Political Economy as Civic Education: A Contested-Principles Approach to New Statutory Requirements in Ohio

Abstract

The Advance Ohio Higher Education Act of 2025 legally requires public universities in Ohio to teach students specific economics content but bans instructors from addressing controversial topics in a biased manner. Rather than avoid controversial issues, civic education should focus on contested fundamental economic principles for two reasons. First, it is a safer strategy for legal compliance. Second, teaching contested principles is a pedagogical boon for the education of citizens in which no single disciplinary perspective can be authoritative. There are both practical dilemmas and pedagogical upsides to the new regulatory environment that are unforeseen in the scholarly literature related to law and economics and the economics of civic education. The contested-principles approach to civics-focused economic education, developed here, is relevant beyond Ohio: to new public institutes of civic education across the United States, to universities that anticipate similar legal requirements, and to anyone interested in unforeseen pedagogical benefits of higher-education law.

1. Introduction

What should the law require citizens to know about economics? Perhaps United States citizens should be informed about tradeoffs involving stimulus cash payments, inflation controls, tariff protections, and other economic policies that have been major political issues in the 2020s. Vassiliou (2024) proposes a baseline for students in higher education, especially in civics institutes at public universities: they should be able “to recognize how their daily economic decisions… impact the public interest” and “to exercise prudent judgment” about how to protect constitutionally enshrined civil liberties in the present economic context. This is a high bar. Still, Vassiliou sidesteps a question of propriety. If citizens are entitled to divergent opinions and perspectives on these matters, who are experts authorized to teach them?

Educators at all levels have lost confidence that the realm of scientific facts known to experts can be neatly separated from the realm of citizens’ value judgments.1 In K-12 civic education, standard rational-actor models of neoclassical economic theory are observed to run afoul of political theories that emphasize how citizens, nations, and the world might distribute scarce resources differently (Adams 2019). In the university, and especially at public universities, an additional problem arises: whose expertise or which discipline should matter or matter most? In debates over environmental policy, for example, students might be informed, reasonably, in different ways by the expertise of the climate scientist versus the expertise of the economist. As citizens facing complex problems beyond the scope of any single discipline, students must weigh contending kinds of expertise (Klein 1996, p. 237). No single architectonic science of citizenship is authoritative. Indeed, to suggest that a self-governing people must be first taught the practice of self-government rediscovers a paradox familiar to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western democratic political theory (Villa 2017, pp. 29, 85).

Despite widespread academic skepticism of any value-neutral science of good citizenship, this topic is now, nevertheless, a matter of public and legal deliberation in the United States. Many American states have founded new public-university institutes for civic education. Some have gone further. For example, under the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, all state institutions of higher education in Ohio are required to offer at least one course in “American civic literacy” that includes “a study of the American economic system and capitalism.” Ohio law also goes further than other U.S. states to require teaching “controversial beliefs or policies” such as climate policy or immigration policy from multiple perspectives, perhaps giving educators the burden of teaching beyond their disciplinary specialties (The Ohio Legislature 2025, p. 15). This legal mandate creates urgent questions about the public authorization of experts.

Faculties of Ohio public universities are not alone in facing challenges of legal compliance when it comes to civic education. From 2017 to 2024, state legislatures in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and other states established institutes for civic education at public universities. Some noteworthy examples include the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University, the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University, the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) at the University of North Carolina, the Institute of American Civics in the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and the Civitas Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. While their mission statements vary, some mention “economic dynamism” (Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin n.d.), “economic thought,” “economics” (The Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee 2022; Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida n.d.; The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill n.d.), and all of them are developing undergraduate curricula that teach economics alongside public commitments to civility and political participation. Throughout this paper, I use the term political economy interchangeably with the citizen-focused economics education that these institutes and their authorizing statutes or bylaws envision.

Each of these new public-university institutes for civic education is committed to intellectual diversity. None claim to advance a single school of political economy, such as a classical-liberal, Marxist, or neo-mercantilist approach to the controversial public policy issues of our time. This commitment to pluralism, which is often legally mandated, is appropriate to teaching citizens who are entitled to their own beliefs and viewpoints. Some civics centers have formal obligations to teach economics from multiple perspectives, including legal obligations. In Tennessee, the report commissioned by the legislature from the Institute of American Civics identifies the importance of viewpoint diversity in civic education (Tennessee General Assembly 2022). Kody Cooper argues that the IAC “anchors itself in an embrace of viewpoint diversity and a rejection of intellectual monoculture” (Cooper 2024, p. 7). In Florida, the statute creating the Hamilton Center mentions the value of “open inquiry” alongside civil discourse (The Florida Senate 2024).

But the statutory responsibility for public-university professors to engage “multiple, divergent, and varied perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues” is greatest in Ohio (The Ohio Legislature 2025). The state-funded institutes for civic education in Ohio are called “intellectual diversity centers” (Knox 2023). Under the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, institutes for civic education are banned from endorsing any “controversial belief or policy” that is “the subject of political controversy”. Instructors at state universities in Ohio are barred from indoctrinating their students by statute; furthermore, bound to “allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions” about such issues; and, furthermore, prohibited to use an applicant’s stances on controversial issues as criteria for hiring decisions (The Ohio Legislature 2025, p. 13). Recent proposals under discussion have suggested that private colleges and universities in Ohio may have to comply with the statute in order to be eligible for state funding, such as the Governor’s Merit Scholarship program (Newbury 2025).

I focus upon Ohio law because as of 2025 it has the most expansive and specific prescriptions about civic literacy education, and because it seems to raise the highest bar for instructors’ compliance and the greatest demands for teaching civic education in a multidisciplinary manner. However, similar laws may be instituted in other states. For reasons given in the third section of this article, I think the pedagogical approach would be appropriate in other contexts and even in the absence of legal requirements.

This article proposes a specific way to teach civics-focused economics in compliance with Ohio law and in similar legal environments. It answers a practical question: How should university teachers approach the American economic system and capitalism in a manner that encourages students to reach their own conclusions about an extensive range of controversial public policy issues? My argument, in a nutshell, is that presenting a range of controversial views in the classroom is less likely to incur legal liabilities when it comes to compliance with statutes banning instructors from adopting controversial viewpoints. Attempting to avoid controversies is risky, because in an interdisciplinary setting, introducing one disciplinary perspective instead of another can be perceived as a politically biased decision. Moreover, this bolder compliance strategy offers some unforeseen reciprocal pedagogical benefits in terms of what economics can offer civic education and vice versa. It is important that these pedagogical benefits have been unforeseen by economists; this fact suggests the positive role that law can play in higher education.

