Next Year’s Classes

Next year I will teach two classes through Gibbs Classical: Plato’s Republic for Beginners in the fall and Foundations of Modern Politics in the spring.

On several occasions, I have spoken of a brief period in my life wherein I considered myself quite liberal. This was sixteen or seventeen years ago now, shortly after I got married. I was, like most people in their 20s, rethinking everything, and at the time, the progressive conception of human nature simply seemed more compelling to me. It was also around this time that I read and taught Plato’s Republic and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution for the first time and I couldn’t help but noticing a remarkable connection between the two. Plato’s defense of an aristocracy and Burke’s explanation of an aristocracy were entirely compatible. They were both based on common sense, observation, and “the way things are.” At the same time, Burke’s conservative presentation of human nature struck me as far more mystical, far more transcendent, and thus far more satisfying than the progressive understanding of human nature as an endlessly manipulatable substance. Burke believed that a human being was a very particular kind of thing and that happiness was the result of working within particular limits. His promises were not as grand as progressives, but they were real. What Burke did for my conception of political man, Plato did for my conception of spiritual man. The Republic is a remarkably lucid argument for how a man ought to curate his soul, govern his soul, bless his soul, and converse with this soul. It’s a handbook on self-control, the same sort of self-control which enables a city or a nation to thrive. Many of the arguments I have made about good taste in the last several years began with reading Plato’s Republic, and I am quite happy to offer a fourteen week class devoted to a slow and patient read of this book. You can read more about that class and register here.

This is the third time I am offering Foundations of Modern Politics, and the class evolves just a little every time I teach it. My desire to offer the class was initially prompted by the movement to defund the police. So many of the arguments I read in favor of defunding the police were based on shallow, faulty progressive arguments about human nature, and yet I consistently found that conservatives were completely unequipped to offer reasonable replies. “We need to spend our police money on the problems that police solve. If people weren’t desperate and hungry, we wouldn’t need the police,” certainly has a gloss of common sense, but it doesn’t hold up to a little scrutiny. Nonetheless, Foundations of Modern Politics was a class that took students back to the beginning of the argument between progressives and conservatives. It explained the philosophical prejudices behind progressive beliefs about society and the individual, as well as the conservative philosophies of time and nature.

Foundations of Modern Politics returns next spring for the 2024 election year, when America will go mad for a little while and give itself over to irrational assertions, unverified confidences, and unfulfillable promises. If you would like to escape the deluge of our political passions and return to the source of the argument, consider enrolling. Don’t spend 2024 shouting at your television. Spend it soberly shaking your head.