The Playing Fields of Eton: Equality and Excellence in Modern Meritocracy

by Mika Tapani LaVaque-Manty

Overview

"Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, The Playing Fields of Eton takes us on a three-century tour of modern mental and physical life. We visit gymnasiums and dueling fields, murderball courts and Olympic venues, and while immersed in thought-provoking stories of people wrestling with the twin pursuit of equality and excellence, we find ourselves learning what it might mean to be modern. With equal measures of erudition and gentle humor, Mika LaVaque-Manty convincingly refutes the view that egalitarian progress forecloses possibilities for human excellence."
---Elisabeth Ellis, Texas A&M University

"A very insightful and clearly written philosophical inquiry into the nature of sport."
---Marion Smiley, Brandeis University

"A marvelously original analysis of the tensions---and interdependence---between equality and excellence in modern political life. From eighteenth-century dueling to contemporary doping in sports, LaVaque-Manty illuminates the bodily life of democracy at play, and challenges us to think in new ways about the connections between achievement and autonomy. The Playing Fields of Eton is an important book that pushes liberal and democratic theory in fruitful new directions."
---Sharon Krause, Brown University

Can equality and excellence coexist? If we assert that no person stands above the rest, can we encourage and acknowledge athletic, artistic, and intellectual achievements? Perhaps equality should merely mean equality of opportunity. But then how can society reconcile inherent differences between men and women, the strong and the weak, the able-bodied and the disabled?

In The Playing Fields of Eton, Mika LaVaque-Manty addresses questions that have troubled philosophers, reformers, and thoughtful citizens for more than two centuries. Drawing upon examples from the eighteenth-century debate over dueling as a gentleman's prerogative to recent controversies over athletes' use of performance-enhancing drugs, LaVaque-Manty shows that societies have repeatedly redefined equality and excellence. One constant remains, however: sports provide an arena for working out tensions between these two ideals.

Just as in sports where athletes are sorted by age, sex, and professional status, in modern democratic society excellence has meaning only in the context of comparisons among individuals who are, theoretically, equals. LaVaque-Manty's argument will engage philosophers, and his inviting prose and use of familiar illustrations will welcome nonphilosophers to join the conversation.

Mika LaVaque-Manty is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472022076
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	08/20/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	389 KB

About the Author

Mika LaVaque-Manty is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

Visit Mika LaVaque-Manty's website.

Read an Excerpt

The Playing Fields of Eton

Equality and Excellence in Modern Meritocracy

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By Mika LaVaque-Manty

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © 2009 the University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11685-0

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Chapter One

Kids and Körperkultur On the Difficulties of Fostering Civic Independence

Most citizens of modern liberal democracies endorse equality of opportunity as a fundamental political value. Many people don't think that it is enough-for them, equality demands more than opportunities-and others aren't quite sure what exactly equality means or requires, and for good reason. As I argue throughout this book, those questions are not easily answered. But all the same, many people take this view.

At one time, not all that long ago, equality of opportunity wasn't universally endorsed. It is of recent provenance, a feature of the modern era. The early instances of the demand for equality of opportunity included calls to make "careers open to talents." That simply means that offices and positions should go to those who are competent to hold them and that if there are competing candidates, the offices should go to the most competent people. That someone should have to make that demand sounds baffling to us-What, we might ask, would the alternative be? But alternatives abounded. The two most common alternatives were the aristocraticinheritance and the sale of offices and positions.

We now know that the obvious virtue of the meritocratic principle over the nepotistic and economic principles prevailed, at least theoretically. It wasn't an easy victory, and the difficulties didn't result only from recalcitrance, corruption, and venal selfishness. The people clamoring for careers open to talents immediately recognized the difficulties in the concept, and many of those difficulties are complications in the general concept of equality of opportunity. One of them-the one this chapter addresses-is the question of the creation of talent. In the first instance, to make competence a job requirement at all is a great improvement over a situation in which Freiherr von Adlerkreutz's imbecile nephew Karl Heinz gets to be the undersecretary of mine administration just because of who he is, but people soon come to realize that talents themselves are partly social: they depend on background conditions that either have or have not fostered those talents. Or, put in another way, once it is obvious that Karl Heinz should not be the undersecretary, people begin wondering about how best to foster the talents in general that make someone good at the job.

