[These are the Introductory Comments preceding Murphey’s Study Guide for use in his Honors 106 course in the Fall semester, 1996, at Wichita State University on “Competing Socio-Political Worldviews.”]

 

Introductory Comments

 

          By taking this course on the main competing worldviews that have struggled for ascendancy in the modern age, you have, in effect, started upon (if you have not undertaken it previously) a process of self-discovery, and your understanding will depend very largely upon your lifetime of reading and study rather than simply upon what you learn this semester.  Your reading and discussion here must be seen as just a start.

          The introductory essays by the professor in this Study Guide should have no more “authoritativeness” for you (such as might be thought to arise from his being the professor for this class) than readings from other authors.  They introduce you to the worldviews as the professor understands them; but introductions to the same worldviews by other people might be very different, especially in their emphases.

          It should be understood, too, that these introductory essays have deliberately been kept quite short, and that accordingly they are not fully adequate analyses of the worldviews.  (The professor’s books on the worldviews give his more complete analysis.)

          A student will want to be aware that there are other major worldviews that aren’t being studied here.  For example, we are not taking up the “fundamentalist Islamic” outlook that is so important in the world today, nor any other religious or ethnic perspectives (except to the extent that Nazism can be seen as an ethnic German worldview).

          Welcome to a subject of vast importance and fascination!

 

                                                                                Dwight Murphey

                                                                                Fall, 1996