1. First off, let me alert you that we’re having a debate between Jay Cost and Sean Trende (the two most prominent and astute of the young and constantly online political analysts) on the current presidential nomination system at Berry next Thursday, December 1 at 5:30 in Krannert. If you come, you get a free buffet dinner. Let me know if your coming, though (plawler@berry.edu).
2. Jim’s article on GRATITUDE (actually public gratitude) below is great. I couldn’t get the website he recommends to bring it up. But you can get it from the Hoover site on its virtues page. There’s also a very fine article by Mansfield on courage and a version of Diana Schaub’s perhaps overly philosophic account of friendship.
3. On PUBLIC GRATITUDE, I can’t help but notice that country music stars, after performing, always express their gratitude to and concern for members of our military. Surely that’s the democratic beginning of public gratitude: Our gratitude for the leadership of our presidents lately is necessarily pretty ambiguous, but let’s begin with those who do the most indispensable and least controversial (if you think about it) and most courageous public service. That kind of gratitude comes easily to southerners, I think. They turn our attention away from the rebel cause during the Civil War to the virtue of loyalty to one’s own. (See Grant’s comments on the nobility of Lee’s surrender.) We can learn from the South that public gratitude has to be infused with loyalty to be sustainable, just as we can learn from the North that public gratitude has to be infused with both true principle and true religion to be sustainable.
4. Carl’s comment in the thread about Christianity and American exceptionalism also demands serious thought. Here are some thoughts that the experts at Hoover might take issue with: Most of what’s good about modernity comes from Christianity. Christianity leaves space for civil piety, but only if it’s not overdone. When it comes to equality, we owe more to Jesus than to Lincoln (see Tocqueville, who, contrary to some, would have fully appreciated the greatness of Lincoln). What’s exceptional about America in the West is the persistence of Christianity. The Sixties dealt bodyblows to instiutional Christianity. But they also liberated “Jesus freaks” and evangelical spirituality, which, despite its many flaws and questionable sustainability, is actually Christian. And the orthodox of various kinds–from the Jews to the Catholics–are waging a comeback that wasn’t expected by the sociologists, the Straussians, etc. There’s a lot more to be said here by Carl.
5. I’m teaching public policy for the first time next semester. Give me some advice.
Saturday, November 26, 2011, 12:04 PM
November 26th, 2011 | 4:22 pm
Any presidential candidate who will head the military should have some service in the military.
Any commentator on the political process should have some service in the military.
I have horrible vision and would never be allowed to serve in the military. As a result, I do not comment on politics.
November 26th, 2011 | 7:32 pm
You know I was just thinking that we needed a standard for political participation that would have excluded James Madison but included Lee Harvey Oswald. Thanks.
I’m thrilled to know that you think my uneventful and wholly undistinguished six years in the Army Reserve better qualify me to speak on the political process than John Quincy Adams and Frederick Douglass.
November 26th, 2011 | 10:45 pm
Advice on teaching public policy? Assign some James Q. Wilson! The guy has written some unbelievably good books on crime, bureaucracy, and interest groups; he’s never really disappointed me (although I haven’t read his “Moral Sense,” which I’m wary of).
November 27th, 2011 | 12:10 am
Doesn’t the issue of military “service” show up in any and every presidential election whether the available candidates have had military experience or not simply because the president is commander in chief?
Other questions emerge no doubt, and Lincoln only saw blood due to a mosquito bite during the “Black Hawk War” and FDR never served even as he was previously assistant secretary of the navy. So two of the greatest commanders in chief were never in the military as “servicemen.”
Commander and service. One takes political action as an executive, while the other merely…what?…serves to do and die? It doesn’t hurt to have so served! It may be merely sufficient and it surely is not necessary, but praising such sufficiency ain’t a bad thing.
Run, Pete Spiliakos, Run!
November 27th, 2011 | 2:03 am
On the public policy class I couldn’t think of a better writer than yourself!
But seriously, maybe you could use articles from National Affairs.
Unless you already have the course developed (but I suspect you already do) I would think that you also might need a “text book” type of book that addresses issues domestic and foreign policy in a way which covers the issues in a way in which they are already spoken about amongst serious analysts. I learned much from William Bluhm and Robert Heineman’s book Ethics and Public Policy. It presents issues seriously, but as a text book it would probably constrain the particular points you would want to make in your class.
You already know the writers worth looking to–Galston, Kass, Yuval Levin, and other writers whom have presented detailed accounts of what needs to be (or could be) done as policy from a philosophically complicated point of view.
Having never taken a course–except for one–let alone taught on public policy, I would think that you already have some idea of where you are going. My educational experience in actual courses on public policy dealt primarily with feminist accounts–like Linda Gordon, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, and Theda Skocpol–so I am not one to ask for suggestions, but these women are important to the academic public policy debate. However, while we read Susan Moller Okin in this class, we also read Jean Bethke Elshtain.
