CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
It is not a matter of indifference that the minds of the people be enlightened.
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws
Some years ago I organized a panel at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association on the topic of political education. A colleague from Princeton gave a paper on the potential effects of John Rawlsâs idea of public reason on political debate, and another colleague from the University of Chicago offered an analysis of the implicitly democratic message to be found in much of Machiavelliâs work. I myself offered some skeptical thoughts about the place Tocqueville and his contemporary followers assign religious belief in the moral formation of a democratic people. As is usual at these events, the presentations by the panelists were followed by a half-hour discussion period during which audience members could raise questions or engage in debate with the authors. Because the panel was well attended, I expected a large number of hands to shoot up the moment the presentations were over. Much to my surpriseâand contrary to my previous experience at such eventsâthere was a distinct and prolonged pause, with nary an anxiously waving arm in sight.
Reverting to my teacherly mode (every professor has had the experience of encountering a wall of student silence after delivering what he or she assumed was a brilliant and intellectually stimulating lecture), I spoke up, offering what I thought was a provocative remark to start the ball rolling. Because every idea of political or civic educationâwhether in its Rawlsian, Machiavellian, or Tocquevillian formâpresumes some idea of âthe peopleâ as the target of its pedagogical efforts, I asked whether, in the United States today, âthe peopleâ even existed. Confronted by the deep social, economic, and ideological differences that currently characterize our body politic, one might well conclude that notions like âthe peopleâ and âthe will of the peopleâ are little more than fictions. While admittedly useful for rallying voting blocs or legitimating particular policies and legislation, they actually correspond to no tangible or even plausible reality.1 The words were scarcely out of my mouth before my fellow panelist from the University of Chicago interjectedâloudlyââthatâs idiotic!â To the audienceâs dismay, perhaps, no fistfight ensued. Discussion, however, was successfully launched.
The point my colleague from Chicago wanted to make was that, at a time of increasingly concentrated wealth and what seems to many to be the âtyranny of the 1 percent,â the idea of âthe peopleâ is hardly irrelevant or unreal. And, indeed, in comparison with the super-rich 1 percent, we are all âthe people.â As the short-lived Occupy Wall Street movement discovered (echoing the experience of countless political movements and politicians from the past), presenting yourself as the voice of the people is a reliable if somewhat disingenuous way of drumming up both attention and support, often from unexpected places. Yet the deployment of phrases like âthe 99 percentâ or the âsilent majorityâ or âthe vast majority of Americansâ always distorts, if not outright falsifies, the social-political reality it claims to represent. This is especially so in a country that is as deeply divided politically as our own.
In our day, âthe peopleâ is and must be a rhetorical construct, one designed to create the illusion of a clear popular will where there often is none. What we actually have is murk (the undecided), ideological division, widespread apathy, andâclearlyâa lack of anything approximating unanimity. Now, as in our past, it is only by presenting some real or imagined enemy of the peopleâthe 1 percent, nonwhite or non-Christian Americans, secularists supposedly intent on restricting religious liberty, the establishment, and so forthâthat such notions gain whatever rhetorical traction they possess. Otherwise, they remain what they always were: the sometimes edifying, sometimes horrifying, yet invariably hollow clichĂ©s of much of our democratic discourse.
Things were not always so. The emergence of civic republican discourse in Florence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the adoption and expansion of this discourse in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the so-called ârise of the middle classesâ during the same period, and the culminating triumph (or trauma) of the French Revolutionâall point to moments when âthe peopleâ was no mere rhetorical device, but the most seemingly concrete of all social realities. The vast bourgeois, artisan, and peasant populationsâall excluded from meaningful political participation in the pastâmade up the bulk of the society of orders that was aristocratic Europe from the feudal age through the Enlightenment.
