Books: "Teaching in an Age of Ideology" by John H. Hallowell

Teaching in an Age of Ideology

Edited by Lee Trepanier and John von Heyking

Contributions by Leah Bradshaw; Charles R. Embry; 

Molly Brigid Flynn; Bryan-Paul Frost; Lance M. Grigg; 

Michael Henry; Tim Hoye; Nalin Ranasinghe; 

Travis D. Smith and Michael Zuckert

This volume explores the role of some of the most prominent twentieth-century philosophers and political thinkers as teachers. It examines how these teachers conveyed truth to their students against the ideological influences found in the university and society. Philosophers from Edmund Husserl and Hannah Arendt to political thinkers like Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, and their students such as Ellis Sandoz, Stanley Rosen, and Harvey Mansfield, are in this volume as teachers who analyze, denounce, and attempt to transcend ideology for a more authentic way of thinking. What the reader will discover is that teaching is not merely a matter of holding concepts together, but a way of existing or living in the world. The thinkers in this volume represent this form of teaching as the philosophical search for truth in a world deformed by ideology.

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Teaching in an Age of Ideology: John H. Hallowell

by Lee Trepanier

In my last post I wrote about Gerhart Niemeyer who sought to avoid indoctrinating his students in order for them to pursue the true, the beautiful, and the good. In this post I want to do the same thing but look at one of Niemeyer’s students, John H. Hallowell, as a teacher. Spending almost forty years teaching political philosophy at Duke University, Hallowell during that time published three books, The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology(1943), Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (1950), The Moral Foundation of Democracy (1954), and numerous articles in political thought. He received several academic honors for his scholarship during his lifetime and his works have been translated into several languages in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

However, as Timothy Hoye writes in his chapter in Teaching in an Age of Ideology, Hallowell saw himself first and foremost as a teacher rather than a scholar or civic activist. In a letter to Dean Friedl on September 15, 1981, he wrote, “I entered this profession because I wanted to teach. In my opinion a university consists of teachers and students primarily. I have always considered teaching my first and most important responsibility.” Hoye points out that Hallowell wrote this letter in frustration with him not understanding how his department chair and colleagues have dismissed the importance of teaching in their profession. In an earlier letter, Hallowell wrote, “It does come to me as something of a surprise to learn that teaching is not considered by my department chairman to be all that important. I would have thought it was the most important activity in which a professor could be engaged.”
Teaching clearly was the most important professional priority for Hallowell, but what did this mean, especially teaching politics? For Hallowell, an education in politics was not participating in it but rather learning to think about it first. This educational process of learning how to think was a mutual search for truth with students, who respect their professors while encouraging to take issue with them and reject their arguments if students have sound reasons. By examining the classics and examples of great statesmen, students would discover the practical knowledge of locating the best means to promote justice within a community. Contrary to those who advocated practical observation and participation in politics as the most effective means to learn about it, Hallowell recognized the prior need of students being able to think, evaluate, and explain their actions before actually doing them; and the best way to accomplish this was to study the tradition of the good, the beautiful, and the true.

Books by the authors mentioned in this essay can be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Read Dr. Trepanier’s essays on Teaching in an Age of Ideology here.


Dr. Lee Trepanier is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan. He is the author and editor of numerous books, the latest being co-edited with John von Heyking, Teaching in an Age of Ideology (Lexington Books, 2012). Read more of Dr. Trepanier’s TIC essays here.


Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org