Concrescence: The Australasian Journal of Process Thought Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp.3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. Published on-line by the Australasian Association for Process Thought, a member of the International Process Network. Democracy and Education: Defending the Humboldtian University and the Democratic Nation-State as Institutions of the Radical Enlightenment Arran Gare Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry, Swinburne University. Melbourne, Australia agare@swin.edu.au Abstract-Endorsing Bill Readings' argument that there is an intimate relationship between the dissolution of the nation-State, the undermining of the Humboldtian ideal of the university and economic globalization, this paper defends both the nation-State and the Humboldtian university as core institutions of democracy. However, such an argument only has force, it is suggested, if we can revive an appreciation of the real meaning of democracy. Endorsing Cornelius Castoriadis' argument that democracy has been betrayed in the modern world but disagreeing with his analysis of modernity, it is argued that the tradition of modern democratic thought can only be properly comprehended in relation to the 'radical enlightenment' originating in the Renaissance, efforts to subvert this by the 'moderate enlightenment', and the revival and reformulation of the radical enlightenment in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. It is shown that subsequent political thought only becomes fully intelligible in relation to the on-going struggle between the radical and the moderate enlightenments, and that it is necessary to appreciate that the moderate enlightenment, manifesting itself in neo-liberal thought, is profoundly anti-democratic. While the radical enlightenment was developed in the nineteenth century by philosophical idealists, it is suggested that the achievements of the idealists can be successfully defended now only on naturalistic foundations through process metaphysics. Process metaphysics, it is shown, provides the basis for reviving the Humboldtian model of the university, the democratic nation-State, and a vision of the future as 'communities of communities' to counter the dissolution of all communities into the global market promoted by neo-liberals. Keywords-Democracy, education, Humboldtian University, globalization, Castoriadis, radical enlightenment, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel, neo-liberalism, process metaphysics. The University is in ruins, claimed Bill Readings in a book encapsulating this claim in the title.1 This work is of major significance not only because it accurately portrayed the malaise of universities at the time it was written more than a decade ago, but because of its prescience in characterizing how they would evolve. This prescience seems to vindicate his diagnosis of the basic cause of this malaise. Not only is 'the professoriat being proletarianized', but universities are suffering 'an external 1 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1996. legitimation crisis'. The University 'is no longer linked to the destiny of the nation-state by virtue of its role as a producer, protector, and inculcator of an idea of national culture.'2 Without this role, the University 'no longer participates in the historical project for humanity that was the legacy of the Enlightenment: the historical project of culture.'3 Instead, 'the University is becoming a transnational bureaucratic corporation'.4 By providing 'a structural 2 Ibid., p.3. 3 Ibid., p.5. 4 Ibid., p.3. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 4 diagnosis of contemporary shifts in the University's function as an institution', Readings showed that it is 'no longer clear what the place for the University is within society nor what the exact nature of that society is'. Thus 'the wider social role of the university is now up for grabs.'5 Readings argued that all this has been brought about by the process of economic globalization.6 To explain why economic globalization has had such an impact, Readings traced the roots of the modern university to the ideas promulgated by von Humboldt on the establishment of the University of Berlin. In opposition to those who have looked upon the Humboldtian University as just one model among others, Readings showed how the Humboldtian model virtually defined the modern university, having been taken up, although with variations unique in each case, by France, Britain and the United States as well as Germany.7 The Humboldtian University linked the University to the nation-State as an apparatus to produce national subjects by developing the national culture. With economic globalization, the State is being reduced to a bureaucratic apparatus of management without need for national subjects. As Readings noted, 'the capitalist system in its contemporary form offers people not a national identity ... but a nonideological belonging: a corporate identity in which they participate only at the price of becoming operatives.'8 Since 'the economic is no longer subjugated to the political',9 social 5 Ibid., p.1f.. 6 In this Readings was influenced by Masao Miyoshi's 'A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State, Critical Inquiry, Vol.19, no.4, Summer, 1993, pp.726-751. Miyoshi took up these issues again in '"Globalization," Culture, and the University', The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998, pp.247-270, criticizing Readings proposed 'solution', but not his analysis of the situation. 7 The French utilitarian model which emerged from the French revolution was a rival, but it led to intellectual stagnation and was eclipsed and subsumed under the Humboldtian model. The Newman model was never a real rival and was more important for corrupting and weakening the Humboldtian model, making it more vulnerable to attack. The American business model, now being revived in a more aggressive form, had already revealed its inadequacies when it was attacked by Veblen in The Higher Learning in America in 1918 (republished with an introduction by Ivar Berg, New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 1993). 8 Readings, The University in Ruins, p.48. 9 Ibid., p.46 meaning no longer resides in the political question of 'what kind of state can establish the just society and realize human destiny' but 'in an economic sphere outside the political competence of the state.'10 Hence, we have consumerism. Consumerism 'is the economic counterpart of the hollowing out of political subjectivity that accompanies the decline of the nation-state. ... It is the sign that the individual is no longer a political entity, is not a subject of the nationstate.'11 When 'the individual is positioned as a consumer without memory, a gaping mouth, as it were, rather than as the subject of a narrative of self-realization'12, when the individual is no longer a subject of the nation-State, there is no need for the Humboldtian University. The strength of Readings' analysis lies in his appreciation of the relationship between the Humboldtian University, the nation-State and the Enlightenment, of the centrality of the notion of culture to comprehending this relationship, and of the threat posed to the nation-State, the historical project of Enlightenment and along with these, the Humboldtian University, by economic globalization; the weaknesses, astonishing given his analysis, are manifest in an insufficient appreciation of the Humboldtian University and all that it stood for. Despite brilliant analyses and stirring passages suggesting a deep appreciation of what is at stake, Readings was too willing to give up on the Humboldtian University and to reconciling us to living in its ruins. In this paper, I will argue that what the Humboldtian University stood for the struggle for democracy in the modern world. Not only does Readings appear to have failed to appreciate the connection between education, the nation-State and democracy, he appears to have failed to appreciate the deeper meaning of historical project of Enlightenment as the struggle for freedom, and what it means to have this project undermined. In this failure, I will argue, he is symptomatic of the malaise he appeared to have diagnosed, a malaise which afflicts even those who have appreciated the relationship between education and democracy. In this regard I will examine the work of Henry and Susan Giroux and Cornelius Castoriadis, showing how these thinkers for different reasons have failed to 10 Ibid., p.48. 11 Ibid., p.48.. 12 Ibid., p.143. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 5 appreciate the importance of the Humboldtian University to democracy. If someone as acute as Readings has, despite appearances, failed to grasp the immensity of the destruction being wrought by economic globalization, and thinkers as acute as the Girouxs and Castoriadis have failed to appreciate the importance of the Humboldtian University to democracy in the modern world, this I will argue does not justify dismissing the historical project represented by the Humboldtian University; it calls for a deeper examination to explain how the 'historical project of culture' has been lost in order to revive it. LACUNAE IN READINGS' ANALYSIS Where did Readings' analysis go astray? Despite efforts to avoid the blinkered perspectives of other critics of universities, Readings' analysis was limited by his own discipline of cultural studies and comparative literature. The University in Ruins provides an insightful analysis of the development of the disciplines of literature, cultural studies and multiculturalism absent in most of the writings of other literary and cultural theorists who have complained about what is happening to universities without appreciating the rationale for their existence in the first place.13 While taking his own discipline as his point of departure, Readings did acknowledge the significance of other disciplines. He noted for instance the characterization of the goal of undergraduate education in physics by a Nobel laureate as introducing students to 'the culture of physics', noting that the contested status of knowledge in physics 'requires a model of knowledge as a conversation among a community rather than as a simple accumulation of facts.'14 This is entirely in accordance with the Humboldtian idea of the university. Readings also noted that funding for science was under threat.15 Yet Readings is still open to the charge that his dramatic title reflects the fall in standing of literature and the other humanities disciplines, and it is open to the defenders of the new order to claim that the new corporate university is more efficient. By forcing universities to respond to 13 See for instance Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992. 14 Readings, The University in Ruins, p.4f. 15 Ibid., p.130. market forces and getting rid of areas of learning and research that people are unwilling to pay for, universities are being made more productive. It is not the University but literature, a highly subsidized form of entertainment, which is in ruins. What matters is not literature but knowledge which enables us to produce more and greater variety of commodities. In the new globalized economy where knowledge is valued more than ever, universities are flourishing as transnational enterprises. To counter such an argument, more needs to be made of the sciences and other humanities disciplines, particularly history. An excursion into the history of science would have shown that science has been the battleground for different conceptions of the world, and even in Anglophone countries, has been as important for defining who we are as literature.16 Furthermore, historical research has shown that when the quest by scientists to comprehend the cosmos and our place within it is discounted and efforts made to control science and reduce it to an instrument, these efforts have always failed. Joseph BenDavid revealed a recurrent pattern where creative advances within science have been followed by periods of stagnation as governments have attempted to manage science to make it serve the government and the economy.17 The last time this happened was with the Stalinization of science in the Soviet Union after 1929.18 In each case the proponents of these policies argued that it was impossible to leave science to the curiosity of philosophers or scientists; a new era had come making it impossible to go back to the past. In each case, science languished in what had been centres of creativity. Von Humboldt had recognized this destructive effect of efforts to manage research and his model of the university was designed to guarantee its autonomy from such interference. It can be expected, and now there is ample evidence, that the new round of managerial control of science integrating more 16 The role of Darwinian evolutionary theory in this regard has been demonstrated by Robert M. Young in Darwin's Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 17 Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1971. 18 On this, see Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984. On its effect on biology, and ecology in particular, see Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 6 efficiently the University into the economy will have and is having the same destructive effects on science.19 On these grounds alone Readings was justified in characterizing the University as in ruins. However, it is in his willingness to abandon the 'nostalgia for national culture'20 and along with it, the nation-State and the historical project of Enlightenment that Readings most fully reveals his lack of appreciation of von Humboldt's idea of the university. 