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Our Polity
A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
Joseph C. Macfarland
August 28, 2020
It customary for the dean’s lecture to do two things: to reflect on our common education, but,
more than this, to do so in a way that aims to exemplify the kind of learning that we undertake
in common, to deepen our understanding of some book or question. The longer I serve as dean,
the less time I find for such learning. So tonight’s lecture will not explore any particular book or
speculative question; instead, I mean to reflect on the nature of our small community, drawing
a little too easily from books we read in common, from many of my colleagues writings (past
and present), and from the ways we sometimes talk about our community, especially in
imaginative terms.
My talk has three parts:
1. Our polity
2. Liberal arts, and
3. The citiless
The first part: Our Polity
In speaking about our community we refer to the “polity.” There is a written document which
defines the parts of our community, its officers and directors, and their powers and
responsibilities; the document is called the “Polity.” But more casually we use the word to refer
to the community as presently embodied, the human beings who collectively make it up.
Parallel to this, a part of our community, the largest part, the student body, has their own
governing document; this is called “the Student Polity,” often “the Polity” for short, and in this
context, the body of all students is sometimes called “the polity.”1
There is a similar ambiguity at the origin of the word, “university.” When the first universities
came into being, the Latin word, universitas, referred to a number of persons joined in any kind
of association, for example, a “university” of barbers or a “university” of carpenters (Haskins,
9). In the middle ages, the students of Bologna, Italy, formed a student union, and in doing so
they coined the word, more or less as we now use it. They formed a union in order to gain
leverage in negotiating the terms of their residence in the city, and the responsibilities of the
1
The student polity is provided for in an article of the Polity per se.
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�faculty in teaching them. The first “university,” as a student union, excluded faculty; conversely,
the first so-called “university” in Paris was a union of teachers, and excluded students.2
Our union of faculty, students, and staff, is not a “university,” [not a union], but a “polity.” St.
John’s has a charter that goes back to 1784, but it was in the early 1940’s, in the first decade of
the New Program, that a committee of tutors, consulting with the entire faculty, drafted the
first “Polity” as a supplement to the charter (JW Smith 48). The inaugural president,
Stringfellow Barr, asked the faculty, “to investigate thoroughly the type of polity that… would
be appropriately adapted to and coordinated with the aims of the program” (emphasis added).
I wonder if there is any other college in America—or the world—that sought to discover the
correct type of polity to serve its educational ends, or that continues to refer to itself in this
way? As most of you know, the word “polity” is a transliteration—via Latin—of the Greek word
politeia. And politeia is derived from the word polis, or city, a complete, self-sufficient political
community. For Aristotle, at least, the polis exists by nature and, like everything that exists by
nature, it has material and a form. The material of the city is the population, especially the
citizens. Citizens come to be and pass away, immigrate and emigrate, so that the whole
population, the material, is continually flowing. Yet through all this, the city, the polis, somehow
remains the same as itself (Politics 1276b12): it must therefore have a form separate from the
material. The word for the form of the polis is politeia: this is its enduring structure or
arrangement (taxis), a kind of fundamental law (1274b39; 1326a30). Cities come in many
forms, and there are different types of polity: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and so on, and
mixed forms as well. Thus, Barr’s question to the faculty: which type of polity is adapted to the
aims of our education?3
Of course, there is an element of foolish affectation in our common use of anglicized Greek
words like this—entirely fitting for a college located in “Annapolis.” 4 If we speak with precision,
the college is not a city; it is not a complete and independent community; it relies in infinite
ways on the political communities within which it is situated; so we cannot have a “polity.” It’s
a metaphor. Someone wishing to speak with precision might say that the college is a not-forprofit business in the service sector. The central function is an exchange of goods: the student
tenders payment for instruction, and instruction concludes with a recognized, valuable
credential. The relationship lasts as long as the terms of the exchange are met: faculty and staff
2
Haskins, 18. The “college” (collegium) was originally a hospice or residence hall.
Of course, one of the six forms of polity is called, simply, a “polity,” and it is a mixed form, a blend of democracy
and oligarchy.
4 Coincidentally, Francis Nicholson, the colonial official who seems to have given the name “Annapolis” to “Anne
Arundel’s Town,” also founded the King William School, predecessor to St. John’s (Murphy, 3, McWilliams, 18-21).