This points to the larger complication that equality of opportunity is very sensitive to: equality at what point? If Joe has a Harvard MBA and Jack dropped out of high school, it may be entirely fair, on a careers-open-to-talents basis, that Joe is hired at McKinsey Consulting and Jack isn't. But if Jack dropped out because he had to take care of his family while Joe enjoyed the benefits of his billionaire parents' wealth, we might wonder whether they were equal in terms of other opportunities and whether equality of opportunity really existed. Most people in the eighteenth century-and quite a bit later, for that matter-weren't terribly exercised about this further complication. After all, almost anyone other than the imbecile Karl Heinz was an improvement. But people in the eighteenth century were not entirely blind to this issue, either. It cropped up as a question of education: how to provide the necessary talents not only for the existing set of offices and positions but for the increasing number of increasingly complex offices and positions. The even broader autonomy problem that I identified in the introduction arose in this context, too: the talk of talents and merit only makes sense against a background picture in which sufficiently many people enjoy some kind of civic independence in which they are the authors of their choices. There is a difference between "careers open to talents" and "careers assigned to talents": the former allows for the possibility that you should also want the job you are competent to do, while the latter allows for someone-Plato or the East German state, for example-to engineer everything from above. But that very difference also reminds us of a common paternalistic desire even many of us moderns have, against our better judgment, to interfere in people's lives for their own good and ours: "Son, it's great that you want to be a rock star, but your math skills just point more toward accounting than heavy metal."

This chapter explores one of the settings in which these questions about the creation of talent and the fostering of civic independence come together: the increasingly numerous eighteenth-century debates about the rearing and education of children. Such debates were numerous because contemporaries considered the question of children pressing for political reasons. At base, those debates involve the questions of who should be educated and how. They are more generally if a bit more abstractly about conceptions of autonomy, merit, achievement, and the roles of nature and nurture. We should not be surprised when, as I show, the question of physical education emerges as an important part of the debates about education as soon as theories we'd recognize as modern arrive on the stage. One of this book's arguments is that such modern ideas as "moral personhood" and "intrinsic dignity" and "equal citizenship" not only are about embodied physical beings-we already knew that-but are necessarily physical themselves.

This chapter shows how a dynamic relationship between the upbringing of real children and metaphorical children-the currently immature masses-works politically. I concentrate on educational reformers, although I spend some time on conservative opposition to reform as well. As in chapter 2, I dwell on Immanuel Kant's treatment of these topics. His thinking of real and metaphorical children in particular is helpful: he was a theorist with a penchant for metaphors, and children and child-related images crop up in his works frequently and give us a sense not only of how he and his contemporaries thought about the autonomy problem but also of how a focus on children might help solve it.

Little Creatures

One curious feature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraiture of children is that they tend to look like miniature adults. They often wear adult clothes, and even when they don't, the proportions of their bodies, the expressions on their faces, and their activities suggest that they are not children but small adults.

There are debates about whether modernity invented childhood-that is, whether something we now recognize as childhood existed before the modern period-but something like an obsession about children clearly developed during the eighteenth century. Particularly interesting for our purposes was this mutual dynamic: on the one hand, children stood in for adults-they are the future, after all-but, on the other hand, childhood-related metaphors often described the adult world. Just think of what I called Enlightenment's "autonomy problem" in the introduction: contemporary masses were seen as "immature." To call someone immature is to imply that she is not acting her age: she is like a child. This suggests that if you are concerned about putting an end to the masses' immaturity, you might look to the development of children to see how they become autonomous. The obvious problem with that strategy is that children don't just turn into autonomous adults. They need to be brought up. They need biological and particularly social nurturing. And how they are nurtured affects the way they turn out.

This was well known in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment era thinkers hadn't yet heard Ernst Haeckel's claim that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny-that is, the biological development of an individual goes through the same stages as the development of the entire species-but it would have been a good metaphor for how many of them thought about individual psychology and historical anthropology. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had suggested that the process whereby humanity had developed and (in his view) been corrupted was more or less recapitulated in every (male) individual during his formative years. And as Rousseau had explicitly spelled out in his hugely influential works, most importantly in Émile, education could stop the corrupting processes and instead foster healthy autonomy. There are always new generations to be brought up, and it doesn't take much beyond ordinary common sense to realize that insofar as one wants to effect permanent change in prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and types of personhood, childhood might be the place to start.

You don't even need to be a social reformist to endorse part of this view. Because children are the future, the maintenance of ways of life also requires attention to children: if you are a conservative and want to reproduce not just future generations but future generations that sustain the things that you find worth sustaining, you had better pay some mind to children's upbringing.

None of this means that you must educate all children. If a society's continued way of life seems to require the passivity and ignorance of its majority and you are hoping to preserve that society, then you will try to ensure that future generations remain passive and ignorant and make your educational policy pretty selective. Or if you believe humans differ from one another in systematic ways in terms of potential capacities, you might think that education policies ought to acknowledge that and be appropriately tailored. It's called tracking. Varieties of conservatives and elitists have often subscribed to the former view. The latter view has been held by as diverse a group of thinkers and policymakers as Plato and the East German educational authorities, with many perfectly respectable, sane, well-intentioned, and even possibly right-headed folks in between. The very novelty of what we call comprehensive education shows that we didn't always think that people required the same basic education, and mainstreaming special-needs students remains controversial.

