Lehrman American Studies Center

When students learn the law today, they are taught more likely than not from the perspective of legal positivism. This school of thought asserts three principles: 1) the social fact thesis, 2) the conventionality thesis, and 3) the separability thesis. The first claims that legal validity is a function of certain kinds of social facts; the second emphasizes the law’s conventional nature; and the third denies any connection between law and morality. These assumptions are usually not explicitly stated in the classroom but are implied when students read about constitutional cases, examine legal ethical dilemmas, or explore the philosophical underpinnings of the law itself.

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During my time at the Lehrman Summer Institute, I was often asked to give an account of my current research project. When I informed curious parties that I planned to write my dissertation on Plutarch, I met with great interest and even greater sympathy: my lack of job prospects were apparent to everyone. So, believing as I do that the solution to most difficulties in life must begin by admitting that there is a problem, I will offer a general explanation of why I think it is that Plutarch, who used to be widely read, is now so rarely studied.

I will begin by saying that I think one of the many sins of our modern academy is that Plutarch's Lives has been pushed to the periphery. After all, if Shakespeare had founded a college, he would have required the students to read Plutarch. The same could be said of any curriculum launched by Machiavelli, Milton, More, Montaigne, Rousseau, Madison, or Emerson.

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Friends of the Lehrman American Studies Center should look at Tom Karako’s insightful op-ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times on the budget crisis in California.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-karako26-2009jul26,0,757702.…

Karako notes that the crisis is partly due to the state’s dysfunctional constitution, which has left the legislative and executive branches too weak “to resist special interests and non-elected bureaucracies.” The solution, he argues, is a state constitutional convention and the federal constitution written in Philadelphia in 1787 ought to be the delegates’ model.

The piece is certainly worth a look and well-worth discussing.

I worked at a school that claimed to be tolerant to all ideas. It turned out that this was the case only for as long as one does not refer to the Bible as God's revelation or argue for the superiority of capitalism over all forms of socialism. Now I have found an intellectual home at the King's College. Why? Because we make no false pretenses. We know who we are and what we stand for. We stand for Christ. We stand for freedom. And that sets us apart. Apart from the moral relativist. Apart from the economic interventionist.

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The conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke has a piece in a recent Weekly Standard issue that includes—bizarrely enough—a "twittered" (meaning truncated and txt style) version of the Constitution. It is funny and biting and brilliant. And I think I will use it next year with my American government students, after they read the full version of the Constitution. Does it denigrate our grand founding document, and the intellectual accomplishments of its authors? Some might say so. But this strikes me as an excellent way for 18 year olds in 2009—those doyens of the digital—to latch onto the fundamentals of our governmental form.

See what you think.

I am sure that most of us remember being dragged to some historical site with our classmates sometime back in the 5th or 6th grade. Ah! The field trip! Teachers screaming, students playing jokes on one another, chaos!….A learning opportunity? Hardly.

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I confess that after much reading and reflection it is still hard to nail down the essence of a great leader or statesman. Justice Potter Stewart’s comment on obscenity and pornography is easily applicable to statesmanship: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it.” While it may difficult to pin down the core of statesmanship, one knows it when one sees it.

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Kant directly confronts political realism in To Perpetual Peace. The preface confronts the pragmatic politician who dismisses the theoretical speculations of the political theorist who offers his wisdom concerning international affairs. The pragmatic politician cannot defend what counts as his pragmatism or utility, and his Realpolitik threatens the dignity of human beings as free and rational beings. The "law of the jungle" that constitutes contemporary international affairs makes us all beasts.

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Beyond Secular Reason

There was a time when liberals would decry liberalism's transformation into a tradition as a betrayal of liberalism, a reversal of the Enlightenment, a corruption of pure reason by irrational belief. Well, as Mr. DeHart points out in his excellent post, "Doing Political Philosophy after the Enlightenment's End," things have changed. We have moved “beyond secular reason.” The era of Enlightenment, modern, foundationalist, universalist, idealist liberalism has been displaced by post-Enlightenment, postmodern, anti-foundationalist, particularist, pragmatic liberalism. The most sophisticated and honest of contemporary liberal theorists have not only admitted liberalism’s traditionalist identity, but have defended it precisely as such. Tom Bridges summarizes the raison d’etre of the traditionalist liberal project:

If liberalism is to survive the collapse of Enlightenment culture, liberals must now attempt to de-universalize or contextualize their poli…

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Is it possible to get students excited about primary sources by helping them learn how to read them properly and "translate" them into terms they'll understand better? I'm hopeful that a translation of the Declaration of Independence might help students to better understand the motivations of the Founders (and incidentally help them become better readers of primary source documents).

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