'National culture' was so readily abandoned by Readings because he took this to be founded on the idea of community based on perfect communication with 'mutual transparency' associated with an idea of the State as 'the abstract ground that assumes the individual is disinterested and autonomous.' On this basis Readings argued that 'the alleged autonomy of the subject, its freedom to participate in communicational transactions such as this, is conditional upon its subjection to the idea of the State. The subject is "free" only insofar as she or he becomes, for heror himself, primarily subject to the state.'21 To this Readings counter-posed the 'thought of community without identity' in which 'communication is not transparent, a community in which the possibility of communication is not grounded upon and reinforced by a common cultural identity.'22 Here 'the social bond is not the property of an autonomous subject, since it exceeds subjective consciousness and even individual histories of action.'23 Readings argued that we can dwell in the ruins of the university without a grand narrative of culture by giving up the thought of consensus and acknowledging that '"thinking together" is a dissensual process'.24 Such a postmodern analysis and proposal is to be expected from someone strongly influenced by 19 J.R. Ravetz noted this in 'Social Problems of Industrialized Science' in Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, ch.2. David Dickson showed how this corruption of science was gathering pace in the 1980s. See David Dickson, The New Politics of Science, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. See esp. ch.2, 'Universities and Industry: Knowledge as a Commodity'. 20 Readings, The University in Ruins, p.149. 21 Ibid., p.181f. 22 Ibid., p.185. 23 Ibid., p.186. 24 Ibid., p.192. thinkers such as Lyotard,25 Derrida and Foucault with their concern to oppose what they took to be the oppressive tendencies deriving from German Idealism, particularly from Hegel. But this does not do justice to von Humboldt, or to Hegel. In choosing his principles for the University of Berlin, von Humboldt was influenced more by Schleiermacher than anyone else, and both von Humboldt and Schleiermacher were strongly influenced by Herder, whose ideas also influenced Hegel. There were few people more aware of the problems associated with communication and more tolerant of diversity and dissension than Herder. Herder originated the idea that it is only by tolerating diversity of points of view that we can ever hope to arrive at anything like the truth.26 He transcended the opposition between the dissensus and consensus that has preoccupied the postmodernists. This argument for tolerance of diversity strongly influenced von Humboldt. Von Humboldt was concerned to promote education which would develop people's civic virtue and intellectual and physical excellence, but argued for two more elements: 'moral autonomy, or the ability to govern ourselves, and individuality..., the development of each person's unique character.'27 So insofar as the Humboldtian University was concerned to produce subjects for the State, they certainly were not the kind of subjects that Readings suggested they were. In fact, Herder was a major proponent of democracy, and while von Humboldt was a liberal rather than a democrat, the 'subjects' that Humboldt had in mind were the autonomous individuals required to support a State with a significant democratic component. LINKING EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 25 Bill Readings wrote a book on Lyotard: Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics, London, Routledge, 1991. 26 See Johann Gottfried von Herder, 'Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793-7) [excerpts concerning freedom of thought and expression], Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.370-373. 27 Frederick C. Beiser, 'The Early Political Theory of Wilhelm von Humboldt', Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992, p.132. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 7 But there is no reference to democracy in Readings' account of the university or in his proposed response to its present malaise. Readings exemplifies an anomaly, noted by Henry and Susan Giroux in their recent book, Take Back Higher Education: [N]either the decline of democracy nor the crisis of education have gone unnoticed. But curiously, progressive advocates and activists clustered around either issue have little regard for each other. Astute readers of the national political scene have little interest in ... the state of education ... And educators seem to have lost the language for linking schooling and democracy, convinced that education is now about job training and competitive market advantage.28 The Girouxs argued that '[r]ecognizing the inextricable link between education and politics is central to reclaiming higher education as a democratic public sphere.'29 They made the obvious point that in a democracy 'formal sites of pedagogy must provide citizens with the kinds of critical capacities, modes of literacies, knowledge, and skills that enable them to both read the world critically and participate in shaping and governing it.'30 They also pointed out the relation between the destruction of higher education, globalization and neo-liberalism. 'Globalization now signals the retreat of nationStates that once played a significant role in ameliorating the most brutal features of capitalism'.31 Concomitantly, '[t]he ascendancy of neoliberalism and corporate culture ... not only consolidates economic power in the hands of the few; it also aggressively attempts to ... subordinate the needs of society to the market, reduce civic education to job training, and render public services and amenities an unconscionable luxury.'32 As a consequence, 'a democracy of critical citizens is being replaced quickly by an ersatz democracy of consumers.'33 They point out that '[i]f right-wing reforms in higher education continue unchallenged, the consequences will 28 Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p.4. 29 Ibid., p.8. 30 Ibid., p.7. 31 Ibid., p.75. 32 Ibid., p.249. 33 Ibid., p.222. result in a highly undemocratic, bifurcated civic body.'34 But even the Girouxs have not fully faced up to the role required of universities to support democracy. To defend this argument they did not refer to the Humboldtian University. They invoked 'a distinguished tradition of educational thought ... extending from Thomas Jefferson and W.E.B. Du Bois to Jane Addams, John Dewey, and C. Wright Mills', thinkers who argued that 'citizens have to be educated for the task of selfgovernment.'35 They also invoked Raymond Williams and Cornelius Castoriadis. However, the idea of citizens being educated to be able to govern themselves is not taken as taken sufficiently seriously. This is illustrated by the Girouxs' defence of multiculturalism, not only against neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, but also against 'conservatives' such as Harold Bloom and E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch is criticized because his notion of 'citizen as bearer of common cultural knowledge ... privileges a Eurocentric perspective of history and culture'.36 One can hardly object to the Girouxs' complaint against conservative defenders of the study of literature that they had shifted 'from production of active citizens to passive consumers of high culture.'37 But the Girouxs have a less profound appreciation than Readings of the original role of literature in the curriculum. In opposing the notion of common cultural knowledge and defending multiculturalism, they are really focused on how to defend and extend the public sphere as a place for oppositional discourse based on 'democratic imperatives of equality, liberty, and justice' rather than for people upholding these imperatives to take power and really govern themselves. Readings had a more profound understanding of multiculturalism within cultural studies as an ineffectual effort to adapt to economic globalization in which the University has become a transnational corporation.38 Or worse, as Masao Miyoshi suggested, it is an alibi for complicity in the trans-national corporation 34 Ibid., p.11. 35 Ibid., p.223. 36 Ibid., p.163f. 37 Ibid., p.167. 38 Readings, The University in Ruins, p.45. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 8 version of neocolonialism.39 Hirsch is really more radical in this regard.40 The problem with the Girouxs' approach can be highlighted by looking more closely at the work of Castoriadis with whom they align themselves. In The Terror of Neoliberalism, Henry Giroux quotes with approval Castoriadis's claim that education is required to sustain democracy: Let us suppose that a democracy, as complete, perfect, etc., as one might wish, might fall upon us from the heavens: this sort of democracy will not be able to endure for more than a few years if it does not engender individuals that correspond to it, ones that, first and foremost, are capable of making it function and reproducing it. There can be no democratic society without democratic paedia.41 This is surely true, and it is laudable that Giroux turns for support to one of the most profound proponents of democracy of the twentieth century. But Castoriadis also argued that democracy is very rare. Democracy, for Castoriadis, meant that society is autonomous, that is, at least in part, 'it self-institutes explicitly and reflectively.'42 Autonomy in this sense has only been achieved twice in history, Castoriadis claimed, the first time in the democratic Ancient Greek cities, the second time with far greater breadth in the modern Western world, which he took to have begun in the late Middle Ages and to be fading out in the present.43 Education for democracy must be of a very unusual kind. Individuals become autonomous by explicitly coming to want to be something, an Athenian, a Florentine or whatever, explicitly and reflectively choosing to participate in the social imaginary significations of their society – norms, values, myths, representations, projects, traditions, etc., which involves 'an effort to make be and to give 39 Miyoshi, 'A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State', p.751. 40 See E.D. Hirsch, Jr. 'Why Traditional Education is more Progressive', The American Enterprise, March/April, 1997, pp.42-45. 41 Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy, Boulder, Paradigm Publications, 2004. This quote is from Cornelius Castoriadis, 'Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime,' Constellations vol.4, no.1, 1997, p.10. 42 Cornelius Castoriadis, 'Culture in a Democratic Society' in The Castoriadis Reader, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997, p.340. 43 Ibid., p.340. life to the institution of its society.'44 This supports the Girouxs' claim that students should be educated to be active; but far more is required; and it is hardly compatible with multiculturalism. It appears that democracy has been so corroded that even its most ardent defenders are losing a sense of what it involves. LINKING DEMOCRACY WITH THE HUMBOLDTIAN UNIVERSITY So what form of education is required for democracy in the modern world? The problem, first of all, is to define what we mean by democracy. Almost everyone apart from Islamic fundamentalists claim to be on the side of democracy; but the word has lost almost all meaning. Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives have been able to portray themselves as on the side of democracy simply by redefining it as the freedom to exchange labour, resources, goods and services in a global market dominated by transnational corporations and billionaires. We live in a culture where, as Ulrich Beck aptly put it: 'Concepts are empty: they no longer grip, illuminate or inflame. The greyness lying over the world [...] may also come from a kind of verbal mildew.'45 To free ourselves from this verbal mildew and to recover the original meaning of democracy it is necessary to revive a moribund language. Castoriadis attempted to do this, attempting to recover the original meaning of democracy as part of the project of autonomy. He was surely right in believing that if we want to understand democracy in a world in which the project of democracy is in crisis, especially in an Orwellian post-1984 world where language has been distorted and the meaning of words inverted, then we do need to go back to the first instance of democracy to work out what it really meant. Having done this, however, Castoriadis provided little comfort for those attempting to defend or redefine modern institutions to align them with democracy, and certainly was no supporter of the Humboldtian University. His work was opposed not only to capitalism, but also to socialism and communism which, he argued, through their over-riding concern with 44 Cornelius Castoriadis, 'The Crisis of Western Societies' in The Castoriadis Reader, p.261. 45 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? trans. Patrick Camiller, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000, p.8. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 9 control and economic growth had abandoned or undermined the project of autonomy.46 A former Marxist and at one stage an associate of Lyotard, Castoriadis became highly critical of the heritage of German thought.47 In fact Castoriadis's criticisms of German philosophy and Hegel in particular as 'the full opposition to modernity within modernity – or the full opposition, more generally, to the Greco-Western spirit',48 lends support to Readings' misgivings about the Humboldtian University for promoting a very limited and compromised form of democracy, one that involved reducing people to subjects of the State. Castoriadis portrayed education in the modern world as nothing but 'a breadwinning chore for educators, a boring burden for pupils ... it has become a question of obtaining a piece of paper (a diploma) that will allow one to exercise a profession (if one finds work).'49 Castoriadis's criticisms of the institutions of modernity would suggest that he believed we should revive the social forms of Ancient Greece. But Castoriadis argued that 'Athenian democracy cannot be for us anything but a germ, and in no way a model; one would have to be a fool to claim that the political organization of 30,000 citizens might be copied so as to organize 35 or 150 million citizens.'50 So while Castoriadis deployed his insights into the nature of autonomy as this had begun to be realized in Ancient Greece to criticize core institutions and ideas of the modern world, particularly to expose the pseudo-democracy of the new neo-liberal order,51 he was very vague about what kind of society we should be striving for.52 But then Castoriadis was very vague about the second emergence of autonomy that occurred in the modern world. I think it can be shown that, partly for this reason, he did not do justice to the German thought of 46 Cornelius Castoriadis, 'The Pulverization of MarxismLeninism', World in Fragments, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997, pp.58-69. 