You may ask how I dealt with such classes in feminism–well I decided to write papers on Habermas and Foucault instead. Rather than give the detailed and fact oriented analyses my professor wanted me to give in terms of the one-sided readings I ended up challenging the entire premises of the course by arguing with its intellectual foundations. You could end up with papers challenging the assumptions of your course too. This is not such a bad thing, but for this lonely scholar I must wonder if it is this the best thing for the character and fate of the typical student and his/her education? It might be good. I have no serious complaints of mine own.
These papers on Habermas and Foucault led to further papers on John Dewey, G.H. Mead, C. Wright Mills, and Max Weber too–papers which were littered with references to Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Durkheim etc. Of course, I was compelled to write on Rawls too (both Theory and Political Liberalism), as well as as “communitarians” like MacIntyre and Sandel and supposedly unclassifiable types like Charles Larmore and Richard Rorty.
So I learned nothing regarding policy from the course because the course design seemed too one-sided to me (in this case a specific version of feminism that kept relying on premises that were eminently open to question).
Perhaps your students are less uneducable than me, but given my lone experience I am always wary of public policy courses. But then they can hone intellectual virtue for the student willing to go it alone, even if it means going against being stuck with virtue. This is a good thing. So I guess you better put Ronald Bailey in there too. And if Bailey, then Larry Arnhart is even better philosophically if not as audacious.
It could be a great class despite my reservations. I’m not sure if public policy can be studied academically. Yes philosophy begins in ordinary opinion regarding what is good, but philosophy is hardly non-partisan. It is always partisan for the interests of philosophy. If that sounds too Straussian, then even neo-Thomism is partisan when you get to the nitty gritty. Jacques Maritain, for instance, liked the industrial areas foundations at the basis of Saul Alinsky which is code today for partisan “liberal” politics.
So in this class, make sure you distinguish between theory and practice before you show their connection. I know this is easier said than done (especially in a class on policy), and perhaps the situation at your college makes such qualifications less necessary for the purposes of inquiry into what is the common good, but in my opinion it is certainly necessary outside the confines of anybody’s experience of the “academy.” It is good for anybody to at least recognize this distinction.
You should show Last Days of Disco to exemplify what it means to have high minded ideals as one needs to live (even if meaningfully) in the world too.
And I haven’t even mentioned the economists, let alone popular dour commentators like John Derbyshire and in a more upbeat version of doom–Mark Steyn. The economists have all public policy problems solved, if only the American people (or their educated expertise in terms of their unelected representation) weren’t so stupid. Derbyshire and Steyn show our so-called experts to be stupid, and they do it in lucid prose.
So this is my unfortunate recommendation for a public policy class.
November 27th, 2011 | 8:07 am
@John Presnall, that is a rather amazing response.
I am not sure what “Public Policy” is, but I would assume that the law in any given area reflects “public policy”. A good primer on “Public Policy” would thus be the various restatements in any given field.
Also is the distinction between theory+practice a theory of distinction? Or is the distinction an empirical reality which fluctuates because it is germane to the creation of theory itself (i.e. the restatements are simply generalizations which reflect majority rules, synthesis and expert opinion and not actual law?)
Technically speaking what accounts for the distinction between theory and practice? Some theories or some approaches to public policy seem incredibly pragmatic, descriptive and mechanical, such that practice is comprehended as theory, or as they might say in patent law the theory or invention is “enabled”.
Practice itself I suppose has an intellectual theory or certain given facts behind it. One might say for instance that Posner is utilitarian, except for when he isn’t, which in practice is quite often, because Posner as a federal judge applies and works with binding precedent, that in copyright is often times utilitarian, but not always. So there could well be a distinction between Posner’s theory(abstracted into a theory) and his practice(i.e. his own legal opinion).
In addition in many areas, a legal decision can be theory, in familly law for example is quite possible to win a case finding that custody was wrongly decided only to have a finding on remand that the amount of time that has passed would create a hardship for the child if custody were to be granted as it should have been in theory. This isn’t necessarily a distinction between theory and practice, but rather an intervention of broader public policy(best interest of child).
I am actually rather confused on the distinction between theory and practice. Or to put it another way I am willing to accept the following proposition: Any theory sufficiently “enabled” is practice, or a theory of practice for one ordinarily skilled in the art.
Is the distinction between theory and practice accentuated by public policy governing copyright, favoring a modicum of originality fixed in a tangible medium of expression vs. what the distinction between theory and practice would be if the work product was only governed by patent (thus requireing the enablement of the invention, or the translation from theory to practice for one ordinarily skilled in the art?)
There are a whole host of areas where the failure of a product to conform in practice to theory or technical specifications(practical theory) means failure. Is there not a lurking public policy against the distinction itself?
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact