Institutional Considerations

In modern American universities, there are three educational nodal points that command our attention and our resources: Ph.D. programs, M.A. programs, and Undergraduate programs. The students in these different kinds of programs arrive at the university with different aspirations; and the faculty members who teach them generally understand their task to be different as well. Or rather, those tasks should be somewhat different. Today, they are increasingly mixed together; but let us return to that in a moment.

The Ph.D. program has as its purpose the reproduction of the discipline. It is the location where the inner secret of the university—that it is, finally, a feudal institution, whose success depends on a student’s apprenticeship with a mentor, through whom is achieved prudential knowledge concerning what constitutes good taste in thinking^{Footnote 6}—is laid bare. Ph.D. programs are, consequently, expensive to build and maintain. Like the pin-making guilds that Adam Smith sought to undermine in the opening chapters of The Wealth of Nations,^{Footnote 7} they are inefficient but reliable fora through which—to use aristocratic language appropriate to the feudal age—the image of “the fathers” is reproduced in “the sons.”

In Ph.D. programs, guild-masters and apprentices have in mind the craft-product they produce: the journal article or the university press book, whose audience is other guild-members. As guild membership grows, the bar must necessarily be lowered, so that more may join in the conversation. In proportion as this happens, the task within the guild subtly shifts. In graduate schools even a generation ago, it was uncommon for students of political theory to gather together to read each others' work. More often, if they gathered together, it was to consider Plato, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the other canonical figures. The secondary literature was of secondary importance. Today, more often than not, graduate students gather to read each others' work rather than the canonical authors. The secondary literature, which carves out smaller problems and projects, occupies their attention a great deal more than it did for earlier generations. And that is, in part, because graduate students today are under immense pressure from their mentors—most of whom know that their students are as yet ill-equipped—to produce “scholarship” while still in graduate school. Such “scholarship” cannot possibly concern itself with big questions or issues. Who, after all, has the time to consider those questions in the grueling race to complete a Ph.D. in four or five years, while being driven to have something publishable or already published to show for it? The agonistic disposition of generations past, which presupposed that graduate students stood before canonical authors as sinners did, unworthy, before an angry God—and needed to be reminded of that, publicly—has been replaced by a heart-swelling desire of workshop participants and conference attendees to offer “constructive criticism,” the aim of which is to help “a paper” become “better.” The “literature” of political theory swells with article after article praising agonism; the habits of political theorists, however, betray a contrary sentiment that seeks only accord and conciliation.

This increasingly cautious and conservative guild reproduction is something about which to be concerned. Notwithstanding much warranted criticism, however, we should not forget that it has been because of independent disciplinary guilds that universities in America have flourished. Elsewhere around the globe, there is ample evidence of what happens when they get undermined. In Iraq, for example, the destruction of these disciplinary guilds by the Ba’ath regime from the 1970s onward undermined what was once arguably the best university-system in the Middle East. Today, more than a decade after the Ba’ath regime was destroyed, every text book and every course syllabus in Iraqi public universities must still be approved by the Ministry of Higher Education in Baghdad. A vibrant journal and university press culture are nowhere to be found. Without these, and the disciplinary guilds they presuppose, universities cannot flourish, and Iraqi higher education cannot be rebuilt—no matter how many faculty exchange programs the U.S. State Department organizes. In Iraq, the habit of guild-destroying centralization remains, long after the facts on the ground that produced it have disappeared.

Are faculty guilds also endangered in American universities? There is, to be sure, growing government involvement in their affairs. This should worry us a great deal, for as the money flow increases, it will only be a question of time before government officials require that federal funds be spent more expeditiously. How the humanities as a whole will fare under such an arrangement is not difficult to discern: certain ideas and self-understandings will win out over others, and professors who teach the government approved textbooks ^{Footnote 8} will receive relatively secure contracts, while other prospective faculty members inclined to protest never get hired in the first place. I doubt that this development will appear in the United States in the form of explicit government directives, or that it will happen soon. In some distant future when it does happen, it will likely occur because of a shift in the mental habits of all those charged with the stewardship of American universities, and will be accelerated by the educational accrediting agencies, which mediate the relationship between the government and the academy—and which, with each ten-year cycle, require more and more in the way of “compliance.” When the government gives little to the academy, little will be expected; when it gives a great deal, an accounting will be necessary. With the ever-increasing involvement of the government in academic life, it is only a matter of time before post-K–12 education has a “Common Core,” authorized and maintained by the government, as well.

