ISI Faculty Resource Center

My students learn from Thucydides that Athens was most moderate when under the guiding hand of Pericles. He restrained their pleonexia while lifting them up when things went badly. But the strong leader died and failed to prepare Athens for his successor. Athens became less moderate as time goes on, and they saw their empire threatened even more. The Sicilian expedition ended in disaster, and the perennial anxieties of the Athenians that a single loss would knock out the supports of the Athenian empire came to fruition.

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Perhaps "Economic Logic" strikes you as a scary pair of words. "Thinking like an economist" is the avowed goal of most economics programs (and of a best-selling economics textbook, Heyne, Boettke, and Prychitko 2005), which means both using the vocabulary correctly (as in "economic grammar"), learning to distinguish truth and falsity (as in "economic logic"), and learning to put together persuasive arguments (as in "economic rhetoric").

Then, at what point in the curriculum is economic logic taught? When should it not be taught? What should be the focus of the teacher, the take-away for the student?

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I regularly assign works of literature in my political theory classes which has caused some of my colleagues in Political Science, Philosophy, and English to question me about what it is that I teach. The Political Scientists want to know what the "political" quality of the literature is while some of my colleagues in philosophy want to know why I use literature instead of more "philosophic" texts that emphasize reasoning and logic. My colleagues in English often think that I am distorting a text by "reading too much into it." In response to these queries I offer the following thoughts on the relationship between philosophy and literature.

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…Words made famous in the contemporary film, Old School, when Will Farrell's character takes on famous pundit, James Carville. While our students may not have an amnesiac moment of brilliance like Frank the Tank, they can be compelled into debate.

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I have been arguing that economic logic focuses on teaching students to construct and evaluate truth and falsity in economic argumentation, while economic grammar focuses on vocabulary and identification. This should help an economics department and the individual instructor decide how to differentiate between Principles and Intermediate courses (see previous post) as well as between courses like Statistics and Econometrics. Most electives fall in the logic category (insofar as the grammatical groundwork has been laid in the Principles sequence).

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"All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his students failed for want of system." — The Education of Henry Adams

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An early Institute session on the liberal arts leads to further—and more troubling—ruminations on the topic…

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An interdisciplinary approach to the study of America is obstructed by the specialized training of graduate school. After assessing the nature of this problem, I offer a modest proposal for how this problem may be addressed.

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A methodological gulf exists among disciplines. Political Science and Philosophy rarely discuss context while to Historians (of which I'm one) context is our shibboleth. Because of my training, I find it difficult to fully engage in discussions with both academics and students on these non-contextual issues. In fact, in these discussions I am reminded of the great quip by John Adams: "Facts are stubborn things." My question/concern is, therefore, how can conservative scholars bridge this gap and introduce into our classrooms both context and, for those of us who toil in the fields of events, transcendent issues? Is there a way? Let me add, too, that I struggle with this myself as I believe in a transcendent moral order but think it is necessary—perhaps to an absolute degree—to know the context of events that shapes the debate on this question/answer.

Next spring I'll be teaching a course on colonial and revolutionary American history. I've picked up some strategies for teaching the Founding from sessions of the Summer Institute, and I'm particularly interested in utilizing Gordon Lloyd's website on the Constitutional Convention. I'm also fascinated by Jonathan Den Hartog's syllabus and his assigning of an important monograph to each student to review and briefly discuss in class. I'm curious to know how successful this endeavor was. I also wonder if colonialists have had good results from assigning primary sources such as Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity or excerpts from Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation. As Gary Gregg emphasized, if one of our goals as teachers is to stimulate our students' imagination and inspire them to appreciate and think deeply about the ideals and values of earlier Americans and their institutions, do these primary sources serve us better than fast-moving popular narratives such as Mayflower and 1776? I'd appreciate hearing about previous successes and disappointments from anyone who has taught this subject.