabulary. The results were varied. Some students had been taken captive by the language of their source text and had lost sight of their own communicative intentions, others had been empowered to speak with greater force and clarity, and yet others had been unable to say anything of meaning with their chosen words.

Another exercise required them to sit in one of Ann Arbor's cafés for half an hour and then reflect on how they made sense of their perceptions, what they noticed, and how they transformed their now more consciously selective awareness of the world around them into socio-political stories and judgments. The point of this exercise was to take note of the world more consciously. Moreover, I asked students to step back and to observe themselves observing others, to think lucidly from one thing to the next. The largest difference between students' reports reflected two separate constituencies within the class: those who read the world through what they see and those who read the world through what they hear. The in-class discussion of this exercise examined how different sensory relationships to the world condition the kinds of stories we tell about it.

Insights

When asked what they were going to do with their visions, this studious group replied quite earnestly: “Do more research.” Somehow that answer—a return to the search engine—wasn't the one I had expected. The class certainly met the goals it aimed for: better thinking, reading, and, most importantly, better writing. Looking back, I can see that there's a heady kind of optimism that grows while the visions take shape, a sense that transformation—once thought and written—is just around the corner. I'll have to follow up with these students in 10 years to learn about the afterlife of their experiments in theorizing.

With important exceptions, the final projects were strikingly gendered. This fact stood in stark contrast to the initially low level of student interest in the concept of gender itself. Many students assured me that they had been fortunate to be born into a post-gender world. I wasn't convinced, and their writing seemed to contradict the post-gender hypothesis. Without wanting to generalize excessively based on a tiny sample of 18, I found that the women in the class mostly felt more drawn to pursue the fulfillment of desires such as health, peace, and justice in their writings. One woman envisioned a utopia in which the gym occupies the center of community life. She mandated two hours of sport or play (not narrowly defined) per day as the basic requirement of socio-political membership in response to what she viewed as the collective deficits and individual suffering that result from a lack of meaningful social interaction and salubrious activity in the contemporary United States. By contrast, several women's dystopias were devastating in their treatment of sexual violence and eating disorders.

A majority of the men developed dystopias with nightmarish science fiction-inspired manipulations of the political subject. They played with the human-machine distinction, explored the engineering of collective life, and articulated anxieties regarding mind control. However hard we tried, we couldn't shake off the images of Star Trek's Borg, a restlessly assimilating cyborg species made famous by the movie First Contact—even before we gave in and watched the movie. The Borg, not surprisingly political shorthand for communism, consistently made our exploration of more collectively oriented communities more difficult. In discussion, most departures from anything but a strict ontological individualism risked a quick descent into Borgdom.

Manifestos work wonders for students who are categorically turned off by the idea of creating their own utopia or dystopia. A male engineering student deeply frustrated with and resistant to the fictional and imaginative component of the course wrote a knockout (retrospective) manifesto calling for an uprising against Alberto Fujimori in Peru.

Political Science 292, Moravian College, Spring 2004

One year later, I grappled with similar questions when I had the chance to teach the utopia course again as a special topics class in political theory in the department of political science of Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Bethlehem and its history—a Moravian community founded on Christmas Eve, 1741—became more and more significant as the semester progressed and students gained new ways of interrogating both the town and the college as forms of intentional community. In effect, Moravian College is an intentional community within the intentional community of Bethlehem in a larger context of Pennsylvania's various German Pietist settlements. As an eighteenth-century planned community organized around a shared ideal of spiritual life, Bethlehem itself offers surprising examples of how space, property, and the separation of the sexes can be orchestrated in new systematic interrelations.

