Entering the great debate

Abstract

hY do we study and teach the Great Books? Why should we? The forms ese basic questions t ake -and the doubts or controversy implied in the questions-vary from one discipline to another. My discussion here of the reasons for, and the obstacles to, teaching the Great Books will be the product of my own, necessarily limited, experience of teaching those books within a political science department. Yet what I say will have substantial implications for the proper teaching of the Great Books in all deparunents. For one cannot, I believe, adequately defend the teaching of the Great Books without articulating a rather specific conception of liberal education in general. Moreover, I think that the perspective from which I will speak, while it is necessarily restricted, is for that very reason in some ways privileged. The teaching of the Great Books has a unique, uniquely paradoxical and therefore uniquely thoughtprovoking, status within the discipline of political science. Political science is by far the oldest of the social sciences. It can boast not merely a longstanding, but also a very distinguished, star-studded h i s to rybeginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and extending to such giants as Hegel, Tocqueville, and Marx in the nineteenth century. As a result, it was taken for granted until several generations ago that the study of this illustrious history ought to be a central and required part of the political science discipline. But the very fact that the study of the Great Books was taken for granted meant that such study had gradually become more routine, antiquarian, and pedantic. Fewer and fewer political scientists--including, unfortunately, those who were scholars of the history of political thought--possessed or even thought much about a compelling justification for the required study of the history of political thought and its Great Books. Such justifications as were perfunctorily offered in the introductions to required courses and textbooks were either formulaic and platitudinous, or else raised more questions than they answered (see, for example, George Sabine's preface to his well-known History of Political Theory of 1937). The study of the Great Books within political science depa~t~uents was ripe for devastating (and not altogether unjustified) criticism. The criticism emerged in the 1930s and 1940s under the twin banners of Science and Progress. The argument went as follows: political science ought, like the other social sciences (and maybe even the humanities, if they wish to be up-to-date and respectable), to strive to be a genuine sc ience-a science modeled (in a properly adapted form, to be sure) on the natural sciences. But the history of science is not a central or required part of genuine science, the natural sciences. The study of the history of science, mathematics, and medicine is at most a mere adornment for, or curious ancillary to, the education of