As political pressures mount, then, we would do well to remember that the disciplinary guilds we seek to reproduce in our Ph.D. programs are a bulwark against political tyranny. For these guilds to work well, however, they must be self-policing and either immune to capture by parochial interests or able to self-correct if captured. It is no secret, however, that the disciplinary guild clearing-houses—namely, the flagship journals and university press outlets—are in the midst of their own reckoning, which must be squarely faced or else, someday, university administrators are going to establish other criteria for tenure—should tenure be granted at all. This reckoning has two aspects, which arise from the problem I described earlier, namely, that political theory has become the craft of collection specialists. Here, I will only name its aspects, and leave it for others to elaborate. First, there is what could be called the problem of connoisseurship and the breakdown of the review. Second, there is the growing problem of hermetically sealed epistemic communities. Both of these have emerged, paradoxically, at a moment when political theorists are publishing more than ever before, and fewer and fewer scholars or members of the reading public find what they write timely or important, let alone penetrating and profound. Any number of tenured and tenure-track faculty may be satisfied with this current configuration, but university administrators, Boards of Regents, and elected officials at the state and national level are increasingly dubious about the works produced by the guilds in the humanities as a whole, and in political theory in particular.

Before turning to Undergraduate programs, the consideration of which will shed additional light on the problems raised here, let me note, with a few summary observations, a second distinct educational nodal point: the M.A. program. Unlike the Ph.D. program, which is held together as a guild through journal and university press book publication, the M.A. program offers a specific set of career skills for those who will soon enter a profession, or for those already within one. Students learn from faculty members, though not with a view to becoming one. Where Ph.D. programs are underwritten largely by graduate schools within universities, M.A. programs are generally “full-freight” for those students enrolled in them—a fact that has prompted administratively top-heavy universities everywhere to develop these programs as rapidly as they possibly can. While these programs seem tangential to many within the university, they are, in fact, the canary in the coal mine, whose song alerts us that the staggering administrative costs that now burden universities can no longer be borne by tuition fees alone or even in conjunction with endowment funds. The recent fixation with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which seems to be abating for the moment, is driven in some part by the hope of administrators that their share of the university budget may remain unchallenged and that the budgetary cuts they seek may be borne on the faculty side of the ledger.

The third educational nodal point in the modern university is the Undergraduate degree program. These vary immensely, but share the common trait of drawing in a generation of young men and women not yet able to participate in the business of society, with a view to preparing them to do so in the four years or so that they reside, restlessly, on our campuses. The task of the Undergraduate program, I dare say, is to help produce thoughtful citizens, in addition to whatever other immediate competencies these citizens-in-training pick up in their classrooms.

Nowhere is the tension between the two sorts of understandings more obvious than in Iraq and in the rest of the Middle East, where in most undergraduate programs students are trained only to pick specific competencies. The French and the English systems of education, themselves highly specialized, hover in the background; the colonial legacy, however, does not alone account for Undergraduate hyper-specialization in the Middle East so many decades later. For highly specialized Undergraduate programs to perdure, the economy must be organized in a top-down fashion, by state planners who think they can know how many doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, and teachers their societies will need, years in advance of the graduation of a student cohort. In Iraq, once students have a Major (decided by national test administered at the end of High School) they can never change it.