3
2
�are obliged to perform services faithfully, to deliver the product; students are obliged to meet
the conditions necessary to be awarded the degree. As a friendship based on utility, it is only as
durable as the exchange. In referring to the college as a polity, we signal that our community is
not defined by or limited to the activity of exchange. Aristotle says the city is distinguished from
a business in that it nourishes a stronger kind of friendship, one that aims at living well, that
might aim at human excellence (1280b5-1281a8). So there is some truth in our metaphorical
claim to be a polity.
In other ways, too, from the beginning St. John’s has imitated the well-arranged polis. Forgive
me if I take time to say things apparent to many, but it is, I think, an opportune time to repeat
them. The polis is small by nature (1325b33ff.): the good administration of a city requires that
the citizens be acquainted with one another, that they know one’s another’s character
(1326b15); this cannot happen when there are too many. In fact, too large a city cannot be
well-ordered, cannot have good laws, cannot be a polis at all (1326a25). Moreover, there is
greater beauty in what is measured. If the population grows too great, the appropriate remedy
is to send out a colony, to send out citizens who will form their own their own polis, a new
independent entity, with its own form and material, sometimes even destined to eclipse its
parent in beauty or greatness, as Syracuse eclipsed Corinth. And so also the college, smaller
than it is now and wishing to be no larger, established a second campus with the expectation
that more would follow.
Another sign of the best-formed polity is that it attends to the education of everyone on a
common plan (1337a30). In Sparta, famously, all citizens enjoyed the same education; they
shared hardships and trials of all kinds, and meals and conversations as well, aimed at
developing self-control and excellence in war. The end sought was not high, but the fact that
the education was elaborately contrived and common in character distinguished the city from
all others. St. John’s is perhaps most distinctive for its education being in common. Its original
raison d’être was the rejection of the elective system: no electives, no departments, no majors.
In the university, by contrast students differentiate themselves by their major, and within their
majors, by their subfields, and by their electives as well—they project and confirm their
individuality by these choices. Their education is á la carte: everyone sees, discusses, and has a
taste of what others at the table are having. In our small polity, the education is common to
students and tutors alike—despite our widely ranging interests and abilities, we share the same
trials and rewards. There is no one among us with whom you cannot talk about what you are
studying and what you are thinking. The commonness of the enterprise compresses or erases
hierarchical distinctions—there are no ranks in the faculty; and each tutor and student
addresses all others as equals, for in the classroom, “reason is the only recognized authority”
(Statement of the St. John’s Program), and each one of us needs others for our own learning.
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�The commonness of the education enables the members of the polity to become friends, albeit
in varying degrees. Each achieves some understanding of himself by being reflected in a friend;
this mutual recognition is realized through shared activities of all kinds, high and low: athletics,
dance, singing, or philosophizing (cf. Ethics 1172a3).
The city is by nature, and human beings are political animals by nature, because they possess
speech, logos: our sounds express not merely pleasure and pain, but the beneficial and harmful,
just and unjust, good and bad (Politics 1253a10ff). More than any concrete, true polity, ours is
constituted by this shared logos; it is our principal work. We discuss the pleasurable and the
painful, just and unjust, good and the bad, but for the most part not in the way that citizens talk
about these things. For our principal work is not the rectification of injustice, or the acquisition
of goods, but investigation and understanding of these things. Certainly, as friends of a kind, we
do not tolerate injustice among ourselves, but when we are focused on the execution of justice
rather than its form or idea, we have descended from the higher purpose of our logos in order
to attend to its low but necessary conditions. For our polity, like the city, is grounded on
exercising the human capacity for logos, but about the pleasurable and painful, or the just and
unjust, mostly as they are related to the true and the false [the pair not present in Aristotle’s
list of four, given above].
Finally, the college may resemble a finely-formed ancient polity in being largely indifferent to
the arts and technology, focusing rather on the development of character and abilities. The arts
and technology are always pushing forward, the new cleverly superseding the old, whereas the
laws of a polity, especially the unwritten laws and practices, gain strength with time and are
weakened by change (1269a20). The advance of the arts can bring wealth, but the best city
aims at wealth only as condition for the development of character and mind (1323a39).
Aristotle notes that the pursuit of wealth is often achieved through trade by sea, but with
wealth thus subordinated, the best city stands only close enough to the sea to allow some
trade, but far enough from the sea to deter the citizens from becoming mariners.5
Part Two: Liberal Arts
We sometimes say we study the “liberal arts” or practice “liberal education.” I will not concern
myself with whether “arts” or “education” is the appropriate noun—although it is a good
5
Politics 1327b8. In the best practicable government, the “polity” in the narrow sense, the citizens are largely
farmers (compare 1292b25 with 1298b34). The city in isolation can be happy if it is well-governed (1325a1).