Placed in this context, the fiction of the people takes on flesh and reveals itself to be powerful precisely because it corresponded to a universally perceived social reality, the so-called third estate. To use the AbbĂ© SieyĂšsâs famous phrase from 1789, this was an estate that had been nothing but was, in fact, everything.2 The same can be said of Machiavelliâs earlier use of il popolo in the context of the city-states of Renaissance Italy. The more than rhetorical resonance of this phrase flowed from the very real and widespread domination practiced by the nobles or grandi. That domination was a clear and unavoidable fact of life. For political thinkers writing critically about the society of ordersâand the monopoly on political power possessed by the nobles, monarchs, and the Churchââthe peopleâ was thus a legitimate category of social analysis, one that packed a powerful rhetorical punch.3
With the advent of democracy and what Tocqueville was to call a democratic condition sociale, however, âthe peopleâ begins to apply more or less to everyone. It takes on concrete political and social resonance only where a clear and universally acknowledged elite monopolizes political authority and social power. This has sometimes been the case in the United Statesâthe Gilded Age comes to mindâbut most periods in our history are open to debate. Although populism remains a highly effective political strategy in the contemporary United States, the absence of such a clearly identifiable elite means that it remains little more than a strategy and a rhetoric, open to any number of ideological uses. The simple fact is that âwe the peopleâ can come to no real agreement on who the elite is. Is it Wall Street? Ivy Leagueâeducated liberals? The politicians and lobbyists in Washington, DC? White males? All the above? According to one prominent school of political analysis, our lack of precision on this matter is both predictable and, indeed, inevitable. For more than fifty years, political scientists of the pluralist school have denied that any elite actually runs things in quite the way the populist mind imagines. The answer to the question âwho governs?â is shifting and unpredictable.4
The present book goes back in time in order to investigate the political education of the people as it was conceived by four canonical European thinkers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G. W. F. Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. Rousseau wrote just before the French Revolution, and his impact on that event and its aftermathâa favorite topic of dispute among scholarsâwas considerable. Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill wrote after that epochal event. For all of them, the idea and even the inevitability of increasing popular participation in politics brought with it great hopes and an equally great anxiety.
In the period I will be discussing, âthe peopleâ was not just a useful fiction. It denoted an undeniable social reality, one fighting for the opportunity of sustained and meaningful political participation. As a result of nearly seventeen hundred years of domination by nobles, monarchs, and the Church, the people were without the experience or the knowledge that most thinkers in the Western tradition have assumed were prerequisites for the exercise of political power and participation in the political process. As Hegel himself pointed out, the history of Western culture up until the French Revolution was a history framed by the duality of masters and slaves, lords and bondsmen. In such a world, there could be little expectation of popular political wisdom, ability, experience, or judgment. For such advocates of liberalization as Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill this meant that the crucial work of their age had to include an enormous effort directed at popular political education.
From the perspective of these four thinkers, âthe peopleâ had, somehow, to be brought up to speedâmorally, intellectually, and experientiallyâif they were to wield successfully even a limited amount of political power. Without the rudiments of political knowledge, the cultivation of political judgment, and the inculcation of civic virtue, the peopleâs ever-widening participation in the political realm was likely to end in disasterâor so these thinkers thought. Such was the case even when the theorist in question diverged markedly from the more or less literal idea of popular sovereignty endorsed by Rousseau. Thus Hegel, Tocqueville, and Millâall of whom approved of increased popular participation and representationâdevote a good many pages, and much theoretical energy, to the problem of how âthe peopleâ should be educated into politics and public affairs. At the center of their respective political theories is the question of how ordinary people can be equipped with the competence, judgment, and public-spiritedness these three thinkers thought essential to the more representative politics of the ânew age.â
The concern with popular political educationâand with popular education in generalâis obviously an outgrowth of the Enlightenment and the so-called bourgeois (French and American) revolutions. If Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill agree on anything, it is that a politically active people must also be an enlightenedâthat is, minimally educatedâone. The concern with literacy and knowledge of public affairs was never a conspicuous feature of Catholic absolutism nor, it must be said, of the often authoritarian politics of the early Reformation (one thinks of the hierarchies imposed by the Calvinist âsaintsâ in Geneva and elsewhere). It came into increasing prominence only with the emergence of the now much maligned idea of progressâan idea with roots in the scientific revolutions that preceded the Enlightenment and that was subsequently extended by the philosophes to the spheres of morals and politics.5
In this regard, Robespierreâs hyperbolic declaration âTout a changĂ© dans lâordre physique; et tout doit changer dans lâordre morale et politiqueâ only summed up what many thinkers of the age, including those of a notably less radical bent, assumed. Just as religious dogma on how nature and the âworld systemâ worked had been dispelled by Newton, so too an increase in the knowledge of moral and political principles (born of the collapse of monarchic-aristocratic ideology and religious obscurantism) would invariably lead to a new, more rational and just, political order.
One finds this faith expressed throughout the writings of the American founders and the French revolutionaries, as well as in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. The point in the present context is not that a dogmatic rationalism came to replace an equally dogmatic body of religious belief and divine right ideology (a point beloved by religious conservatives and postmodernists). Rather, it is that knowledge and enlightenment were now perceived to be within the grasp of ordinary people (a wholly novel expectation), but only if they had the proper teachers and widespread access to education. Enlightenmentâconceived as popular literacy combined with access to free thinking and instruction in the new principles underlying morals and politicsâwent hand in hand with the spread of republican and democratic ideals. A corollary of this view was that, where enlightenment failed to penetrate, republican and democratic ideals would either fail to flourish or grow up in a twisted and malicious form.