47 Cornelius Castoriadis, 'The Retreat from Autonomy', World in Fragments, pp.32-43. 48 Ibid., p.35. 49 Cornelius Castoriadis, 'The Crisis of Western Societies' in The Castoriadis Reader, p.260. 50 Cornelius Castoriadis, 'Done and To be Done', in The Castoriadis Reader, p.407. 51 Castoriadis, 'The Pulverization of Marxism-Leninism', in World in Fragments , esp. p.68f. 52 See Castoriadis, 'Done and To be Done', in The Castoriadis Reader, p.413ff. which he became so critical. While this could be shown by examining Castoriadis' explicit comments on different German philosophers and contesting his interpretations, it is much more illuminating to see these German philosophers as inheritors of the tradition of the Greek quest for autonomy as this was described by Castoriadis, developing this tradition to deal with new circumstances. In this way, the historical continuity in the quest for democracy and education can be shown and the importance of the Humboldtian University as a core institution of democracy revealed. The Girouxs' argument for combining the defence of education with the defence of democracy can then be strengthened. To argue this it is necessary to combat the politically debilitating orthodox Marxist view (which Marx himself abandoned)53 that history can be understood as a mere sequence of socioeconomic formations, denying any significant role to the ongoing struggle for liberty against forms of domination. Modernity did not inaugurate an era of capitalism in which all political institutions were merely instruments in the struggle to accumulate capital. Democratic institutions of the modern nation-State developed in the struggle for freedom at least partly in opposition to those who were deploying market mechanisms to exploit people. The neoliberals and neoconservatives, who are imposing a globalized market by fraud or force are not proponents of democracy, as they claim. They are reviving a profoundly anti-democratic tradition of thought inspired by Hobbes, using the market to subvert democracy and dominate people. The tradition of democracy derives from an opposing tradition, that of the 'radical enlightenment'.54 One of the most important components of this radical enlightenment is education, particularly as it was developed and promoted by the Humboldtian University. The advance of the Humboldtian University was a triumph in the struggle for democracy. This is the form of the University that has kept alive the quest for autonomy. I will argue that the struggle ahead, 53 On this, see James D. White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, Macmillan Press, 1996, esp. p.275. 54 The term 'radical enlightenment' was coined in 1981 by Margaret C. Jacob in The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (2nd ed. The Temple Publishers, 2003) to characterize the radical legacy of the English Revolution. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 10 which will determine the future of the world, will be a struggle between corporate globalization defended by neoliberals and neoconservatives, and democracy, and the defence of the Humboldtian University is central to this struggle for democracy. DEMOCRACY AND THE ANCIENT GREEKS What was democracy for the Ancient Greeks? As Castoriadis pointed out, 'democracy' meant a polis in which citizens were actively participating in legislating and decision-making, with offices filled by lot. Essentially, the Greeks invented politics. In Athens, citizens were required to consider public issues, express their views and discuss these in the agora before voting in the ecclesia. As Pericles proclaimed in his Funeral Oration at the outset of the Peloponnesian War: 'Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the polis as well ... we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.'55 There was no 'representation'. Castoriadis argued that it was here, for the first time, that a people no longer took their institutions as having a foundation outside the community, as heteronymous, and saw themselves as autonomous. A society is autonomous, Castoriadis argued, 'not only if it knows that it makes its laws but also if it is up to the task of putting them into question.'56 With the birth of autonomy, unlimited interrogation of actions, institutions and beliefs exploded on the scene.57 Castoriadis argued that it was this autonomy, involving the population in decision-making, which led to the birth and flourishing of philosophy, drama and history as the citizens of Athens grappled with the problems raised by this freedom of how to make decisions, how to evaluate actions, how to live and how to organize society. As he put it: 55 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972, Bk II, 40, p.147 (translation modified). 56 Castoriadis, 'The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary', World in Fragments, p.87. 57 For an analysis of this see Cornelius Castoriadis, 'Power, Politics, Autonomy' in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy. New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp.143-174. [A]utonomy, social as well as individual, is a project. ... The questions raised are, on the social level: Are our laws good? Are they just? Which laws ought we to make? And, on the individual level: Is what I think true? Can I know if it is true-and if so, how? ... Autonomy ... is the unlimited self-questioning about the law and its foundations as well as the capacity, in light of this interrogation, to make, to do and to institute.58 Some of the most important questions to emerge in this environment were What is the good life? and How can society be organized to enable people to live the good life? This was associated with the development of the notion of the common good both as a goal defining the political order and as a topic for investigation. All decision-making was expected to be for the common good. Aristotle characterized proper constitutions as monarchies, aristocracies or democracies according to whether one person, the best people, or the general population rule for the common good. Tyrannies, oligarchies and ochlocracies, where people rule in their own interests, were seen as deviations from proper constitutions.59 With democracy the education of citizens became a major concern, required to enable them and to motivate them to participate in and defend these institutions.60 As Castoriadis pointed out, education involved 'becoming conscious that the polis is also oneself and that its fate also depends upon one's mind, behaviour, and decisions; in other words, it is participation in political life.'61 'No one would dispute the fact that it is a lawgiver's prime duty to arrange for the education of the young' Aristotle argued in The Politics. The ultimate concern of education was the character of the people. '[In] all 58 Castoriadis, 'Power, Politics, Autonomy' in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, p.163f. 59 Aristotle, The Politics, Bk III – 7, trans. T.A. Sinclair, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, p.189f. There is a problem in translating Aristotle in that he used the term 'demokratia' to characterize the degenerate form of 'politeia'. Given the subsequent history of the terms I think it is appropriate to translate 'politeia' as 'democracy' and demokratia' as 'ochlocracy'. See the translator's comments on p.191n. 60 On this see Castoriadis, 'The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy' in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, p.101f. and M.I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1983. 61 Castoriadis, 'The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy' in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, p.113. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 11 circumstances the best character produces the best constitution' Aristotle proclaimed. While there must be preparatory training for various crafts and professions, there must also be training in virtue. And 'since there is but one aim for the entire city, it follows that education must be one and the same for all and that the oversight of education must be a public concern...'62 What kind of character is required for a democracy? A character aware of the value of freedom and with the courage to fight for it. While Castoriadis made some profound observations about the Ancient Greeks, even he did not do full justice to what they stood for. The Greeks were under constant threat from Persia. Ancient Persia was a multinational empire, the ancient equivalent of the globalized economy of today. If the Greeks had not defended themselves, they would have been incorporated into this commercially prosperous empire in which they might well have flourished economically, but at the loss of their autonomy. It is because they valued autonomy rather than economic prosperity and had the courage to fight for it that the foundations of European civilization were laid. Pericles called upon his fellow Athenians to 'Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends upon being courageous.'63 Although the Athenians were defeated first by the Spartans, and then later by the Macedonians, Pericles' prediction that 'Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now'64 proved correct. They inspired a struggle by people for autonomy which has continued, with interruptions, to the present. DEMOCRACY AFTER THE ANCIENT GREEKS As I have noted, Castoriadis acknowledged that the modernity of the West inaugurated a new era of autonomy, but was very vague about how this began and how it developed. He took this to have begun at the end of the Middle Ages, identifying it with the 'new cities founded by a new category 62 Aristotle, The Politics, Bk VIII, I, trans. T.A. Sinclair, Harmondsworth, Penguin, p.299. 63 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Bk II, 43, p.149f. 64 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War , Bk II, 41, p.148. of individuals, the first "bourgeois"'.65 Castoriadis did not pay much attention to this development. In fact, the revival of autonomy took place in Northern Italy beginning in the Eleventh Century, and engendered the new philosophy of civic humanism. The Italians as they struggled to maintain their autonomy looked back to the Ancient World for guidance, not only to Ancient Greece, but also to the Republic of Ancient Rome. Although the Romans never achieved autonomy of the Ancient Greeks, it is necessary to recognize that the era of the Roman Republic also contributed something to the idea of democracy, bequeathing to posterity the notion of the republic, the model of a mixed constitution and the idea of liberty. The Romans overthrew their kings and proclaimed Rome a 'republic'; that is, a res publica, a 'public thing'. As Polybius (a Greek) noted, this republic had a 'mixed constitution', part monarchy, part aristocracy and part democracy. While being more aristocratic than democratic, this constitution proved more stable than the democracy of Athens and was therefore characterized by Polybius as 'the best of all existing constitutions.'66 For the most part, subsequent defences of democracy have been defences of mixed constitutions with a strong democratic component. It was the development of the concept of liberty, however, which was most important contribution of the Romans to the subsequent history of democracy. The Roman Republic succumbed not to external forces, but to corruption from within. This was associated with the concentration of wealth and the growth of empire, the corrosive effects of which culminated in the seizure of power by Julius Caesar. It was in winning and then losing their autonomy that the Romans developed their own concept of freedom – 'liberty'. Unlike later social contract theorists, liberty was not seen as natural state of individuals to which we have a right, but as something won and maintained. For individuals to be free requires first and foremost that they be members of an autonomous or selfgoverning State or community. To be selfgoverning, the laws of the State must be enacted 65 Cornelius Castoriadis, 'The Crisis of Culture and the State', Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, p.221. 66 Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, Bk VI-10ff., trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1979, p.311ff. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 12 with the consent of all its citizens who must all be subject to these laws. Livy (who wrote a 142 volume history of Rome) characterized Rome as a self-governing community in which 'the imperium of the laws is greater than that of any other men'.67 Such liberty was always defined in opposition to a condition of slavery. When Livy speaks of free States losing their liberty, he invariably refers to this as falling into slavery. A slave is someone subject to the jurisdiction of someone else and is consequently in the power of another person.68 Whether or not they are coerced is not the issue. A slave who ingratiates himself to his master and thereby avoids coercion is still a slave. Romans jurists characterized the condition of someone perpetually subject or liable to harm in this way as obnoxious, while Roman moralists and historians applied this term to anyone dependent on the will, or goodwill, of someone else. And this is how many Romans understood their condition after the Republic had been overthrown. The success with which tyrants and oligarchs had crushed the quest for liberty and the democratic spirit is evident in the amazement of the twelfth century German historian, Otto of Freising, that in Northern Italy people's desire for liberty had generated a political life in cities at odds with the assumption that the only sound form of government is an hereditary monarchy. These people had formed independent republics governed by consuls who were changed almost every year in order to maintain the freedom of the people.69 Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, invaded in 1154. The Italian city-States successfully fought off repeated invasions from the German emperors over nearly two centuries. Initially, the Papacy had supported the cityStates, but then it attempted to control them, often by manipulating their internal politics. This also was effectively resisted. However, most of the republics later succumbed to internal discord and the seizure of power by despots. In the effort to defend their liberty and to understand and 67 Cited by Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.45 from Livy 2. 1. 1. 68 See ibid., p.41. 69 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One, The Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p.3. avoid the corruption which led to despotism, a number of thinkers in Florence, one of the last republics to succumb to despotism, rediscovered and advanced the heritage of Greek and Roman political thought. This was the tradition of 'civic humanism'.70 Looking back to the rise and fall of Athens and of republican Rome as well as to their own history, the Florentines identified liberty with both freedom from external aggression and from tyranny, and as active citizenship in pursuit of the common good. What was new about civic humanism was its focus on how to avoid the corruption which undermined liberty and thereby led to people's enslavement either to conquerors or to despots. Corruption could be lack of civic commitment by the people, putting their own interests before the interests of the city, or it could be the pursuit of glory by the nobles. To avoid corruption, it was argued, it is necessary to provide people with the opportunity of achieving honour by working for the public good, involving them as much as possible in the running of the commonwealth, and to cultivate virtù, the individual's capacity for political and military action. Virtù, a notion which is Roman or 'Ciceronian' rather than Athenian, was understood to be both intensely public and intensely personal. As appropriated by the civic humanists, it served to identify 'the citizen's personal autonomy with his immediate capacity for public action; without the one, he would not have the other.'71 This required the right process of education, which became a major concern of the civic humanists in their quest prevent the decay of republics. It was argued, originally by Petrarch, that a scholastic education should be replaced by an education based on the study of the classics, and that the study of Greek philosophers should be supplemented by the study of Roman rhetorical writings. Petrarch argued that while Aristotle's analysis might contain penetrating insights, 'his lesson lacks the words that sting and set afire' and so he is unable to urge his readers 'towards love of virtue and hatred of vice'.72 The Roman rhetorical writings 70 This was argued by Hans Baron in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, revised ed. New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1966, p.47ff. 71 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003, p.558. 72 Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, p.88. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 13 provided this. At the same time, the Florentines revived the study of history which also became a central component of Renaissance education.73 EXTENDING THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY TO COUNTRIES While the Italian city-States sometimes formed alliances, government was, as it had been in the Ancient world, of cities. Republican Rome was a city with an empire, not a country. With the Treaty of Westphalia (or 'Peace of Westphalia') of 1648, which put an end to the Thirty Years War, a new political structure came into existence. The Treaty, which put an end to the religious wars which had decimated Europe, broke the power of the Holy Roman Empire, gave formal recognition to the United Provinces (the Netherlands) and the Swiss Confederation, and created the State as simultaneously the political organization of a country and a component of a System of States recognizing each other's legitimacy and autonomy. From the seventeenth century onwards, the ideas of the civic humanists and other Italian thinkers helped inspire struggles to transform these States into democratic republics. The quest to create a republic in Britain, the reaction to this by Hobbes, the intellectual struggle between the proponents and opponents of democracy and the defeat of the more democratic among the revolutionaries inspired directly or indirectly most of modern political philosophy. To begin with, the English civic humanists elaborated the ideas and ideals of the Italian civic humanists, while the 'nature enthusiasts' developed a more radically egalitarian philosophy. While the Italians had characterized the state of dependency as obnoxious, the English civic humanists condemned the 'obnoxious character' of people formed by such an obnoxious relationship. The upright person full of integrity required to sustain a free society was contrasted with 'the obnoxious lackeys and parasites who flourish at court' characterized as 'lewd, dissolute and debauched ... cringing, servile and base ... fawning, abject and lacking in manliness.'74 Such notions had a major influence 73 See Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon, 2001, p.156f. 74 Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 1998, p.95f. on the first English revolution. Charles I was condemned and then executed in 1649 partly because by invading parliament he was, from the perspective of the civic humanists, striving to make people dependent upon his will. He was seen thereby as attempting to enslave to him the upright people of Britain.75 Confronting the magnitude of the task of preserving ancient liberties in the modern world after the revolution, a leading English civic humanist, James Harrington, proposed various measures to deal with the tendency to corruption. This included a division of powers between the legislative and executive arms of government, an idea first put forward by the Florentine civic humanist Francesco Guicciardini, a notion that came to be widely embraced without its source being appreciated.76 Following the Italian civic humanists, the English republicans also argued for the central importance of education in avoiding corruption. John Milton, a more radical civic humanist than Harrington, argued that '[t]here can be no true political reformation which is not also a reformation of manners and morals, of the household, of education.'77 Another republican, Robert Molesworth, argued that pupils should be exposed to 'the weightier matters of true learning ... such as good principles, morals, the improvement of reason, the love of justice, the value of liberty, the duty one owes to one's country and the laws ... the right notion of a generous and legal freedom.'78 The Levellers also called for a republic, calling for more democracy. They argued for political rights for all householders, however poor.79 The more radical Levellers, the True Levellers or Diggers, embraced a form of 'nature enthusiasm' which echoed the philosophy of Giordano Bruno who, along with defending a new religion of 75 See ibid., p.47ff. Such sentiments were supplemented by a false belief in an 'ancient constitution' that was supposedly being subverted. 76 See Pocock, The Machiavellan Moment, p.480. 77 Blair Worden, 'English republicanism', The Cambridge History of Political Thought: 1450-1700, ed. J.H. Burns, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p.456. 78 Cited by Worden, 'English Republicanism', The Cambridge History of Political Thought, p.469. 79 The Levellers were not influenced by civic humanism. See David Wootton, 'Leveller democracy and the Puritan Revolution', in The Cambridge History of Political Thought: 1450-1700, pp.412-442. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 14 nature80 also defended republicanism.81 Nature enthusiasm and the work of Bruno involved an even more revolutionary transformation of thought, challenging the hierarchical cosmology of traditional Christianity and celebrating the creativity of nature. THE OLIGARCHIC REACTION TO CIVIC HUMANISM AND NATURE ENTHUSIASM Cromwell had no interest in the civic humanists' notion of liberty and was utterly hostile to their more radical allies, the Levellers. After the revolution, he became effectively a dictator. With the restoration, which followed Cromwell's death, an attempt was made to re-establish absolute power in the hands of the monarch. Although the king was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, this was not a triumph of civic humanism and democracy. It involved a new configuration of power based on a new ideology. The struggle for liberty by those influenced by civic humanism had provoked a significant intellectual reaction, to begin with, from Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes attempted to undermine and replace the intellectual foundations of the civic humanists' (and Aristotle's) political philosophy and to transform language to make their ideas unthinkable.82 Embracing and developing a mechanistic view of nature, he characterized humans as machines moved by appetites and aversions, society as a social contract between these egoistic individuals, and redefined liberty as not being hindered from acting according to one's powers.83 Justice he redefined as simply that which is lawful, whatever the laws happen to be. Hobbes denied any connection between freedom and participation in the public life of an autonomous society. In society people are free, 80 The revolutionary nature of this doctrine has been argued by Louis Dupré, Passage To Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993, esp. p.58. 81 See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975, esp. chap.7. On the most influential True Leveller, Gerrard Winstanley, see Brian Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic & the New Philosophy, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1980, pp.222-231. On Bruno, see Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, esp. p.31f. 82 Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, p.10. 83 See Thomas Hobbes, 'Of the Liberty of Subjects', Leviathan, [1651] Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986, Part II, Chap.XXI, p.261ff. he argued, when through fear of the consequences of disobeying laws they acquire a will to obey the laws. Freedom therefore is compatible tyranny, the form of absolutist monarchy Hobbes was defending. The Latitudinarians, the moderate Whigs, were concerned to oppose absolutist monarchy, but continued Hobbes' opposition to civic humanism, and also attacked the more radical ideas of the nature enthusiasts. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, the major intellectual figures in this movement, strove to develop an alternative philosophy of nature to that of the scholastics and most importantly, to that of the nature enthusiasts.84 John Locke, embracing Hobbes' conception of humans as complex machines, allied himself with Newton and reformulated Hobbes' social contract theory to represent the central role of government as the protection of property. Although he also sought to justify insurrection against tyrants under certain circumstances, rule by parliament and argued for religious tolerance, he was not a defender of democracy. He was a defender of oligarchy, rule by the few in their own interests. The Hobbesian conception of humans as complex machines was further elaborated by the utilitarians in their attempt to develop a 'moral Newtonianism'.85 Utilitarianism originated with John Gay (portraying himself as a disciple of Locke), who argued in a work published in 1730 that 'all people seek pleasure and avoid pain: to seek pleasure is at once the necessary and the normal law of human action, and those actions are obligatory which lead to happiness.'86 This idea was developed by Helvetius, Paley and Bentham into a juridical theory, a political theory and a science of society and of social control. Closely related to the utilitarians were Scottish thinkers 84 See Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic & the New Philosophy, p.137. See also Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, London, Wildwood House, 1982. On the Latitudinarians, see James R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution, New York,, Burt Franklin, 1977, and Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1976. On the outcome of the triumph of Newtonian thinking, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. 85 Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris, London, Faber and Faber, 1978, p.6. 86 Ibid., p.7. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 15 such as David Hume and Adam Smith.87 The Scots, taking the opposite path to the Ancient Greeks, had given up its claim to sovereignty in 1707 and had subsequently flourished as a centre of commerce. This led to a relative decline of interest in politics and, despite the strong influence of civic humanism and its defence by Adam Ferguson, a vigorous effort to develop a science of society modelled on Newtonian physics.88 Postulating avarice and a desire for gain as a constant principle of human nature, Smith laid the foundations for classical economics as the science best equipped to explain the dynamics of societies. 