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�question—I will muse instead on connotations of the adjective, “liberal.”6 One of the first
notable appearances of the phrase, “liberal arts,” is in the works of Cicero, and the root of the
Latin word for “liberal,” liber, is familiar even to us Johnnies from our punning Latin motto,
Facio liberos, et cetera.7 Something is liberal when it is free, or befitting a free-born person. In a
classical polity, free-birth is the lowest and broadest criterion for citizenship; it is the criterion
for citizenship used in a democracy, the rule of the multitude, the rule of the poor. To be “free”
means to be a citizen, to have a share in the polity, not to be ruled tyrannically or
monarchically.8
A liberal art or discipline prepares the citizen for participation in the polity; in the best polities,
education aims at a good life or some human excellence (Pol. 1337a34ff.). A good education
includes arts that are necessary and useful, such as grammar, arithmetic, or gymnastic, but only
if they are not pursued so far that the mind or body becomes impaired or less disposed to
virtue. No art should be pursued to the point that it makes the student less free, more servile.
In this context, opposite of “liberal” or “free” is “base” or “vulgar” (banausos). Cicero
distinguishes the “liberal” arts or trades from “base” ones (sordidus): the base trades include
manual labor, retail, and services providing pleasure [e.g., dance]; those trades requiring
serious thought (prudentia) are liberal, such as medicine, architecture, teaching, and farming. 9
These quasi-aristocratic connotations linger in the English word “liberality,” the virtue
characteristic of a free person. The liberal person may not be wealthy, but he is at least free
from material necessity; he has the capacity to make gifts in a fitting and beautiful way.10 In a
classical polity, to be free, to be a citizen, while broadly shared, is still a mark of distinction, it
separates the free citizens from non-citizens, from slaves or resident aliens. Freedom does not
imply universal equality, but often entails some degree of elevation. It is not uncommon, of
course, for free citizens to elevate themselves precisely by denying this freedom to others: as
the notable freedom of the Spartans was contingent upon on the slavery of the Helots.11
6
See the fine 2015 lecture by Dan Harrel, “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art.” My own quick sketch: liberal arts are part
of a classical and medieval heritage; liberal education is a modern formulation, and can imply an aversion to the
traditional list of arts. Even Dante, to the seven arts, added physics, metaphysics, and ethics (cf. Convivio).
Furthermore, arts implies that we acquire skills and competencies, and that there are disciplines that we come to
know or master. Education appears to be a way to renounce this focus on skills and competencies in favor of
metastrophic recognition, coming to know that we don’t know.
7 Prior to Cicero, Aristotle refers to the liberal sciences (eluetherai epistemai; Politics 1337b15). It is hard to say
that the phrase or notion has a chronological origin.
8 Cite the Politics on the criterion of citizenship in a democracy; check Cicero, De republica 1.32.48 (cited by Lewis
and Short).
9 De Officiis 1.41.150ff. Compare Politics 1337b4ff.
10 Politics 1338a32: there is a sort of education pursued not as “necessary or useful,” but “liberal and noble”; at
1338b3, “great-souled and free.”
11 Compare Machiavelli’s characterization of stance of the Roman people to those whom they conquered
(Discourses, Book 2), or Montesquieu’s Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans.
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�If it is base for liberal education to be too deeply engaged in the useful or necessary
occupations, it seems to follow that whatever serious disciplines are not in the least necessary
nor useful, and do not serve external ends, but are pursued only for their own sakes, would be
the most free or liberal. Here, of course, the freedom of the liberal art depends less on the
status of the human being who pursues it, and more on the inner character of the art itself.
According to Aristotle, nature seeks not only that we labor (askolein) as we should, but, when
not working, that we use leisure well (1337b30; cf. Klein 165). Insofar as a virtuous action is
done for its own sake, insofar as it attains beauty, liberal education may aim at it. But the
courageous act, even if beautiful in itself, is generally also useful to the city, sometimes
indispensable. The education of the free develops not only one’s character but one’s mind
(1337a38-42), and the activities of the mind, inasmuch as they are for the sake of themselves,
are more free. Geometry and astronomy are liberal arts because they culminate in free
contemplation. In late antiquity, when the liberal arts came to be defined as exactly seven in
number, architecture and medicine were excluded from the list for dealing with mundane
rather than celestial matters.12
The liberal arts under this second understanding pull away from the city and the citizen, away
from the community of the free. Political freedom may be a condition for liberal learning—in
order to study well one needs some leisure—but the liberal arts in this mode do not
reciprocally serve or augment that political freedom. One can certainly imagine a city where the
entire education is designed to foster the very highest activities of the mind—I mean Kallipolis,
of Plato’s Republic—but this effort results in a highly stratified society, a city with very few free
persons in it.13
The “liberal” in “liberal arts” skews in one way to the city—to the community of free persons—
and in another way outside or beyond the city, to the celestial, to speak metaphorically. The
opposing movements are still evident in the way we speak about liberal education today,
although transformed in important ways.
