4.5.10

LANGUAGES AND POLITICAL THEORY: People seem to get confused about this, including people actually in political theory programs, so I'll make an attempt to say something clear:

You're not becoming a well-educated person: you're seeking comparative advantage. Graduate school is professional training, not educational training. If you conceive of graduate school as an educational process, than you should probably learn all the languages you can, all the better to be well-rounded. If you conceive of it as a professional enterprise, then you should only learn those that will be most immediately useful for your work. There is no fixed set of methodological tools you need; those will be determined by your subject and your question, and lots of different research questions are (or can be) interesting. No use banging your head to do something at a mediocre level when you could be doing something at which you excel. Generally speaking, the sooner you figure this out, the smoother the transition from coursework to your own research.

(following on FLG here and here)

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