'The invisible hand' could now replace the quest for autonomy and control over one's destiny. Bentham attempted to fuse his own ideas with those of Smith. The success of these thinkers realized Hobbes' goal, to render the notion of liberty, and with it, the notion of democracy, as these had been understood by the civic humanists, unthinkable. As Castoriadis put it, this is where the 'emancipatory project of autonomy' was replaced with the 'imaginary of technical and organizational rationality'.89 This helped to transform British government, despite the power of the House of Commons (elected with a very limited franchise) into an oligarchy based on wealth which deprived most people of access to means of production, forcing them to sell their labour power as a commodity; that is, reducing them to 'wage slaves' dependent on the wills of others for their livelihood. As these people were impoverished, government became increasingly oppressive. This is the tradition which the neoliberals have revived.90 87 Ibid., ch.3. It has since been shown that Adam Smith's views are more complex than Halévy appreciated and did not totally reject civic humanism (see Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An essay in historiographic revision, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975), but this does not invalidate the overall picture of this tradition of thought. 88 See Fania Ox-Salzberger, 'The political theory of the Scottish Enlightenment' and Andrew S. Skinner, 'Economic Theory' in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, Alexander Broadie (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2003. 89 Castoriadis, 'The Pulverisation of Marxism-Leninism,' World in Fragments, p.62. 90 This tradition is analysed in Arran Gare, Nihilism Inc., Sydney, Eco-Logical Press, 1996, chaps 5-7. THE RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE REVIVAL OF CIVIC HUMANISM The ideas of the civic humanists and the nature enthusiasts did not completely disappear, however. In Europe these traditions were fused by John Toland and others to form what Margaret Jacob called the 'radical enlightenment'.91 Toland, strongly influenced by Bruno, coined the term 'pantheism' to characterize their cosmological views. A similar synthesis of thought had been emerging earlier in the Netherlands associated with Pieter Plockhoy, Van den Enden and the brothers Koerbagh, although in less coherent form.92 This was the original enlightenment, with its roots in the Renaissance. The Cartesians, Newtonians and Leibnizians were reacting against these radical ideas, and they developed what Jonathon Israel has characterized as the 'moderate enlightenment'. This was, Israel noted, supported 'by numerous governments and influential factions in the main Churches'.93 With the triumph of the moderate enlightenment in the early decades of the eighteenth century, specifically, the Newtonian/Lockean branch of this, the radical enlightenment went underground where it flourished internationally, its ideas being disseminated through the Masonic lodges, 91 On the formation of the radical enlightenment, see Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, esp. p.63f. 92 On these thinkers and their influence see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, ch.9 & 10. 93 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p.11. Israel gives an excellent account of the radical thinking of the period, particularly Dutch radicalism, and each of the three strands of the moderate enlightenment, noting that by the 1730s and 1740s the European mainstream was espousing the ideas of Locke and Newton 'which seemed uniquely suited to the moderate enlightenment purpose.'(p.11). Israel identifies the source of the radical enlightenment in Spinoza. Spinoza's name was certainly used by opponents of the radical enlightenment to brand them as atheists or even nihilists, but Spinoza's A Political Treatise was quite conservative, and his conception of nature mechanistic. (see reviews by Margaret C. Jacob and Anthony La Vopa in The Journal of Modern History, June, 2003, Vol.75, Issue 2, pp.387-393). It was Spinoza as reinterpreted in Germany from 1750 onwards that became a focus of radicalism, that is, Spinoza reinterpreted through the pantheism of Toland et.al.. On this see John H. Zammito, '"The Most Hidden Conditions of Men of the First Rank": The Pantheist Current in Eighteenth-Century Germany "Uncovered" by the Spinoza.Controversy', Eighteenth Century Thought, Vol.1, 2003, pp.335-368. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 16 keeping alive and promoting the struggle for democratic republicanism.94 In the early eighteenth century, however, it was not a proponent of democratic republicanism but an opponent who made the most original contribution to the tradition of civic humanism. This was Montesquieu. Montesquieu was a great admirer of the achievements of the English revolution, but had little sympathy for Harrington, let alone the more radical Levellers and nature enthusiasts. However, his main concern was to oppose the threat in France of despotism posed by Louis XIV, and he was fundamentally opposed to the ideas of Hobbes and those thinkers who had been influenced by him.95 Rejecting the Hobbesian notion of freedom, Montesquieu argued that 'liberty can consist only in being able to do what one ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what one ought not to will.'96 He not only embraced but further developed the notion of separation of powers, arguing (following Bolingbroke) that there should be a separation of the legislative, executive and judicial arms of government in order to achieve a balance of power. Going far beyond any previous examination of the motivations of people and of the diversity of mores and customs, Montesquieu argued that 'Every nation is dominated by a general spirit, on which its very power is founded. Anything undertaken in defiance of that spirit is a blow against that power, and as such must necessarily come to a stop.'97 He argued that different kinds of governments are based on different 'springs': republican democracies and aristocracies require virtue to function, monarchies are based on the quest for honour, while despotisms are based on fear. In the modern world it is no longer possible to maintain the virtue needed for either democratic or aristocratic republics because countries are too large. But this absence of virtue does not matter in monarchies where people can be induced to act for the common good through their concern with honour. If monarchies embark on imperial ventures, however, then it is likely 94 See Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, chap.5. 95 See Melvin Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, London, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p.63. 96 Montesquieu, 'The Spirit of Laws' Book XI, Chapter 3, in Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, p.243. 97 Montesquieu, 'Considerations on the Causes of the Romans Greatness and Decline', XIII, Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, p.29. that they will be transformed into despotisms and fear will become the basis for organizing society. Montesquieu presented both a challenge and resources to those who wished to revive the quest for democracy. The most important figure in this regard was Rousseau (although as Israel points out, Rousseau was more indebted to Diderot than is usually appreciated).98 Rousseau embraced the idea that we are only free when we act morally which formed the basis of his notion of the 'general will', the common will working for the common good. He argued we are only really free when we act according to the general will. This was a major modification of the notion of virtue and a strengthening of the notion of freedom and the relationship between freedom of the individual and freedom of the society of the civic humanists. Secondly, in order to sustain this common will Rousseau embraced Montesquieu's notion of spirit and argued it is necessary to cultivate national customs and life-styles and so preserve the collective character of people's nations. As he advised the Corsicans: 'The first rule which we have to follow is that of national character: every people has, or must have, a character; if it lacks one, we must start by endowing it with one.'99 Civic humanism was also revived in America, developed in reaction to the Whig government of Robert Walpole in Britain and had a major influence on the American Revolution.100 There were opposing tendencies among the revolutionaries, many being vehemently opposed to democracy. John Adams wrote, 'I was always for a free republic, not a democracy, which is as arbitrary, tyrannical, bloody, cruel, and intolerable a government as Phalaris with his bull is represented to have been.'101 It was the civic humanism of Thomas Jefferson and others, not the philosophy of Locke, which inspired the 98 Israel, The Radical Enlightenment, p.78. 99 Rousseau, Projet Corse, 1915, II: 319, cited in Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, p.27. 100 J.G.A. Pocock, 'Civic Humanism and Its Role in AngloAmerican Thought', in Politics, Language & Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, esp. p.97f. See also Tom Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1992. 101 Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p.282n.. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 17 democratic elements of the US republic.102 Echoing the Italian and English civic humanists, Jefferson took education to be central to democracy to avert the tendency towards despotism.103 Education was also seen by Jefferson as the condition of progress. 'If the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated,' he argued, 'education is to be the chief instrument for effecting it.'104 The Girouxs described this aspect of Jefferson's thought: Jefferson's vast educational plans for a free and universal, multi-tiered educational system including primary, grammar, and university training are central to his social and political thought. For Jefferson, education was the primary means for producing the mind of critically informed and active citizenry necessary to both nurture and sustain a democratic nation; he argued, in keeping with classical republican tradition, that democracy was the highest form of political organization for any nation because it provided the conditions for its citizens to grow both intellectually and morally through the exercise of these faculties.105 Jefferson understood education in accordance with the tradition of civic humanism.106 GERMANY, THE RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE HUMBODTIAN UNIVERSITY It is against this background that it is necessary to understand the tradition of the German political thought derided by Castoriadis. The most important of this thought was a development of the radical enlightenment, the synthesis of civic humanism with nature enthusiasm, enriched by a critical engagement with Greek and Christian philosophy. Germany in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was fragmented, still partly feudal and ruled by petty princes or kings, mostly French speaking. Germans were left behind by the dramatic political, social and intellectual developments taking place in Britain, Holland, 102 This is not to say that civic humanists and followers of Locke formed to distinct camps. The quest for democracy and the defence of property tended to be confused. 103 Giroux and Giroux, Take Back Higher Education, p.146. 104 Ibid., p.148. 105 Ibid., p.145. 106 Although not consistently. See Eva T.H. Brann, 'Jeffersonian Ambivalences', Philosophers of Education: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, London: Routledge, 1998, pp.273-283. America and France. But while looking on from a distance, they were in a position to assess the successes and failures of these developments and respond to them. Herder in particular embraced and developed the tradition of civic humanism while developing a general attack on the mechanistic view of nature (developed as a reformulation of Spinoza's philosophy),107 atomic individualism and the utilitarianism of the 'moderate' enlightenment.108 Having encountered Toland's writings in the 1770s, and through them, the work of Bruno,109 Herder was the legitimate heir and the most important proponent of the radical enlightenment in the late eighteenth century. Echoing the ideas of the nature enthusiasts, he participated in laying the foundations for a new, post-Newtonian concept of nature as creative process,110 argued that humans are essentially social beings participating in this creativity, and promulgated an ethics of self-expression or self-realization, calling on nations and individuals to express the potentialities unique to them. He argued that geography formed the natural economy of a people, and that their customs and society would develop along the lines favoured by their basic environment. At the same time, he anticipated some of Castoriadis' core ideas, arguing that 'We 107 Herder's central and enormously influential work on natural philosophy is God, Some Conversations [1787], trans.Frederick H. Burkhardt, Indianapolis, 2003, 1940. 108 See F.M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965 and Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988. Barnard argues that both Rousseau and Herder 'fit into the tradition of civic humanism' (Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy, p.1). See also Beiser, 'The Political Theory of J.G. Herder', Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, pp.189-221, and John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002. For some of Herder's writings on politics, see Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, trans. and ed. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin, Indianapolis, Hackett, 2004. On the political philosophy of the early romantics, strongly influenced by Herder, see The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. and trans. Frederick C. Beiser, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 and Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early Romanticism, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003. 109 See H.S. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy & History of Science, Cambridge, Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970, p.13. 110 See Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy & History of Science. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 18 live in a world we ourselves create.'111 He was clearly a proponent of autonomy. Advancing beyond Montesquieu and Rousseau, he argued that each nation has its own culture, using this notion to refer to language, everyday practices and technology as well as art, literature, science and philosophy. The concept of 'culture' was central to his thinking, and Herder was the first philosopher to refer to 'cultures' in the plural. It is through culture that we create ourselves, Herder argued. In this regard, Herder regarded poetry as particularly important. 'A poet is the creator of a people; he gives it a world to contemplate,' he wrote, although at the same time he argued that the poet is to an equal extent created by the people.112 Poetry is 'the expression of the highest aspirations' of a nation.113 But as Isaiah Berlin noted, Herder 'believed from the beginning to the end of his life that all men are some degree artists, and that all artists are, first and last, men – fathers, sons, friends, citizens, fellow worshippers, men united by common action.'114 He acknowledged the diversity of ways of life and the value of each of these. He was vehemently opposed to the arrogance of Europeans and their destructive colonization and exploitation of the rest of the world. Unlike Jefferson who, in accordance with the practices of Ancient Greece and Rome, accepted slavery and the subjugation of the American Indians, Herder was opposed to slavery and lauded the political organization of the Iroquois Indians.115 While he is generally known as the theorist and proponent of national culture, what is not usually appreciated is the relation between this and Herder's political philosophy. Herder was grappling with the problem of identifying the prime force for spontaneous political association which could overcome people's short-sighted self-interest and motivate them to strive for liberty, which he characterized as 'self- 111 Herder's sämmliche Werke, ed. Bernhardt Suphan, Berlin, Weidemann, Vol.viii, p.252, cited and translated by Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy, London, Pimlico, 2000, p.229. 112 Herder's sämmliche Werke, Vol.viii, p.433, cited and translated by Isaiah Berlin, loc. cit. 113 Johann Gottfried Herder, Against Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Marcia Bunge, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, p.143. 114 Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p.230. 115 Herder, Philosophical Writings, p.400ff. determination'.116 His proposed answer, 'culture', was associated with his strong commitment to democracy, his view that reform must come from below, and that freedom of speech is necessary to expose ideas to criticism. Although it was not fully elaborated, it was Herder who originated the idea that the State should be an expression and instrument of the nation; a nation-State. The 'Westphalian State' was to become a democratic nation-State. Based on this understanding of culture, Herder placed education at the centre of the effort to create a democratic society. He pinned his hopes on the emergence of popular leaders who would promote education and guide the rest of the nation to a stage where political rulers would no longer be necessary. In some sense he was continuing the traditional concern with education of the civic humanists, but in place of the study of the Greek and Roman classics as the basis for moving people to a commitment to the common good, Herder extolled the value of the literature, philosophy and science of each nation. This required not only the study of these subjects, but that as much as possible people participate in developing their culture, creating their own literature, philosophy and science. These should not be understood contemplatively. As early poetry was a spur to action, so should it be now, and so should science and philosophy. Herder, as Berlin pointed out, was 'the originator of the doctrine of the unity of art and life, theory and practice.'117 In extolling the notion of culture as the medium through which people create themselves and their world, Herder redefined the meaning of education. He characterized education as Bildung, as self-forming in the context of tradition.118 'Bildung is to connote its original dynamic meaning of forming, shaping, or creating, of building up or rebuilding' wrote Barnard, an expositor of Herder, while 'tradition is to connote the consciously purposive activity 116 Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, p.82. 117 Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p.230. 118 On the concept of Bildung, its history and the way it has influenced education, see Erik Nordenbo, 'Bildung and the Thinking of Bildung', Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol.36, No.3, 2003, pp.341-351. On how it was taken up and developed by the early Romantics who influenced von Humboldt, see Frederick C. Beiser, 'A Romantic Education: The Concept of Bildung in Early German Romanticism', in Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, London: Routledge, 1998, pp.284-299. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 19 of handing down, of preserving as well as of determining a social and cultural heritage in its manifold complexion.'119 Education is selfforming through creative appropriation and development of one's culture, always understood in relation to people's active engagement in the world and in society, preparatory to passing this culture on to the next generation. And through such self-formation through culture, Herder believed, people would be able to govern themselves. Herder had been a student of Kant, and although Kant did not have the same enthusiasm for democracy as Herder, he concurred in Herder's belief in the value of education. Believing that the core of enlightenment is people thinking for themselves, Kant defended the need for open argument in the university, if nowhere else. In The Conflict of the Faculties he analysed the eternal combat between the supposedly lower faculty of philosophy with its commitment to reason and truth and the faculties of theology, law and medicine oriented to serving the interests of government.120 In the medieval university the Arts Faculty served to provide the basics for students going on to the law, medicine and theology faculties and they were not meant to engage in issues of theology or politics. Kant's work strove to invert the status of the faculties, vindicating the 'lower' faculty and the right of its members to freedom of expression precisely because they were not mere instruments of the government. It was these ideas on education of Herder and Kant and those they influenced which inspired Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian minister responsible for establishing the new University of Berlin, to redefine the meaning of 'university'. Humboldt embraced the notion of education as Bildung. He characterized humans as beings who can be educated and characterized the ultimate aim of education as self-knowledge. 'In order for an individual to extend and individuate his character' von Humboldt wrote, 'he must first know himself, in the fullest sense of the word. And, because of his intimate contact with all of his environment, not only know himself but also 119 Barnard, Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy, p.173. 120 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor, University of Nebraska Press, 1992. his fellow citizens, his situation, his era.'121 Ultimately, self-knowledge requires knowledge of world-history and the cosmos. Laying out the principles of the new university, Humboldt characterized the function of higher institutions as 'places where learning in the deepest and widest sense of the word may be cultivated'. To attain their purpose, ... the inward organization of these institutions must produce and maintain an uninterrupted cooperative spirit, one which again and again inspires its members, but inspires without forcing them and without specific intent to inspire. ... It is a further characteristic of higher institutions of learning that they treat all knowledge as a not yet wholly solved problem and are therefore never done with investigation and research. This ... totally changes the relationship between teacher and student from what is was when the student still attended school. In the higher institutions, the teacher no longer exists for the sake of the student; both exist for the sake of learning. Therefore the teacher's occupation depends on the presence of his students. ... The government, when it establishes such an institution must: 1) Maintain the activities of learning in their most lively and vigorous form and 2) Not permit them to deteriorate, but maintain the separation of the higher institutions from the schools ... particularly from the various practical ones.122 Philosophy was to be the core discipline of the university, providing an integrated perspective relating all the other disciplines. Von Humboldt was formulating for the first time the principle that universities cannot be mere instruments of the government without destroying them. If the government is to get what it wants from universities it has to respect their autonomy. It must confine itself to fostering vibrant communities of teachers and students, inspiring each other in their joint quest to understand themselves and the world. Above all, it is necessary to foster this spirit of inquiry. As von Humboldt argued: As soon as one stops searching for knowledge, or if one imagines that it need not be creatively sought in the depths of the human spirit but can be assembled extensively by collecting and classifying facts, everything is irrevocably and 121 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1963, p.125f. 122 Humboldt , Humanist Without Portfolio, p.132f. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 20 forever lost, lost for learning which soon vanishes so far out of the picture that it even leaves language behind like an empty pod ....123 Von Humboldt argued that the aim of the State is to help people realize their nature as human beings. As Frederick Beiser wrote of his conclusions in this regard: The end of human beings is not happiness, however, still less the accumulation of property. Rather, it is the realization of their characteristic powers, the development of all intellectual, moral, and physical powers into a harmonious whole. ... The state must be a Bildungsanstalt, an institution for the development of humanity.124 Von Humboldt believed that everyone can achieve some form of Bildung; on no account was it to be seen as the privilege of the elite. Von Humboldt did wonder though whether Bildung could survive the growth of commerce. HEGEL'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY One of the early appointments to the chair of philosophy at Berlin was Hegel. In developing his philosophy Hegel stood on the shoulders of Kant and Herder and their followers (most importantly Fichte and the young Romantics, including Schelling), developing a natural, social and political philosophy to challenge the tradition deriving from Hobbes, Newton, Locke and Bentham. It was Hegel more than anyone else who developed Herder's ideas into a political philosophy able to counter this tradition.125 Developing Rousseau's ideas, Kant had argued that freedom is not freedom from constraint but limiting one's actions in accordance with principles that one has judged to be universalizable. Fichte had reformulated Kant's ethics to emphasise the sociality of the ego and of reason. 'All individuals must be brought up to be human beings' he proclaimed, arguing that one only becomes a free, self-conscious subject through being recognized as such by other free, self-conscious subjects.126 On this basis, Fichte 123 Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio, p.134. 124 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, p.131. 125 As Charles Taylor argued in Hegel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976, ch.1 126 J.G. Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, trans. Michael Bauer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, §3, p.38. argued that the fundamental principle of ethics must be 'to limit your freedom so that the others around you can also be free'.127 He used this as a starting point to develop a political philosophy based on upholding human freedom, arguing that we have a primordial right to be free, that is, to be the cause of our actions rather than the effect of others' actions. The foundation for the freedom of the citizens of Athenian Greece and Republican Rome, that which gave them the independence and time to participate in public life, had been landholdings worked by slaves. To provide the basis for freedom without slaves, Fichte argued that freedom must include the right to gainful and secure employment from which people are able to make a living.128 One of the functions of the State is to embody the common will and be the objective viewpoint from which to recognize the freedom and needs of each individual and judge the actions of its citizens. Along with its legislative, executive and judicial functions, Fichte argued that the State should also observe the various activities of the branches of the State and government to see whether they comply with the basic principles of 'right'.129 That is, the State should recognize and guarantee people's freedom, including their freedom from economic insecurity, and recognize the significance of their role in society. Embracing and developing Fichte's arguments, Hegel reformulated Herder's ideas on culture and self-formation by conceiving 'culture' (although Hegel generally wrote of 'spirit' rather than 'culture') as the medium through which people are recognized and then become free agents as well as the medium through which they work to transform nature and strive to represent the world to each other and to themselves. Hegel could now explain the advance of freedom as an outcome of the struggle for recognition, and he had identified the motive which could overcome people's egocentric interests and inspire them to act for the common good: the quest for recognition. He had shown how we only become free persons through achieving mutual recognition in a free society and being educated to understand this. Hegel then characterized the whole of human 127 Ibid., §10, p.102, as translated by Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p.123. 