Civic Studies updates

Posted on September 3, 2025 by Peter

My friend Trygve Throntveit and I sent the following email yesterday to a list of 508 people who have been involved with Civic Studies institutes in the USA, Germany, or Ukraine over the years. It offers some news from the field. If the email missed you even though you have participated in Civic Studies, it’s because of my imperfect list-management, and I apologize; but please let me know.

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing as the co-chairs of the Civic Studies Related Group within the American Political Science Association (APSA). This group is a cluster of activity for Civic Studies. Under a previous name, it launched The Good Society journal, it organizes annual panels at the APSA national conference, and it has its own list of 50+ members (who are included on this email).

We also realize that the APSA group is less relevant to our colleagues in Civic Studies who are not political scientists or not based in the USA. Here we will offer a selection of news and opportunities for the Civic Studies field, defined broadly.

Organizations related to Civic Studies

§ The APSA Civic Studies Related Group: If you would like to join, first join APSA and then navigate here: https://apsanet.org/resources/related-groups/. (You do not have to be a political scientist.)

§ The Alliance for Civics in the Academy: Inaugurated in Spring 2024 at a meeting sponsored by Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy is a nonpartisan network of instructors in higher education involved in teaching courses and developing academic programs aimed at civic education. Peter serves on the Executive Committee, and Civic Studies has been frequently discussed at ACA events. See: https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/alliance-civics-academy.

§ The possibility of a Civic Studies Association: Harry Boyte, Marie Ström, and Trygve Throntveit have written a post entitled “A New Approach to Politics and Professions: The What and Why of ‘Civic Studies,’” which ends by asking, “How should proponents (like ourselves) develop and expand Civic Studies as a field in these times?” Please contact Tryg if you are interested in helping to form a Civic Studies Association or a broader association for “citizen professionals and other likeminded Americans to promote a civic political alternative to today’s dysfunctional politics.”

Summer Institutes of Civic Studies in 2025

§ Chad Hoggan and Tanja Hoggan-Kloubert (Summer Institute 2015) led the European Institute of Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy in Augsburg, Germany in June

§ Peter offered a short course on Civic Studies at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine in June and discussed the experience in “Teaching Civics in Kyiv” on the Kettering Foundation blog.

Teaching Civic Studies in Kyiv, June 2025

And, looking forward to 2026 …

§ Tanja Hoggan-Kloubert and Chad Hoggan are co-chairing the International Transformative Learning Conference on Oct. 21-23, 2026, with a pre-conference symposium on Civic Studies on Oct. 20, at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Peter will provide a keynote address.

Civic Studies Journals

The Good Society journal

The Good Society is the journal of Civic Studies. The latest issue (vol. 33, no. 1) is half of a special issue on “Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community in Civic Life,” guest-edited by David J. Roof and Sarah M. Surak (JMU Summer Institute ‘23). The second half of the special issue is being edited now.

Introduction

Cultivating the Commons in Uncertain Times: Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community in Higher Education and Our Democracy. –David J. Roof and Sarah M. Surak

Articles

§ Higher Education and the Commonwealth. Harry C. Boyte

§ Validity and Reliability of the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale in a Place-Based Experiential Learning Context: Integrating Ethical and Self-Construal Theory. -Danka Maric, Grant A. Fore, Brandon H. Sorge, Francesca A. Williamson, and Julia L. Angstmann

§ Beyond Red v. Blue: A Four-Part Model for Cultivating Moral Vision in Higher Education. – Brandon Neal Edwards

§ Teaching Teachers With, For, and Through Dialogue: Demonstrating Democratic and Ambitious Social Studies Teaching Through an Education Foundations Course. William Waychunas

§ Integrating Lessons about Community into the PreK–12 Curriculum. Katharine Kravetz (Summer Institute ‘09)

New Political Science

Sarah Surak is also a co-editor of New Political Science (the journal of APSA’s Critical Political Science section, newly transitioned to Duke University Press). She says that they are open to publishing and have published Civics Studies-related pieces that align with the journal’s mission.

Many appearances of Jürgen Habermas at a Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies

An open position

Tufts University is seeking an assistant professor of political science in the subfield of political theory. Teaching topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to, civic studies, the pursuit of justice, citizen behavior under conditions of injustice, the intellectual foundations of liberal democracy, and political rhetoric.

Recent publications and talks or podcasts related to Civic Studies

§ Vachararutai (Jan) Boontinand and Joshua Forstenzer (both Summer Institute 2016) and Fufy Demissie, eds, The Pedagogy of the Community of Philosophical Enquiry as Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives on Talking Democracy into Action (Routledge 2024), also including a co-authored contribution by Jonathan Garlick (Summer Institute 2016).

