Abstract
This paper argues that the study of politics as a liberal art is under assault today, both from outside pressures on liberal arts education and from the discipline’s vision of the study of politics as a narrow “political science.”
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For a cogent analysis of the application of corporate imperatives to the academy, see John Champagne, “Teaching in the Corporate University: Assessment as a Labor Issue,” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, 2 (2011): 1–26.
Hope Yen, Associated Press, “Note to Class of 2012: more than half of young college graduates now jobless or underemployed,” www.huffingtonpost.ca, Huffpost Style Canada, April 23, 2012.
Open tendencies abound in the sub-field of political theory. Examples in other sub-fields include social constructionism in international relations, qualitative approaches to comparative politics, and American political development. Perhaps the most eminent individual maverick, both methodologically and politically, is the always stimulating and provocative James C. Scott.
Andrew Rehfeld, “Offensive Political Theory,” Perspectives on Politics 8 (June 2010): 473, 466.
To cite just a few examples from the twentieth century, see Michael Oakeshott’s notion of politics as the making of common arrangements; Hannah Arendt’s notion of politics as speaking and acting together in the public realm, where “acting” means creating something new; and Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political as that which decides the friend/enemy distinction. While all of these definitions are related to power, none is reducible to it. Moreover, all three thinkers define power in distinctive ways that cannot be boiled down to the same thing. Neither can any of these thinkers forfeit his or her definition of either politics or power without making fatal changes to the larger theory in which those concepts are embedded.
For the classic argument about the essentially contested character of political concepts, see W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 56 (1955–56): 167–98; and William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1974).
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” The American Political Science Review 63 (December 1969): 1062–81.
Wolin, “Political Theory,” 1071.
It’s hard to imagine it happening, but a change in the name of the discipline from Political Science to Politics, which my own department made before I joined it many years ago, would signal an embrace of that pluralism.
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Thanks to Elizabeth Markovits for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as to the anonymous reviewers of this symposium entry.
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Cocks, J. The Death of Politics as a Liberal Art?. Polity 46, 85–91 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2013.31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2013.31