128 Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, §19D, p.203. 129 Ibid.,. §16, p.151. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 21 history as a sequence of cultural formations (or forms of spirit) through which people have been recognized more and more adequately as free agents, culminating in the modern State where everyone is recognized as free. In developing his account of the modern State Hegel, building on Fichte's work, was concerned to understand the achievements and also the problems of the past, particularly of France and Britain. He was centrally interested in exposing the illusions in the apparent success of Britain and working out an alternative social and political order.130 He argued that while the oligarchy of wealth based on self-interest had led to the flourishing of commerce, it had also led to excessive concentrations of wealth and reduced most people to day labourers or to an unemployed rabble, losing all sense of right, integrity and honour.131 The general population had become, as Marxists argued, wage-slaves, forced into dependence for their subsistence on the arbitrary will of another and incapable of enjoying the wider freedoms of civil society. Hegel concluded: England which, because private persons have a predominant share in public affairs, has been regarded as having the freest of all constitutions. Experience shows that that country – as compared with the other civilized States of Europe – is the most backward in civil and criminal legislation, in the law and liberty of property, in arrangements for art and science, and that objective freedom or rational right is rather sacrificed to formal right and particular private interest.132 But France had not provided an alternative. It was clear to Hegel that there was no possibility of achieving freedom through making people conform to the general will conceived as the result of a contract, as Rousseau had proposed and the French had attempted to achieve in the 130 That Hegel was not merely describing reality but was putting forward ideas to solve problems, disguising what he was doing to avoid censorship, has become increasingly evident. On this see Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History, London, Routledge, 1991, esp.104-119. 131 Hegel The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, §244 132 Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, §544, p.273. French revolution. The result was, inevitably, terror.133 To overcome such problems Hegel argued for a social order which gave a place to the market or 'civil society' in which people pursued their own interests, but treated this as only one domain which must be circumscribed and checked by other domains. Hegel argued for not only a division of powers between the legislative, judicial and administrative branches of government, but a plurality of autonomous institutions checking the power of each other in which people could engage, achieve recognition and realize their freedom. To begin with, the family as the institution in which people achieved immediate recognition in a relationship of love, should not be conceived in economic terms. Civil society in which the market, dominated by selfinterest, operated, was acknowledged but was treated not as a natural order of things but a particular institutional structure based on the recognition of rights to property. Such recognition implies a system of law standing above such self-interest and above the market. Hegel acknowledged, as the economists had done, that in this domain self-interest worked for the common good, but only up to a point.134 Without guild corporations, employers in England and Scotland (where trade unions were illegal until 1824) were able to lower wages to such an extent that the economy suffered from under-consumption, driving civil society to seek markets elsewhere and to colonize other countries.135 To overcome this problem Hegel defended the Corporation as an institution able to provide the family with a stable basis in the sense that it could ensure its members a livelihood and gain recognition for its members' needs, abilities and their contribution to society.136 This would provide their members with an identity as people of significance, as part of a whole which is itself an organ of the entire society, enabling them to 133 Hegel, The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §258, p.276.. 134 Ibid., §243, p.266. 135 Ibid., §246, p.267f. 136 Ibid., §253, p.271. This is a contentious claim, since in the past interpreters of Hegel assumed that he was merely describing different kinds of people in society. This is almost certainly a misinterpretation. See Robert R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, p.251 for a discussion of this issue. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 22 promote with comparative disinterest the ends of this whole. Hegel noted that when Corporations break down and people are reduced to mere selfseeking, they will strive to gain recognition through external proofs of success to which no limits can be set. That is, Hegel had recognized conspicuous consumption as a disease of a defective society. Beyond the Corporation is the State. The State was characterized by Hegel as the unification of the family principle with that of civil society.137 The State 'as the spirit of a nation [Volk] is both the law which permeates all relations within it and also the customs and consciousness of the individuals who belong to it.'138 It is the embodiment of the universal aspect of the society, the common good in which recognition of the significance of each individual and each institution is objectified; the organization of the whole, differentiated into particular agencies concerned to produce the whole as a result. The government is that part of the State 'which intentionally aims at preserving those parts, but at the same time gets hold of and carries out those general aims of the whole which rise above the function of the family and civil society.'139 The government itself should consist of a plurality of partly autonomous institutions. As Hegel argued: The one essential canon to make liberty deep and real is to give every business belonging to the general interests of the State a separate organization wherever they are essentially distinct. Such real division must be: for liberty is only deep when it is differentiated in all its fullness and these differences manifested in existence.140 Hegel's State was to consist of a constitutional monarchy, an elected bi-cameral assembly, local self-government and a powerful civil service. The employees of the State are its public officials or civil servants. As a consequence of his position, the civil servant's appointment 'provides him with resources ... and frees his external situation and official activity from other kinds of subjective dependence and influence.'141 Hegel 137 Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, §535, p.263. 138 Hegel, The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §274, p.312. 139 Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, §541, p.269. 140 Loc.cit. 141 Hegel, The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §294, p.333. proclaimed 'that the service of the State requires those who perform it to sacrifice the independent and discretionary satisfaction of their subjective ends, and thereby gives them the right to find their satisfaction in the performance of their duties'.142 Hegel only made sporadic comments about education, but it is clear that for the most part he endorsed Herder's exalted notion of education as Bildung, self-formation through appropriating, developing and passing on a tradition, making it possible for people to govern themselves, Fichte's claim that '[a]ll individuals must be educated into being persons, otherwise they would not be persons',143 and von Humboldt's redefinition of the university as an institution which can only function properly insofar as its autonomy is maintained.144 He differed from these predecessors, particularly in his later philosophy, in according less significance to individuality. As one interpreter of Hegel noted, he held that education 'consists fundamentally in disciplining what is particular or individual in the human personality so that it conforms to what is universal ... developing the capacities to rise above mere feeling and intuitions, to think in conceptual terms which can be articulated and rationally defended in discourse.'145 However, it is likely that the autonomy of the university defended by von Humboldt was Hegel's model for defending autonomy for a plurality of institutions within the State and its government as the condition for real liberty. But universities have a privileged place among such organizations. It is through education that people are formed as self-forming subjects with an understanding of the internal relationships between all the parts of the State to each other and to the whole. Since the universal also means 'what is rationally recognized as valid and binding in the social order' education 'is therefore also the development of the capacity 142 Loc.cit. 143 Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, §3, p.38 as translated by Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p.121. 144 See Alan W. Wood, 'Hegel on Education' in Philosophers on Education, ed. Rorty, pp.300-317; and Nigel Tubb, 'Hegel's Educational Theory and Practice', British Journal of Educational Studies, vol.44, no.2, June 1996, pp.181-199. 145 Wood, 'Hegel on Education', p.313. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 23 and disposition to conform to the rational demands of social life.'146 Universities produce the people who can understand and commit themselves to upholding and advancing freedom and the quest for truth and the institutions which objectify and sustain this quest. They provide the standpoint from which those engaged in inquiry are able to advance people's understanding not only of themselves, their society and their era, but of human history and the cosmos and our place within it. In Hegel's terminology, the universities are the objective standpoint from which Absolute Spirit is able to see that 'the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom.'147 GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE REVIVAL OF THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY What I have presented here is a very schematic account of some of the central ideas of Herder, Kant, von Humboldt and Hegel which, as Germany became the intellectual centre of the world in the nineteenth century, had an enormous influence throughout the world.148 These are the ideas which, advancing the radical enlightenment, formed the core of the opposition to the tradition of thought deriving from Hobbes, Newton and Locke. They underlie the notions of national culture, the formation of subjects of the State and education associated with the Humboldtian University (and education generally) explicated by Readings. As opposed to the Hobbesian tradition of political philosophy with its focus on protecting property, increasing wealth, maximizing pleasure and keeping people under control, the tradition of radical enlightenment as it had been developed in Germany and interpreted elsewhere upheld a notion of the good life as self-actualization through participating in an autonomous, democratic nation-State committed to social justice and economic security for its members to enable them to participate in community life and develop their full potential as humans. By 146 Loc.cit. 147 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York, Dover, p.456. 148 On its influence on Great Britain and Australia, mainly through the philosophy of T.H. Green, see Marian Sawer, 'The Ethical State: Social Liberalism and the Critique of Contract', Australian Historical Studies, April, 2000, Vol.31, Issue 115, 67-90. presenting these notions as simultaneously a development of the radical enlightenment concerned with autonomy, democracy, liberty, self-determination and freedom, and as a response to the opposition to this tradition with roots going back to Hobbes, it should now be clearer what is at stake in the dissolution of the nation-State and of the Humboldtian University. In the past this opposition has been somewhat confused by labels. Orthodox Marxists, claiming inspiration from Marx, interpreted his work from a Hobbesian perspective and, perversely ignoring the subtitle of him major work, Capital, Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, defended classical economics against neo-classical economics. As such, while appearing to be defenders of the radical enlightenment, they became major proponents of the Hobbesian tradition of thought.149 John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, while still proclaiming himself a utilitarian, became one of the most influential proselytizers of the ideas of the radical enlightenment.150 In hindsight it can now be seen that the opposition between the moderate enlightenment with its Hobbesian roots and the democratically oriented radical enlightenment is more important than the opposition between 'right' and 'left' the defence of privilege versus egalitarianism. Democracy implies an egalitarian community. Claims to support democracy without addressing inequalities of wealth and income are a sham, but so also are commitments to egalitarianism without commitment to democracy. Both orthodox Marxists and utilitarian proponents of the welfare State have betrayed the poor they purported to represent. Neoliberals, orthodox Marxists and orthodox Fabian socialists have become almost identical; the real opposition to oppression comes from those committed to 149 On the perversion of Marx's ideas by orthodox Marxists, see James D. White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism, Houndmills, Macmillan, 1996. 