Ironically, we gained access to the Moravians, the mostly ignored background of daily life for many students at the college, only through a field trip to the Ephrata cloister near Reading, Pennsylvania. For starters, there were the physical space and the structures of the cloister, the visible parameters and artifacts of the daily life of the community, including narrow beds with wooden blocks as pillows as the most striking reminders of the community's commitment to heightened consciousness in all aspects of life. But it was a series of letters describing the disputes over the practice of celibacy between the Solitary, as the Brothers and Sisters of Ephrata called themselves collectively, and the (non-celibate) Moravians that sparked students' interest in their everyday surroundings back in Bethlehem. On South Campus, student dorms face the old gender-segregated living spaces, the Schwesternhaus and the Bruderhaus, where unmarried Moravians lived. We also literally saw the familiar space of Main Campus from a new perspective: the third-floor panoramic views of Main Campus from our regular classroom offered a constant visual reminder of the disciplining nature of ordered space, of the habit-forming power of buildings and paths. Our view helped us think about the liberal arts college as a space consciously set apart from other spaces, but also emphasized our own daily life in an intentional community.

My ambition for this course shifted to conveying canonical knowledge of political theory in the process of encouraging visionary writing. Since I am no longer teaching in the interdisciplinary space of the writing program at the University of Michigan, I face a reversal of my previous challenge. Now I need to think about how to teach canonical texts to students whose attention is riveted to contemporary politics and not to political science per se or even to the classic texts in political thought. I decided to conceptualize utopian thinking as a method or strategy, not the focus or subject of the course. I also put a stronger emphasis on readings in order to ensure the inclusion of texts vital to basic literacy in my field.

Whereas the composition course began with More's Utopia, the point of departure for the political theory course was Genesis. To many students' surprise, the stories of Genesis went far beyond the vague accounts of paradise and the fall that they had retained from earlier readings or other sources. Reading Genesis revealed—in addition to lessons, gifts, and resolutions of conflict—many of the undesirables of human life: betrayal, injustice, loss of life, and destruction of communities. Later in the term, students drew connections between the darkness of Genesis and the problems that beset projects of human creation or even just the imagination thereof: the constant slippage from the ideal into the nightmare.

Genesis also gave us hints as to the aspects of life that might be ordered in the first place. Time, space, species, roles, names, division of labor, sources of legitimacy, and systems of justice come to mind as examples. How could we make sense of a cultural inheritance of stories about divine creation in relationship to questions of political foundation? What are we willing to take for granted? And what are the consequences of accepting a given starting point? These turned out to be much more serious questions than most students had imagined. The problem of the new and the beginning brought many assumptions into view and politicized the status quo of daily life.

When we did get to More's Utopia, I added selections from Aristotle's Politics to introduce students to teleological thinking, but also to consider where More might have stood between his religious commitments and intellectual curiosities: how much freedom or optimism regarding human creation could he allow himself? We watched “The Matrix” (1999) and read the passages on the cave and the divided line from Plato's Republic to think about how we know the world and the political commitments and consequences of different ways of apprehending it. What sources of knowledge, what kinds of information would they rely on in their own visions? We read The Communist Manifesto (1848) and asked ourselves why early modern utopias of space, such as More's Utopia (1516) and Campanella's City of the Sun (1602), are treated so differently from 19^th-century utopias of time. For the perhaps more familiar utopia of time German wordsmiths have so neatly coined the term Zeitutopie, and the French speak of uchronie, a literary or philosophical non-time synonymous with alternative or counter-factual history. What is an example of Zeitutopie? Arguably, Marx and Engels' 1848 work projects its alternative into the non-existent time of the future as opposed as to the non-existent space of the Raumutopie, the more familiar utopia of space.

Throughout the semester, I anticipated reading the final projects. These were some of the most rewarding assignments to read; I was continually surprised at the unexpected directions in which students had moved once they had left the shared discussion. Reactions to September 11th and the war in Iraq were shared concerns, but sexual violence and economic exploitation also made frequent appearances. The most complex of these visions, a double dystopia entitled Diplopia after a condition that makes the sufferer see double, offered profound insights regarding global relationships of power and the decline of mental health in privileged populations. For Linsey, the second-year student author of Diplopia, the world is divided. The oppressed have dreams and the privileged have nightmares. Oracles interpret all dreams as a system-enabling theology. While they rest their eyes on the truth, they cannot recognize it as such. The dreams that show the life of the other quite literally are instead interpreted as symbolic representations. Once an oracle achieves political insight, her gift is revealed as a disease. The resolution of oppression brought about by collective action cures the distortion of double vision. Diplopia has overtones of The Communist Manifesto's account of ideology, of Nineteen Eighty-Four's politics of surveillance and internalized practices of control, and of The Parable of the Sower's ingenuity in imagining new subjects with new sensibilities that condition new forms of community.

