Lehrman American Studies Center

My husband (a historian) and I (a philosopher) are planning a colloquium examining the cognitive requirements of a free society.

The general questions we want to raise for discussion are: Does liberty repend upon rationality? If so, rationality understood in what way? If free institutions require thinking men to conceive, create, and operate them, what habits of thinking are necessary to found and sustain a free society, and how can one inculcate such habits? Does liberty require that the majority of the people be habitually rational, or only the constitution makers or some ruling "natural aristocracy"?

For this proposed colloquium, participants will read and then discuss primary sources that raise these questions. For the reading list, we are considering excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Jefferson, The Federalist, and Tocqueville, among other thinkers. Might anyone suggest specific texts that might be appropriate for our purposes? Thanks for your help!

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Lehrman American Studies Center vets may wish to sup on the words F. Scott put into the pen of Amory Blaine, Princeton '17, and appearing in a student rag called "Nassau Lit." I think he would bid us do better than this professor:

Good Morning, Fool...
Three times a week
You hold us helpless while you speak,
Teasing our thirsty souls with the
Sleek 'yeas' of your philosophy....
Well, here we are, your hundred sheep,
Tune up, play on, pour forth...we sleep.
You'd sniffed through an era's must,
Filling your nostrils up with dust,
And then, arising from your knees,
Published, in one gigantic sneeze.

Note: This was supposed to be pre-Summer Institute thoughts on some of the readings, specifically about Bertonneau's complaints about teaching students history and literature.

I have several responses to this. First of all, there are two sides to every story. One wonders how good a teacher Bertonneau is. This is a fair question to pose to anyone who complains about the consistent problems with his students. But beyond that and more generally, I am sympathetic with Bertonneau's complaints.

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What can we do to encourage the philosophical habit of mind? Short of founding a new university or taking over Administration Hall by storm, what can we do? I would be very interested to hear other people's experiences with reading groups, lecture series, co-taught courses, and so on.

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Sitting in the Starbucks on Nassau Street, just across from Princeton this week, I overheard a conversation between two political philosophy undergraduates that strikes me as either simply humorous or deeply troubling. I report it here as a way of inviting a conversation on teaching students in today’s liberal arts environment.

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Next spring I'll be teaching a course on colonial and revolutionary American history. I've picked up some strategies for teaching the Founding from sessions of the Summer Institute, and I'm particularly interested in utilizing Gordon Lloyd's website on the Constitutional Convention. I'm also fascinated by Jonathan Den Hartog's syllabus and his assigning of an important monograph to each student to review and briefly discuss in class. I'm curious to know how successful this endeavor was. I also wonder if colonialists have had good results from assigning primary sources such as Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity or excerpts from Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation. As Gary Gregg emphasized, if one of our goals as teachers is to stimulate our students' imagination and inspire them to appreciate and think deeply about the ideals and values of earlier Americans and their i…

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A methodological gulf exists among disciplines. Political Science and Philosophy rarely discuss context while to Historians (of which I'm one) context is our shibboleth. Because of my training, I find it difficult to fully engage in discussions with both academics and students on these non-contextual issues. In fact, in these discussions I am reminded of the great quip by John Adams: "Facts are stubborn things." My question/concern is, therefore, how can conservative scholars bridge this gap and introduce into our classrooms both context and, for those of us who toil in the fields of events, transcendent issues? Is there a way? Let me add, too, that I struggle with this myself as I believe in a transcendent moral order but think it is necessary—perhaps to an absolute degree—to know the context of events that shapes the debate on this question/answer.

An interdisciplinary approach to the study of America is obstructed by the specialized training of graduate school. After assessing the nature of this problem, I offer a modest proposal for how this problem may be addressed.

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An early Institute session on the liberal arts leads to further—and more troubling—ruminations on the topic…

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"All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his students failed for want of system." — The Education of Henry Adams

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