Steven Douglas Maloney

In one of my student’s papers comparing Henry V to Ligurio in Machiavelli’s The Mandrake Root (Mandragola), the student writes that Ligurio’s plan makes everyone happy and Henry’s invasion of France makes “everyone who is still alive happy.”  Aside from the fact that this isn’t even true in Henry V, I could not help but think about the final song in the game “Portal,” where the creepy testing machine sings a song about your escape from her clutches.   In the context of the song, it’s a real backhanded compliment to Henry.

Anyway, back to grading…

Every time I plan out a political theory course, I try to have a major theme that I organize the course around.  The theme for my Fall 2009 POLS 275 Course:  Enlightenment and Political Maturity.

As if to underscore Nietzsche’s psycho-physical view of human beings, I had a stomach ache before my last classes, which caused me to not eat lunch, which caused me to be a bit tired for my last classes… that combined with epic heat.

I oftentimes wonder what is the appropriate way to wrap up a course.  Is it best to summarize the whole class?  A thank you to students?  Carry on as if nothing is different?  I think I hedged between all three, and I have to say: not the right choice.

I’ve known about Brian Leiter for a while, mostly for his philosophy department rankings. However, in teaching On the Genealogy of Morals, I decided to have a go at reading Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality (thoughts on this topic later)- which I think is excellent.  I also know that Leiter is a legal realist, and I was curious if he responded to the decision to expand the scope of Twombley to civil rights cases today (definitely more on this later). 

While looking for such a post, I found a blog post that inspired my heart to soar.  I now know that I love Brian Leiter.  His post that I adore?  “Does the NY Times Not Realize That Stanley Fish is Philosophically Incompetent?” 

… Aaaaand cue the man-crush.  

I have some thoughts on how to best design an undergraduate theory curriculum in ways that teach essential texts and keep enrollment and interest in the subfield high.

Here’s the current layout:

200 Level: Intro to Political Theory
300 Level: Plato to Marx
300 Level: Marx to Present
400 Level: Occasional Special Topics

I’m wondering if doing the 300 level courses by subject or theme would be better, but I’m not entirely sure. The advantages of theme would be snappier course titles (to increase enrollment), rotation of course subject, coherence in teaching important theoretical developments that begin before Marx but end after him, a greater diversity of offered courses in theory.

The drawbacks to a change might look like: increased difficulty in creating a consistent curriculum, topics may sound intimidating to non-theorists, an appearance that the theory subfield isn’t an actual program for students to go through.

This time at the Minnesota Orchestra!! Program notes here.

All,

Since my soccer posts have started to outpace my other posts here, I decided to separate them out. I have a site at oleole.com called Soccernomics. Bad title, or worst title ever? It’s definitely the former, because it, sadly, was the best thing I could come up with. Everything else was too long or too obscure. I’m going to write primarily about institutional behaviors in the beautiful game and I couldn’t think of anything that conveyed that in the title and was also short.

Anyway, if you like my soccer posts, go there. If not, they are gone from this site, so rejoice.

Signed,

The Management

I’m thinking of trying to put together an undergraduate political psychology course as a proposed junior level seminar for ’10-11.  It occurred to me that I have never read anything by Jung.  So, while out at the bookstore the other day I picked up Portable Jung.  I have read Joseph Campbell‘s introduction, and already I feel that there is a mixture of hypotheses that are intriguing and some moments in Jung’s autobiography that make him sound as crackers as the people he examined.  I am both excited and weary about what I might find in these pages.  

My general strategy for trying to understand someone’s thought is to approximate an immersive  contextualization for a while.  When I start, I go too far, overemphasizing the value of the contribution, only to have it (hopefully) burn away over time until I keep a good amount of the good thoughts without going turning myself into an “-ian” (as in Kantian, Foucaltian, Hayekian, etc.)  I apologize in advance for those moments when I will be over-doing the Jung thinking, I’m sure it will wear off as it does with everyone I read.  

Also, anyone who has traveled the pages of Jung already, I’d be interested for any words of advice (and caution) you ay have.

I am writing this from the lobby of the Palmer House. The hotel is the setting for the MPSA conference. The hotel is also the setting of an early scene of Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day.”. Industrialist Scarsdale Vibe meets Inventer Extrordinaire, Heino Vanderjuice and offers him a massive amount of money to eliminate the usefulness of inventions of colleague Nikola Tesla.
This theme of cancelling out runs through the book as Pynchon’s fictional world spirals towards the cancelling out of humanity – which we call World War I in modern parlance. As I look around the lobby one hundred years after the fictional encounter in Pynchon’s story, I see so many colleagues, and I wonder how much we cancel one another out for money in similar, more subtle ways. I wonder what the proportion is, in terms of new ideas, between what gets built and what gets destroyed.

Palmer House Lobby:

Name Tag, Membership Card, Program: