Why political theory classes shouldn’t skip from Aristotle to Machiavelli, or, Why the Middle Ages matter:

  1. You can’t read medieval political thought without running into the word God. This is (I suspect) exactly why some professors skip that era. But a classroom in which students never have occasion to utter the word God is one in which Jewish, Christian, and Muslim students (and perhaps others) will receive the tacit lesson that they need a wall of separation between what they read or think about at school and what they read or think about at shul, church, or mosque. That compartmentalization is intellectually and spiritually (and probably emotionally) unhealthy.
  2. A robust idea of human equality enters Western political thought through the early Church and its medieval echoes. The early moderns' reduction of equality to equal liberty is an obfuscation and a distraction: if you want to think or teach about political egalitarianism, you need the Middle Ages. (Along those lines, I recommend St Benedict’s Rule as a highly teachable text.)
  3. You can’t understand Machiavelli (or Hobbes, etc.) without understanding what the early moderns were so strenuously rejecting. At a minimum, if you’re teaching Machiavelli’s Prince, you need to assign some earlier sample of the Mirror of Princes genre. (I’ve used both Christine de Pizan’s Book of the Body Politic and Aquinas’s On Kingship to good effect.)
  4. The Middle Ages are more fun than any other era: medieval literature is livelier, funkier, weirder. My Mirror of Princes text this semester will be Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and I can’t wait. (Why do I put G&GK in that genre? Read the banquet scene at the beginning!)