§ Boontinand and Forstenzer, “Educating About, Through and for Human Rights and Democracy in Uncertain Times: The Promise of the Pedagogy of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry” in Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 57 no. 7 (2025)

§ Harry C. Boyte, “Revitalizing the American Commonwealth,” in The National Civic Review, vol. 114, no. 2 (Summer 2025)

§ “Restoring Power and Agency to the Public for Civic Studies and Renewal,” a “Friends & Fellow Citizens” podcast with Harry Boyte and Peter Levine, interviewed by Sherman Tylawsky

§ Albert W. Dzur and Carolyn M. Hendriks, Democracy in Action: Collective Problem Solving in Citizens’ Governance Spaces (Oxford, 2024). See also their summary article in the National Civic Review

§ Joshua Forstenzer’s paper, “Do the Unexpected! Democracy as a Way of Life and Real Politics, Or Why Deweyan Democrats Should Be Pluralists About Tactics and Strategies” won the Educational Theory/John Dewey Society 2024 Outstanding Paper Award.

§ Chad Hoggan and Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert, Learning for Democracy: A Framework for Adult Civic Learning (Palgrave Macmillan, in press)

§ “Professional Study of Civics,”a Great Battlefield podcast in which Nathaniel G. Pearlman interviewed Peter Levine

§ Prof. Sachi Ninomiya-Lim, Rikkyo University (Japan) used Civic Studies concepts in a keynote address on “The modern value of ‘pollution studies’ from the perspective of environmental education.”

§ Benjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey, “Why Civic Thought?” AEIdeas, May 14, 2025

§ American Enterprise Institute/Johns Hopkins University conference on Civic Thought and Practice: The Intellectual Foundations of Citizenship (May 16-17, 2025) with archived videos of the panels.

§ Shigeo Kodama (President, Professor, Shiraume Gakuen University) and Tryg Throntveit delivered papers on aspects of Civic Studies at the International Political Science Association in Seoul in July

Civic Studies at Colleges and Universities

Ball State

Ball State University is launching a Civic Studies Minor this fall (2025).

The Ball State project entitled Cultivating Civic Character for the Common Good (C4G) was funded by the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest. A major aspect of this project will be faculty development and student activities connected to the Civic Studies Minor and Third Way Civics.

David Roof developed a new course at Ball State titled Citizenship, Community, and Leadership (HONR 390) based in large part on Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy and using Third Way Civics. methodology. He will be teaching two related courses in the Netherlands this summer/

Huston-Tillotson University

The Politics Lab at the James L. Farmer House at Huston-Tillotson University leads the Texas HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance, now in its fifth year. The Alliance serves as a statewide platform for designing civic architecture rooted in Black institutional leadership. By integrating institutional design and broad-based cultural and community organizing into a unified practice, the Lab builds Democracy Schools and creates civic infrastructure, lasting institutions, networks, and capacities that sustain democratic life.

This fall, the Alliance will convene alongside a public forum series on the future of higher education. These events extend a method that links legislative outcomes, campus leadership, and scholarly production in a single strategic frame.

Tufts University

Tufts’ Civic Studies Major was launched in 2019. About 50 majors and minors are declared at any time. The requirements include an “Introduction to Civic Studies” course that is regularly taught by Peter Levine and Brian Schaffner, who is the Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies; it enrolls 50 students. There is also a required internship and a capstone course on communicating civic ideas, along with a menu of courses that meet requirements for normative reasoning, the empirical study of social action, and civic skills, such as dialogue and deliberation, conflict-mediation and peacemaking, community-based research, communication and media-making, public art, community organizing, evaluating nonprofits, or financing social enterprises.

All incarcerated or formerly incarcerated students in the Tufts prison program are Civic Studies majors.

University of Sheffield (UK)

Joshua Forstenzer regularly teaches an advanced undergraduate course and an MA course that is largely inspired by the Summer Institute of Civic Studies. It is called: “How to Change the World From Here: Utopian Vistas, Reformism, and Democratic Action”. It involves reading philosophical texts related to political technology (or the question of political means) from different historical eras, and students engage in a personally-selected service learning practice throughout the semester and reflect on it. It is very popular with students, regularly reaching full capacity, and receiving very strong student evaluations.

Forstenzer also leads an ‘Impact Case Study‘ at Sheffield, which involves engaging in research-informed practice-based activities with non-academic partners (mostly collaborating with European non-profits) on the question of flourishing in challenging educational contexts, with a special focus on climate crisis education.