There are three sections. First, I explain why the new legally mandated civic education wrong-foots many scholars in economics and economics-adjacent fields, including economists who value civic education highly. Laws are changing economics pedagogy in higher education; since few economists called from ‘within the house’ to integrate their discipline with American civics, these changes would not have happened spontaneously.2 Therefore, second, I make a best compliance argument for economics teachers suddenly facing these new laws. Any cautious attempt to avoid “controversial beliefs or policies” is, legally, less felicitous from a compliance standpoint than a contested-principles approach. Third, I argue for the distinct and reciprocal pedagogical advantages of this contested-principles approach, showing what economics can offer civic education and vice versa. The case study in this section is Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the only work of economics mandated in the Advance Ohio Education Act, and a text that clearly impinges on controversial political issues of trade and tariffs.

2. The Uncertain Place of Economics in Civic Education

The new civic education movement in the U.S. is characterized by what Carrese (2024) calls “higher civics”. Historians, political philosophers, and scholars of American political development call upon students to engage substantively with American constitutionalism and leadership. Civics seminars invite students with “contending opinions” to debate core texts and pivotal moments in U.S. history (Berkowitz 2024). The place of economics in the “higher civics” renaissance is uncertain. This is not simply because the field of economics, in Carrese’s words, is “dominated by extremes of abstraction and dogmatic theory” (Carrese 2024, p. 10). True, the history of economics subfield lost major ground in the twentieth century as economics became more mathematically sophisticated (Weintraub 2002). However, as we shall see, even the most historical and contextual economics education imparts concepts, epistemologies, methods, and principles that would challenge ordinary contending opinions. Economics is marked by a specific approach to market exchange behaviors or to production, distribution, and consumption of goods. How can the discipline of economics, which is more properly defined by its methods and models, inform the “higher civics” that is already (sometimes legally) defined by its substance, that is, by historical content, recognizable figures, and enduring themes? This is an awkward question for two additional reasons: one, because economists tend to conceive of civic education differently from historians and political scientists, and two, because economists and economic analysts of law question the value of an informed citizenry altogether.

The economists who are most committed to civic education do not exactly envision the canon of “higher civics” that is now in vogue (see Carrese 2024). The “mainline” tradition of political economy that runs from Adam Smith to the late Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom emphasizes the importance of ordinary citizens’ participation in civil society institutions and voluntary associations to resolve social dilemmas (Boettke et al. 2016). Concern with civic education is present at the origins of this mainline tradition. Stephen Macedo points to Smith’s concern in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations that ordinary people in industrial society will lose the skills and habits of self-government (Macedo 2000, p. 47). However, it is not clear what the “essential parts of education” are for Smith, beyond the ability “to read, write, and account” and perhaps military and gymnastic exercises to reduce cowardice (Smith 1981, pp. 785–88).

“Mainline” economists therefore, though most supportive of civic education, are less aligned with the “higher civics” canon than they may first appear to be. Hayek (2016), a central figure in this tradition, argues that ascendant twentieth-century economists overlooked informal and imperfect knowledge “dispersed” among ordinary people. Dispersed knowledge, he argues, can only be aggregated by the continuous change of market prices (Hayek 1945). Ostrom also conceives civic knowledge as dispersed in this way. In her 1997 address to the American Political Science Association, Ostrom underscores the importance of ordinary citizens’ informal knowledge. She argues that passing down such knowledge is necessary to sustain all sorts of associations:

All too many of our textbooks focus exclusively on leaders and, worse, only national-level leaders. Students completing an introductory course on American government, or political science more generally, will not learn that they play an essential role in sustaining democracy. Citizen participation is presented as contacting leaders, organizing interest groups and parties, and voting. That citizens need additional skills and knowledge to resolve the social dilemmas they face is left unaddressed. Their moral decisions are not discussed… It is ordinary persons and citizens who craft and sustain the workability of the institutions of everyday life. We owe an obligation to the next generation to carry forward the best of our knowledge about how individuals solve the multiplicity of social dilemmas—large and small—that they face.

(Ostrom 1998, p. 18)

Hayek and Ostrom emphasize informal workaday skills that ordinary citizens need to act together in everyday life over and above “higher civics” content knowledge of a nation’s history and principles.

Mainline economists committed to civic education, then, largely expect the content, goals, and strategy of collective action to come from citizens’ opinions and informal knowledge.3 This resembles Peter Levine’s approach to civic studies, which also assumes and begins with dispersed student knowledge. Assuming that students have prior knowledge and opinions, Levine outlines practical steps to help students form and sustain the institutions and habits of public deliberation (Levine 2022, pp. 205–6). This represented a shift, twenty-five years ago, away from the higher civics to “civic engagement” (Carrese 2024, p. 6). The ways that economists such as Hayek and Ostrom conceptualize civic knowledge are aligned with Levine’s shift to civic engagement. However, as we have seen, the new state-university civic education centers have a set of more specific legal obligations, for example, to teach the American civic tradition. They demand not only “action civics,” as Jeffrey Sikkenga and David Davenport call civic studies that focus upon engagement, but also go further to impart substantive knowledge of the events, ideas, and persons who make up our body of “civic knowledge” (Sikkenga and Davenport 2024, pp. 58–61).

In addition to conceptualizing civic education differently, economists argue that proponents of “higher civics” overestimate both the social cost of citizens’ economic illiteracy and the benefits of a better-informed citizenry. Although The Myth of the Rational Voter projects that the social costs of bad economic policymaking are vast—they cannot be easily measured, but they are “enormous”—Bryan Caplan does not agree with Vassiliou, ergo, that citizens require a higher level of economics education (Caplan 2011, pp. 119–22). One cannot assume that voters would act in their interests or in the public interest if they had improved levels of economic knowledge, because it is not clear that they are motivated by their self-interest or the public interest in the first place. Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger find that voters’ level of general economics knowledge—unlike, for example, ideology—does not correlate to their policy preferences (Blinder and Krueger 2004, pp. 372, 382). Caplan concludes that citizens vote because they enjoy expressing their beliefs about the world, including irrational beliefs, and at some level of complexity, almost inevitably erroneous ones (Caplan 2011, p. 138; cf. Riker and Ordeshook 1968). Since the social costs of bad policies are distributed across society, citizens adopt emotionally satisfying beliefs. Therefore, past a certain point, the education of a better-informed citizenry is a bad investment.

