Professors Benjamin and Jenna Storey have a motto: “Education must begin from where the students are.” Today, they note, “an increasing number of bright, politically interested young people prefer Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, and Malcolm X to the ‘Federalist Papers,’ John Stuart Mill, and Martin Luther King, Jr.” While the Storeys find such attractions “obviously troubling,” they also “take them seriously as a sign of students’ desire to look everywhere for insight into our current political problems.”
“Like Henry Adams, intelligent young people are looking for real education,” they argue. “They want to know not only about government but also about questions of God and the good life that Plato thought were embedded in arguments about justice.”
Students can explore these enduring arguments in the Tocqueville Program, which the Storeys co-direct at Furman University. The program, they say, offers “an intellectual community dedicated to exploring the moral and philosophic questions at the heart of political life.” Located at South Carolina’s oldest private institution of higher learning in Greenville, the program launched in 2008 with the help of the Storeys’ colleague Aristide Tessitore.
