One of my favorite books to teach is the Xunzi. In the famous chapter titled “Human Nature is Bad,” Xunzi compares human nature to crooked wood that the ruler must steam and bend straight. “Now without teachers or proper models for people, they will be deviant, dangerous, and not correct. Without ritual and yi , they will be unruly, chaotic, and not well ordered.” 1 Immanuel Kant and Isaiah Berlin maintain that liberalism is predicated on the ruler not being able to straighten the crooked timber of humanity and that the effort will lead to violence. Xunzi, on the contrary, argues that the ruler may manipulate words— yi , standards of righteousness—and the environment— li , ritual—to shape the souls of subjects. I object to Xunzi’s authoritarianism but find him to be a profound critic of liberal democracy. One reason to research and teach comparative political theory is to engage thinkers who disagree with things oneself and one’s students take for granted.

Should public schools provide students with opportunities to write poetry? If so, why? The modern education reform movement insists that students be able to answer questions citing specific textual evidence. In practice, this means that American public education focuses on standardized testing and gives students few opportunities to say something new. In this essay, I explain how Charles Taylor’s expressivist thesis justifies a place for poetry in the public-school curriculum. According to Taylor, the designative-instrumentalist theory of language emphasizes its role in transmitting pre-existing thoughts. The constitutive-expressivist theory of language, on the contrary, maintains that people form and clarify their thoughts in expressing them. For the latter view, poetry is a way to give voice to one’s authentic self, one’s community, and the cosmos. This article brings this insight into contemporary debates about the curriculum and explains the democratic value of encouraging students to express themselves.

In 1952, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a term paper on the influence of Darwinian biology on pragmatism as a graduate student at Boston University. In his 1968 sermon titled "The Drum Major Instinct," King built on the work of James Wallace Hamilton to envision how to combine Christian ethics and the pragmatist conception of instincts. For King, as for the psychologist Gordon W. Allport, one way to end racism is to bring children into contact with children of other races as equals, such as on a sports team. This article shows how King studied and refined the pragmatist thesis that social reform depends on individual and collective efforts to train egalitarian instincts. The article concludes by contrasting King's antiracism with Ibram X. Kendi's.

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Do Americans have a right to believe that the country is making racial progress? Conservatives sometimes answer yes and argue that the country is achieving Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of a color-blind society. Afropessimists answer no and point to the continuing problems of police terror, mass incarceration, and poverty among Black Americans. This article unearths King's 1952 term paper on the pragmatists to reveal an early engagement with William James' notion of the will to believe. The article interprets King as articulating a right to dream of a just and loving world to maximize the chance of the community actualizing it. The conclusion argues that the idea of a right to dream helps people become energized rather than despondent in the aftermath of the Supreme Court case prohibiting race-conscious college admissions.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMary F. Scudder and Stephen K. White. The Two Faces of Democracy: Decentering Agonism and Deliberation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 210. $99.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).Nicholas TampioNicholas TampioFordham University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 13, Number 2Spring 2024 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/729173 PermissionsRequest permissions For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

ConstellationsEarly View BOOK REVIEW Deparochializing Political Theory By Melissa S. Williams, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020 Nicholas Tampio, Corresponding Author Nicholas Tampio [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-7295-8486 Fordham University, Bronx, New York, USA Correspondence Nicholas Tampio, Fordham University, Bronx, New York, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Nicholas Tampio, Corresponding Author Nicholas Tampio [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-7295-8486 Fordham University, Bronx, New York, USA Correspondence Nicholas Tampio, Fordham University, Bronx, New York, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 04 April 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12750Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsNicholas TampioNicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is an editor of the journal Comparative Political Theory.

Political theorists argue that justice requires treating people's time as having equal worth. In this article, I contend that justice sometimes requires making exceptions to uniform time rules. The article focuses on New York State's regulations for nonpublic schools and how they affect Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish day schools, or yeshivas. Dissatisfied yeshiva graduates, the state education department, and several liberal political theorists assert that the state should pressure yeshivas to dedicate more time to secular studies. Reconstructing Horace Kallen's argument against the melting pot conception of citizenship and for cultural pluralism, I maintain that liberal states should be generous toward non-liberal ways of life on condition that they do not systematically abuse children or pose a danger to public safety. A liberal education landscape may sustain many kinds of schooling, including ones that outsiders think waste time.