Nor is the field of law and economics, the research program that applies economic analysis to the development of law, a driving force behind civic-focused economic education. The law and economics approach is summarized in the legal scholar Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law: “the doctrines and institutions of the legal system are best understood and explained as efforts to promote the efficient allocation of resources” (Posner 1986, p. 20). Posner attributes this insight about torts regarding nuisance in the English common law to Ronald Coase. The approach emerged in the Law and Society program at the University of Chicago Law School, originally championed by Hayek and led by the economist Aaron Director. However, Hayek downplays intentionality and design behind those legal rules that turn out to be efficient; instead, judges’ highly contingent decisions on a case-by-case basis “approach a system of rules of conduct which is most conducive to producing an efficient order of actions” (Hayek 2011, p. 118). Posner’s insistence that the common law is an “inarticulate” process to realize efficiency gains implies a possible criticism of the higher civics (Posner 1981, p. 113): good laws result from common sense applied to everyday situations, not articulate knowledge of economics, constitutional law, or history.

Many economists and scholars in economics-adjacent fields, who have internal grounds for skepticism about the “higher civics”, are nevertheless ‘lumped in’ to the new legal mandates for civic education. Their discipline inspires recalcitrance. But unlike legal mandates to teach creationism that were struck down in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) or Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) on First Amendment grounds, mandates to teach “higher civics” seem to have a compelling public interest. Legal reasoning about the public interest has been untroubled by economists who have long denied that citizens ever collectively act for an enduring public interest across majority cycles (Buchanan 1954; Caplan 2011). I am to overcome economists’ skepticism by proposing that economics and “higher civics” can be brought together for mutual pedagogical advantage. But since this opportunity for arises as a matter of legal necessity, and indeed would not have arisen otherwise, I first turn to recommend the best strategy for compliance with the most robust test case so far, the aforementioned Ohio statute.

3. Teaching Controversy Is Best for Compliance

The lawmakers who passed the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act and similar bills intend to improve their fellow citizens’ collective decision-making, even if many economists are skeptical that this is possible. The new institutes for civic education are publicly dedicated, by statute or by boards of regents, to constitutional principles that should animate United States citizens and the citizens of the various states. To take an early example, in Arizona, Title 15 orders SCETL at Arizona State to “develop civic education standards” that include “[t]he original intent of the founding documents and principles of the United States” and “responsibility for preserving and defending the blessings of liberty inherited by prior generations” (Arizona State Legislature 2024). This statute stipulates not only content knowledge but a manner of interpretation—originalism. Even the Institute of American Civics (Tennessee), whose task of “enhancing civic knowledge… building civic skills… and promoting public engagement” seems most open-ended, requires the teaching of certain specific content (The University of Tennessee System Board of Trustees 2023). The white paper launching the Institute of American Civics indicates a number of content areas: how institutions and structures of government work, the “principles and philosophies” that contributed to the founding of the United States and to Tennessee, and “politics, economics, philosophy, American history, American government, and other related fields” (The Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee 2022, p. 14). The curricula of these civic-education institutes, schools, and centers must envision a more specific and content-laden approach than Hayek, Ostrom, and Levine envision, or which can be found in the mainline tradition of political economy. Most specific of all, Ohio stipulates that all public universities must teach a class or classes of at least three credit hours in civic literacy in which students read the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, a minimum of five essays from The Federalist (“selected by the department chair”), the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and selections from …the Wealth of Nations (The Ohio Legislature 2025, p. 15). While many of these readings raise controversial issues from different perspectives, …the Wealth of Nations is the only fundamental economics text required.

But this, of course, raises the question of bias and compliance. The Advance Ohio Higher Education Act prohibits instructors from endorsing any controversial belief or policy, defined as “any belief that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion” (The Ohio Legislature 2025, p. 11). It is possible, at first glance, to remain in compliance with the law by simply avoiding these topics. Economics, after all, might be described as “a way of thinking” that may help students understand the tradeoffs of environmental regulations or immigration restrictions, for example, but do not determine or endorse any specific policies (see Heyne et al. 2013). But is a policy of not teaching any controversial topics the best way to stay in compliance with Ohio’s legal restrictions on teaching controversial content?

There are two interrelated reasons why a cautious strategy that avoids controversial beliefs and policies is not the best approach to a civics-focused approach to economics, and the subfield of law and economics helps us to understand them both: the reality of disciplinary bias and the inescapability of controversial beliefs and policies in the domain of political economy.

Economics has a disciplinary bias. Studying economics correlates to certain political views. The latest research shows that studying economics does not make students more politically conservative, exactly, though it may make students less likely to favor strong immigration restrictions (Girardi et al. 2024). But even in the absence of these empirical correlations, economics might appear to engender political bias. By “disciplinary bias” I mean, more precisely, the appearance of political bias when an instructor applies the concepts, common methodologies, recognized scholars, and workhorse theories of a single discipline to a complex public problem. Disciplinary bias in this sense is the agenda-setting effect of posing these questions as opposed to those, which is always vulnerable to the charge of selection bias. Economists have different concepts and methods at their disposal than environmental scientists and ethicists, respectively, have at theirs. To take one controversial issue mentioned in the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act as an example—climate change—economists are more prone to discuss cap-and-trade schemes than the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. To take another—immigration—economists tend to discuss the costs of restricting the free flow of labor across border, while ethicists might focus on justice for asylum seekers.

Disciplinary bias, or the appearance of political bias when any single disciplinary lens is selected, is unavoidable. The concepts, methods, and subject matter of any discipline, even if they are neutral in themselves, can serve or offend a political bias when they are invoked instead of the concepts, methods, and subject matter of another discipline. Since the law empowers students to report instructors for political bias without additional guidelines, my expansive concern with disciplinary bias is appropriate in this context. When instructors present the prevailing methods and conclusions of their discipline, that is no shield from charges of political bias. Quite the contrary. Students in attendance are very likely to find instructors biased and engaged in “indoctrination” (The Ohio Legislature 2025, p. 11). Students are now entitled to mount legal challenges and to invite the courts to adjudicate the matter.