Individuals’ News

§ Tahima Yesmin Shova (European Institute 2023) defended her doctoral dissertation in Philosophy at University of Sheffield, advised by Joshua Forestenzer (2016), with Peter serving on her committee

§ Yuriy Petrushenko, who has attended the Institute of Civic Studies more than once and serves as President of the Eastern European Network for Citizenship Education, was appointed director of the Fund of the President of Ukraine to Support Education, Science and Sports.

“Class Notes”

Among the first cohort of Civic Studies alumni (2019): Paula McAvoy is a Professor of Education at NC State; Whitney Barth is Executive Director of the Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion and professor of law; Michelle Bellino is professor of education at the University of Michigan; Meenakshi Chhabra is Vice Provost for Mental Health & Wellbeing at Lesley University; James Croft is University Chaplain at University of Sussex; Connie K. Chung is a researcher and consultant on youth engagement; Andrea Finlay is a Research Health Scientist for the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs; Elizebeth Gish is the Senior Program Officer for Democracy and Education at the Kettering Foundation; Katharine Kravetz is emerita at American University and has an article in the current Good Society; Meredith Mira founded and leads Choice Points Coaching; Vedant Nanackchand teaches printmaking and human rights/democracy at the University of Johannesburg; Sung-Wook Paik is Professor of Political Science at York College; Anna Rosefsky Saavedra co-directs the University of Southern California’s Center for Applied Research in Education; Tim Shaffer is the inaugural Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Chair of Civil Discourse and director of the SNF Ithaca Initiative at University of Delaware; Laura Wray-Lake is a Professor of Social Welfare at UCLA; and Nick Zavediuk teaches at High Point University

We welcome additional news for future (occasional) emails!

Peter Levine, Tufts University

Tryg Throntveit, Ball State University

open webinars on resistance

Posted on September 1, 2025 by Peter

I’m offering these interactive webinars for Crossroads and Connections, which is related to Indivisible.

Session 1 – Tuesday, September 2, 2025 – 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

What do people need to know for resistance? (And how can we learn it?)

Session 2 – Wednesday, September 10, 2025 – 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

Is MAGA part of a global right wing? A revival of US nativism? A personality-driven authoritarian movement? A symptom of polarization?

Session 3 – Thursday September 18, 2025 – 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

What do people need to know for resistance? (And how can we learn it?) (Repeat of 9/2)

I will begin these sessions with some offering remarks, but I intend them to be conversations. You can sign up here.

teaching in the era of AI (thoughts for fall 2025)

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Peter

Artificial Intelligence is already disrupting education, especially in the humanities and portions of the social sciences. It is part of the “toxic brew” that makes my friend Austin Sarat, an Amherst professor, say that he’s “not ready to return to the classroom” this fall.

Students can use AI to extend their learning–to pose demanding and advanced questions or to summarize bodies of material so that they save time for reading other texts closely. But they can also use AI to reduce the total amount of valuable effort that they would have otherwise committed to a course, thereby learning less from it. As Clay Shirky writes, “If the student’s preferred working methods reduce mental effort, we have to reintroduce that effort somehow.”

I think writing and reading are distinct issues.

AI can assist writers in valuable ways. It can be a thought-partner, a preliminary reader, a copy-editor, and even a drafter of routine passages. Writing for school or college–writing to learn–is a special case, because the goal is not to generate the text but to develop one’s understanding and skills. There can be no substitute for struggling mentally with this task. A student can use AI to help, but a reliable question for students to ask themselves is whether they have invested effort in the document that bears their name. If not, they can’t have learned much or anything.

To some extent, we instructors can alter incentives so that students write without relying on AI. In a course that I am co-teaching this fall, we’ll require an in-class midterm. Oral presentations and exams are worth considering. A new independent study finds that commercial tools are quite good—right now—at detecting AI-generated text.

Nevertheless, students will probably get away with learning less by relying on AI to write in college. My general philosophy is that you can lead the horse to water but not make it drink. Capable college students have always been able to cut corners to the detriment of their own learning. I did so, to some extent, long before AI. (I would sometimes read summaries in secondary sources instead of hard primary texts.) The main question is whether we can inspire and guide students who want to learn to work intensively on forming and expressing their own ideas.

Reading seems more problematic to me. Using AI to summarize texts is both more tempting and harder to monitor than using it for writing. When I open any PDF document in Chrome right now, Adobe pops up to tell me that it can summarize the file for me. ChatPGT usually does a credible job of producing notes on a text, including a whole book–and including whole books that I have written.

Once again, we can use these tools to extend learning. I sometimes use AI to summarize material that (frankly) I do not deeply respect but feel I should dip into. Although I don’t use the time that I save as well as I should, I do reserve some of it for close-reading hard texts.

The case I would make for reading is fundamentally spiritual. We are at grave risk of being caught inside our own limited heads. When we read carefully, we follow someone else’s thinking for a significant time. We are not merely notified of the authors’ main points; we learn how they think, word by word and paragraph by paragraph. We learn what counts as a persuasive point or a telling example or a provocative question for another human being.

I think that many people would concede this point if the author is a literary genius. If you’re going to study Shakespeare at all, you obviously must read his work, because his language is admirable and integral to his project. But I want to make the same point about routine academic authors.

The typical contributor to the Journal of Politics is no William Shakespeare. Yet each competent scholarly author has a distinctive way of constructing an argument, and each subfield or scholarly community has its own shared ways. (Linguists would say that authors have idiolects of their own and dialects for their groups.) Struggling to make sense of a routine yet capable piece of academic writing is a way of getting out of one’s own mind. Of course, it is not the only way. Among many other activities, we should listen to people speak. But reading is one way to escape solipsism, which is a form of spiritual death.

See also: what I would advise students about ChatGPT (my 2023 iteration of these points); a collective model of the ethics of AI in higher education

The Art of Solitude

Posted on August 28, 2025 by Peter

I first explored similarities between Montaigne’s Essays (1580-88) and the ancient Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon (particularly the “Chapter of Eights”) on this blog in August 2024. I have been developing these ideas into a longer article or perhaps a portion of a book. One shared theme (among several) is that we should be committed to other people rather than to our own ideas. We can be unattached to our opinions while still deeply caring.

Last week, I discovered and read Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (2022), which emphasizes precisely the same pair of texts. He translates the whole Chapter of Eights and discusses Montaigne at length.

Batchelor is a great writer on solitude. He does not define it as being alone, but rather as being deeply attentive to what’s going on inside yourself. In fact, you can hide away in your room or retreat to a forest and yet be mentally consumed by other people and events, or you can genuinely talk and listen to others while retaining an inner space. Montaigne makes these points well, as does the Pali Canon.

Montaigne, a Renaissance European, knew nothing of Buddhism, but he was impressed–at least during a phase of his life–by the Skeptical philosophy of the Greco-Roman author Sextus. The Skeptical School traced its origins to Pyrrho of Ellis, who had visited India with Alexander the Great in 327-326 BCE and may even have become a Buddhist. In my view, the strongest evidence of Buddhism’s influence on Greek Skepticism is this passage, which purports to represent Pyrrho’s teaching:

Whoever reflects on how to attain happiness must see three things: First, what are matters like by nature? Second, in what state should we approach matters? And last, what happens to those who are in this state? … Matters are without an essential nature, unmeasurable, and unfixed, and for this reason neither our senses nor our opinions are true or false. For this reason, therefore, do not believe them, but be without opinions and without biases and without agitation. …

Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica, 14.18.1-4 (my trans)

Christopher Beckwith (2017, p. 32) shows that this text “is so close to” a specific, early Indian Buddhist text “that it is virtually a translation of it,” and he argues that some of the Greek words were coined to translate Sanskrit words that were important in early Buddhism, such as anatman (without an essential nature) and duhkha (unsteady or unstable).

At any rate, Greek Skepticism developed during a period when Greeks were in dialogue with Indian Buddhists in a large region where many schools and sects taught overlapping ideas. And Montaigne was strongly influenced by Greek Skepticism.

Batchelor is less interested in such historical links and influences than in sheer similarities. He presents Montaigne as having rediscovered principles of solitude, meditation and compassion from personal experience and experimentation, which is how Montaigne describes his own journey.

Montaigne is far more empathetic and compassionate than Sextus, who often tries to attain inner peace by ridiculing the various views of past philosophers. There are more than 1,300 quotations from Latin alone in Montaigne’s Essays (Selevold 2010), and his usual mode is to demonstrate that he appreciates the quoted author’s stance without necessarily endorsing it. By introducing compassion to Sextus’ Skepticism, Montaigne actually moves closer to Buddhism (without knowing anything about that tradition).

There is pretty good evidence that Montaigne also remained a believing Catholic, in private as well as public life, which means that some of his deepest commitments were incompatible with Buddhism. But he could write long passages in which his religious commitments appear irrelevant and he is fully guided by ideals that we could call compassion and mindfulness. Just for example:

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been absorbed by external events for part of the time, I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude and to myself.

Montaigne, 3:13 (“On Experience”), my trans.

Batchelor beautifully translates this and other relevant passages–as I can attest, since I have been translating an overlapping set of excerpts from Montaigne for my own use. (I do wish, however, that the Yale Press book provided notes or other references, because it is quite a task to locate Batchelor’s original texts.)