The general questions eighteenth-century people asked remain with us: Who should be educated? Who deserves to be educated? (This is a tricky one: if education is supposed to generate genuine merit, how can desert enter into the question before education?) If there are differences in how people should be educated, what causes those differences? Nature? Nurture? What would education be for? Whom would be it for? Whose responsibility is education?

One of the valuable insights we discover in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates is a serious attention to what kinds of creatures the institutions of upbringing and education are supposed to treat. There were separate questions of who could and should be educated and how. Many answers were importantly attentive to details. The debaters' understanding of the details was often wrong, theories of physical and psychological development then being what they were, but that in part makes the discussions so interesting to us.

Although these debates took place all around eighteenth-century Europe and North America (in Benjamin Franklin's writings, for example), I focus here on the German Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century. That intellectual context is not just a good exemplar of the general trends but was particularly influential even beyond the Germanic world. For example, one of the main "educational products" of the late-eighteenth-century German Enlightenment was Joachim Heinrich Campe's rewritten Robinson Crusoe story, Robinson der jüngere. First published in Hamburg 1779-80, the book was immensely popular and was available in more than dozen languages before 1800. (I will return to the subject of Campe and his Robinson.) More importantly, for my purposes, some of the German educational reformers are the first moderns to introduce Körperkultur (physical culture) through physical education as an important part of a school curriculum, with an explicit pedagogical rationale for doing so. As we will see in chapter 3, this German influence will figure prominently even in the more famous setting for physical culture, Victorian England.

Erziehung and Bildung

First, a quick clarification of terms. German actually has two roughly corresponding terms for education, Erziehung and Bildung. The differences between the two are significant. When people talk of the educational models and ideals of the German Enlightenment, they usually focus on Bildung. In his answer to the question What Is Enlightenment? to which Kant's contribution is more famous, Moses Mendelssohn had Bildung go hand in hand with Enlightenment (Aufklärung) and culture (Kultur). Although the idea is broad, its modern conception points to education as the cultivation of higher learning not for any instrumental purposes but as intrinsically valuable. Furthermore, it is fundamentally a state of an individual's inner landscape-that is, his (or her) cognitive, moral, and spiritual dispositions. Bildung does, to be sure, affect the person's actions and even physical way of being in the world but does so only indirectly. The word's etymology is what it suggests to an English-speaker: it is about building. The philosophical conception of Bildung is based on a late-medieval idea that Bildung describes the state of a person's soul. Although the modern conception is decidedly more secular than the medieval one, we can think of the modern idea in semireligious sense: a person with Bildung has a healthy, well-developed soul.

The idea of Bildung became particularly important for the so-called Romantics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Through them, it influenced not only German culture for much of the nineteenth century but also other areas of the continent, and it had a large impact on aesthetic pursuits in general, including fine arts and music. But although Bildung was the most famous aspect of Enlightenment education, it wasn't the only one. The other German term for education, Erziehung, connotes something slightly less highbrow than Bildung. There is no consensus on the exact relationship between Bildung and Erziehung, but the rough-and-ready distinction is that while Bildung culminates in higher education, Erziehung is something you might receive even in elementary or vocational school. It may have an instrumental relationship to Bildung, but it may also have an instrumental relationship simply to making ends meet as a cobbler, welder, accountant, or lawyer. If Bildung is intrinsically valuable, as some of the Romantics thought, Erziehung is primarily useful to some other end. This meant that Erziehung was the proper education for a person who was not yet mature enough for the autonomy-emphasizing Bildung. The precise location of that line was-and remains-a matter of controversy, but at least for children, Erziehung was clearly the appropriate approach. So Erziehung precedes Bildung, for practical and philosophical purposes. But even Erziehung doesn't begin in the cradle, so let us backtrack even further: a child's development during what we call the preschool years affects what he or she looks like when she shows up on the first day of school.

Walking Carts and Leading Strings

Here is the story the early moderns-folks somewhat before our eighteenth-century Enlighteners-told of childhood:

The Infant is wrapped in Swadling-clothes, is laid in a Cradle, is suckled by the Mother with her breasts, and fed with Pap.

Afterwards it learneth to go by a Standing stool, playeth with Rattles, and beginneth to speak.

As it beginneth to grow older, it is accustomed to Piety and Labour, and is chastised if it be not dutiful.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Playing Fields of Eton by Mika LaVaque-Manty Copyright © 2009 by the University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

Contents Preface Introduction: The Indispensable Fictions of Equality and Excellence Part One One - Kids and Körperkultur: On the Difficulties of Fostering Civic Independence Two - Dueling for Equality: The Master’s Tools Will Take Down the Master’s House Part Two Three - Mens Sana, the Playing Fields of Eton, and Other Clichés Four - Physical Culture for the Masses Part Three Five - Being a Woman and Other Disabilities Six - The Political Theory of Doping Conclusion: “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” Notes References Index