Clifford Orwin
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Clifford Orwin is a Canadian scholar of ancient, modern, contemporary and Jewish political thought. He is also a prominent controversial writer on contemporary politics and culture.
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[edit] Academic career
He earned A.B. in Modern History from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy with Allan Bloom, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Harvard University under Harvey Mansfield. He is a Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he has taught for more than twenty five years and where he currently serves as Chair of the Munk Centre's program in Political Philosophy and International Affairs.
He is often identified as a Straussian. [1][2][3] He was a student of Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield.
He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship. He has been a Fellow at the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership, and in 2003 he received the school's Outstanding Teaching Award.
[edit] Writing
He has written and translated articles on Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Churchill, Charles Taylor, American religion, and humanitarian military intervention. His books are The Humanity of Thucydides (1994), and The Legacy of Rousseau (1997) edited with Nathan Tarcov.
He projects a book on the role of compassion in modern political thought and practice, and a study of the Book of Esther. He describes Rousseau as "the modern philosopher with whom I'm most familiar".
[edit] Controversy
He is often asked to speak at student events. When debating Canada's role in Afghanistan at the University of Toronto's Hart House in 2006, he was interrupted by a small demonstration.
He writes both polemical and philosophical columns for the Globe and Mail and National Post.[4]
[edit] Teaching
The Chair of the University of Toronto Political Science department has said of him: "If there is another observation to be made or argument to be explored or interpretation to be developed, Cliff wants to hear it."[1]
He has written of his teaching method: "My methods harken back to an older kind of warfare: 'Don't teach until you see the whites of their eyes.' Eye-to-eye teaching resembles hand-to-hand combat. Teacher and student struggle, and if they're lucky both lose -- each is compelled to learn from the other. It's not a relation of equals, and teachers who pretend that it is should find another calling, like talk show host. But neither is the role of the student passive."
[edit] Notes
- ^ See this essay from May 2006 on Leo Strauss; Orwin is concerned to argue against identification of Strauss as a neoconservative, and other positions.
- ^ See this review for an attribution of the influence of Strauss's The City and the Man.
- ^ This column by Paul Gottfried classes Orwin with: Allan Bloom, the Kristol family, Paul Wolfowitz, Harvey Mansfield, Richard Perle, John Podhoretz, Thomas Pangle, David Frum; while stating one should not leap to the unwarranted conclusion that all Straussians are neocons.
- ^ For example, this column against Michael Ignatieff and this column about education and technology.
