Government 1060, "The History of Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy"

Does the title of Government 1060, “The History of Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy” refer to the course's placement in the FAS catalogue (just before Government 1061, “The History of Modern Political Philosophy”) or to instructor Harvey C-Minus Mansfield's birth-year?

Now that the professor has published his panegyric to the penis, entitled ¨Manliness,¨ it´s hard to imagine that Mansfield was really born in 1060. (Compared to the luminaries of the early Middle Ages, after all, Mansfield's gender philosophy appears positively Cro-Magnon.)

And to answer the question once-and-for-all, the Government Department has re-assigned the course to a visiting professor, Aaron Garrett of Boston University, who was born in 1965.

The personnel-switch might mean an up-tick in the number of A´s and A-minuses distributed to course-takers; Mansfield is the Faculty's most-notorious grade-deflator. But expect the course to remain, at its core, a grueling—but gratifying—intellectual challenge.

The best argument in favor of Government 1060 comes from the course's own syllabus: Book VI of Plato's Republic: ¨Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is.¨ (¨This small class¨ indeed – 31 undergraduates enrolled in the class this past fall, and 19 undergrads signed up in 2004, when Richard Tuck led the course. By comparison, the average size of a Moral Reasoning core course last year – and Government 1060 now counts for MR credit – was a whopping 176.)

Graduates of Gov 1060 will be emerge from the experience with the capacity to comment—intelligently, if not expertly—on sages from Socrates to St. Thomas Aquinas.

But in the aforementioned passage, Plato also cautions would-be course-takers: ¨The worthy disciples of philosophy will be but a small remnant…who in the absence of corrupting influences remains devoted to her.¨

Students have poured over Plato for nearly 2500 years—and it takes about that long to resolve the most recondite riddles in the “Republic.” Brace yourself for several hundred pages of reading a week—and breezy prose this is not.

But as St. Augustine of Hippo writes in ¨City of God,¨ another standard of the Gov 1060 syllabus, “The greater the joy, the greater the pain that precedes it.”

Harvey or no Harvey, Gov 1060 will continue—intellectually speaking—to separate the boys from the men.