Batchelor also writes about meditation and his own experiments with hallucinogens. Those sections are engaging and interesting but beyond my capacity to evaluate.

Sources: Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press 2022); Christopher I. Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton, 2017); Sellevold, Kirsti. “Quotation in Montaigne’s Essais: communication across time and contexts–A case study,” Symbolae Osloenses 84.1 (2010).

holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Peter

Two points are valid, in my opinion, and we should address both:

First, the Trump Administration is using almost every available tool, including unconstitutional methods, to harm universities and to interfere in their internal affairs. At my university, they literally abducted a beloved graduate student because she had written a completely appropriate op-ed in our student newspaper, thus suppressing speech on our campus.

The Administration receives support from people who think that higher education has been intolerantly leftist (or biased against Israel). Trump and his close associates may believe those complaints. However, their campaign against higher education is top-down and self-interested and closely resembles that of other “personalist” authoritarian regimes around the world today, which range across the ideological spectrum:

“Under the [right-wing] authoritarian leadership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the government has started a culture war to dismantle the independence of academic institutions.”
“As Modi’s [Hindu nationalist] BJP tightens its grip, India’s universities become political battlegrounds where academic independence is sacrificed to ideological loyalty.”
In Venezuela, “The main public universities, in particular, have paid a heavy price as a consequence of their defense of democratic values and academic freedom, as they have been defunded by the government” (which is left-wing).
“Much of the structure of Turkish higher education” is being dismantled “through purges, restrictions, and assertions of central control, a process begun earlier this year and accelerating now with alarming speed.”

Both here and in other countries, attacks on universities are coordinated with attacks on broadcast media, foundations, law firms, civil servants, judges, and, often, the legislative branch.

In its battles with US higher education, the Administration has some grassroots support. In July, Gallup found that 41% of people had little or no confidence in higher education, and of those, 32% said it was “’too liberal,’ trying to ‘indoctrinate’ or ‘brainwash’ students, or not allowing students to think for themselves as reasons for their opinions.” That group represents 13% of the whole sample: enough to generate a flood of social media, but a minority of the population. The Administration’s agenda is mostly self-interested rather than populist.

Thus I disagree with people like Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), who believe that American universities courted trouble by being intolerant of conservatives. He says, “If they’d listened to us 15 years ago, none of this would be happening.”

I welcome FIRE’s current work against the Trump Administration, but I believe that Trump would have gone after higher education in exactly the same way if universities had attracted more prominent conservative faculty and speakers or had avoided issuing statements about current events. Right-wing media would still have found plenty of anecdotes about liberal bias, and 13% of Americans would still have denounced higher education from the right. The administration needed a pretext–not a fair assessment–to squash higher education as an autonomous sector.

Second, I believe that one of our most important tasks–as humans, and specifically as people who study or work in universities–is to inquire into what is right. This process (call it “normative analysis”) is comparative or dialectical; it’s about juxtaposing alternative values and competing arguments and reasoning about which is better. Furthermore, John Stuart Mill was correct; you can’t just read and discuss alternative arguments to feel their force. You must talk to peers who sincerely hold them.

I think that swaths of US higher education are too ideologically homogeneous to support this kind of reasoning well. In the liberal arts and some of the professions, the dominant ideology is left (although not Marxist, because real Marxism is marginal). In business schools, economics departments, and business-oriented engineering programs, I think the bias is center-right and biased toward technology.

I do not object to the characterization that the whole of higher education is too homogeneously center-left. For instance, at my university, less than one percent of faculty political donations went to Republican candidates or organizations in 2018. At the same time, the name “Marx” is mentioned in just four Tufts course descriptions this semester, half of which are in Art History; none in the social sciences. In short, the ideological range is constrained on both sides, not to mention that academic culture tends to be secular, meritocratic, cosmopolitan, civilian, Anglophone. and technocratic.

Excessive homogeneity can lead to clichés, “motivated reasoning” (selecting evidence to favor a preferred conclusion) and weak argumentation. It can fail to prepare people to engage the broader society.

Meanwhile, few faculty are trained and empowered to address questions of value in academically rigorous ways.

Normative analysis is the focus of a subfield in political science, political theory, which had about 75 job openings in the USA in 2022-3 (5.75% of all political science jobs). That year, there were also about 450 job openings in the USA for philosophers involved with value-theory (broadly defined). Put together, those searches constituted about one open job dedicated to teaching normative inquiry for every ten institutions of higher education in the United States.

Normative analysis is (and should be) conducted in other disciplines as well. Yet it is generally countercultural across higher education and in contemporary society.

