Do the Classics Have a Liberal Bias?

President Roth, on the Bill Maher show suggested that studying the classics tends to produce liberal teaching. I think he is right, but perhaps not for the reason he intended. The classics do not teach students to be Democrats, progressives, or liberals in the modern political sense. They do something more fundamental—and potentially more troublesome to established authority. They teach students to ask, “Why should I believe you?”

Socrates may be the most obvious example. His great offense was not that he belonged to the wrong political party. It was that he insisted on questioning people who claimed to possess wisdom and authority. Generals, politicians, poets, religious authorities, and respected citizens were not entitled to intellectual obedience merely because of their positions. Their claims had to withstand examination. Socrates paid for that principle with his life.

In Rhetoric, Aristotle teaches us to examine how people are persuaded—to separate the speaker’s character, the audience’s emotions, and the argument’s logic. Once students learn to recognize ethos, pathos, and logos, political speeches, sermons, advertising, and propaganda become considerably less mysterious, lessening the social, political, or economic power of authority.

That is where the “liberal bias” of the classics really lies. It is not a bias toward a particular contemporary political program. It is a bias toward inquiry over obedience, reason over inherited authority, and argument over assertion.

Of course, questioning authority does not guarantee liberal conclusions. A student can question a liberal professor just as legitimately as a conservative politician, a priest, a corporation, or a government. Indeed, a professor who teaches students to question authority but becomes offended when they question his authority has missed the point of the classics entirely.

But historically, established institutions have depended heavily upon people accepting certain propositions because kings, churches, governments, parents, teachers, or traditions declared them true. Classical education gives students the intellectual tools to resist that demand.

So, studying the classics may have a liberalizing effect, which serves society. Bias is not political; it is bias toward the examined life. And once you teach students that authority must give reasons for what it asks them to believe, you have already introduced a profoundly liberal idea.

James Corbett can be reached at corribean46@gmail.com.