9/13/14 - As a Political Science major in college, I was fortunate enough to read some of Aristotle. Surprisingly, I understood SOME of it, too. For him, the art of the statesman was practical wisdom, and required two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of right and wrong - of what comprises justice in the political order - and knowledge of the practical - of how ones political regime works and what is possible to do given prevailing laws, customs, and opinions. At Loyola, which back at the time was a traditional Roman Catholic college, we began with the idea that U.S. politics can only be understood in light of its first principles. To do that, requires, first, an understanding of those principles as they were understood by our Founders. So, we began by studying the three main founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. One professor threw in the Articles of Confederation in case we had a bit of extra time to read. After that, came a study of the Federalist Papers, and we were asked to try to comprehend the relation of those first principles to the Constitution and their fate in the development of modern American political institutions and practice. We did that by reading the classic works of the Western tradition, from Plato to John Locke, then more modern writers like Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, to understand the roots of contemporary thought and where the latter three went wrong. Today? Basic principles are ignored, what the Founders set out to accomplish is ridiculed, and the three founding documents seldom, if ever, mentioned.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 21:34:26 +0000
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