In a command economy, choreographed from above, highly-specialized Undergraduate programs may have their place; in a vibrant, market-commerce-oriented economy, however, such programs are ill-fitting. Market commerce, unlike a command economy, involves entrepreneurs making competing wagers concerning possible futures. A society oriented by market commerce, in short, does not have an economy at all. The pricing mechanism of market commerce presumes that the future cannot be known, and therefore opposes the establishment, by political fiat or in the name of stabilizing an extant order, of a permanent set of winners or losers that the term, “the economy,” names. The undergraduate education appropriate to such an unknowable future must be concerned to prepare young men and women whose challenge it will be to find their way in a world whose future is unknowable. Only in a completely controlled command economy, or only at the “end of history,” will we be able to establish, with certainty, what undergraduates should know for their future. In a liberal society, oriented by market commerce, education must do more than teach students what they should know, if only for the reason that it cannot be unequivocally established what that might be. In a liberal society, education must involve the sort of midwifery that prepares students for a future that neither teachers nor government officials can know. An education unto political theory, and unto the humanities, can prepare them to do just that, even if the “learning assessment” at the end of the semester cannot measure it.

There is, finally, a necessary tension between these three distinct educational nodes—Ph.D., M.A. and Undergraduate programs. This necessary tension, however, is heightened when the disciplinary guilds that are concerned with reproducing themselves are not mindful that the guilds themselves do not pay faculty salaries. Student tuition, university endowments, state and national governments do. These salary-paying bodies, in principle, remind faculty members that whatever their important guild-obligations may be in the Ph.D. program, they must not lose sight of the citizen-producing task in the Undergraduate program. This healthy attenuation of the disciplinary guilds, which ought to ground the thinking of faculty practitioners enough to keep them from succumbing to reification in their writing, seems less and less to be happening. I suspect this is part of the reason why political theory has, as I mentioned at the outset, been less and less concerned with addressing significant historical events, and why the annual disciplinary meetings amount, increasingly, to tired debates within well-established sub-groups, whose argumentative topography was established decades ago.

The Crisis in the Humanities

Let us extend our discussion, now, to the humanities. The humanities are those disciplines, concerned with the full range of human experience chronicled in books, whose study does not admit of the degree of precision that is attainable in the natural sciences. This states the obvious, but it is worth reminding ourselves of the obvious from time to time. As Aristotle put the matter,

The desire for precision, which Plato intimates betrays a soul that longs for power,^{Footnote 10} is not precisely our concern here. More important is the question, “why is precision demanded of all knowledge?” Tocqueville (on whom I will be relying for much of what follows) answered that the longing for parsimony would intoxicate us in the democratic age,^{Footnote 11} and that true pluralism would therefore be rare. So captivated, it would be exceedingly difficult for persons in the democratic age to hold onto Aristotle’s wisdom, let alone organize a university with that wisdom firmly in mind. Tocqueville thought, indeed, that in the democratic age, the idea that different domains of knowledge might have differing and incommensurable methods appropriate to them would scarcely enter the mind. The need for parsimony, the confident expression of which would be methodological monism of the sort that demands precision everywhere the human gaze fixes, would entrance us all. The study of politics, admitted by Aristotle not to be renderable through mathematics, has largely succumbed to this need, as has the study of history, which is increasingly embarrassed with “small N samples”—hence, in part, the turn to “social” history.

This habit of thought, if you will, that demands precision wherever knowledge is sought has either coopted those disciplines where some precision is possible (the study of politics, of society, and of history) or pushed those other disciplines where it is not possible (the study of literature, and of theology) into the nether-space of personal taste or mere fancy.^{Footnote 12}

Making this problem of the relevance of the humanities even more challenging is what is supposedly happening on the other side of the lectern, in the synapses of the brains of our students. There, apparently, our thoughtful educational experts think it possible to discover “measurable outcomes,” which course surveys promise but never quite deliver. What is the “measurable outcome” of a fifteen-week course on Plato’s Republic, I wonder? How does a fifteen week course on Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, Mill, and Nietzsche, which seeks to diagnose the existential malaise of the modern world, help students, measurably, toward their career goals? When, at the university in which I teach, I ask those administrators who are fixated on “educational assessment” just how I might measure what students learn in these classes, they cannot help me—yet nevertheless insist that such measures are necessary. And I remember Aristotle, and Tocqueville, who they have never read.

