PHILOSOPHY & POLITY

I can personally attest to the exclusivist trend in upper-division academia in at least the departments of Philosophy and Political Theory. What’s more, any cursory examination of JSTOR’s holdings would reveal that out of every 100 articles, only a handful are immediately accessible to undergraduates in terms of vocabulary, scope, and readability. This attitude is nothing new; Arthur Schopenhauer famously attacked Hegel in his preface to The World as Will and Representation for being virtually unreadable and inaccessible, calling him, “that intellectual Caliban,” (Schopenhauer). However, in recent years it has reached a fevered pitch, and now more than ever Ivory Tower academics sequester themselves away and deliver symposium topics that few in the room understand, and that the man-on-the-street could never hope to grasp. It is my sincerest conviction that the role of any true academic scholar should not just be to endeavor to understand or quantify our world’s most puzzling issues, but also to synthesize that information in such a way that it is accessible. But all too often whatever intellectual work has been truly done is awash in a sea of confusing language and vaguely defined concepts.

Herbert Werlin laments this in his article, “Political Science: Hard Science, Soft Science, Primitive Science.” On the confusing treatment of key concepts he says, “Ask a political scientist what he or she understands by ‘politics.’ The reaction is likely to be a combination of annoyance and confusion, indicating just how primitive political science remains,” (Werlin). Politics, the very concept that all such writing is and should be immersed in, remains undefined and unexplained while minutia is squabbled over indefinitely. Read more…