How is it possible to improve the material conditions of the poor in the United States, whose number is disproportionately black?How is it possible to treat every citizen as deserving of dignity, including black citizens vulnerable to gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and vote dilution?In A Realistic Blacktopia, Derrick Darby makes a compelling argument that improving the condition of black citizens requires forging alliances among marginalized communities.My critique is that Darby sometimes refrains from pursuing this argument to its logical conclusion: reaching out to white working-class Trump supporters.The book challenges the progressive story that 'race-specific remedies are required to address racial wrongs' (p.2).Darby knows that African Americans still lag behind whites on many objective measures and that the legacy of slavery and red-lining practices contributed to this situation.His argument is that if African Americans want substantive, and not just symbolic, progress, then they need to pitch a bigger tent: 'And the reason is obvious: the substantive things blacks want for themselves are also things that other marginalized populations want too, and to get them we must unite to fight' (p.4).Darby identifies conservative jurists as one reason that race-specific remedies will not fly in a supposedly post-racial America.Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says that the 'Constitution abhors classifications based on race' and that 'every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all' (p.29).Chief Justice Roberts argues that the 'way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race' (p.107).Whites are unlikely to understand and sympathize with arguments for reparations or affirmative action, according to Darby, because they psychologically resist viewing themselves as responsible for injustices done centuries or decades ago.It is not just conservatives who are wary of marching under the race-first flag.Many conservatives, moderates, whites, and blacks are 'fatigued with and

Political theorists teach students in a classroom, but they also teach the public through opinion essays, speeches, social media, and conversations. In this chapter, I share insights gleaned from a decade of participating in public debates about education. Initially, I explain and defend Michel Foucault's argument that theorists should be specific intellectuals, commenting on their areas of expertise, rather than general intellectuals, who can comment on lots of topics simply by virtue of being smart. How can theorists best contribute to public conversations about politics? My advice includes establishing your credentials, researching a policy area, staying abreast of developments, choosing whether to work within or outside the halls of power, learning the ropes for writing and pitching popular articles, and bringing scholarly habits into public-facing work. Political theorists may study, and participate in debates about, every level of the political ocean.

Political theorists may investigate the ocean flows of politics with the help of the natural sciences. In this chapter, I consider how political theorists may draw upon neuroscience to address the problem of in-your-face politics. In the Constitution of Poland, Rousseau intimates that somatic habits are the soil from which an ethico-political sensibility grows. In this chapter, I engage recent neuroscience research to identify habits that may facilitate civic friendship, including walking outdoors, dancing, eating foods with nutrients that reduce inflammation, smelling calming odors like lavender, and sleeping soundly.

Political theory courses aim to teach students to think profoundly about politics. A syllabus helps this endeavor by juxtaposing authors who come at the same question from different angles. I recommend that teachers assign a mix of major and minor authors who tend to support or undermine the existing intellectual and political arrangement. To illustrate this procedure, I explain how I teach nineteenth-century American political thought by assigning the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, the Pequot Methodist minister William Apess, and the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. If the purpose of crafting a political theory syllabus is to prepare us for ongoing political tasks, I suggest, then American political thought should become Hemispheric and incorporate perspectives from Mexico, Haiti, Central America, and South America.

One definition of thinking is having a dialogue in one's head. A political theory class can prompt students to think by giving assignments that require them to stage a dialogue in a debate, exam, presentation, research paper, or thesis. In this chapter, I describe how to make assignments that give students an opportunity to think about how to address caste and race alongside Indian and African American political theorists. The assignments stage dialogues between Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Marcus Garvey on how to forge a people, B.R. Ambedkar and W.E.B. Du Bois on the ends of a freedom struggle, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the means to achieve a society filled with love and justice, and Varsha Ayyar and Saidiya Hartman on how social movements may address intersectional oppression.

Political theorists teach a tradition that begins, for all intents and purposes, with the ancient Greeks. Theorists teach major figures such as Plato and Aristotle that have set the agenda for much of Euro-American political thought, but they can also teach minor figures who challenge the notion that the wise should rule. In this chapter, I make a case for teaching Sextus Empiricus, author of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Sextus suggests that our claims to know things seem to be affected, limited, and distorted by our senses, circumstances, and customs. People accuse sceptics of contradicting themselves, but I invoke Michel de Montaigne to explain that this is because language favors dogmatism. The chapter explains how teaching Sextus can lay the foundation for subsequent theories in the history of political thought that marshal scepticism for liberalism, pluralism, and democracy.

"The quest for revolution in Australian schooling policy." Journal of Education Policy, 37(2), pp. 334–335