The desire for precise measurable outcomes, let us submit, is a serious problem faced by the humanities. It is a problem, shall we say, that confronts the observer of the humanities, intent on answering the question, “how is this sort of knowledge more or less useful than another sort of knowledge?” There is another kind of problem, however, that the participant in the humanities must address, which I take to be more serious still—namely, how are the books that are the objects of study to be read and taught? Here, too, I believe that Tocqueville’s thinking about the democratic age helps us understand the problem and, perhaps, how we might ameliorate it.

The Hermeneutic of Suspicion

The de-linked condition,^{Footnote 13} as Tocqueville called it, of the democratic age not only facilitates the heightened sense of loneliness among us all, it also establishes the sovereignty of the individual in all matters of deliberation. What hold can the authority of others have on their understanding once this has occurred?

In the aristocratic age, Tocqueville thought, the situation was otherwise. In 1637, René Descartes wrote his now famous Discourse on Method, in which he dared to suggest that for knowledge to be trusted, it must not be accounted as true if it rests on the foundation of custom or on the authority of others. One of the philosophical harbingers to the democratic age, Tocqueville noted that the Americans are Cartesian without even having read him. As he put it:

Most, but not all, of our students intuitively adopt this democratic mode of understanding, if such a term can be used. They instinctively recoil at the notion that an idea should be taken seriously because of the authority of the name associated with it. Especially in America, the prevailing notion is that the political philosophers we have our students read have no authority whatsoever over them. Doubtful, therefore, that there can be such a thing as a Western canon, they are reflexively disposed to approach the books we read with a hermeneutic of suspicion, as it has been called.

The term, hermeneutic of suspicion, may have emerged within the tradition of post-modern thought, but in Tocqueville’s idiom, it names the democratic prejudice about authority. Doubtful that anyone can really teach them anything they have not already discovered by their own lights, our students are ill-disposed to patiently entertain the finally un-provable wagers all great philosophers made concerning the world, its wellsprings, and how we must, accordingly, live.

There is something salutary about this hermeneutic of suspicion. It draws us out of the complacency that can easily befall us if we accept an idea on the basis of authority alone. Moreover, because the democratic age summons everyone to become their own arbiter in nearly all matters, it is inevitable that a hermeneutic of suspicion should have the place that it does in our educational institutions today. “Critical thinking” is everywhere, as it should be. At its best, this encourages the development of our faculties, and contributes to the formation of that most precious and rare gift: an authorial voice.

The Hermeneutic of Deference

I do not think, however, that education worthy of the name can be achieved by the hermeneutic of suspicion alone. And, I will submit here, the humanities are in trouble in no small part because they have bet the farm on the hermeneutics of suspicion.

When suspicion is the singular principle of education, the result, unintended to be sure, is a collapse into a solipsism no less debilitating than the complacency blind reverence can produce. Education worthy of the name surely cannot involve a blanket dismissal of ideas because of where or when they emerged, or because of the predicates—race, class, gender, identity, historical moment of production—that adhere to the people who held them. Yet, today, that judgment has been definitively made by a vast number of students who have been nourished, exclusively, by the hermeneutic of suspicion. Convinced they have found a reason to dismiss much of what has been written in the past, many of the students on our campuses think of their political philosophy courses as they would a visit to a mausoleum. They wonder, in fact, why the books they read should have been declared monuments and placed there at all—and by whom, and under what authority. They wish to live among the living, who they think can neither be indebted to, nor be overshadowed by the dead.

I do not think, however, that this is all that can be said about our students. They are restless, and they hunger for nourishment they cannot yet name. In the democratic age, each generation is bound to look at its predecessor as an archaism, and to revel in the novelties it has discovered and by which it has been captivated. This does not eradicate the restlessness or the hunger.

It would be futile, of course, to declare to our students that canonical texts should be read because through the study of the depth and breadth of their civilizational legacy, their restlessness can be quieted and their hunger sated. No one believes in declarations anymore. In their experience of restlessness and hunger, however, we—their teachers in the humanities—are provided the opportunity to offer them this gentle intimation and wager: through a reverential encounter with certain books to which we continue to return for guidance and provocation, their experience of restlessness can be given form and named, and their hunger nourished.

