Faculty at Oxford are asked every seven years to demonstrate our “impact” as part of the British government’s Research Excellence Framework, which is a nationwide assessment to allocate university funding. The typical approach is to show how one’s research changed public policy; but it is commonly understood that the substance of the changes does not really matter, so long as the research was impactful outside university walls.

A colleague once remarked to me how the exercise made little sense for evaluating the real influence of universities, because the impact we have is inside our walls, through our students. I once worked alongside a politics tutor who had taught over her career three British prime ministers. And while President Donald Trump has not graced our institution, Bill Clinton did, as well as 31 of the United Kingdom’s 58 prime ministers.

The fact of the matter is that universities build politics through their students, not through their policy ideas. We occasionally come up with a good thought or two, but even these are made good by having young people who kindly spend hours listening and debating with us (and pay us for it)—and not because we are able to condense our ideas into sound bites or tweets, or because we happen to be well networked.

While teaching politics at Oxford, I have been closely following the rise of the new “civics centers” in the United States—such as the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, the Salmon P. Chase Center at Ohio State, and the School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC–Chapel Hill, among others. Here I intend to offer a playbook identifying how they will, in my view, bring about a new growth area for the discipline of politics that will be at least as significant as the invention of international relations or the founding of public policy schools.

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First, let me step back and say something about political division in our cultural moment. We are in a tussle, not between the Left and the Right, but between Tocqueville and Rousseau. Tocqueville says that we are what we are at the meso (middling) level—the small institutions, churches, and associations that transform the self-serving individual into a proud and vibrant community. Rousseau, on the other hand, says that the meso level must be eliminated if the general will is to be properly realised. Many link the French Revolution with Rousseau’s ideas, which in turn played an irreplaceable role in creating our present notions of “Left” and “Right.” It is for this reason that on the extreme of both the Left and the Right, commitments to eliminating or reshaping the meso level can be found, as opposed to Tocqueville’s sense that if we work with the culture that we have, the good we are able to do is within reach.

From Tocqueville’s point of view, everything we do in helping people be responsible locally helps them be responsible nationally; America provides the example of the political culture that suits this new age of democracy through its dedication to equality and participation at the community level. As he writes in Democracy in America

What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

But from Rousseau’s point of view, all local and intermediary associations—however much they may claim to cultivate civic virtue—are a threat to equality because they stall the movement of individuals from a state of pure nature to centralized order.

The civics playbook tests instead the Tocquevillian insight, even though the playbook is neither an analytic political theory nor a public policy. It is a call to arms—one that is totally inappropriate for the academy. 

What is the civics playbook? Let me make clear that academia often progresses by taking a step backward. We progress when we realize things we took for granted are not so clear—like realizing the sun does not revolve around the earth, or, to get closer to our present topic, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which shows that we cannot rely on self-interest to arrive at stable election outcomes. In the academy we often realize that we can no longer take for granted things we thought made sense, and even though the discovery is unsettling, it helps us delve deeper into what is really going on. 

The discipline of politics has always improved through a questioning of what we take for granted, however painful. The creation of public policy schools, and the establishment of public policy as an academic subdiscipline from the Second World War onward, were  results of dropping the assumption that theories could be translated into practice without asking what works within the policy cycle of agenda-setting, implementation, and feedback (an idea systematized by Harold Laswell in 1956). Likewise, the development of international relations from the beginning of the twentieth century dealt with the fact that nation-states had to be treated as independent units each with its own national interest; the discipline then further refined some of its methods during the Cold War, through admitting that simply pursuing national self-interest was, unfortunately, not the playbook for success. Instead, countries had to game the best responses to other countries’ best responses to know what would make a rival back down. Both disciplinary innovations involved questioning what we previously took for granted, and both helped refine the academy’s contribution to the common good.

Here are the two ways in which the emerging discipline of civics questions preconceived assumptions in the field of politics. The first I will call the Frederick Douglass praxis, and the second the Edmund Burke praxis.

The Frederick Douglass Praxis

Changing the world requires changing yourself first. This is uncomfortable, but true. It is easy to point out defects in others’ arguments and think that laws alone can create conditions for success. But policies are insufficient for our political togetherness. If anything, an overreliance on the law may be driving us apart. So the stakes are increasing, every year, as to what instead can nurture that togetherness, what can restore meaningful levels of social trust. Education toward leadership has too often focused on changing the world once you are in charge, not asking whether you are of service to your present network. If you do not create an environment of responsibility where you are, why would you do that when put in charge? Leadership relies on civics, and it is a civics that must begin with citizens freely deciding to become persons of intellect and virtue.

The Edmund Burke Praxis

Changing the world requires finding a patria, a hometown. The patria does not necessarily have to be our nation, or even our native city. We cannot avoid the fact that our talents may be most of service in another place or among a community different from the one we started with, especially when we fall in love. But whether we are adopted or born into it, there must be a patria—a hometown—to live authentically in civic virtue. The patria is the place where rights meet responsibility. It is the place where we cannot hide from our duties; the place we are held to account. The Baby Boomers advised their kids to follow their dreams and seize their freedom. Scattered and poorly guided, Gen Z are on their way back, asking why they have no sense of home, no authenticity. The civics playbook takes this truth seriously and offers a tradition that counters the idea that justice and freedom can operate entirely apart from community.

