ABSTRACT
Colleges and faculties of liberal arts are facing potentially devastating declines in enrollments, driven in part by their own loss of clear purpose. To stem the tide and regain their rightful place at the center of the university, liberal arts faculties need to rethink the meaning of liberal education. This article argues that education in the liberal arts should be directed above all to cultivating practical wisdom, for which a deep inquiry into the central questions of political science is especially valuable. It discusses the relation of liberal education to civic education, the proper tasks of civic education at the university level, the benefits of dialectical inquiry, and the means by which students’ thoughtless relativism can be replaced with habit of moral reasoning suitable to a modern cosmopolitan society.