For this wager of ours to be evaluated by our students, the hermeneutic of suspicion, which they know by heart, must be momentarily suspended. In its place must be enthroned a dangerous “maybe”—maybe the canonical authors can provide our students with a way to understand themselves that currently evades them. That dangerous maybe, let us call, “the hermeneutic of deference.” Might the canonicals authors, we must ask, have understood a great deal more than our students accredit to them? Might the teacher of the humanities be singularly able to elicit from students the recognition that without the books of which we are custodians, they have, in fact, been feasting on crumbs?

I do not doubt that this type of education is a rare achievement, not least because it asks of both teacher and student that they be guided by both the hermeneutic of suspicion and the hermeneutic of deference. While I cannot prove it, I suspect, nevertheless, that such a non-parsimonious education is more necessary for self-governance than is often imagined.^{Footnote 15} In the democratic age, we too easily drop off into solitude. We sense ourselves cut off and alone, and without a basis for communion with our neighbors, with nature, with the generations that come before and after us, and even with ourselves. A hermeneutic of suspicion will always slip naturally into our thoughts. A hermeneutic of deference will invariably be an afterthought, so to speak, which takes hold only in the aftermath of the discovery that what we have in the way of our own opinions and what we have been given by the popular culture around us cannot satisfy our hunger. That our hunger can be ameliorated, even if not completely sated, by feasting at the table that canonical authors set for us seems horribly out of date with the times. I dare say, however, that that ought to be the wager made by every educator in the humanities, and one of the most important tasks set for institutions of higher education in the democratic age.

Higher Certification and Other Hazards

I have suggested that most of our students are reluctant to adopt a hermeneutic of deference because they think they must “judge the world” for themselves. That is true. There is another reason as well:

These rather prescient remarks by Tocqueville have been confirmed by developments in higher education over the last generation. Indeed, it is tempting to say that what occurs in many of our universities nowadays amounts less to higher education than to Higher Certification, perhaps even Higher Stupification. The amount of coursework required is often staggering, and reflects political bargains struck among faculty constituencies rather than an overarching consensus about the kind of democratic citizens our colleges should aspire to graduate. It is not unusual for students to take five and even six courses a semester, many of them mind-numbing prerequisites that train them to flirt with ideas but not fall in love with them. Barely able to discuss an idea, let alone write about one in depth or with coherence, the tests our students take are, as I mentioned earlier, more and more geared to “measurable outcomes,” which overthrows an older, if never fully realized, understanding of the labor teachers in the humanities are called to perform, namely, Mentor and Midwife. With this relationship now almost fully undercut, if students are anxious, searching, and unsure of their bearings, they head over to that corner of the campus reserved for “counseling” rather than to their professor’s office—where in the not-too-distant past at least some of their “problems” might have been treated in light of the range of insights the canonical authors would have offered about them. Only recently has the human psyche been claimed as the exclusive domain and prerogative of psychology and neuro-science. Armed only with the hermeneutic of suspicion, I doubt the humanities will ever be able to claw back the territory it once held. Should we really wonder why our students on campus are so focused on their wounds and their traumas, when nearly every account of the human situation teachers in the humanities put before them is said to be warrant for violence of one sort or another? The therapeutic model reigns because the others have been forced to abdicate.

To these immense constraints in, and modifications of, college life should be added the proliferation of “service-learning” and extra-curricular activities, which further distract students from grappling with ideas in the classroom even while they fill out their resumes with yet another line item. Too hindered by never-ending requirements and too frightened that their resumé will be one line shorter than the student sitting next to them, there should be little wonder that students think of university life in terms of certification rather than education, or that most graduate without having the good opinion of their suspicion tempered by a breathtaking encounter with a seminal idea that reconfigures their understanding of their own experience.

There is more. In the democratic age, university education comes to be thought of as a universal right. As more and more students are accommodated and “forced through the same filter,” the bond between teacher and student must of necessity be weakened, and the art of reforming character through education nearly abandoned. In order to facilitate this new situation, the older classroom—which required only important books, desks, chairs, blackboards, professors, and students—is replaced by an impoverished but immensely more expensive high-tech, virtual, online and remote “learning environment,” the cost of which is ultimately borne by mind-boggling student loan debt and federal funds that behold colleges to national government in unsavory ways as never before. This cannot end well.