Some right-wingers denounce discussions of “divisive concepts.” I have personally observed left-wingers who are genuinely intolerant of conservative (or classical liberal, or religious) arguments. And many administrators, professors and students are positivists. They believe that facts and values are strictly distinct; that values are matters of opinion; and that scholarship should be about facts. It is particularly difficult to have a serious discussion about values in a community where people share key political values and yet deny that values are relevant, claiming that research and teaching are only about facts.

In sum: we should expand philosophical or ideological heterogeneity on college campuses, which means extending our ideological range to the right but also in other directions. We should do so because it is good for us, not because the Trump Administration claims to want this outcome. Trump’s people simply want to squelch autonomous civil society. A powerful civil society is confidently pluralistic and willing to debate normative questions from many angles. Getting there requires internal work, even as we battle our national government for freedom.

Montaigne’s equanimity

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Peter

Michel de Montaigne famously imagined that he could learn not to mind dying. After all, there is no rational reason to fear not existing, nor to regret that you won’t still be alive in 100 years, for you weren’t alive a century ago. But if we are not going to fear death when we meet it, then there is no reason to fear it now. By imagining that we will face death without fear and working back from our last day to the present, we can remove distress.

As Montaigne says, no soul is “at rest so long as it fears death,” but if the soul can remove that fear, “then it can boast something almost surpassing the human condition: anxiety, torment, fear, and displeasure can no longer lodge in it” [1.20, my translation].

In this early essay, “To Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne canvasses many arguments against the fear of death. Nevertheless, the general air is of a person who is indeed anxious about dying, and whose everyday experience is colored by that fear. He seems to be clinging to logical arguments that are not really changing his state of mind.

Montaigne’s last essay, “Of Experience,” revisits the same topic in a spirit of greater equanimity, even though the author is old and close to his real death. Here he suggests that he has absorbed the arguments against fearing death and has made them part of his character:

Yet I am prepared to lose life without regret, as something that is losable by its very nature, not as something that is annoying and troublesome. Besides, only for those who delight in living is it appropriate to dislike dying.

There is a certain housekeeping involved involved in enjoying life; I enjoy it twice as much as others do, for the degree of enjoyment depends on the amount that we apply ourselves to it. Especially at this hour, when I perceive my life to be so brief, I want to extend its weight; I want to arrest the promptness of its flight by the promptness of my senses, and to compensate for the hastiness of its passing by the vigor of its use: since my possession of life is shorter, I must make it deeper and fuller.

Others feel the sweetness of contentment and prosperity; I feel the sweetness as they do, but not as something passing and slipping away. Also, we must study, savor, and ruminate on life to give appropriate thanks to the One who grants it to us.

Other people enjoy all pleasures as they do the pleasures of sleep, without knowing them. So that even sleep might not escape me so stupidly, I have sometimes found it good to have my sleep disturbed so that I can catch a glimpse of it.

I consult with myself about my own contentment, I do not skim over it. When I have become sorrowful and disgusted, I probe that state and bend my reason to meditate on it. Or do I find myself in some tranquil setting? Is there some pleasure that tickles me? I do not let myself be swindled by my senses, I associate my soul with it, not to engage in it, but to agree with it, not to lose myself in it, but to find myself there; and I let my soul see itself reflected in this state of thriving, to weigh and estimate its good fortune, and to amplify it. [Montaigne 3.12 (“Of experience”)]

If, as a young man, Montaigne had known that he would later achieve equanimity, then he would have known that he didn’t have to fear death in the present. Unfortunately for him, he could only advocate equanimity, not predict that he would achieve it until he actually did (or at least, so he claims).

If the sky were seen for the first time

Posted on August 21, 2025 by Peter

Now give us your true mind, turn to reason.
A new thing is trying to reach your ears 
To reveal itself to you in novel forms.
But nothing is so simple that it is not
At first hard to believe, nor any marvel 
So great that we don’t soon forget our wonder.

The sky’s clear and pure color, so restrained,
The stars shining everywhere, the moon,
And the splendid brightness of the sun’s light— 
If all this were suddenly, for the first time,
Unexpectedly revealed to mortals,
What could be called more miraculous than this,
Not less than what nations had dared to believe?

Nothing, I think; this scene would compel wonder.
We’re so tired of seeing, we don’t care to look up
To the resplendent temples of heaven.
Stop being terrified by this novelty
Stop spitting reason out of your mind.
Rather weigh it with sharp judgment, and if it seems true
Give it assent, or, if not, fight against it. 

For the mind seeks reason, and the highest place 
Is infinitely beyond the walls of this world. 
What is there beyond, where the mind wishes to look,
Where the free-thrown spirit itself can fly?

