Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill
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Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill
376eBook
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Overview
The year 2016 witnessed an unprecedented shock to political elites in both Europe and America. Populism was on the march, fueled by a substantial ignorance of, or contempt for, the norms, practices, and institutions of liberal democracy. It is not surprising that observers on the left and right have called for renewed efforts at civic education. For liberal democracy to survive, they argue, a form of political education aimed at “the people” is clearly imperative.
In Teachers of the People, Dana Villa takes us back to the moment in history when “the people” first appeared on the stage of modern European politics. That moment—the era just before and after the French Revolution—led many major thinkers to celebrate the dawning of a new epoch. Yet these same thinkers also worried intensely about the people’s seemingly evident lack of political knowledge, experience, and judgment. Focusing on Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill, Villa shows how reformist and progressive sentiments were often undercut by skepticism concerning the political capacity of ordinary people. They therefore felt that “the people” needed to be restrained, educated, and guided—by laws and institutions and a skilled political elite. The result, Villa argues, was less the taming of democracy’s wilder impulses than a pervasive paternalism culminating in new forms of the tutorial state.
Ironically, it is the reliance upon the distinction between “teachers” and “taught” in the work of these theorists that generates civic passivity and ignorance. And this, in turn, creates conditions favorable to the emergence of an undemocratic and illiberal populism.
“[An] extremely timely book.” —Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226467528 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 922 KB |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
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 Rawls's 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 Machiavelli's 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 surprise — and contrary to my previous experience at such events — there 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 education — whether in its Rawlsian, Machiavellian, or Tocquevillian form — presumes some idea of "the people" as the target of its pedagogical efforts, I asked whether, in the United States today, "the people" even existed. Confronted by the deep social, economic, and ideological differences that currently characterize our body politic, one might well conclude that notions like "the people" and "the will of the people" 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. The words were scarcely out of my mouth before my fellow panelist from the University of Chicago interjected — loudly — "that's idiotic!" To the audience's 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 "tyranny of the 1 percent," the idea of "the people" is hardly irrelevant or unreal. And, indeed, in comparison with the super-rich 1 percent, we are all "the people." 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 "the 99 percent" or the "silent majority" or "the vast majority of Americans" 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, "the people" 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, and — clearly — a lack of anything approximating unanimity. Now, as in our past, it is only by presenting some real or imagined enemy of the people — the 1 percent, nonwhite or non-Christian Americans, secularists supposedly intent on restricting religious liberty, the establishment, and so forth — that such notions gain whatever rhetorical traction they possess. Otherwise, they remain what they always were: the sometimes edifying, sometimes horrifying, yet invariably hollow clichés 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 "rise of the middle classes" during the same period, and the culminating triumph (or trauma) of the French Revolution — all point to moments when "the people" was no mere rhetorical device, but the most seemingly concrete of all social realities. The vast bourgeois, artisan, and peasant populations — all excluded from meaningful political participation in the past — made 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 Abbé Sieyès's famous phrase from 1789, this was an estate that had been nothing but was, in fact, everything. The same can be said of Machiavelli's 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 orders — and the monopoly on political power possessed by the nobles, monarchs, and the Church — "the people" was thus a legitimate category of social analysis, one that packed a powerful rhetorical punch.
With the advent of democracy and what Tocqueville was to call a democratic condition sociale, however, "the people" 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 States — the Gilded Age comes to mind — but 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 "we the people" can come to no real agreement on who the elite is. Is it Wall Street? Ivy League–educated 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 "who governs?" is shifting and unpredictable.
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 aftermath — a favorite topic of dispute among scholars — was 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, "the people" 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, "the people" had, somehow, to be brought up to speed — morally, intellectually, and experientially — if 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 people's ever-widening participation in the political realm was likely to end in disaster — or 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 Mill — all of whom approved of increased popular participation and representation — devote a good many pages, and much theoretical energy, to the problem of how "the people" 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 "new age."
The concern with popular political education — and with popular education in general — is 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 enlightened — that is, minimally educated — one. 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 "saints" in Geneva and elsewhere). It came into increasing prominence only with the emergence of the now much maligned idea of progress — an 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.
In this regard, Robespierre's hyperbolic declaration "Tout a changé dans l'ordre physique; et tout doit changer dans l'ordre morale et politique" 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 "world system" 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. Enlightenment — conceived as popular literacy combined with access to free thinking and instruction in the new principles underlying morals and politics — went 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 Tocqueville — by 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 being — insisting 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 III — Tocqueville's bête 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 "world made new" — that is, the world after the fall of the ancien régime — required 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, Tocqueville's 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 "universal" 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 "authority of the instructed" (and advocating what, to our eyes, appear to be very odd schemes of proportional representation) was influenced by the example of democratic Athens — and, of course, by Democracy in America — to 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 Prussia's reformed, post-Jena constitution), Hegel saw the most important dimension of political education as a kind of "learning by understanding." 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, "being at home in the world" (as opposed to being alienated from it, as many of us are) is a crucial if not determining feature of Hegel's 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 "the people," 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) will — the will of the moi commun, or public self, that comes into existence with the constitution of a political society.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Creating—and Preserving—a Free People
3 Hegel as Political Educator
4 Tocqueville: The Aristocrat as Democratic Pedagogue
5 J. S. Mill: Democracy and the Authority of the Instructed
6 Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Index