When I was 18 years old, I fell in love with political theory. I decided I wanted to be a professor and teach political thought. I took every political theory class I could, read voraciously and loved it. After taking a few years break to work and travel, I went to grad school and studied the history of political thought. It too was a great experience and I dreamed about spending all day in the library reading the history of ideas, until I could bring forth a great book and a brilliant series of lectures.
A funny thing happened on the road to that dream, I ran into even better opportunities! Being alive at the birth of the internet and getting to work at companies like Amazon.com and Microsoft presented more immediate satisfactions than toiling in academia. I kept up my reading and even went to some conferences, but the intellectual history that was getting made captured my interest more than the history I had studied. And when I looked at the family life I hoped to have and the realities of political theorists' opportunities for wages and work places, well let's just say that Seattle in 1997 felt more like Florence in 1540. Cambridge, MA or Princeton, NJ lost their attraction.
This is turning into a long story.
Anyway, in the Fall of 2003, while I was bloodlessly toiling at Microsoft thinking about what I really want to do with my life, an old friend called to say he'd be going on sabbatical, and would I be interested in teaching his political theory course the following year? Naively, and with great excitement I said yes - and a lifelong goal to teach political theory in a university setting came closer to being crossed off my list.
Having completed the course now, I'm very thankful for the opportunity and very appreciative of my students who helped me to learn so much more about the theorists I taught. It was a great experience, but I was surprised by many of the things I learned from it. One, it made me much more productive to get up early in the morning and prepare lectures for a class that started at 8:15 am. It made me simplify my exposition of ideas and realize where I don't really know certain subjects well enough to present them with sufficient simplicity. It rekindled my love affair with the history of ideas.
But it also made me appreciate the things I do outside of the academy that also involve the concepts I was teaching: liberty, authority, natural law, rights, commerce, property. All of these things are at least as alive in my life and work as they were in the classroom. Sometimes, before I taught, I pined for the opportunity to be back in the milieu of political ideas. Having now done this, I have a better appreciation for my already, ongoing engagement. I hope I passed this same value on to my students.
Net: I'm glad I did this and I think it was worthwhile. It was a great chance to try out a path I thought I had left behind. Did I wish I'd stayed on the academic track? No, definitely not. Was it worth it to learn this and all the other things I learned by trying to share my love of intellectual history with others? Absolutely.
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