12
Martianus Capella, 346. Cicero’s De oratore is cited as one of the first appearances of the phrase, “liberal arts,”
has artes quibus liberales doctrinae atque ingenuae continerentur (3.32.127). In this dialogue, an interlocutor
points out the incompatibility between having the leisure to pursue these arts, and the employment of rhetoric
amid political responsibilities (3.32.131).
13 And in this city, those who engage in the highest or freest activity, are the least free, being compelled to rule.
Klein: “It is important to see that there is a definite tension between the exigencies of political life and the selfsustained goal of liberal education. This tension is very great” (169). The death of Archimedes makes us see, “the
ultimate incommensurability between this kind of searching and questioning, the basis of all liberal learning, and
the implacable conditions of our existence” (170).
6
�The founders of the New Program were not shy about affirming the importance of liberal
education for citizenship in a democratic republic. On the eve of U.S. intervention in World War
II, Stringfellow Barr wrote that, “colleges like St. John’s,” were established to teach students,
“to practice the liberal arts, to use their intellects, to reflect, to make choices, in order that a
free society might be able to govern itself wisely, freely, and justly, and not fall prey to a
government by force” (Report of the President, May 1941). Self-governance as a nation stands
on the self-governance of the individual, and education in the liberal arts strengthens and
disciplines the powers by which young people come govern themselves.14
This connection between liberal education and free government comes without the ancient,
quasi-aristocratic distinction between the free and the unfree, between the liberal and the
base. According to Scott Buchanan, writing in 1945, in a democratic republic, there is no
division of labor between “higher functions” and lower: “it is an integral part of the American
dream that each man in our society may and must perform the highest functions. These
functions consist in the intelligent free choice of the ends and means of both our common and
individual life. This is a most glorious and most difficult proposition to which we are dedicated.
Among other things it means that each man must have his measure of liberal education…”
(Catalogue 1945).15
I am not the first to note that Barr and Buchanan connect liberal education to free citizenship
more closely than is now common for us.16 They echo the ancients, that education prepares
adults to act virtuously as free citizens—as our motto asserts—but education here does this not
by directly shaping the character of citizens, but by cultivating intellectual freedom. Education
challenges and sharpens the mind, and insofar as the mind is strengthened and disciplined, it
supplies the means by which the individual citizen may choose to act well.17 A liberal arts
14
“We live and enjoy liberty that we may pursue happiness, and the man who penned this triune phrase was
perfectly aware of where that happiness law: in the fullest possible development, and use, of man’s most human
powers, the powers of the intellect.” Cf. Buchanan, “Liberal Education and Politics” (1944): “For various reasons
the European citizen of the republic of learning would not have said that liberal education is for everybody. That is
the great revolutionary American contribution to our knowledge of what the liberal arts are….”
15 Buchanan: “Inner freedom or human liberty is indicated, not primarily civil liberties and economic freedom
about which modern liberalism is concerned. But as all the founding fathers of our institutions have insisted, inner
liberal education is a vital necessity if free men are to maintain and protect their external liberties in a democratic
state” (“In Search of a Liberal College,” 1937, 4.1).
16 Recent versions of the Statement of the Program have tended to be more modest about the connection
between liberal education and democratic citizenship, emphasizing the intervening steps between developing
powers and exercising them in citizenship. The direct work of the college is the “pursuit of fundamental
knowledge,” which entails “awareness” of “social and moral obligations,” and incidentally confers “the means and
will” to become a “free citizen.”
17 “The aim of the liberal arts is the inner freedom that comes from knowledge of the truth, a freedom to match
and justify the freedom that we liberals seek in the outer world” (“In Search of a Liberal College,” 1937, 3.19).
7
�college supports free government only through the medium of its students, and through their
sustained intellectual development.