Thus it is that we find a thinker like Tocquevilleâby no means a fan of the French Revolution, despite his counsel that his fellow Catholics and his fellow aristocrats accept the new world it had brought into beingâinsisting that it is the enlightened character of the American people that made an ordered form of democracy possible in the New World. Where enlightenment in this minimal sense was absent, the democratic movement would result in the lust for equality surpassing the desire for civil and political liberty. The result would be degeneration into anarchy (the mob during the French Revolution) or the rise of dictatorship (for example, that of Napoleon or his nephew, Napoleon IIIâTocquevilleâs bĂȘte noire). In other words, the absence of enlightenment would result in either a disordered democracy or some form of democratic despotism.
As a result, the âworld made newââthat is, the world after the fall of the ancien rĂ©gimeârequired teachers of the people (Volkserzieher) far more than it required teachers of princes (Fenelon) or statesmen and political leaders (Burke). As suggested above, the vocation of the political theorist changed accordingly, and the question of popular political education came into sharp focus for the first time.
Just how this education was to be conducted, and just what it consisted in, is the subject of this book. In it, I have chosen to concentrate on two tensions internal to the project of popular political education, at least as that project was conceived prior to, and in the wake of, the French Revolution. The first is the tension between a moralizing idea of political education or citizen formation such as we find in the republican tradition (for example, Machiavelli and Rousseau) and the more intellectual, Enlightenment-inflected version we find in German Idealism (notably Hegel) and progressive English liberalism (Mill). Despite his liberal reputation, Tocquevilleâs idea of political education owes far more to the republican, moralizing view than it does to the idealist or liberal one. This fact accounts for many of its flaws. Or so I will argue.
The second and more important tension is between conceptions of political education that stress the learning by doing of ordinary citizens and conceptions that emphasize a more passive exposure to, and absorption of, enlightened, informed, or âuniversalâ views. Rousseau and Tocqueville seem to fit, more or less naturally, into the former category, while Hegel and Mill appear more at home in the second. Yet, as I will argue in this book, there are important moments of self-contradiction, self-deception, or both in all four cases. Tocqueville, perhaps the clearest and most celebrated proponent of the learning by doing model (gleaned from his observation of the American practice of local self-government), is surprisingly top-down in his conception of how his own theory and analysis might guide practice in his native France. Mill, on the other hand, while upholding the âauthority of the instructedâ (and advocating what, to our eyes, appear to be very odd schemes of proportional representation) was influenced by the example of democratic Athensâand, of course, by Democracy in Americaâto the point where he attached great if not determining importance to political participation as a good in itself.
It is not surprising that it is Hegel who presents us with the most intellectual conception of political education. It is not learning by doing that matters. Indeed, one could say that, for Hegel, the importance of political participation for attaining a grasp of public affairs and an adequate degree of public-spiritedness has been vastly overrated. While supporting broader participation and representation (at least beyond the rather narrow confines of Prussiaâs reformed, post-Jena constitution), Hegel saw the most important dimension of political education as a kind of âlearning by understanding.â It was only by grasping how the modern constitutional state did justice to the claims of both individual freedom and the ethical life of the community that an ordinary citizen could come to feel at home in his or her political association. And, as is well known, âbeing at home in the worldâ (as opposed to being alienated from it, as many of us are) is a crucial if not determining feature of Hegelâs understanding of what freedom, the supposed telos of human history, truly is.
Of all the theorists considered here, it is Rousseau who, perhaps predictably, offers the most complicated and paradoxical array of motivations, goals, and methods. There has rarely, if ever, been a more eloquent defender of popular sovereignty as the only possible legitimate form of political authority. Yet, precisely because of his commitment to the ultimate legislative authority of âthe people,â Rousseau worried intensely about how easily they might be misled and their simple patriotism and civic virtue corrupted. In his view, what the people needed to avoid this fate was not enlightenment or any specialized form of knowledge or experience. Rather, it was a well-designed set of exercises for strengthening their collective (or general) willâthe will of the moi commun, or public self, that comes into existence with the constitution of a political society.
Characteristically, for Rousseau it is the âgreat legislatorââthat old stand-by of the civic republican traditionâwho provides the institutions and set of laws that form and enhance the people as a moral and collective body. While insisting on the greatest possible degree of popular sovereigntyâat least in comparison with the other thinkers considered hereâit is Rousseau who most carefully and thoroughly weaves le peuple into a constraining set of institutional, procedural, and legislative leading strings. These are designed to keep an uncorrupt people on the straight and narrow once they have attained the level of civic spirit and collective identity necessary to make the general will a manifest reality.
These two sets of tensionsâbetween virtue and enlightenment, on the one hand, and between participation and understanding, on the otherâpoint to a more fundamental conundrum underlying virtually all republican or democratic ideas of political education. This is the problemâor perplexityâwrit into the very idea of an education to autonomy.
This problemâwhich in its micro form is fami...