Note what this means: deliberately avoiding any discussion of controversial topics, by teaching the strict “disciplinary line,” will almost inevitably result in the perception of bias based on one or more student’s ideological inclinations. Neutrality is impossible. As long as evaluative conclusions seem to follow from facts—in Alasdair MacIntyre’s example, from the facts, “This watch is grossly irregular in time-keeping… [and] too heavy to carry around comfortably” comes the evaluative conclusion “This is a bad watch” (MacIntyre 2007, pp. 57–58)—the facts of the matter can endorse certain value judgments. Prevailing academic perspectives about the facts surrounding climate change, immigration, or tariffs may imply a political evaluation; this does not even begin to consider academic fields where “autoethnography” and methods that express personal experiences and values are considered legitimate. It is now up to the courts to determine where academic freedom ends and students’ rights begin under the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act. In any event, this gray area is why the minimal compliance or avoidance strategy will fail.

A more specific problem would arise if one were to attempt to avoid controversy while teaching political economy. There is no brightline between a disciplinary bias, in terms of how scholars approach a topic, and straightforward political bias. Thus: the principles of capitalism are both the disciplinary principles of political economy, at least from a classical-liberal view of the discipline, and the regime principles of the United States, at least from the perspective of scholars from Hartz (1955) to Zuckert (1994, p. 167). Now, I am not defending this as a thesis of the history of political thought (at least not here). The point is, rather, that the discipline shaping scientific or investigative principles of Smith—the natural propensity to exchange, the division of labor, the invisible hand, etc.—are also political principles, the “branch of the science of the statesman,” that are meant to shape policy on a wide range of controversial issues (Smith 1981, p. 428).

And so even if one shares Glory Liu’s skepticism about the historical intertwinement of these academic and political traditions, and rather sees postwar popular intellectuals like Milton Friedman opportunistically “twinning” Smithian laissez-faire economics with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, this is merely an academic objection (Liu 2022, p. 247). The law requires respect for the political viewpoint that the United States is founded upon free-market principles that resemble Smith’s system of natural liberty. In other words, the statute legitimizes and protects a political point of view that a scholar might have an almost inveterate tendency to question, critique, and perhaps oppose. But importantly—and this defeats any compliance strategy that aims to avoid controversy—there is no guarantee that an academic perspective is not also a political perspective. In political economy, it is not only unlikely but impossible that academic perspectives can be irrefutably separated from political evaluations.

Smith is an interesting test case, not only because he is the only economist and the only non-American among the authors required by the Advance Ohio Education Act, but also because his contribution to “the science of the statesman” straightforwardly endorses controversial policies (Smith 1981, p. 428). Ohio requires every public university to have one course that includes “The writings of Adam Smith, including a study of the principles written in The Wealth of Nations” (The Ohio Legislature 2025, p. 15). Ohio prohibits instructors from indoctrinating students in any “social… point of view” and from endorsing controversial beliefs or policies (The Ohio Legislature 2025, p. 13). But Smith offers a commanding point of view on a range of policies that are no less controversial today than they were in 1776: he generally defends free trade against tariff protections, he argues that “always and every where” [sic] employers conspire with police to keep workers’ wages artificially low, he argues that civil government to defend property is “in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor,” and he rejects the American revolutionaries’ arguments against paying taxes towards the public debt of the British Empire (Smith 1981, pp. 85, 463, 715, 944). When Ohio requires instructors to teach Smith in the mid-2020s, they require at least the presentation of a controversial free-trade point of view in a time and place where tariffs are a major political issue. The Advance Ohio Higher Education Act puts them in a double bind.

Teaching controversial topics in economics is practically inevitable; meanwhile, avoiding them is likely to reduce the benefits of civic education, and, as I argue in this article for the first time, to expose departments and universities to greater compliance costs. This leaves educators and academic institutions with a conundrum. In classic educational theory, a contested-principles approach is not appropriate to introductory classes. Jerome Bruner argues that beginning from controversies can privilege relativistic perspectives before students grasp the methods and “structure” of a discipline, satisfying students with a false understanding (Bruner 1977, p. 31). Yet sometimes law intrudes.

Still, civic education is different than education in any given discipline. In citizen education, no one disciplinary perspective is entitled to predominate. Here, civil dialogue requires asking more fundamental questions, for example, do we have moral obligations related to the environment that are more important than economic prosperity? Do we have specific moral obligations to humans who share our national culture that outweigh individuals’ economic freedoms? These questions sound interdisciplinary for good reason: in the absence of a commonly recognized architectonic science, no single discipline has a monopoly upon them in a university.4

In the next and final section, I shall try to convince my skeptical academic colleagues who teach economics that the safest strategy for legal compliance also has distinct pedagogical merits. These benefits appear when we consider how economics can contribute to the education of citizens who face complex public problems, rather than training future economists or providing the tools of economics research to business analysts. No introductory course in any academic discipline, including economics, promises all of the answers to controversial and complex political issues. Besides the value that Brunner sees in learning the structure of one discipline, educational theorists such as Klein (1996) and Newell (1999) point out, reasonably, that an academically informed perspective on complex public problems in the real world requires integrating knowledge and methods from many different disciplines and weighing competing evidence from disparate approaches. It is possible, then, that real pedagogical opportunities emerge when the law forces instructors beyond their disciplinary comfort zones.

4. Teaching Basic Controversies Is Best for Civic Education Overall

Now I will extend my argument: the contested-principles approach is not only a safer strategy for legal compliance but also a better introductory approach for civic education in contemporary legal frameworks. Civic education is a multi-disciplinary endeavor. Therefore, the contested-principles approach is not merely a concession to laws that interfere with best pedagogical practices or with the academic freedom of scholarly disciplines. Instead, legal prohibitions against political bias protect civic education from being colonized by a particular disciplinary bias. The intrusion of law may be a feature, in other words, not a bug, for civic education. First, I argue, this is because contestation is essential to civic education. Then, I demonstrate what one contested-principles approach in economics looks like, namely, highlighting Adam Smith’s fundamental but contestable notions of wealth, power, human nature, and freedom, and some of their signal critics over the centuries. Finally, I explain how this pedagogy engages students in the discipline of economics and simultaneously contributes to the “higher civics”.

Civic education brings the realm of politics and law, wherein citizens are entitled to their opinions, into the different realm of education, where authorities who are thought to know better have the last word. If it is played as a trump, the priority of politics is a powerful argument against civic education, state-sponsored or otherwise. Hannah Arendt’s defense of what she calls “conservative” education plays this trump:

We must decisively divorce the realm of education… most of all from the realm of public, political life, in order to apply to [education] alone a concept of authority and an attitude toward the past which are appropriate to [education] but have no general validity and must not claim a general validity in the world of grown-ups.