There is a fourth reason why our students are reluctant to adopt a hermeneutic of deference. During the last half-century or so, there has been a tectonic shift in the way history has been taught. A perusal of the course offerings at most colleges will reveal scarcely a course about the singular actions of “great men” and a great many courses about social history—notably “race,” “class” and “gender.” In the aristocratic age, the task of the historian was to provide exemplars for human conduct, as would be expected in an age when human beings looked to the past for models of action, commerce, beauty, and piety. In the democratic age, when each person becomes small and the body social looms large, a different kind of history gets written.

Tocqueville did not think it inappropriate to attend to social history; he did think, however, that over-emphasizing it in the democratic age taught a dangerous moral lesson to students, namely, that no single person, armed with clarity of mind and formidable character, can alter the course of history. Habituated by the mode of history-telling that pays little attention to individual greatness, the very idea of adopting a hermeneutic of deference seems quite odd. Today, most of our students believe that the world is animated wholly by social forces. “How might an in-depth and patient study of a canonical author’s ideas possibly benefit them?” they wonder. The hermeneutic of suspicion that comes so naturally to their imagination is in some measure a consequence of the inevitable prejudice about social forces in the democratic age. It is therefore very difficult to counter-balance. We do not serve our students well, however, if we take our task to be the reinforcement of the habits of mind they already largely know by heart.

A Deeper Kind of Inquiry: Placing the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

What of the twenty-first century, and of the fate of political theory, and the humanities, in this global age? Can universities around the world, very old ones and very new ones, produce thoughtful undergraduates, who are able to think both critically and deferentially? Here, I think it important to start from the common observation of the growing tensions around the world, and the intuition so many of us have that liberalism is not going to triumph over the alternatives in an easy way, or perhaps even at all. Consider the blur of daily events in the Middle East that often fogs the mind. When we are not “[seeking] a refuge under a little wall from a storm of dust and hail driven by the wind,”^{Footnote 18} the terms that immediately come to mind to explain that daily blur generally coalesce around what can loosely be called nineteenth-century liberal triumphalism, on the one hand, and twentieth-century post-colonial indignation, on the other. One is unmindful of the intransigent fact that liberty is not the meta-narrative of the Middle East and elsewhere; the other, professing to support the indigenous peoples in the region with a clean conscience, adopts European anti-modern tropes in order to defend them. In short, the analyses rely on ideas that emerge over the period of the two-century wound that is European colonialism, but go no further. Even when purportedly pure Islamic thought in the Middle East is brought forth, it is, I venture to say, suffused with and overwhelmed by European anti-modern tropes. In sum, the terms of the debate are as one-sided as was colonialism itself.

Much more is needed. Discussions with administrators, teachers, fathers and mothers in the Middle East and elsewhere has convinced me that while they know their institutions of higher education must be reformed, they are also frightened by the prospect that their sons and daughters, like ours in America, may very well acquire knowledge that can be “measured”—but that such knowledge will contribute little to their understanding of the civilization that is their inheritance. Absent an educational undertaking whose results probably cannot be measured, the coming generations of students will lack the fluency needed to grasp the wagers made by the canonical authors who formulated the range of understandings that constitute their own inheritance and those of members of other civilizations. How is understanding between the different peoples of the world possible without this fluency? Not only between Americans and the peoples in the Middle East, but between peoples everywhere?

We flatter ourselves to say that ours is the first global century. There is, nevertheless, an urgent need for us to begin a global conversation that neither starts from the pretense that there is a “universal human discourse” nor from a supposition that reifies civilizations or groups within them into sacrosanct and impervious “identities.” Beyond the blur of events in the Middle East, beyond the well-worked-out oppositions between liberal triumphalism and post-colonial indignation, lies a third alternative, still without a name, that might be called comparative canonical inquiry, which seeks to return to the origins of all durable civilizations, and trace their development through the great ideas, often at odds with one another, that are registered, again and again, in their respective canons.

I take developing this sort of inquiry to be the most important task for political theory and the humanities as a whole in the twenty-first century.

