The Harmonious Classroom: Teaching Political Theory With Period Music
By Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton, History and Society, Babson College, Wellesley
With spades and hoes and ploughs, stand up now, stand up now,
With spades and hoes and ploughs, stand up now
Your freedom to uphold, seeing cavaliers are bold
To kill you if they could, and rights from you to hold.
Stand up now, Diggers all.
The rebellious verses of Gerrard Winstanley’s “The Diggers Song” sound throughout my classroom as students take their seats. In the few minutes before class begins, private conversations at first compete with the music, then gradually dissipate. Some students hum or sing under their breath. They already know this song; I assigned it for today’s meeting alongside selections from Winstanley’s political tract, The Law of Freedom. Lyrics in hand, we take a trip of the imagination to England of 1649. The king has been executed, new ideas about traditional hierarchies abound, and a band of radicals calling themselves ‘Diggers’ climb St. Georges Hill in Surrey to collectively till the land — there by asserting the equal right of all to God’s creation.
Winstanley’s political writings express a clear-eyed view of the connection between political power and control over the land. Yet, few of his written works share the blunt radicalism of the protest anthem he wrote for his short-lived movement. The song establishes a ‘right’ of the people to maintain the land, dismisses the deceptions of lawyers and priests as so much self-serving ideology, questions the elite monopoly of violence (‘the club is all their law’), and dreams of world in which ‘the poor shall wear the crown.’
Political theory is a more musical field than traditional classroom practices would suggest. Rousseau composed popular operas, Machiavelli wrote lewd carnival songs, Hobbes loved to sing about kisses, and Plato argued that some rhythms were so dangerous that they threatened social order. Given the often-inseparable linkages many canonical thinkers draw between their musical commitments and their political ideas, it is striking that music is so rarely brought into our classroom discussions.
In a new essay, “The Harmonious Classroom: Teaching Political Theory with Period Music,” I argue that a thoughtful selection of music can be used enrich student comprehension insofar as it complements a thinker’s ideas (conceptual clarification) or provides important cultural context (contextual elucidation). While some instructors advocate the use of contemporary popular music, a better case can be made for what I call “period” music, i.e., music contemporary to a thinker’s time and place. For example, popular royalist or parliamentarian ballads vividly illustrate the political stakes of the English Civil War, which can be useful for teaching Hobbes and Locke; Alexander Agricola’s arrangement of Fortuna Desperata resonates with Machiavelli’s discussion of fortuna in The Prince; nineteenth century labor ballads such as “The Chartist Anthem” provide a helpful context for reading Marx; and Rousseau’s opera, Le Devin du Village echoes key themes present in his political work. In short, music can be a wonderful way to enhance student learning while also cultivating a wider appreciation of the historical context from which the ideas emerged.
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