(Arendt 2006, p. 192)

For Arendt the conservative view of education is hierarchical; the teacher is the authority on the subjects that students learn. But can the law permit a realm where the teacher-scholars are the law unto themselves? It is not clear that education and politics can be divorced to the degree that Arendt proposes (Villa 2017, p. 277). Arendt’s separationism can be contrasted with John and Evelyn Dewey’s progressive vision of the classroom as a democratic space where students have “an equal opportunity to express themselves in a shared experience” (Dewey and Dewey 1915, p. 126). While Arendt’s hierarchical classroom may impart knowledge necessary for democratic citizenship, it does not simulate the practice of politics among equals, and therefore it must be “divorced” from the adult world of democracy. State legislatures, unsurprisingly, are not keen to allow colleges and universities, especially publicly funded ones, to operate outside beyond controls of the law.

A more modest and feasible hybrid solution is to bring some democratic contestation into the classroom by teaching contested principles, for instance, in a survey of debated ideas in the study of economics or concepts such as wealth, markets, and development that seem fundamental to economic thinking. Hayek and Ostrom are correct to this degree: in democratic citizen education, political arguments and perspectives about various laws pre-exist the classroom in which any expert claims to offer any disciplined approach to political questions. Adopting a curriculum in citizen education should simulate a rule of unanimity; in a sense, no stipulation by the instructor about the appropriate disciplinary lens to understand a complex public problem can be authoritative (see Buchanan and Tullock 1999, pp. 89, 99). Civic educators should first choose to accept this constraint, in the spirit of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and only then endorse the legally mandated pedagogy that minimizes the cost of economic illiteracy, in the spirit of Posner.

Disciplinary bias and essentially controversial concepts do not disappear as soon as one invokes “principles,” however. It is not enough to analytically distinguish (disciplinary) economic principles from the principles of a political regime. For example, Joseph Schumpeter uses economic principles, such as comparative efficiency, to compare and evaluate socialist central planning and the free market system (Schumpeter 2008, pp. 188–93). But economic efficiency is not necessarily the principle of justification to which proponents of socialism or free markets themselves appeal, in the end. What, then, is a properly fundamental contested issue? A fundamental issue, in citizen education, is one that puts a discipline (and any expertise derived therefrom) in question. It is a litmus test for disciplinary bias. In political economy or civics-focused economics, the first fundamental question is, “What is economics?” This turns out to be contested.

It is not only citizens and lawmakers who disagree about what economics should be; economists themselves disagree about the nature and scope of their field. Mainstream economists often consider the most efficient system of allocation; for example, markets should underprovide public (non-rival, non-excludable) goods, because would-be free-riders will under-signal their demand for goods that they expect their neighbors may provide them (Samuelson 1954). (In this way, I may want a guard dog, but I do not share this information with my roommate, in the hope that she buys a dog herself, so that I enjoy the security benefits without bearing the costs.) Using Paul Samuelson’s concept of public goods, mainstream economics predicts a “market failure” and indicates a public system of allocation may be more appropriate. (Taxes for a well-funded community police force will save my pusillanimous roommate the greater expense of the guard dog and will not allow me to “ride free”).

However, some heterodox economists detect a disciplinary bias in mainstream economics against voluntary or market-like behavior, one which is simultaneously a presumptive political bias for laws to provide public goods that free markets would underprovide. Ostrom shows how more complex institutional arrangements commonly arise “between” individuals and the states (Ostrom 2010, pp. 642, 645). (My roommate and I could devise the rules of a cost-sharing scheme to maintain the guard dog and form a dog-share club.) Facts about public goods and market failures, in other words, prime students to make evaluative claims that public solutions are required in these cases, but they do not necessarily warrant them. So rather than simply identifying the preconditions for market failure, an economist should compare the efficiency of public solutions with these complex associations through which groups solve their own problems independently. Her belief in the importance of these groups to civil society explains why Ostrom is so concerned that citizens retain the “skills and knowledge to resolve social dilemmas,” large and small, through the “institutions of everyday life” (Ostrom 1998, p. 18). These methodological arguments within economics have powerful implications for how students will see the proper role of law and democracy. My contested-principles approach aims to show students how debates about disciplinary bias occur within the field of economics itself. The new law in Ohio can have an educational benefit as long as instructors achieve legal compliance by highlighting the biases not only of their disciplines, but within their disciplines, as they relate to politics and lawmaking.

The “mainline” tradition of Smithian economics (as opposed to “mainstream economics”) defines economics as the study of markets, or voluntary exchange-behavior (Boettke et al. 2016). It is simply a disciplinary principle of mainline economics to study market-like behavior, including how citizens engage in market-like behaviors when they cast a vote, form a policy preference, or write a constitution (Buchanan and Tullock 1999). Since Ostrom, it has been developed into a complete theory of public administration, informing how policymakers interpret and enact legal statutes (Aligica et al. 2019). In the mainline tradition, the disciplinary principles of economics come close to political and legal principles that favor the free market: they test how far market can be extended. Teaching only mainstream economics or only mainline economics is liable to conceal disciplinary and political bias; teaching the contest between them reveals how disciplinary and political bias may operate for students to reflect upon.

Behind political and legal disagreements are a series of yet-more fundamental ideas, and ultimately perhaps what might count as “first” principles. With an eye to the current legal and civic context in Ohio, I identify four candidate fundamental principles: wealth, power, human nature, and freedom. All of these are prominent themes in Smith’s …the Wealth of Nations. I hasten to add that I am not recommending a contested-principles approach to teaching Smith only for reasons of legal compliance with the statute, but also for its pedagogical merits. Again, the point is that the law supports the teaching goals of this pedagogical approach.

Smith’s …the Wealth of Nations follows a contested-principles approach to economics itself, since this classic book establishes fundamental principles in light of other alternatives from the very beginning. It is an especially appropriate text to consider, not only because it is legally required to teach it, but also because it highlights contested fundamental principles in economics in ways that standard economics textbooks do not. The first question suggested by its title—What is the nature of wealth?—forms the basis of its critique of the prevailing economic thought and imperial policies of the late-eighteenth century. Smith understands wealth as a power, “the power of purchasing,” as opposed to the common notion that wealth is a stock of goods, for example, some amount of money (Smith 1981, p. 48). One of his aims is to convince British legislators to embrace free trade. Smith considers his economics in …the Wealth of Nations to be “a branch of the science of the statesman or legislator” (ibid., p. 428). Economics is distinct from jurisprudence, Smith’s other great interest, because it focuses on teaching lawmakers what they do not know.