This emphasis on freedom through intellectual development marks, I believe, a notion of what
it means for an education to be “liberal” that is more at home in a modern democratic republic
than a classical polis. Civil government is now instituted for the purpose of preserving freedoms
enjoyed by its citizens: freedom of speech, of assembly, and of worship. The responsibilities and
powers of civil government are circumscribed: government seeks the safety of the state, and
the security of its citizens and their property; the force of government has no effect on the
minds of citizens; its laws do not touch upon the truth or falsity of opinion; limited government
carves out a free domain for religion and, in doing so, for speculative thinking as well.18
Education at St. John’s may be called “liberal” most of all on account of this intellectual
freedom, one fostered within a modern democratic republic. As is said in the Statement of the
Program, there are only two rules in class: “all opinions must be heard and explored, however
sharply they may clash; [and], every opinion must be supported by argument.” As participants
in the discussion, we are constrained to give reasons for our opinions, and we are constrained
as well by the necessities we encounter within the logos itself, but as the questions we ask
nevertheless often remain open—better defined in the wake of our analysis—we are each free
to pour over the contours of the arguments again privately, to draw our own conclusions, and
to live accordingly.
Our democratic republic provides the conditions for this exercise of intellectual freedom, but, if
Barr and Buchanan are right, our exercise of this intellectual freedom, in turn, serves the
preservation of the republic. Yet despite this reciprocal relationship, the fact that this freedom
is internal, that it has its roots in our hearts and minds, means that the cooperative exercise of
such freedom requires a large measure of detachment from the wider, fortuitous political
circumstances which foster it.
A liberal education eschews utility and specialization; it assumes a detachment from the
constructed world and contemporary polemics. Our direct task is studying and discussing books
that raise persistent questions about the greatest themes in human experience, books that
have stood the test of time and have elicited various alternative, coherent interpretations.19 It
18
Locke in the Letter Concerning Toleration: “It is light that is needed to change a belief in the mind; punishment of
the body does not lend light” (8). Note Buchanan: “The individual citizen of this secular republic, as pupil, teacher,
or official, as well as the universities and schools, enjoyed this same liberties and immunities from the political
state that the church enjoyed. Freedom of thought and freedom of religion have this common history” (“Liberal
Education and Politics,” 397, in 1944).
19 Cf. J. Winfree Smith, 24; Buchanan, 1945 Catalogue.
8
�takes a sustained effort to read such books well, and through this effort to grasp the arguments,
to be transported in thought, to pose these questions for ourselves, and to pursue them
wherever they lead. Such questions shake our assumptions and cause us to see what is familiar
and gaze upon it now, as if, for the first time; we become detached, disoriented, turned around
(Klein 162). The experience of detachment is the cost of thinking deeply and well.
Penetrating inquiry requires the greatest freedom from contemporary common opinions; they
require that one not just “entertain,” but hear and methodically think through seeming
nonsense and heresies. To comprehend what a number is, one has to take seriously the
thought that the square-root-of-two is not a number, or that one is not a number; or to think
clearly about the cosmos, one has to take seriously the thought, confirmed, after all, by all the
appearances, that the ground beneath my feet is motionless. And it is no different in the
religion, ethics, or politics: to think thorough what justice is, one has to take seriously the
argument that the best regime is the kingship of the wise and the subjection of the unwise. It is
natural to feel a rush of derision, as you read how the heavens revolve about the earth, or to
feel a shudder at the argument that inequality is natural. If, despite your prior opinions, you felt
nothing as you contemplated these jarring thoughts, you would not be taking them seriously;
following the argument would be reduced to a verbal game of maneuver. But we also suspend
these felt responses, lest they prematurely tether our thinking.
Is freedom simply the end? Perhaps not. We are also lovers of wisdom—let it be very briefly
supposed that, if wisdom were achieved, and opinion were replaced by knowledge, then
everything one thinks would be constrained by necessity, and freedom might be reduced to
actively thinking what is true. But as lovers of wisdom, and so lacking it, the range and nature of
freedom itself remains one of our persisting questions, and provisionally, at least, a more ample
notion of freedom is sufficient to animate our community.
As a tiny community of learning, we embrace the ethos of a Greek polity: small, intimate,
sharing a way of life with long established, unwritten laws, nourishing a kind of friendship, and
ambitiously aimed at human excellence. But this tiny community is not a city in fact. We
embrace the shared ethos of a Greek polity for the sake of an intellectual freedom that was
unknown to those polities, one native to our present democratic republic. We speak with one
another frankly, freely, for the sake of following the argument wherever it leads—as modern
free thinkers—but, as citizens of our tiny polity, we do so as friends, tactfully, generously,
gently, neither expressing nor provoking anger.20 We suspend—or at least mute—our private
religious and political commitments, in order to take our place in a community whose activity
20
Drawing on my lecture from 2019, “Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtues.”