This is an excerpt from Lucretius (2.1023-46), which I found because Montaigne quotes the second part of it in his essay “It is Madness to Base True and False on our Self-Confidence” (1.27). My translation of this Latin text. Stephen Batchelor also discusses this passage (in his translation) in The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press, 2020), p. 42.

learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Peter

Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay estimate that the No Kings protests this June were among the largest in American history, and the number of protests is growing faster than in 2017 (see the graph above).

Protesting has several purposes, including advertising a movement and recruiting people to take other actions. But protests can also influence people to change their views or behavior. For example, they can convert people who disagree or motivate people who are passive (Bayard Rustin 1965).

Inevitably, the vast majority of any protest’s audience does not observe it directly. People see it through media of various kinds. That was even true during the French Revolution (Jones 2021), and more so in an era of mass communications. It is critical whether and how media organizations (and nowadays, social media users) describe protests (Wasow, 2020).

For those protesting against Trump, two current challenges are: 1) neglect and 2) backlash. Some prominent voices in the media seem not to notice that protests are happening, which may reduce their impact. And many powerful media outlets misrepresent protesters. For example, right-wing media obsessively presented Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests as violent, when data show that they were not, and this contributed to a very tangible backlash. BLM demanded reductions in police budgets, but the presence of BLM protests was associated with increases in police budgets (Ebbinghaus, Bailey & Rubel 2024).

The power of media can be discouraging, especially given the splintered and ideologically polarized media landscape and the prevalence of media outlets that are outright hostile to resistance.

However, protest events can break through if they are skillfully designed (and perhaps a bit lucky).

Consider the apex moment of Gandhi’s career as a protest leader, the Great Salt March of 1930.

Before he launched the March, the Indian independence movement was struggling, and Gandhi was struggling against rivals who included religious sectarians, Marxists, and violent revolutionaries. The media that mattered to him (Indian and foreign) was polarized by ideology, language, and ethnicity and was widely hostile to him.

Gandhi chose to march to the sea to harvest salt because that action would dramatize the evils of imperialism, provoke police action, acknowledge the needs of poor Indians for whom salt was expensive, and turn salt itself into a powerful symbol.

When Gandhi set off on foot with a rather small group, press reports were dismissive and patronizing. The Statesman newspaper of Calcutta called the march “a childishly futile business,” and the Times of India defended the government’s salt monopoly as good for the poor. In the USA, TIME Magazine mocked Gandhi’s “spindly frame” and called his wife Kasturba, “a shriveled, little middle-aged Hindu.” (I quote these and the following snippets from Guha 2018.)

But the scale of the march and the brutality of the police response at the shore broke through. TIME switched to describing Gandhi as a statesman and even as “St. Gandhi,” whose “movement for independence” uses “Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs.” Perhaps not all the world’s coverage was favorable, but most of the media switched from viewing Gandhi as a bit of a joke to taking him very seriously indeed. He was back at the head of the Independence movement, which now had momentum.

I am not saying that we need a new Gandhi. Centralized leadership is overrated (even in the Indian independence movement). The way to achieve a breakthrough today is to try many tactics in a decentralized way until one or more of them work. But all of us can learn from the Great Salt March, particularly:

Innovation: We always need new forms of civil disobedience. Harvesting salt illegally on a public beach was an innovation in 1930. Protesting at Tesla showrooms was an innovation in 2025. What’s next? (Right now, I am wondering about a march of many religious congregations from the National Cathedral toward Lafayette Square.)
Grassroots support: Gandhi would have lost humiliatingly except that thousands of people joined him on his march. The cost of salt resonated with poor Indians (as did his leadership, of course). The question is not which issue is most important, but what gets many people involved.
A focus on the audience. It is always hard for social movements to think rigorously about how outsiders will receive their messages, because they disagree with the outsiders! Activists are not obliged to change their goals to cater to public opinion, but they must consider perceptions. What will “Normies” think about our protest? That may sometimes be an annoying question, yet victory depends on answering it well.

See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; features of effective boycotts; how to engage our universities in this crisis etc. Sources: Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement” Commentary (February, 1965); Colin Jones, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021); Omar Wasow, “Agenda seeding: How 1960s black protests moved elites, public opinion and voting,” American Political Science Review 114.3 (2020): 638-659; Mathis Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey & Jacob Rubel, “The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How ‘Defund the Police’ Sparked Political Backlash, “ Social Problems, 2024, spae004, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spae004; Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The years that changed the world, 1914-1948 (Vintage, 2018).

Embracing Difficult Conversations

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Peter

This is a recording of the plenary session entitled Embracing Difficult Conversations: The Intersection of Ethics and Civics Education at the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) conference in June.