The counter-intuitiveness of Smith’s fundamental principle about the nature of wealth can be illustrated as follows: if the only grocery store in a small town begins to sell a new item, sushi for example, the residents of that small town are now wealthier simply because they have the power to exchange their money for an item that they were not able to purchase before. Likewise, individuals become wealthier when prices are lowered. Wealth grows as markets grow. For Smith, this is morally desirable: when the set of all exchanges grows, because individuals can fulfill more of their desires consensually and peacefully, without the need to resort to coercion, law, or what Smith calls “political” power (Smith 1981, p. 48). His moral argument for markets finds interesting counterpoints. Sandel’s (2012) What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets contains dozens of contemporary examples to stimulate a classroom discussion on this fundamental debate about the moral upsides and downsides of living in a commercial society.

Further making it appropriate for contested principles pedagogy, …the Wealth of Nations stages all sides of the eighteenth-century argument about wealth, namely, whether wealth is money, the produce of land, or (his own view) purchasing power. The popular notion “[t]hat wealth consists in money,” or is some stock of money, underwrites the prevailing economic policy of the late eighteenth century, the mercantilists’ “system of commerce” (Smith 1981, pp. 428–29). Mercantilists, of course, lobby governments to encourage exports (through subsidies) and discourage imports (with tariffs) in order to create a positive balance of trade, or a net inflow of money, which serves the powerful special interests of export industries and industries that wish to be shielded from foreign competition, but raises prices for ordinary people (ibid., p. 450). Smith’s work of economic theory is a contested-principles approach to economics in itself, because it focuses on a fundamental and contested question about the nature of wealth; for Smith, it is the vital center of the problem that statesmen and legislators should consider when they propose to enrich their nations and governments. This makes Smith an especially apt illustration of intersections between economics, politics, and the law.

By defining wealth as purchasing power in the course of his inquiry, Smith raises a second and even more fundamental question: what is power? Behind familiar tradeoffs between guns and butter along the production possibility frontiers of ECON 101, Smith shows us, there is a relationship between two forms of power: wealth and (coercive) political power (Poast 2019). Sometimes Smith defends policies that bolster national security at the expense of national prosperity, such as Great Britain’s Acts of Navigation, “[a]s defence… is of much more importance than opulence” (Smith 1981, p. 465). Even though they are two different forms of power that are augmented in different ways, Smith reminds us that wealth and military strength are complementary overall. Britain was better able than France to finance the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), Smith argues, not because the Bank of England stockpiled more money, but rather because Britons were freer to produce commodities for which the rest of the world paid money (ibid., p. 443). Rulers who attempt to enrich themselves by fraud (e.g., debasing their coinage) or force (e.g., enslavement, seizing mines)—in other words the attempt to use military power to create wealth in a direct sense—usually end up counterproductively diminishing their purchasing power (ibid., pp. 43, 98). Indeed, European empires in America, initially underwritten to seize gold mines, only inadvertently enriched people around the world by creating new markets and currents of exchange (ibid., pp. 587–89). Wealth creation is a felicitous but unintended side effect, Smith thinks, of a wrong-headed and immoral European policies of imperial domination throughout the Americas.

Power, as Smith demonstrates his contested-principles approach, is a double game. Political leaders must play by one set of rules, so to speak, in order to obtain wealth (purchasing power)—fostering more exchanges mostly by leaving markets and currencies alone but also by domestic infrastructure. To provide for the national defense, however, they must extract public revenue and invest in technologically advanced arms (Smith 1981, p. 708, cf. 19). It is interesting that Smith accepts technological discoveries to be the decisive factor for national security, but argues that division of labor and not technological improvements is the primary cause of wealth generation. If political leaders do not concern themselves with military power, they risk falling to foreign invasion; if they do not allow individuals to create wealth, they will not secure a “flourishing and happy society” but rather a “poor and miserable one” and also risk falling to a foreign invasion of a wealthier nation (ibid., p. 96). While force of arms and wealth are complementary forms of national power, since they are secured by different means, tradeoffs appear on the margins. By exploring synergies and tradeoffs between these two forms of power—wealth and security—Smith’s …the Wealth of Nations offers a framework for citizens and lawmakers to contest one another’s principles.

Smith’s study of the relationship between wealth and political power further opens up disputed questions about the role of the state in creating and maintaining markets, which now leads to a third fundamental question and contested point about human nature. …the Wealth of Nations presents the natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”—that is, human nature—as the cause of exchange and markets (Smith 1981, p. 25). For Smith, individuals’ persistent efforts to better their conditions generally create wealth despite “the greatest errors of administration,” drawing an analogy to the way that the “unknown principle of animal life” restores the sick to health in spite “of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor” (ibid., p. 343). Individuals’ efforts to enrich themselves are not only motivated by self-interest; the underlying motives also include what Smith regards as perfectly natural desires for parents to leave their children well-provided-for with ample inheritance (ibid., p. 397).

However, on the topic of human nature, Smith’s contested principles are buried. A rich vein for discussion lies in the apparent contradiction between the sympathetic moral man of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the homo economicus who periodically appears in …the Wealth of Nations, which German critics famously call Das Adam Smith Problem (Tribe 2008; Klein et al. 2018). In his economic writings, however, Smith does not consider the contrary view that markets are not natural; or that political and legal power must create and sustain markets. He simply concludes that markets are both natural and that his “system of natural liberty” is self-sustaining so long as the legal sovereign defends the territory from invasion, protects citizens from injustice, and maintains certain public works and institution—though notably this latter category includes significant investment in public education (Smith 1981, pp. 687–88, 781).

Therefore, as becomes evident, the contested-principles approach in economics should sight-in the famous critics of Smith’s view of human nature. It must consider that exchange may be a learned behavior rather than a propensity of human nature; as David Graeber criticizes Smith’s “myth of barter” with a range of anthropological examples (Graeber 2011, pp. 20–41). It might consider whether the desire for unlimited acquisition is an “irrational element” with religious origins, such as the Protestant work ethic (Weber 1958), rather than a rational desire to leave one’s children an ample inheritance. It might also consider whether modern markets originate in early-modern England not because that country was comparatively laissez-faire, but due to an intense state intervention, especially through the Enclosure Acts, to artificially create a market society (Polanyi 1957, pp. 43–57). The contested principles paradigm could also engage with early twentieth-century Progressives for whom markets are not self-sustaining because natural monopolies are common enough that ongoing state intervention is required to break up these monopolies and preserve competitive markets (Ely 1900, p. 247). The formidable critics of Smithian fundamentals are giants of economics, sociology, and history themselves.

