Why Colleges Don't Teach the Federalist Papers

Peter Berkowitz of Hoover examines the import - and ignorance - of The Federalist Papers. 

"In the misguided quest to mold political science to the shape of the natural sciences, many scholars disdainfully dismiss The Federalist—indeed, all works of ideas—as mere journalism or literary studies which, lacking scientific rigor, can't yield genuine knowledge....By robbing students of the chance to acquire a truly liberal education, our universities also deprive the nation of a citizenry well-acquainted with our Constitution's enduring principles."

This "scientistic" attitude is the long-range result of philosophy's abdication from epistemology, which has left us bereft of tools to clearly determine when we know something from observation, inference, and deduction.

The fact that many law schools, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Berkeley, do not include these works in their course of study is appalling, but explains the way far too many lawyers are willing to run roughshod over the Constitution. 

The Federalist should be taught in high school as well as college, along with so many other original documents of American history and politics that have been replaced by leftist revisionism, such as Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.

What does education have to do with Bush hatred and Obama euphoria?

In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz argued that Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are two sides of the same coin - the triumph of passion over reason. He laments the current, deformed thinking of our intellectual classes.

"As Hamilton would have supposed, the susceptibility of political judgment to corruption by interest and ambition is as operative in our time as it was in his. What has changed is that those who, by virtue of their education and professional training, would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton's lesson of moderation are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.

"Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.

Unfortunately, Mr. Berkowitz comes close, but misses the mark, in identifying the defining factors which led to our current, sorry State.

Philosophers from Kant to Marcuse and later spent years gutting reason of its power to arrive at objective judgments, and promulgating this view through the Academy. Without this ability, what individual can stand, with certainty, against the crowd? What's left but emotionally based alliances?

Reason becomes rationalization, justifying intellectual passion-stoking - and making collectivist purposes so much easier to advance. This view of reason is what what separates our current thinking from that of the Founders, and why so few intellectuals today reflect the “education and professional training” of Hamilton’s times.