Half Time Report: Learning Outcomes 11:20 pm / 04 January 2013 by Jock, at Jock's OXFr33? Blog
This university vacation marks, I was slightly shocked to discover, the half way point in my degree. Three semesters down, three to go. Shocked in the sense of a sudden feeling that time does indeed fly so quickly when you are enjoying yourself. Because whatever else I might say or write, about higher education in general, about what the university does and how it does it, it remains true that doing this degree is the best thing I've done.
It's not that I particularly feel I have been challenged academically - it's looking like I'm on course to continue averaging a high 2:1 sort of a level, perhaps inching toward a first. It's more to do with putting some structure to my existing thoughts and interests, making links between and boundaries around topics I have in the past been interested in in a rather more amorphous way. Reading a bit about international development here, a bit about Leviathan there, keeping up with contemporary public intellectual debate on things like citizenship or financial markets. Having to choose four subject areas to study in parallel for twelve week blocks automatically imposes a sort of order and different ways of connecting ideas between them.
For example someone studying philosophy and politics brings a different set of connections and perspectives to a Political Thought module than someone studying, as myself, economics and politics. Equally, I may have read all sorts of bits of Hobbes and Locke and so on over the years, but never put them together in a narrative of the development of political philosophy. Rather I have usually read them, say, to defend a specific position I have held, such as Lockean Proviso property rights.
There seems to me to be a fair bit more intellectual freedom after the first year modules too. I can't put my finger on it specifically, but I feel it has been easier to explore my somewhat heterodox ideas. It may simply be smaller class sizes where one can feel a bit more free to speak up than the first year mega-modules. But I've also found more tolerance, if I may put it that way, for making links between what we have been studying for coursework assignments and non-state alternatives, for example.
Future semesters might find it difficult to beat the one just gone for a mix of interesting subjects...
I've covered Political Thought, a module I had to fight to get onto following an unfortunate clash introduced over the summer vacation. Twelve weeks seems too short to study in much depth the political thinkers covered - Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and J S Mill - but I have come away from it with what I hope may be an abiding interest in finding out more about the justifications for government, the idea of natural law and natural rights, the state of nature and the social contract, and intertwine some serious political philosophy into my exploration of stateless society. That said, I think I am now glad not to be doing Political Thought II in the new semester. I think I need a year to digest the first module before struggling through giants like Marx!
International development is an area I've been interested in for a long time. But the opportunity to study formally some of the models that have so signally failed to deliver escape from abject poverty experienced by so large a proportion of the world's population has helped me focus on the sort of institutions we might need to design to provide a stateless alternative to the global clusterfuck that has seen poverty get worse for many of the bottom billion over the past forty years. There are connections here to be made as well for political philosophy. Some of the conditions of the global poor appear to bear some similarities to some ideas of the pre-political "state of nature" - certainly, for too many on the planet life really is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Maybe some of the philosophical ideas for escaping that state of nature can be applied to the near blank slates that are some developing nations today.
Probably the module I have most enjoyed this semester has been State and Society in Europe. I thought about doing it before, but it was only eventually in my programme because of the unfortunate Political Thought clash. So it was a little bit of a surprise. It's a little like the practical version of the Political Thought theoretical module. How does the development of the nation state and citizenship reflect some of the ideas of these earlier philosophers? It has probably been the most intellectually challenging module to date. And I have come out of it with two particular ideas to pursue: first that the Scandinavian model of citizenship is a product of a particularly benign conjunction of class awareness preceding industrialisation resulting in a more empowered partnership of more equal negotiating partners between capital and labour; second that T H Marshall's correlation between the growth of capitalism and of civil citizenship was a critical mistake in the development of liberalism toward a more state interventionist ideology.
I'm now really looking forward to doing what is in many ways a successor module this coming semester, Comparative Welfare States. Another addition to get round clashes.
And finally there was what was in some ways an "outlier" of a module, less connected to the other three in any obvious ways. In Financial Markets and Institutions a lot of what was covered I had already learned, less formally, in my first career at the Stock Exchange. That, however, has probably made me more complacent about it. That and the fact that whilst it is interesting, it's not necessarily an area I will want to develop further in my economics. Whilst it wasn't a struggle, I won't have done quite as well in this one I think.
Next semester is, on paper, less interesting. One compulsory module on research methods in preparation for the dissertation; a module on contemporary British Politics, a subject that, by comparison with my younger student colleagues, I will have the benefit of having lived through I suspect; the Welfare States one mentioned already I am looking forward to; and finally Macroeconomics II, a subject I find it extremely difficult to relate to, as an anarchist.
One last thing: I never really felt until this semester just how much I loathe exams. Especially exams that involve at attempt to scribble a couple of quick essays in a couple of hours. Fair enough subjects where you can ask objectively right or wrong answers. But without exception every essay question in every exam this semester justified a fully researched and referenced academic essay and whilst I have not always been well planned and prepared for coursework essays, I would have preferred to tackle them properly as coursework. In all my careers I cannot think of any work activity for which the two or three essay scribblethon is a meaningful test or preparation.