In other words, and this is pivotal for the contested-principles approach: the principle that markets are natural, and the related principles that exchange is a natural human propensity and that markets are naturally self-sustaining, can be contested at the level of anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology, or other disciplines. Even if an instructor cannot be expert in all of these fields, a civics-focused approach to economics in current legal frameworks must admit the legitimacy of the different questions that these different disciplines pose to classical economics, and indeed how they have been influential at different times in the history of economics.

A fourth and final fundamental principle that appears in …the Wealth of Nations, but which Smith also does not present as contestable in the manner that he treats wealth and power, is freedom. The granting of freedoms of the bourgeois family, which allow the accumulation of private intergenerational wealth in the families of commoners, is Smith’s important and overlooked “revolution” in the history of liberal societies (Smith 1981, p. 389). These are the privileges to give their daughters in marriage, to pass their property onto their children (or other heirs), and to trade freely, received by medieval burghers in town charters, amount to being “really free in our present sense of the word Freedom” (Smith 1981, p. 400). In some grand scheme of things, it is part of the end of feudalism and the beginning of liberal societies that protect private property rights; if this Smithian bourgeois freedom is not a “twin” of the Jeffersonian natural-rights freedom in the Declaration of Independence, as Friedman claimed, it is at least an ancestor (Liu 2022, p. 247).

But even if Smith does not present these ideas as contestable, an open discussion inevitably follows, because my students are not impressed that freedom in our present sense of the word in 2026 amounts to fathers choosing whom their daughters may marry or bequeathing inheritances. In the past 250 years since Smith published his book, it is safe to say, liberals, republicans, Marxists, socialists, radical feminists, queer theorists, and others have added to the many senses of the word freedom that are current today in universities and beyond them. A contested approach to a discussion of freedom based on Smith’s exposition will need to take them into account.

An open methodological question—What is economics?—thus secures an openness to these discussions that are appropriate for a civics-focused class in current legal frameworks. Citizens, after all, relate to one another as equals. A citizen has the prerogative to retain his or her own opinions. An expert has the narrow authority of his or her discipline alone. The confusion of these two domains can make citizen education an awkward affair; the teacher is in no position to pontificate upon every approach, attitude, belief, methodology, and opinion incumbent upon the good citizen.

Appropriately for citizen education, however, the contested-principles approach brackets disciplinary authority and expertise in favor of contested questions that are fundamentally open. In political economy, this means not even endorsing one conception of the field of economics, whether that is mainstream economics who are interested in the most efficient allocation mechanisms, “mainline” Smithian economics who offer sociology of market behavior, Marxists who criticize ideology, or any other perspective. These contested principles may cover more ground in the history of economics than any other discrete academic discipline.

Now I turn from Smith and the history of economics to make a last argument: the contested-principles approach to economics has pedagogical benefits that should secure it a place in the “higher civics”. Understanding the fundamental contested principles of wealth, power, human nature, and freedom from the plural perspectives of economics is a prerequisite of civic literacy. Political economy rescues the study of historical debates about constitutionalism, enslavement, federalism, and the founding from anachronism and unchecked moralism.

The famous debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the early republic about the role of the federal government in subsidizing certain industries is plagued by anachronism. Jefferson’s preference for an agrarian republic is portrayed as “essentially nostalgic” in Hamilton: An American Musical and even by some contemporary historians (e.g., Foner 2005, p. 105). This judgment seems too obvious in hindsight. A student who has read Book IV of …Wealth of Nations can appreciate how extensively Jefferson read the Économistes of the French Enlightenment. These are the physiocrats for whom, Smith argues, the produce of land is the nature of wealth (Smith 1981, pp. 98, 429–30). A counterclaim to Foner and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton musical occurs to anyone who has read Smith’s arguments about the nature of wealth: Jefferson’s agrarianism could equally be a studied and cutting-edge vision of America’s future that is up-to-date with the latest Enlightenment economic science.

Meanwhile, the Hamilton of the 1791 “Report on Manufactures” emerges as a figure who has closely studied Smith. Yet while he uses Smith as a cudgel against Jefferson and the American physiocrats, in order to deny that agriculture is the fundamental source of wealth, he has the pluck to disagree with Smith’s overall preference for free trade (Hamilton 1893, p. 11). Studying eighteenth-century political economy reveals the extent to which Jefferson and Hamilton, as well as other early Americans, were students of economics as well as statesmen. The Jefferson-Hamilton debate makes arguments that touch the first fundamental principle of economics above—“What is wealth?”—and contest it with the future of the country hanging in the balance.

The regime principles of the United States, as they pertain to economics, have been historically contested from the 1790s down to the present. The debate over the “true” American System, that is, whether the framers of the United States constitution, on balance, were devoted to free-market ideals, or whether they envisioned a muscular federal government with an active role in economic development, crystallized by 1831. The leading Hamiltonian case comes from Henry Clay’s “Speech on the Tariff of 1824,” also known as his “American System” speech, while Albert Gallatin’s “Memorial of the Free Trade Convention,” sent to Congress in 1831, is the great laissez-faire response. Clay was a disciple of Hamilton at a time when tariffs were a vital source of revenue for the federal government to fund national defense and internal improvements. He refers to the “ever memorable 4th day of July—… 1789” when the first Congress made a new tariff “[t]he second act recorded in the statute book, bearing the illustrious signature of George Washington… the cornerstone of the whole system” (Clay 1893, p. 86). Gallatin, who had served as Secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson, argues that the “true American system” was one free from restraints of trade, and now that the national debt was almost paid off for the first time since the War of the Revolution (it was paid off on 1 January 1835), it was time to lower the tariffs (Gallatin 1893, p. 137). These tariff arguments, of course, reverberate in contemporary debates since 2016 and President Trump’s embrace of protectionism (King 2020).

It is exciting to consider that students could be exposed to the full spectrum of opinion around tariffs protections and other controversial contemporary topics, while fully staying in compliance with legal frameworks such as Ohio’s that prohibit the teaching of any “controversial opinion,” as instructors adhere to a contested principles approach.