The panelists were: Sarah Stitzlein, University of Cincinnati; Winston C. Thompson, the Casto Professor at The Ohio State University; Jana Mohr Lone, PLATO; Allison Cohen, a teacher at Langley High School in McLean, VA; and me. Debi Talukdar moderated.

Sarah Stitzlein reported on conversations with conservative critics of controversial issues in schools. She suggested some responses to their concerns: Ground discussions in American principles, such as the tension between equality and liberty. Use historical rather than current examples. Delay the most contested discussions until students are older. Let students lead. And emphasize the purpose of living well together, finding common ground while respecting differences.

Winston Thompson discussed the common phenomenon of individuals being given too much or too little credibility or being misunderstood because of their perceived identity. (For instance, an immigrant from a given country could be treated as if her view of that country was definitive or else discounted on the assumption that she must be biased.) The practical steps that Winston recommended included setting norms for addressing identities, allowing people to opt out of “representing” a group, taking responsibility for imbalances in credibility, and teaching about such challenges as part of civics education.

Janna Mohr Lone described listening as an ethical orientation, not just a skill; it means giving full attention to another person. It requires receptivity, curiosity, and open-heartedeness. Among her practical tips: Allow long pauses so quieter voices emerge. Avoid the “ping-pong” when the teacher answers each student, and instead encourage students to respond o each other.

Alison Cohen spoke from extensive experience as a classroom teacher. She noted that reasons and arguments rarely change minds; fear and anger often underlie our positions. Instead of asking students what they’re angry about, she often asks “What are you concerned about?”—a question that helps uncover core values. She acknowledges students’ legitimate concerns without insincerely agreeing with them. She shifts discussions toward shared philosophical questions, often linked to Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity). Her background in ethics and political philosophy allows her to frame these concerns productively without formally teaching philosophy. She encourages listening for understanding first, rather than searching for flaws to attack, and helps clarify students’ points to reduce misunderstanding and fear of speaking.

Thanks to my co-panelists, it was a rich and insightful conversation with much relevance for practice.

Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Peter

Here are two frameworks for analyzing Trump and MAGA. Although elements of both could be true, they are not fully compatible. More importantly, they suggest quite different responses.

MAGA is an ethnonationalist right-wing movement with considerable popular support (although less than a solid majority), a base of local organizations, and deep roots in American history (Smith 1999). Donald Trump is the current national leader of this movement, but it will outlast him. The movement uses many conventional methods, such as winning elections and passing legislation through the legislature. It also plays hardball and violates rules and norms, but that is not a definitive trait. In fact, the center-left has also used similar behavior at times. Ethnonationalist right-wing movements are common around the world today. Some are led by charismatic figures, but that is not especially true of AfD in Germany, for instance. Their common characteristic is their ideology.
Trump is a personalist or patrimonialist leader. Today’s personalists around the world include right-wing, left-wing, and technocratic leaders, and many are ideologically flexible. In essence, they are charismatic leaders whose followers owe their power to the leader and who trample rival power centers in the civil service, other branches and levels of government, the media, and civil society (Frantz et al.). In personalist parties, the grassroots is almost entirely passive; power is centralized. Insofar as today’s personalists share a philosophy, it is populist-authoritarianism, or perhaps Bonapartism–identifying the authentic people with a single “strong” leader.

If you apply the ideological framework, then your response to Trump will vary depending on your ideology. If you’re on the left, you’ll want to build a more popular and effective progressive alternative. You may welcome defectors from the right, but you will be suspicious of them if they remain conservative. If you’re conservative but not MAGA, you may see some value in some of Trump’s positions and suspect that liberal elites are biased against him. If your main concern is polarization, then you may recommend cross-partisan dialogue and favor a centrist response.

On the other hand, if you apply the personalist framework, then you may be attracted to the solution that seems to work in other countries–a broad-based coalition in defense of constitutional limits and against the charismatic leader. This coalition should have a modest economic and social agenda and focus instead on challenging the authoritarian leader.

I suppose my own view is that Trump is a personalist authoritarian who taps into a robust right-wing ethnonationalist movement, just as other personalists use locally popular ideologies (Hindtuva, Chavismo) in their respective countries. This means that I would endorse strategies that challenge Trump as a personalist as well as ideological opposition from the left and center-left. However, I am not sure the same people and organizations can do both at the same time.

See also: democracy’s crisis: a system map (a revised version to appear in Studies in Law, Politics and Society); what is the basis of a political judgment?. Citations: Smith, Rogers M. Civic ideals: Conflicting visions of citizenship in US history. Yale University Press, 1997; Frantz, E., Kendall-Taylor, A., Wright, “Why Trump’s control of the Republican Party is bad for democracy,” The Conversation, Jan 30, 2024.