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�and end is conversation that questions, challenges, and deepens those individual thoughts and
commitments.
Part Three: Citiless
A “campus” is a field. For centuries, colleges were not campuses, not fields, but walled cloisters.
Students were kept in; the public was kept out (Delbanco, 38). Students were sequestered for
the quiet, long work of study. Extra-curricular activities were intra-mural, literally, “within the
walls.” The oldest continually existing college, the College of Spain (1364), at the oldest
university in Bologna, Italy, was designed as a refuge for international students, the ultramontani. At St. John’s, of course, we have no walls—unlike our neighbors across the street.
Students do, however, often speak of another barrier surrounding us: the “Johnnie Bubble.” It
is transparent, difficult to discern, and so difficult to penetrate; higher than any wall. When I
hear it referred to, it’s with a measure of satire, and a pinch of unease. There’s no gate, no
porter keeping us in, but one may bristle a little at the thought of not being able to get out.
The bubble is an indirect consequence of deliberate choices: we choose to inhabit a small polity
that enables our common way of life, although it can get claustrophobic; and we deliberately
cultivate a degree of detachment from the world of human action. To read long and well is
already to become a little “lost in thought” (cf. Zena Hitz); we lose ourselves in books whose
original era and worldly stance is generally foreign to our own. One in every five St. John’s
students hails from another nation; the nation in which the college is located is not their own;
insofar as we lose ourselves in the books and in the arguments that we spin out of them, we are
all resident aliens, for a time more present to one another and more present to the voices of
our authors than to the active world. For the sake of conversing with one another and with our
distant authors, we are temporary exiles from the public world of political activity; for a time,
we are citiless.
It is this quality of being citiless, detached and immersed in the arguments, that keeps us one
“college” in two disparate locations. Campus cultures and extracurricular activities differ; the
books on the reading lists vary; but in our central work, as liberal artists, we are much the same,
as if the location is not essential. In some degree, the same might be said of all the alumni who,
in their busy lives, continue to put a high value on the reading and thinking they did here and
continue to do. Detached from the world, searching in thought for what endures, the cloistered
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�becomes somewhat other-worldly, so that while the cloister contracts one’s community
materially, it surprisingly also expands it.21
At the college we have actively cultivated this detachment. Decades ago, according to lore, the
faculty discussed whether it was wise for the coffee shop to have a newspaper box. It sounds
comical now that each of us carries in our pockets more news than we can read. The intention
was serious: could heightened concern for the news of the day, the active world, distract us
from our shared work, the study of venerable books and persisting questions? The skirmish was
reignited about a decade ago, as inevitably happens, when considering whether wifi should be
installed around campus: by limiting wireless connectivity, many tutors sought to make it easier
for us put away our devices and converse, face-to-face, in person, over a book. The skirmish
was won, but the war was not, as the Johnnie Bubble does not repel electromagnetic waves.
A bubble, of course, is fragile; it can vanish in a moment. But we would not, on the other hand,
wish the barrier to be too sturdy: a bubble may serve us better than a wall. As the Statement of
the Program says, the books, “illuminate the persisting questions of human existence and…
bear directly on the problems we face today.”22 We would not devote the time and effort to
reading the books if they did not provoke and deepen our thinking about our present lives.23 If
our shared conversations were perfectly separated from our private, lived concerns, it would
imply an analogous complete separation of theoretical and practical wisdom. It would imply
that the question, what can I know?, is entirely separate from, what must I do? It is difficult to
reach clarity about exactly how much detachment is salutary for our inquiries because the
relationship between theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom is itself one of the persisting
questions that occupy us. It would be destructive of our inquiries to assume that “every frame
of thought is an ideology,” that every speculative question is nothing but a practical question in
disguise.24 But neither would we want to erase the practical import of our speculative
inquiries—we hold it in abeyance, rather, to preserve the freedom and the rigor of our
thinking—and then let it back in, when we are better informed. As conversation partners, we
live as if citiless, as if aliens, for so long as necessary to think well and follow the argument
freely.
21
I have in mind Arendt, The Human Condition 2.7.53.