The realm of community goods I am talking about has no possibility of being realized under either the current framework of political science or the current framework of the humanities and social sciences in general. That framework insists on a fact–value distinction, which amounts in political science to the idea that we cannot discover duty through the process of learning more about political systems or political thought. The facts of rules and the duty to obey them are assumed to be distinct points of analysis; but for the real citizen, rooted in place and time, they are brought together in debate over the common good. 

Leadership relies on civics, and it is a civics that must begin with citizens freely deciding to become persons of intellect and virtue.

Citizenship is about recognizing social responsibilities, and creating such responsibilities if previous generations have fled from them. Citizenship avoids excuses. While the rest of the academy goes through a process of compartmentalization and the manufacturing of moral hazard—articulating principles that will supposedly reduce our reliance on virtue and individual moral reasoning—civics tests the hypothesis that the intellectual life and the virtuous life walk hand in hand. A case in point is the modern academy’s valorization of John Rawls’s original position (a thought experiment where one does not know who one will be in society) as the best space for reasoning about fairness. Among other problems, the thought experiment makes the mistake of thinking equality can be achieved without present, real-world decisions to make sacrifices for others, a counter-argument made excellently at Oxford by the Marxist political theorist G. A. Cohen. The reality is that daily sacrifice is our politics; sometimes the most significant political act in your day is not what you say or how you vote, but the way you give yourself up for those around you in need.

A lot of people will no doubt want to know about the political direction of the new civics centers, and there is no hiding that they are inspired by conservative intellectual sensibilities. But to think that there is any sort of partisan agenda set from above misses the point of these schools entirely. The pundits are holding a hammer, and they see a nail. To argue that something has conservative sources and so cannot be a legitimate part of the academy simply goes to show why these schools are necessary. The Left views the human person as a shell to be filled, and is therefore rightly afraid that another ideology will be the fill. But the civics centers are working from the notion that the human person is not malleable: a student’s journey will play out more as a self-discovery in community, which by definition cannot be ideological.

Ideologies insist a certain future is inevitable. Civics, instead, opens moral reasoning for the present. Rights discourse unfortunately fell into that realm of ideology when it became more about fashioning progress than recognizing present needs and limitations. That is why we require a corresponding “responsibility discourse,” which does not settle the question of what particular laws are needed, but it does insist that a spirit of moral responsibility will be needed at every moment. All rights have their corresponding responsibilities, which is the starting point of political debate.

Political science is a very recent invention, and it frequently makes the mistake of assuming both that society can be sized-up through causal laws as in the pure sciences, and that the researcher can be independent of the researched. Some thought that economic rationalization, or the centralization of the bureaucracy, would whittle away the chaotic features of democratic life. Instead, our civil disagreements are more alive than ever, and we are forced to concede that they will not be eliminated through economic and bureaucratic efficiencies.

Four Lost Insights

There is an older tradition that makes sense of distinctly political needs: the art of rhetoric. Rhetoric used to mean much more than speaking well, and is the proper tradition of “teaching politics” that far outdates political science. While Socrates, and then Christians, rightly dethroned the idea that rhetoric should be about dominating or manipulating others to get what one wants, it remained the case that being a statesman was about finding one’s voice, finding one’s role in the nexus between community and collective action. Rhetoric involves, as the Jesuits explained, identifying a usable past and a viable future for the community at hand. While the modern academy rewards activism, it does not really teach it in the truest sense, as that would draw it into discussion of what are the most meaningful goods for our community here and now: What are our truest needs? What are the ways in which individuals need to make themselves accountable to the beliefs and purposes of those around them?

While the contribution of the civics centers will be unsettling for the humanities and social sciences writ large—at least in terms of the study of politics and the wider meaning of rhetoric—it will build on four insights that have been largely lost. The first is a tradition of civic virtue, most keenly advocated by James Hankins at Harvard. Virtue ethics has yet to properly broach the topic of political life, but the in-between concept of civic virtue articulates well the way in which one’s personal virtue needs to chime with the goods of community to be a generator of civic friendship. 

The second is the dying appreciation of public administration and civic education. Paul Carrese has led this countercharge, teaching a model of statesmanship that draws keenly on the role of public educational bodies to develop expertise in public service, and to have communities that understand what they are trying to do politically and why. In this respect, get ready for government bodies to want to hire civics majors over political science majors, because civics majors will have a confident understanding of how the place they actually live in works. 

The third forgotten insight is natural law theory. This is about knowledge of our human nature—how we detect the true needs of the person and community, which is ultimately rooted in a discovery of who we are and of what our guiding human goods are. The former is drawn from philosophy of human nature, and the latter includes studies that are sensitive to how institutions actually function, and that treat institutions’ self-articulated goals as meaningful in the context of wider social theories about community and nation. Identifying point and purpose in this way may be done for small institutions or for the constitution in its entirety. 

The fourth is the place of law and politics for the protection and promotion of morality—a toxic topic for the modern academy, and yet one that is at the forefront of debates about liberalism and pluralism. While respect for the social mores that form our constitutional order dates back at least as far as Montesquieu, a leading modern advocate is Robert P. George, who has defended the place of morality in law, and who argues that the Founding Fathers sought to work with the virtues of the nation. While this is about how law needs morality and morality needs law, at the level of philosophy it is about how moral accounts need to be more rationally refined in order to better structure disagreement over the negotiation of political division.

Getting a bunch of people together who take the love of their patria as a reason for their discipline is the last thing the modern academy wants. But it is rare that the academy advances by pleasing the older generations. What matters is whether we can uncover deeper truths. Politics as the way we make responsibility out of thin air is just that. I look forward to seeing how much the new civics centers  unsettle everyone.

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