Students in the Middle East are right to ask me why I only teach the canonical authors from the West. I tell them that I have spent a lifetime trying to understand why and how those authors may be still important for us, and that I am able to take them that far, but no further. I can, nevertheless, imagine a day when a generation of scholars with a deep and reverential knowledge of their own inheritance sets itself the noble goal of placing before students around the world the great ideas that have shaped civilizations—not in the form of taste-testing survey courses, which make all such ideas seem unpalatable, but in the form of an extended feast, which demonstrates, beyond a reasonable doubt, why those ideas have nourished the minds and hearts of generation after generation. “Variety is disappearing from within the human species,”^{Footnote 19} Tocqueville wrote, with alarm. Commerce and trade hasten its disappearance; memory and habit fortify the variety that remains. I suspect that only something like comparative canonical inquiry can provide a foundation substantial enough for members of different and overlapping civilizations on which to stand and engage in the kinds of conversations that will be required if we are to greet each other under the banner of hospitality, during the rest of this already troubled century and beyond. In the Middle East and elsewhere, a curriculum that includes canonical authors from its several overlapping civilizations can move students beyond the borders of thought established by the historically provincial antinomies of liberal triumphalism and post-colonial thought. In the safety of this more ambitious classroom, students can find their way to ideas they might finally call their own, through a communion with canonical authors who give them reason to believe they must make a longer journey if they are to find a viable antidote to the solitary, de-linked condition of the democratic age—one that takes them back much farther than the last two centuries. By virtue of the sentiments and habits that already vie for the right to rule in the minds of millions of Middle Eastern students and others around the globe (elicited as they have been by “social media,” mobile phones, and text messaging), an education of the capacious sort to which I have pointed is, I submit, well suited for a generation in search of a voice it cannot yet find.

Comparative canonical inquiry—a global enterprise rather than a parochial one—does not begin with the question that constituted political theory in the twentieth century, namely, did the inner logic of modernity lead to the catastrophe of the Great Wars in Europe? We are in a new geopolitical moment, whose question is of a different sort: do the fragile institutions and self-understandings now pervasive in nearly every nation in the world need something more substantial to undergird them than the veneer of modernity (or anti-modernity) that forms their façade but often goes no deeper? Comparative canonical inquiry, I suggest, can contribute to the sorely needed conversation about the range of durable self-understandings within civilizational domains—a conversation desperately needed, not least to alert us to the fact that no consensus about “global values” is possible at the moment, and in fact, may never be. The field of political theory is, I suggest, better served—and better serves—with this new question firmly in mind.

Concluding Thoughts

Notwithstanding the importance of this subfield-reconfiguring formulation of the challenge of the twenty-first century, are there reasons for political theory to stay where it is, inside departments of political science, increasingly disregarded, as might be expected in an arranged marriage? For many political theorists—I am still among them—it remains self-evident that canonical authors pose the initial questions and provide the categories that alone make interesting work in political science possible. A generation or two ago, political scientists comprehensively exposed to the canon as undergraduates, and further disciplined by it as graduate students, also understood this service political theory provided. Undergraduate programs around the country have, however, slowly left the business of citizen formation through an exposure to the canon. Ph.D. programs, pressed to graduate and certify the next generation of guild members, too, have pushed political theory into the background. Each time faculty members turn in their meetings to a discussion of “The-Dreaded-Political-Theory-Requirement,” eloquent but uneasy political theorists appeal to their colleagues less to vindicate the requirement, than to ask for leniency; for they know in advance that members of the other subfields—American government, comparative politics, and international relations—no longer believe that political theory offers anything of value to graduate students in their subfield. Are not the parameters of the questions their students must address already established by “the literature,” these members wonder? Why return to primary sources at all, especially when there is so little time to learn about “the literature” of their subfield anyway? And so year follows year, and one by one, the number of required graduate level political theory courses diminishes. Conjoin this with the factors I identified earlier that conspire against political theory—the desire for precision and the need for parsimonious knowledge—and we come to the current impasse.

