Method and civic education.

• Author: Meyers, Peter Alexander

1. Introduction

   Ceux qui, comme porte nostre usage, entreprenent d'une mesme lecon & pareille mesure de conduite, regenter plusieurs esprits de si diverses mesures & formes: ce n'est pas merveille, si en tout un peuple d'enfants, ils en rencontrent a peine deux ou trois, qui rapportent quelque juste fruit de leur discipline. De l'institution des enfans, Montaigne For more than a generation in the United States, and now increasingly in Europe, students have shown growing interest in the "tradition" of political theory. This particular literary practice is often said to be one of the guiding intellectual threads of the Western tradition as a whole. It is remarkable, therefore, that historically this "tradition" has had practically no professional practitioners. Its recent formation into an academic "discipline" appears to be a by-product of the modern aspiration to a "science of politics," the tensions inherent in which required at one and the same time a rejection and an acknowledgment of past political thought. (1) But institutional efforts to consolidate a field do not explain its popularity. Indeed, with the spirit of anti-politics so pervasive around the world, one is hard-pressed to understand the simultaneous intensification of curiosity about fundamental questions of politics. Yet, that is what the revival of political theory represents.

   Perspicuous writers in this "tradition" have understood that no transformations in political life are more powerful than the ones which come with generational change. Some kind of control over the formation of new citizens is essential to politics. Thus, even in the perspective of momentary decision-making, politics must engage learning processes. Education, then, is where the subject matter of political theory meets the revived interest in that intellectual enterprise.

   While it comes before us as a literary practice, political theory is primarily constituted through and constitutive of dialogue (in the broadest sense of that term). For this reason political theory stands in a special relation to mainstream practices of education for young adults in the United States. These practices, despite notable efforts to multiply student activity and dialogue, are mainly oriented by something almost entirely anti-dialogical: the peculiarly modern idea of Method. Please note that many of the commonsense connotations of the word "method"--orderly, systematic, careful, coherent, etc.--are not subject to critique in this essay. Our attention will focus, rather, on a specific but far-reaching movement of Early Modernity and its subsequent articulations. This idea and ideal of Method will be brought forward just below.

   The purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to reconsider this distinction between Method and political theory (2); secondly, to show how the teaching of political theory exemplifies certain practical educational opportunities which might be used to counteract the negative effects of our "Methodistic" orientation. (3) I also aim to de-naturalize the word Method, which has become so familiar that we no longer know what it means. Recalling its history will ease the task of showing why the kind of teaching exemplified by political theory--but certainly not limited to it--is more than ever crucial to a satisfactory education for citizens.

2. What is Method?

   Method is a pattern for activity and a set of claims concerning the significance of that activity. A few clear and distinct formal steps will get you where you want to go. These steps can be set down in instructions anyone can follow. That is the practical, winning, and apparently efficient modern ideal of Method from its early formulations by Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) in the sixteenth century to the present day.

   To focus on this ideal of Method as such, we must temporarily step outside of many of the familiar debates about educational practice. Such contested topics as progressive vs. conservative, lax vs. tight standards, or classical vs. multicultural content will not be central concerns here. With the field thus cleared, the allegiance to Method becomes everywhere visible. From the textbook and the test to the lab and the lecture, there presides the standard put forward by the world's best-known Ramist, Rene Descartes, in his Discours de la methode (4): start from clear and distinct ideas, divide the matter into parts, proceed in order from the simple to the complex, and omit nothing. The content of this process may be anything: from bits of information and formulas to the elaborate conceptualizations that Max Weber eventually called ideal types. But in high schools and universities, the desire to educate, the social imperative to transmit knowledge, more often than not takes this Methodistic form.

   Method has been tied to some admirable social goals. Descartes presents himself as the enemy of dogma. We may find premature the political view he ultimately traced to Method, which for example implied that civil disobedience is out of order for the cogito, as he called the thinking--and, thus, we must assume, the learning--subject. (5) However, Cartesian politics is only one (and a rather slight) consequence to be drawn from Method. Viewed more broadly, Method has clearly been a mechanism for the extension and equalization of society. Emerging early on as a kind of intellectual capital that could be individually appropriated but not owned, Method was a fruitful and generative machinery. Aspiring to be all form and no content, the knowledge machinery of Method could be reproduced with ease and set in motion anywhere, by anyone. It increasingly became available to a wide variety of people and applicable in many different situations. By the nineteenth century, Method seemed the perfect educational implement for increasingly mass democracy.

   Nonetheless, allegiance to the modern ideal of Method also raises up some perilous obstacles for an education oriented towards the general formation of independent, well-rounded and free-thinking citizens. It is these obstacles to democracy that I shall underscore in this essay.

   In brief, education oriented by Method tends radically to reduce many registers of history and experience and to cover over the inherent plurality of knowledge. Method aims to deliver some one thing to students. But in the theater of education, as on the public stage of the world for which education prepares the citizen, the expectation for "unity of action" is bound to be disappointed. And it should be. To know is a process constituted by necessarily different and often cognitively irreconcilable parts. Democratic education must not only present this plurality but foster it as well. Unity of action in educational practice is a facade. Even granting that an imposition of certain types of intellectual orderliness is extremely important at the level of primary education, unity of knowledge and vision become impediments as the student becomes an adult. Allegiance to Method blocks us from taking this fact seriously. To do so would reveal a vista of entirely different forces. The gravitational center of education would shift. The problem to be solved by, for, and with students would become: How, in both thought and action, can one appreciate and thrive on plurality?

   For, plurality is what generates the life in the life of the mind. This is true whether that mind goes to work at the office, the court, the factory, the school, or stays home to take care of the kids. To know is a constituent element of freedom, not because it permits mastery of the world (although it sometimes does that) but because the plural character of knowing creates a space of possibility and the potential for action. To understand the world we have to understand like the world is. This correspondence coincides with the capacity for action.

   My purpose here is to come at the problem of education from one of its most fundamental components: the living relationship between teacher and student, and how that relationship is mediated by the matters they undertake to consider together. In this respect, my concerns arise in the realm of ethics and lead towards the life citizens live together. The following considerations point to real and consequential choices and commitments for the teacher who takes seriously the contradictory relationship between democracy and the Method-orientation of education. Only at our own risk do we exclude this aspect of the ethical situation of the teacher from the public debate over educational policy.

   This inquiry is motivated by a particular aspect of my own experience as a teacher. I have noticed that political theory is especially resistant to the widely subscribed idea and practice of Method. This resistance presents some special difficulties in teaching "the most comprehensive master science" (as Aristotle called it in the Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b) in a context where Method-orientation is the rule. I will use the friction represented by, but certainly not limited to, the teaching of political theory to define a special potential for transformation already present within the contemporary liberal arts and sciences curriculum.

3. Modernity and Method

   In the 1920s, Jakob Klein suggested that one great highway to "Modernity" was opened with the historical appearance in the sixteenth century of abstract numbers. (6) The novelty in this is hard to grasp but can hardly be overstated. Numbers had been considered, for example by Aristotle and the Aristotelians, as properties and, as such, always instantiated in something. What happens after Viete and Descartes is that "the intellect understands 'fiveness' as something separate from five objects." (7) This transformation operates on number from both sides: it cuts number off from the property it was understood to measure, and it frees it from space and time to allow thereby its application to everything. This change in the character of possible knowledge was unusually...