It's More Than Academic

If Academia is the Mind of the body politic, it is no wonder that American society is so fragmented. A particular incoherence that is prevalent throughout this country's higher education is the standard assignation of Philosophy and Political Science to two different, often incommunicative, departments. Traditional great philosophies aim at systematic comprehensiveness, so that, e. g., a thinker's theory of Logic is of a piece with that of conduct. A notable example is Locke, whose most famous idea is probably 'Tabula Rasa'. This notion is significant to him in two respects. First, it asserts that humans are born possessing no innate knowledge. Second, it proposes that no human is innately superior to any other. The first established Locke as one of the pioneer Empiricists in the field of Epistemology. The second constituted an argument against the premise of a 'Divine Right of Kings', that for centuries validated Monarchism, and, hence, it is one of the foundations of his Democratism in Political Philosophy. But insofar as the first is to be learned only in a Philosophy Department, and the second in Political Science, how can Academia do justice to this, or to any other similarly pivotal, thinker? The consequences can be more than merely Academic, as can be seen in tracing the development of the Neo-Conservative movement. Significant stages of that growth were in Political Science departments around the country, where for decades, its acolytes were able to breed a generation of politicians with eccentric interpretations of the likes of Locke, Plato, etc., that were unchallengeable simply because they were taken out of context. So, if there are Academic bureaucrats who have been horrified by the antics of Bush et. al., they have, to a certain degree, no one but themselves to blame.