Hi everyone! I’ve had a very eventful year since our wonderful Summer idea-moot. It’s been rationalist empirical political science extravaganza for my first-year core curriculum at UCSD’s political science PhD program. Having passed through this gauntlet, but still having my international relations (IR) and political theory comprehensive exams ahead of me next year, I’m interested in following up on a question Peter raised in response to James Ceaser’s “The Role of Political Science and Political Scientists in Civic Education”, which came across my Feedly page at the AEI Citizenship blog.

Responding to Ceaser, Peter writes:“Political science aims to be an empirical investigation into institutions and mass behavior, not an inquiry into what citizens should do. Investigating what citizens should do would require a combination of empirical evidence about how the world works, normative theory about how things ought to be, and strategic guidance about how to improve it (given the resources one has). Ceaser emphasizes the study of regimes, describing that as normative as well as empirical. I would agree, except that I am interested in investigating all scales of human action, of which the regime is only one. (Here I draw on the idea of “polycentrism,” developed by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom.)”

I’m interested in how political theory, specifically, fits into this discussion of political science and civic education. Indeed, much of Ceasar’s piece seemed to focus on classical political theorists rather than today’s (empirical) political scientists. As I’m currently being steeped in the empirical tradition, though, I would also point out that this kind of political science studies rather more than institutions, mass behavior, and regimes. Instead, the empirical “bet” that the logic of political economy, of homo economicus, fits a given situation better than the logic of appropriateness, of homo sociologicus, is itself a strategic bet intended to fit a given society and scenario to produce useful observations and potential predictions.

And while Ceasar mentions Aristotle, he doesn’t focus on a key issue raised by Aristotle on the question of civic education: the “good man” and the “good citizen” in different types of states. Looming large is the question of whether one can be both a good man and a good citizen in the modern American liberal capitalist state, and how civic education can manage the difficult balance between instilling a sense of civic obligation to conationals and the idea of shared nationhood while maintaining a space for dissent.

I’m currently TA’ing a Summer class (“Ethics and Society,” a gen-ed class for mostly engineering students in one of UCSD’s 7 colleges), and we’ve been reading King, Thoreau, Arendt, Malcolm X, and Walter Benjamin on civil disobedience and political violence this week. Along with recent readings of Jacques Ranciere’s Dissensus and Michael Sandel on the moral limits of the market, I’m wondering how civic education can fit in an increasingly marketized society without being coopted. On the other hand, could it truly be called “civic education” to call for a radical restructuring of the state as it currently exists? Not to be too glib, but wouldn’t that be closer to civic reeducation? (And I say all this as someone with no real background in civic education beyond what we all got last year…)

So to tentatively answer my own question—civic education may differ from political theory in its boundedness within a particular political system with a particular social and historical past and present? If Aristotle is right that different types of regimes—the liberal, the civic republican and communitarian, the social democratic, the nondemocratic—require different kinds of civic virtue, is it incumbent upon the civic educator to work within the confines of the ideals of their own type (to the extent that those ideals can be pinned down, whether in dominant or subaltern traditions)?