Padd Solutions

Lying awake the other night thinking about it, I remembered something Michael Oakeshott said about something like this in a characterictically more elegant and approachable way (though he was talking about something else at the time, namely university education). Instead of using clunky terms like normative and analytic to describe something like Marxism being simultaneously a

- concept and

- a way of looking at concepts,

he employs the metaphor of a "literature" and a "language" to say the same. So as for dreary old Marxism, it's both a vast and often dry literature (what's with big philosophers being horrible writers?) as well as a very popular and in many cases useful language. What Robert Gilpin is talking about in the IPE book I'm reading is the latter being used to speak about the world and surviving well past 1989 because it does that fairly well.

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Incidentally, what Oakeshott was describing in the aforementioned essay on education were vocational schools and universities -- each being valuable as teachers of literatures on the one hand and of languages on the other.

A school for plumbers, for example, is going to impart to its students a body of knowledge about plumbing - pipes, leaks, floods, and the behavior of water; in short, a literature - but it is not going to teach them a corresponding way of looking at the world.

A university, according to Oakeshott, is a "place apart" from the routine of practical life whose central task is to bring together and impart not just literatures but languages: there is a biological way of looking and talking about and solving problems in the world. A poetic one, too, and philosophical and mathematical and chemical and sociological ones as well.

It's a fine way of looking at education, even with its shortcomings. (Namely, one could argue that plumbers have a language all their own, and that they learn to speak and think and look and walk and talk - live, basically - with it. It would be difficult, but you could do it.) At anything, really. Another tool to put in your mental toolbox.