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Passing Our Lives through the Fire of Thought: The Personal Essay in the Political Theory Classroom

Why are teachers afraid of sentences that begin with “I feel …” or that draw on personal experience? When Enid Bloch, a former practitioner of political science, asked her colleagues these questions, she was given the standard answer of “subjectivity” or “when someone brings up personal feelings there is nothing to discuss” (1999, 69–73). That may be true for other subfields of political science but surely the books we teach in political theory are brimming with subjectivity. Aren't they? And surely the essays we assign call for injecting the writing self into the broader political discussion. Don't they? So what gets in the way?