In addition to fundamental questions about wealth that shed light on the economic regime principles of the United States, the contested-principles approach to economics enriches students understanding of the country’s formative contest over slavery and its aftermath by adding non-moral considerations of historical importance. It is of course appropriate that students are accustomed to studying the history of enslavement in the United States as a moral disaster, and it can be troubling to encounter historical debates about slavery as a pocketbook issue. After reading Smith, however, students might wonder how and why slavery was profitable, since it is almost axiomatic in …the Wealth of Nations that slavery is unprofitable in most cases and in the long run (Smith 1981, p. 388). Even advocates of a contested principles approach might think that American slavery is “too controversial” to teach in this framework—as it turns out, it is exactly the topic that should be engaged in such a manner, based on the legal and pedagogical considerations outlined above.

Smith’s principled argument that slavery is unprofitable is glaringly controversial in the light of the American civic tradition. Similar principles were used to support the assumption that slavery would gradually disappear on its own, as when Oliver Ellsworth argued at the constitutional convention that, due to increased competition from free labor, “Slavery in time will be not a speck in our country” (Bancroft 1885, p. 318). A further implication of the argument is that the prospective abolition of slavery and its inefficiency would result in formerly enslaved workers competing for jobs, putting downward pressure on wages across the country. These arguments received a wide hearing among northern and border-state Democrats in the 1850s, a time of stagnating wages (Foner 2010, pp. 116, 199). Aware of this argument that slavery was keeping the wages of free labor in the United States artificially high, Frederick Douglass takes pains to argue that slavery was profitable, in no small part because of the barbarism of slave owners to their elderly chattel, and that enslaved people already competed with free labor in the slave states to the detriment of their wages (Douglass 1857, pp. 310–13).

In my experience, even students who have studied the history of enslavement in the United States for many years remain unfamiliar with nineteenth-century debates about the prospective impact of abolition upon wages. But studying contested principles of economic freedom deepens the study of American constitutional history; studying American constitutional history returns new questions about the contested principles of free markets. And immersing themselves in these—admittedly extremely charged and emotionally difficult—19th century historical debates about slavery, extends students’ awareness of human bondage, American history, and the way we may all still live or not live with these debates and their implications and repercussions today. These related fields of study explore what leaders ought to have known and when.

Thus: should Ellsworth have been able to foresee in 1787 that the enslaved population of the United States would not disappear, but grow eightfold to about four million individuals? Hamilton writes in 1790 that the American-grown cotton was poor in quality and that Congress should encourage planters to grow hemp instead (Hamilton 1893, p. 95). Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin on Catharine Littlefield Greene’s plantation changed everything not long after the ink was dry on the Constitution of the United States. Economic principles offer important sidelights on the moral atrocities of chattel slavery and its aftermaths in American history. Again, these complementary discussions include cautionary lessons about how politicians apply economic principles under changing conditions, like Ellsworth and Hamilton, as well as edifying lessons about free workers in America who rallied to fight for the abolition of slavery despite prevailing concerns that it was against their economic self-interest to do so.

To summarize the foregoing, a confident pedagogical approach in civic education should not conceal some political or disciplinary bias. Rather, it should aim to reveal political and disciplinary biases that most students encounter for the first time when they undertake a serious study of history or any of the social sciences. In civic education, where instructors do not represent the perspectives of a single discipline, this confident approach is not only safest from a legal compliance perspective, but the best way to educate those who remain free to disagree.

5. Conclusions

The contested-principles approach is the best strategy to teach political economy—in compliance with Ohio law and some of the mandates for the new institutes of civic education in other states. To the extent that the principles are contested, exploring them encourages students to make up their own minds about questions of political economy. To the extent that the principles are fundamental, exploring them helps students to better understand diverse perspectives, not only those of their fellow citizens—presumably these are the civil dialogue benefits that state legislatures wish to create—but also those various disciplinary perspectives of scholarly experts that students are likely to encounter in a university. In this way, the approach offers what scholars call a dialogically reflective approach to political economy: students become aware of their own opinions and perspectives as well as others, and better understand how others will respond to these opinions and perspectives.5 This is a considerable pedagogical advantage.

Because its aim is only to get behind or reveal the opinions and perspectives that shape debate on controversial policies, the contested-principles approach need not arrive at first principles. While it complements the study of economics, political science, and public policy with generalist knowledge, it does not replace them with a new discipline of political economy under the umbrella of civic education. A contested-principles approach to political economy, grounded in the history of economic ideas, is the work of generalists who are interested in fundamental principles across different academic disciplines, research programs, countries, and historical periods. It is a tangible way to achieve the desiderata of educational theorists who emphasize integrative and interdisciplinary approaches to complex public problems (Klein 1996; Newell 1999). It digs all the way down to different approaches and concepts underlying controversial issues and historical topics.

Another caveat concerns technical content knowledge in public policy, which citizens ought to have to some degree. A focus on contested fundamental principles is only an initial approach that respects differences of belief among citizens, not a sufficient program of education for all the content knowledge that citizens ought to have about economics, public finance, and public policy. For example, in a time when inflation is a highly salient political issue, citizens should understand how and why the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve adjusts the federal funds rate. It is possible to arrive at such topics via the contested-principles approach. For example, one could follow the twentieth-century debate about whether interest rates affect “liquidity preferences” (J. M. Keynes) or the “price of intertemporal exchange” that rewards deferring consumption (F. A. Hayek)—on this and so many other twentieth-century debates, Lawrence White’s The Clash of Economic ideas is a valuable teaching tool for extending the contested-principles approach (White 2012, p. 136). Technical information about the workings of the Federal Reserve, agricultural and industrial policy, energy and climate policy, and other forms of public policy is a desirable part of civic education. A political economy curriculum focused on what citizens should know should extend contested principles into realms that require some technical knowledge—as Vassiliou (2024) has argued or at least strongly implied in this collection.

The contested-principles approach, while not developed with the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act in mind, seems to meet its most stringent statutory requirements for a class that (a) encourages students to reach their own conclusions about controversial political issues, while also teaching (b) the principles of …the Wealth of Nations in a way that (c) contributes to American civic literacy. As state legislatures become increasingly specific about what and how their fellow citizens may be required to learn in terms of political economy, instructors should share their pedagogical approaches in academic journals, so that best practices are held up not only for the scrutiny of those wielding the police powers of the state, but also to the scrutiny of our scholarly peers.