The Statement continues: “They express most originally, and often most perfectly, the ideas by which
contemporary life is knowingly or unknowingly governed. Their authors can speak to us almost as freshly as when
they spoke for the first time, for what they have to tell us is not of merely academic concern, nor is it remote from
our true interests.”
23 The books “change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits.”
24 Eva Brann: “It is the fashion now to claim that all is politics, and that every frame of thought is an ideology. From
this claim it follows that theory and practice are nearly indistinguishable, since every theoretical proposition is also
a political ploy.”
22
11
�This is all less dramatic than I make it sound. True, if humans were political by nature, then
someone without a city would not be human at all, he would be beneath politics or above it, a
beast or god (1253a25). But I have argued that the college has its fitting home in a democratic
republic, in which the scope of government is fundamentally limited. And as it carves out a
domain of freedom for its inhabitants, we are assured a limited domain within which we can be
citiless.25
There is a second way in which we are now citiless, by which I mean, of course, that I am here,
alone, in the King William Room, and you are watching me from your home. Just as formerly St.
John’s-Annapolis and St. John’s-Santa Fe formed a single college, now all of us Annapolitans,
still much more dispersed are trying similarly to remain one college. When the lecture ends
(soon), we will not mingle, shoulder-to-shoulder in the FSK Lobby, a cup of coffee in hand, and
gossip about last night’s seminar, or the lecture, or incidental pastimes, as the buzz of mingled
voices in the background reminds us that we are citizens of an incessantly talking polity.
Instead, you will close the browser window, the same way you exit Facebook or Netflix.
While we have always detached ourselves from the world in order to engage in serious study
and conversation, this detachment did not mean removing ourselves to ours homes, the private
place where we provide for and satisfy bodily necessities. As members of the college, our
detachment used to mean retiring to our metaphorical polity, where our lives remain public,
where we venture our thoughts and questions in one another’s presence, to be heard and
responded to. Instead, most of us are now “working from home,” trying to carry on our public
lives from a private place, which does not serve either very well. You appreciated the irony of
the story of the faculty discussion about whether to install wifi on campus: not a decade after
worrying about whether it would too easy to lose oneself in a screen, we have been furiously
upgrading the wifi and making infinite other technological preparations—never quite
adequate—so that we can converse only through screens.
Early in the summer, a colleague drew an analogy between the predicament of the college
in the face of the pandemic, and Athens before the onslaught of the Persians. The analogy
was hyperbole, of course, but instructive, and a hyperbole I will embrace for this reason.
The course he recommended was the course we only belatedly followed: that we abandon
the city and take to the ships; that we rebuild our city when the perilous threat has
25
If the modern democratic republic is originally designed to tolerate multiple religions, then each person is
permitted to be both a citizen of the republic and a citizen of the city of God, in whatever form of it he believes in.
Religious toleration creates the conditions for multiple, coexisting, extra-political societies; those societies may be
essential to the well-being of the republic.
12
�receded; that “we are Athens, wherever we are, in the Agora, on our ships, or on Zoom.”
The decision was a vexed one; in retrospect, the counsel seems wise.
When the Athenians had fled Athens and yielded the sacred ground to the Persians—the
Acropolis in flames—the Athenian general Themistocles sought to persuade the other
Greeks—Spartans and Corinthians—to keep their ships nearby, so that they could fight the
Persians at sea. A Corinthian responded that Themistocles was a “citiless man,” aner apolis,
and so he had no right to speak: losing one’s city means losing one’s voice in counsel.26
Themistocles’ famous reply: “True, wretch, we have left behind our houses and our city
walls, for it is not worth being enslaved for the sake of lifeless things, but we still have a
city, the greatest in Hellas, our two hundred triremes.”27 At first Themistocles appears to
say that the Athenians in their ships, without fixed harbor or home, alone constitute the
city—he does subsequently relax the claim to say that, by means of such a navy, they can
conquer or establish a new fixed home. So, at St. John’s we, too, have taken to the ships—
to Zoom and YouTube—and even here, if we read long and well, ask questions freely, and
publicly venture our thoughts before the faces of our friends, we can continue to do our
distinctive work, continue to be the finest college of liberal learning.
