Method and Civic Education

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