My unabashed proposal, then, is that political scientists be granted the divorce they secretly wish. I suspect that they will soon enough suffer the same fate the discipline of sociology did when, in the 1980s, unsure of themselves because they were not a natural science, sociologists largely abandoned their rich and fertile nineteenth-century canon in exchange for rational choice theory. Now a faint echo of its former self, sociology wanders in the dark, hobbled and unable to formulate interesting questions because it is unable to draw from the wellspring of canonical authors it has repudiated.

Where, then, would political theory find a home? Here, I think the emergence of the regional and area studies programs in the 1960s are instructive. Developed not because the internal logic of any extant discipline entailed them, but rather because the burden of America’s new super-power status after the Second World War required them, regional and area studies programs flowered in American universities for a generation, before they began to wither—in part, because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in part, because of the discomfort over the “naked singularities,”^{Footnote 20} so to speak, many of them had become.

Notwithstanding the eventual demise of area and regional studies programs, the insight that bears on our question is that changing geo-political circumstances can and do alter the organization of the American university. Now, well into the twenty-first century, and in the aftermath of the sober realization that the End of History has not brought about the consensus that was once envisaged,^{Footnote 21} a new geo-political moment is already being recognized by American universities, and resources pressed into service to respond to it.

From abroad, driven by vanity or by more far-sighted self-interest, ministries of higher education are seeking to facilitate partnerships with American universities. Yale in Singapore, NYU in Abu Dhabi, and the multi-university Education City complex in Doha, Qatar, are prominent examples. These partnerships prompt the American parties to ponder the scope of higher education in a global setting. I suspect that it will only be a matter of time before curriculum revisions on their home campuses follow upon those reflections.

From within American universities, animated by the egalitarian tropes of “diversity,” “toleration,” and “inclusiveness,” among others, which have captivated the imagination of students, faculty, and administrators in American universities for more than a generation, it is easy to imagine the call to broaden the mix of courses offered, so as to deepen the knowledge our students have of other civilizational domains. What is not easy to imagine is how those animated by these egalitarian tropes will respond when they discover that a not-insubstantial number of students from other civilizational domains either do not believe in the egalitarian tropes they see as elite American parochialisms, or have their own versions that are at odds with them. What then?

That matter, however, is for another day. What remains, after recognizing the forces from abroad and within American universities that invite the development of a new and comprehensive forum to accommodate them, is to suggest what it might be called and what it might include. I have suggested a name, comparative canonical inquiry. The enterprise should include political theory, but not only that; for the challenge of civilizational understanding cannot involve but one cross-sectional domain of knowledge. Beyond political theory, there will be a need, as well, for those other humanities disciplines that have, as I suggested earlier, become increasingly relegated to the realm of fancy—literature, the arts, theology, philosophy, intellectual history. Additionally, thoughtful scholars in comparative politics and international relations should be involved in this enterprise as well. Attentive to the fact that liberal institutions do not work well everywhere, they wonder why this is so. The answer comparative canonical inquiry provides is that civilizational pluralism, revealed in the categories of experiences different canons disclose, means that institutions cannot be introduced “from above,” but must rather emerge “from below.”

The reconfiguration I am proposing here, however, comes with one very important caveat: comparative canonical inquiry cannot be based on the hermeneutic of suspicion alone. “Critical thinking” by itself can tear down, but it cannot build up. Comparative canonical inquiry must also begin from the recognition that there are reasons why our different civilizational inheritances, often working at cross-purposes, have endured. Those involved in the enterprise must understand that its purpose is also to wonder aloud, together, in the safety of the classroom, whether in the fragile twenty-first century setting in which we find ourselves, there are ideas and understandings that can and should be retrieved, not with a view to making them small and excoriating their authors, but with a view to the question of how such ideas and authors may better help us live together, now and in the future. In short, comparative canonical inquiry must begin with the prejudice that, in addition to power, one possible answer to the question of why civilizational formulations have endured is that they are—dare I say it—good.^{Footnote 22}

The subfield of political theory can stay where it is, and as it is, and slowly wither. The humanities can continue to bet the farm on the hermeneutics of suspicion. Alternatively, under the rubric of comparative canonical inquiry, they can together find their voice anew, in response to the geo-political moment that now urgently challenges us all.