Government in America today does many things. It builds roads, educates and feeds our children, supplies housing to millions, and gives living assistance to older citizens. And this is just the start of its vast array of responsibilities. Important as these activities are, however, none of them provides the primary reason why people instituted a government in the first place.

This reason was perhaps best described by the English political philosopher John Locke, author of the Second Treatise on Civil Government. Published in 1689, some 80 years before the events that led to the American Revolution, Locke’s Treatise was the most widely read book in America in the 1770s, the Bible excepted. It still deserves our attention today. The work speaks directly to the inchoate movement currently roiling the nation, which calls for defunding (or disbanding) police forces and demands using the money recovered to ‘invest in people’ and adopt ‘a holistic model of public safety…'

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Earlier this year, author Avi Woolf argued that right-leaning academics ought to start crafting a conservative vision for research in the humanities and social sciences. In his view, conservative academics should not limit themselves to advocating for Great Books programs. Studying the classic texts of the Western tradition is a valuable exercise, he allowed, but it is also insufficient, for such books “do not advance specifically conservative ideas.” Thus, he maintained, conservative academics should think about how to provide an explicitly conservative “direction [to] future scholarship.”

I found Woolf’s argument intriguing, and I wanted to hear what conservative professors thought about it. As it turned out, most of them appeared to be highly skeptical of the notion that scholarship should be guided by an ideological vision…
 

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