Just a quick announcement–for anyone in the vicinity of Omaha, Nebraska this July–that I’ll be giving a paper at the 41st annual conference of the North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP), Thursday morning (11:15 am), July 11th, at Creighton University. The paper, “Pedagogy Under Occupation: Between Indoctrination and Neutrality,” is a much revised version of a blog post by the same title that I posted here back in 2015. The paper is scheduled for a session called “Hostile Environments,” with Monika Rydzewski (Queens College) and Joseph Tanke (University of Hawaii). As the blog post suggests, the paper is something of an exercise in standpoint epistemology, or more precisely, I suppose, standpoint pedagogy.

The class I taught under occupation was an introductory course in political philosophy. One claim I make in the paper is that as far as political philosophy is concerned, course descriptions (and survey-type texts, like those associated with Strauss, Rawls, Wolin, Skinner, and Cohen) are, whether implicitly or explicitly, relativized to aims and audiences. What appears to be a course in “The Issues of Political Philosophy” is rarely if ever that abstract in pedagogical practice. In practice, the instructor knows that she’s teaching a specific demographic with particular normative commitments and a particular background. She can’t afford to take “the view from nowhere,” and can’t afford to assume that students will.

In practice, then, “We shall discuss topic X in this class” is elliptical for

Given that most of us share generic political goal G or value V in virtue of belonging to community C, we shall discuss X in relation to G and C,

where G might be as generic as “justice,” and C as broad as “the West,” but is usually more particular than either of those.  Having worked through a couple of dozen syllabi (mostly from American institutions), I’ve encountered no shortage of courses which teach political philosophy with a view to clarifying the politics of, say, the specifically American constitutional order, or the constitutional democracies of “the liberal West.” In either case–in most cases–courses in political philosophy are taught from within a particular regime, for the sake of understanding and coming to terms with the problems one characteristically encounters in that regime. They’re generally not designed to be magic carpet rides through some purely idealized realm of Great Political Ideas.

This relativization to audiences is obviously there in Strauss, Rawls, Skinner et al. It’s almost painfully obvious in Strauss’s “What Is Political Philosophy?”, a revised version of his Judah Magnes Lecture at Hebrew University in 1954-55, which lays out what Strauss regards as the basic problematic of political philosophy, but does so by assuming that the problematics of “the West” set the agenda for the rest. With tragic-comic gravitas, Strauss describes the university’s location as “Jerusalem”–“I shall not for a moment forget what Jerusalem stands for” (p. 10)–but pointedly ignores the fact that the University was located within Arab, not Israeli territory, surrounded by an Arab, not an Israeli population. It was axiomatic to Strauss that “Jerusalem” stood for Jewish history and for the longings and concerns of Jews, not for the history, longings, or concerns of the miscellaneous Arabs or Muslims who happened to live or work nearby. And that’s how the lecture proceeds.

It was a corollary of this axiom that The Problematics of Political Philosophy as Strauss expounded them led directly to the problematics of Zionism, not to the question of what was to be done with the 150,000 Palestinians living in Israel under martial law–or the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled to found Israel in the first place.  Strauss and his intended audience may have disagreed about any number of things, but they shared a sense of priorities–of who mattered, of what mattered, and why. What’s painfully true of Strauss is, I think, more subtly true of, say, Rawls and Skinner. Each had a particular audience. Each audience was a constituency of sorts. Each constituency shared a sense of priorities that excluded other constituencies, and excluded other priorities.

I’m not complaining. Just saying. But I’m curious to gather syllabi to see how far my generalizations go. Are courses in political philosophy generally relativized to audiences and their aims, or are they a purely abstract jaunt through ideas abstracted from audiences, aims, and the particularities of space and time? Feel free to put some syllabi in the comments, or else email them to me at khawajaenator at my gmail account.