In a society where real liberal education and critical thinking are in rapid decline, and intellectual posturing and political oversimplifications abound, there is no better time for a quest for justice. 

Though labeled political science by the department, Quest for Justice addresses the discipline more foundationally than naive first years expect it to. Politics is not always synonymous with policy or solvable problems. Beginning with ancient Athens, this quest for justice forces you to face the perpetual quarrel between philosophy and politics through time. The double ignorance of Socratic knowledge reveals the questions that always lie below the surface, no matter the state of modern politics, and why they ought to remain unanswered and forever debated. 

Any of us who thought the name of the course implied that a universal answer to the question of justice existed between a simple binary should have quickly learned that we were entirely ignorant to what a true liberal education is and how to engage with it. The words “liberal education” fundamentally mean teaching the art of free thought to citizens who govern themselves. It does not preach any one value or idea as just, but implies that you must always examine these ideas further to better understand and see them more clearly. By doing so, as I’m certain any Quest professor would encourage you to do, you open the door to studying justice more clearly and responsibly anywhere or in anything else. 

 Not a single idea taught in the curriculum goes without objection from at least one other author along the way. The course is designed for students to wrestle with competing ideas, together, through careful readings of a diverse collection of eras and viewpoints. Western writers are not inherently Western-centric, as many of them fiercely critique the communities they live in. The curriculum’s focus on the Western canon does not imply that more answers lie within it: quite the contrary. The class allows us to free ourselves from the biases we unknowingly had, and that anyone with a Western upbringing brought to Kenyon. From there, we are better suited to face the regularly updated set of political problems in the second semester of Quest and for the rest of our lives.

In the second semester, there are sections on gender, race, justness in war and more. Professors can also supplement the course with additional readings, as my Quest syllabus saw the addition of stereotypes in American film and TV, racism in the American public school system and support vs. critiques for democratic socialism and sexism in the corporate world, science and domestic life. Though the course importantly does not conclude with a unifying idea of “justice” in any topic, it reveals more of what lies below the surface. The quest for justice is not toward an answer, but rather the perpetual pursuit of the right and revealing questions. Robbie Lifson ’27 is a political science and psychology major from Sudbury, MA. He can be reached  at lifson3@kenyon.edu.