Canon Wars II the Return of the Founders

Higher education in contemporary America has been embroiled in a number of bitter controversies in the recent past. One of the most acrimonious debates concerns the status of the traditional canon of Western thought and its privileged place in the curriculum. Critics of the canon, most notably supporters of multiculturalism, charge that the traditional approach favors the perspective of DWEMS, dead white European males. Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle's The Learning of Liberty enters this emotional debate clearly on the side of tradition. The Pangles believe that a pernicious radical egalitarianism has infected recent scholarship and higher educational policy. Multiculturalism, in the Pangles's view, has unleashed a form of relativism that has undermined the pursuit of those eternal truths that the great philosophers of the Western tradition sought to uncover in their writings. Virtue is the central focus of this inquiry. In particular, the Pangles are interested in the connection between virtue and modem republicanism. In an earlier work, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (1988), Thomas Pangle attacked the historians associated with the new republican synthesis, challenging the conception of virtue employed by scholars associated with this intellectual paradigm. Modern republicanism, Pangle argued, unlike classical republicanism, was deeply imbued with Lockean ideas. Modern commercial republics did not aspire to the austerity and sacrifice of personal interest that characterized the republics of antiquity. The problem for modern republics was to cultivate the requisite virtue needed for the survival of republican government while still promoting the ideals of liberty and economic growth. The Pangles's study of the educational philosophy of the Founders is shaped by the methodological and philosophical approach of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss. The Learning of Liberty reveals all of the

Art · Canon · Literature · American Constitutional Law and Politics

• The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution

  Robert A Rutland, Merrill Jensen•The William and Mary Quarterly•1977

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