There is another side to the story, however: as Plato and Plutarch observed later, taking to
the ships transformed Athenian political culture. Themistocles turned the Athenians from
typical “steadfast hoplites” into “sea-tossed mariners,” from honorable warriors and farmers
into lowly rowers.28 A change in the dominant technology accelerated changes in the character
of the people. The qualities required for success shifted from steadiness and courage to
quickness, cleverness, and duplicitous maneuver. Recall Artemisia at the battle, an Ionian
fighting with the Persians: when pursued by the Athenians, she had her ship ram an allied
Persian ship, in order to deceive the pursuing Athenians into thinking she was on their side. And
prior to the battle, the very mobility of the fleet, floating on the water, gave each of the Greek
admirals a strong incentive to stealthily withdraw rather than engage, to seek safety rather
than risk an outcome here and now.
Themistocles’ wisdom liberated Athens, indeed, liberated all Greece. But by means of this
newly-recognized power, he contrived not merely to free Athens from the Persians, but to erect
26
Herodotus 8.61, cf. 7.104 (about Demaratus, a Spartan exile). Citiless is clearly an insult here. Compare Politics
1253a3.
27 Plutarch, trans. Perrin, 35; trans. slightly modified.
28 Plutarch, 13, explicitly citing Plato’s Laws. To be fair, Athens as a city of merchants and mariners is evident
already in the social strife described in Plutarch’s life of Solon: perhaps Themistocles (and the Persians) only
accelerated Athens’ development.
13
�a new empire over others, Persians and Greeks (Plutarch 55-57). Taking to the ships opened up
new avenues for Athenian ambition, and ultimately stimulated an unsustainable longing for far
off places. Themistocles himself was pulled back from his ambitious design by more measured
comrades, yet nevertheless his design forecast the future of the city, for better and for worse.
At the critical moment, it is true that the Athenians took to their ships and abandoned their
city-walls and their temples, but they did not go far, a few miles only to Salamis and then, in the
straights of Salamis, even upon the yielding water, they “stood their ground” behind a wall of
wood, in order to reclaim their polis—citiless no more.29
29
Themistocles urges Eurybiades to stand his ground (Herodotus 8.62); Themistocles tells Aristides that the Greeks
(in their ships) were unwilling to stand and fight (8.80), so they had to be compelled to do so, by inducing the
Persians to enclose their position. Of course, Aristides, exemplary for his moderation, and no mariner, joined the
clash of fleets by standing his ground on a small island in the middle of the battle (8.95).
14
�Sources referenced
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Aristotle. The Politics. Tran. H. Rackam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932, 1990.
Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Tran. H. Rackam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1926, 1982.
Brann, Eva. “A Manifesto for Liberal Education.” The Imaginative Conservative (online). March
27, 2015.
Buchanan, Scott M. “In search of a liberal college : A program for the recovery of the classics
and the liberal arts” [manuscript]. 1937.
Buchanan, Scott M. “Liberal Education and Politics.” American Scholar (1944): 396-398.
Cicero. De Officiis. Trans. Walter Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913, 1997.
Cicero. De Oratore. Trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1942.
Delbanco, Andrew. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Harrell, Daniel. “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art.” SJC Digital Archives, given July 8, 2015.
Haskins, Charles Homer. The Rise of the Universities. New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1923;
Cornell University Press, 1957.
Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Klein, Jacob. Lectures and Essays. Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1985.
Locke, John. Locke on Toleration. Ed. Richard Vernon. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Martianus Capella. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. Trans. William Harris Stahl and
Richard Johnson. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
McWilliams, Jane Wilson. Annapolis, city on the Severn: a history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2011.
Murphy, Emily. “A Complete and Generous Education”: 300 Years of Liberal Arts. Annapolis,
MD: St. John’s College Press, 1996.
15
�Plutarch. Lives: Themistocles and Camillus, etc. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. 1928, 2001.
Smith, J. Winfree. A Search for the Liberal College: The Beginning of the St. John’s Program.
Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1983.
16
�
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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pdf
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16 pages
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Title
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Our Polity
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 28, 2020 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
Creator
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2020-08-28
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Subject
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Student-administrator relationships
Polis (The Greek word)
Education, Humanistic
Language
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English
Identifier
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Macfarland_Joseph_2020-08-28_Typescript
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bd8bcf65749d37cf48b6b89ccf552814.mp4
3fed843f8fd66bd539d1828ee3ba209d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
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00:44:40
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live YouTube webcast
Dublin Core
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Title
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Our Polity
Creator
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2020-08-28
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
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moving image
Format
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mp4
Subject
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Student-administrator relationships
Polis (The Greek word)
Education, Humanistic
Language
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English
Identifier
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Macfarland_Joseph_2020-08-28
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on August 28, 2020 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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