Another reader, meanwhile, wades in with this observation about the supposed inevitability of philosophy departments hiring on the Left:
“Spend any time surveying the great philosophers, and you…find a large number of conservatives – Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Hume, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and a number who are… not liberals – Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzsche, for example. The liberals are a smaller number – Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Mill. And of course, any of them would be conservatives by today’s standards. “Left-leaning”? By whose standard?”
Well, I’m not so sure about Rousseau, and there’s always cranky Karl Marx, but he does have a point…