Whereas the Michigan composition group had been deeply troubled by the tension between their competing individualist and collectivist desires, students in the Moravian political theory group reflected in great depth on the paradox of unintentionally reproducing one's fears rather than one's desires in political practice, most notably in the case of war. The course turned out to be a diagnostic of sorts that threw into starker relief what ails, motivates, and characterizes different groups of students.

What Did the Students Gain from Studying Political Theory this Way?

The ongoing project of developing one's own vision meant that all texts had something to offer—whether one accepted the argument, rejected their account of the political subject, or found a way to position one's own project vis-à-vis a well-known model of political (dis)order. All assigned readings became relevant to the final projects, and the best projects spared no energy in documenting the relationship between the new vision and the readings.

Similarly, our emphasis on basic questions of political theory as well as the time we took for the writing exercises gave students more time to put together complex thoughts and to keep earlier texts (and even texts from earlier courses) and key writing exercises (desires and fears, for example) in the discussion. The productive slowing down through writing engendered more thoughtful engagements, and texts remained meaningful reference points, rather than quickly disappearing into the hinterland of the syllabus. The specifically visionary aspect of writing promoted a different quality of attention to text and experience as well as a more sustained approach to political argumentation.

Perhaps most important, the visionary writing process clarified political and intellectual priorities for students. For Linsey the visionary writing process unearthed an interest in pathologies as symptoms of injustice and might lead to further considerations of failing mental health in women from a socio-political perspective. Linsey's work also questions how the oppression marks the oppressor and how the fragmentation of political space and the isolation of groups impede political analysis. These are perspectives for her future academic career and political engagement.

What Will I Do Differently Next Time?

1. Launch students into direct work on their own visions early, perhaps after the first three weeks of class. In this context, I plan to make all assignment instructions available with the syllabus at the beginning of the semester.
2. Update my collection of manifestos to include the recently published Hacker Manifesto and the collection of young feminist writings nicely entitled Manifesta.
3. Design exercises that either take us to the college writing center or bring the writing center to us.
4. Expose students to composition theories and the history and motivations behind the current shape of the course.
5. Organize walking tours and introductions to the history of Moravians, the college, and the town of Bethlehem.
6. Open the doors of the Moravian archives to students.
7. Make greater use of email or applications such as Blackboard for comment sharing and division of labor.
8. Extend the introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary, which helped us find the history and unknown shades of words, to other library or online resources.
9. Find new movies. The Matrix is wonderful but overused in courses of this kind.
10. Where available, read autobiographical reflections on writing by political thinkers.
11. Finally, this year I would like to participate in the writing exercises and write a vision of my own.

Synthesizing Vision and Action: Peace Studies

One quiet afternoon, Alaina, a first-year student who had taken both the introductory political theory course with its focus on action and the utopia course, came to see me during my office hours. She had gone to a talk given by a peace activist at Lehigh University, located just across the river from Moravian. She emerged from this talk with a charge against the discipline: “The problem with political science is that it employs conflict as its basic paradigm.” I thought about this accusation in all its damning generality for a moment. Then we looked up the word peace in the dictionary only to find that it is defined as the absence of war or violence. Peace as a negative concept dissatisfied both of us. We decided to design a new course entitled “Imagining Peace: Shifting the Paradigm of Political Analysis.” Alaina wants a synthesis of the study of action and vision to be at the center of this course. We're working on it.