150 Apart from particular arguments, the familiarity with and influence of German philosophy is evident in a series of articles published in 1830 entitled The Spirit of the Age, the quote from Wilhelm von Humboldt with which Mill begins his most famous essay, On Liberty, his argument against 'benevolent despotism' in On Representative Government and his essay on 'Coleridge' (see The Six Great Humanistic Essays of John Stuart Mill, New York, Washington Square Press, 1963, pp.73-126). On Mill's indebtedness to Herder and von Humboldt, see Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, p.167f. Mill's indebtedness to civic humanism is evident in The Subjection of Women. ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 24 democracy, the heirs of the radical enlightenment. While the Hobbesian tradition, elaborated as Darwinism and Social Darwinism, defined progress as the domination of the entire world though commerce enabling the strong to triumph over the weak and backward, the tradition of radical enlightenment upheld the intrinsic value of diverse cultures and justified the independence of nations to pursue their own ends.151 As F.M. Barnard described Herder's political philosophy: Herder's principal political idea was the transformation of a world of 'mechanical' dynastic States into one of 'organic' nationStates, based on the principle of selfdetermination. This vision presupposed ... the realization of certain requirements both within States and in international relations generally during a period of transition, to which Herder applied the term 'humanization'. ... [H]e conceived national and international enlightenment as two complementary aspects of a single process.152 It was the principles of this tradition which were partially realized with the development of the social democratic State and with the League of Nations and then the United Nations; it is tradition deriving from Hobbes and Locke that is now moving towards realization in efforts of the 'coalition of the willing' to undermine the nationState, to either reduce the United Nations to an instrument of the powerful or to debunk it, and to impose market relations on every facet of life in every country throughout the world. The Hobbesian tradition construes nature as a mechanical order of matter in motion to be mastered and controlled by biological organisms in their struggle for survival, while the radical enlightenment tradition and its allies (which included the English Romantics and the American transcendentalists as well as those influenced by German philosophy) is associated 151 The tradition deriving from Herder also had enormous influence in anthropology and the defence of 'primitive' societies. It should be noted that despite a veneer of German Romanticism, the Nazis were part of the Hobbesian tradition of thought, being racists rather than nationalists. As Anthony Smith, the foremost theorist of nationalism pointed out, 'The purest contradiction of nationalism in toto is Nazism.' While appearing 'to be an extreme development of "ethnocentric" nationalism' it 'is founded on an altogether different principle.' (Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism, London, Duckworth, 1971, p.262). 152 Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, p.99. with a post-mechanistic organic conception of nature that gave rise to the discipline of ecology. It is this tradition which underlies the global environmental movement. It should be evident that both Readings' and Castoriadis' interpretations of the German tradition of philosophy were misleading. Hegel was not celebrating existing institutions as Castoriadis claimed; he was criticizing them, most importantly, the institutional forms of early nineteenth century Britain that are now being revived by neo-liberals. Hegel's State did give a significant place to the private realm and did allow a distinction between the governors and the governed, as Castoriadis complained. But Hegel, building on the tradition of civic humanism and Herder's philosophy, was trying to reformulate the notion of autonomy to make it practically relevant to the modern world with its much larger social entities, something that Castoriadis never really did. Hegel accepted a mixed constitution in which 'the imperium of the laws is greater than that of any other men'. In Hegel's mixed constitution democracy had only a limited place,153 but those he influenced modified his philosophy to give democracy a far greater place.154 Castoriadis did have a valid point to make against some German philosophers that they were committed to determinism and thereby rendering the notion of autonomy meaningless, as with Hegel portraying history as the progression of the world-spirit or Reason in which people, moved by their passions, are mere instruments.155 This does seem to uphold a form of heteronomy, presenting institutions not as the creation of a people but as having their source outside them. Even Herder portrayed history as the growing-up of humanity in which some notion of progress seemed to be taken for granted rather than something achieved by people. But a close reading of Hegel suggests that he only regarded broad trends as inevitable, and did not assume that the political form that he was defending must inevitably be realized.156 More importantly, most 153 On just how much committed to democracy Hegel was, see Frederick Beiser, Hegel, New York, Routledge, 2005, p.256ff. 154 See John Edward Toews, Hegelianism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980. 155 Castoriadis, World in Fragments, p.35. 156 See for instance Beiser, Hegel, p.222f. and, on the cunning of reason, p.267ff. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 25 of those inspired by these German philosophers (Marx in his later years and neo-Marxists, hermeneuticists, pragmatists, existentialists and process philosophers) abandoned determinism. Castoriadis' own opposition to determinism was strongly influenced by the advance in these traditions of thought emerging from German philosophy.157 To be made a subject of the State by the education system did not mean 'being subjected to the idea of the state', but being developed as an autonomous person with the means to evaluate and criticize what is actual. The State as conceived by Hegel is not something separate from people to which they had to be subordinated but the set of institutions and roles organized to inspire people and to enable people so inspired to work for the common good of the nation and of humanity and to be recognized for what they are doing. People as subjects of the State are not merely the effects of the State; they are the people continually challenged to produce the State through which they can then define themselves as its 'subjects', that is, as its citizens. And the nation is not something which simply is; it is a project to create a community of memory and a community of hope and to help realize this through a territorial State.158 It is the State as conceived by Herder and Hegel in which the nation is realized as a community which later came to be referred to as the nation-State. The development of the nation-State, the idea of the State deriving from Herder and Hegel, was central to the development of democracy and to the growth of autonomy, reaching a peak in the third quarter of the twentieth century. When this political philosophy is properly understood it becomes possible to properly appreciate the Humboldtian University not only as a central institution of the nation-State but also as central to democracy. Based on the notion of culture and reflecting a deeper appreciation of the relationship between individuals, cultures, societies and freedom than had been achieved by the civic humanists, it was an advance over the kind of education called for by Jefferson, although it was committed to much the same 157 This is evident in Castoriadis, 'Time and Creation' in World in Fragments, pp.374-401 despite opening references to Aristotle. 158 As David Carr argued in Time, Narrative, and History, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991, p.138ff. ends. It should now be evident that Readings had a more profound understanding of the modern university than the Girouxs, appreciating more clearly than they the extent to which education was designed to form people as members of communities, not merely to equip them with the means to protest against those in positions of power. It should also be evident, however, that Readings still did not appreciate the connection between nation-States and democracy and the democratic impetus behind the German notion of the State as a nation-State and the Humboldtian University. Partly, this can be explained by the compromised state of the Humboldtian University prior to the present crisis. In essence, the Humboldtian University combined teaching and research creating a community of academics and students committed to inquiry, and the Arts and Science Faculties were the core of the university by virtue of their relatively disinterested commitment to rationality and pursuit of truth. They were supposed to work towards providing people with a coherent world-view as a means to understand themselves and their place in the world. But in Anglophone countries, as Readings noted, literature was granted an inordinate role in the creation of national subjects, as opposed to Humboldt's original idea of the university in which philosophy was the discipline which played the pre-eminent role, and natural philosophy, what later became the natural sciences, was just as important as literature as a component of culture. In fact it was not simply a matter of science being understood as technology in Anglophone countries as Readings suggested; within Anglophone universities there has been a continual struggle between two opposing conceptions of the world and of humanity, one deriving from the tradition of Hobbes, Newton and Locke which has dominated the natural sciences (although there has been an increasingly strong opposition to this) and those human sciences based on this tradition, notably classical and neo-classical economics and mainstream psychology, the other with their roots in the culture of the Renaissance and late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century German philosophy dominating the humanities (with the exception of mainstream analytic philosophy) and humanistic social sciences (including ARRAN GARE Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 26 historical and institutional economics).159 The conflict between these two traditions has underpinned two major opposing political influences, the first anti-democratic, the second democratic. In general, the Hobbesian tradition has prevailed, overwhelming the humanistic social sciences and reducing much of the humanities to the consumption of 'high culture'. The triumph of neo-classical economics to a position where it has now replaced both ethics and political philosophy and, through 'rational choice theory' is attempting to redefine rationality itself, is the core of public policy formation in both neo-liberal and neoconservative governments, is the ultimate triumph of the Hobbesian tradition of thought. Much of the impetus to destroy the Humboldtian University came from within the university. Within the natural sciences, however, the Hobbesian tradition has been losing ground to post-mechanistic traditions upholding a view of nature as consisting of self-organizing, creative processes, particularly in physics160 and biology161, creating what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers called 'the new alliance' between science and the humanities.162 These developments have been associated with the revival of metaphysics within philosophy, most importantly, process metaphysics, reasserting for itself the role for philosophy called upon by the Humboldtian University, supporting these developments in the sciences and supporting this new alliance.163 The new alliance, vindicating and advancing the radical enlightenment's philosophy of nature and social philosophy, should have supported democracy and strengthened the Humboldtian University. The present efforts to control universities more effectively has been partly in response to this, 159 As shown in Geoffrey M. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History, London, Routledge, 2001. 160 For a popular exposition on such ideas, see David Bohm, Science, Order, and Creativity, 2nd ed. London, Routledge, 2000. 161 See for instance Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin, Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, and Stanley N. Salthe Development and Evolution, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1993. 162 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, Toronto: Bantam Books, 1984, p.xxixf. 163 See Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics, New York, SUNY Press, 1996. See also the SUNY Series, Constructive Postmodern Thought, ed. David Ray Griffin. attempting to characterize science as nothing but a means to develop technology and to more effectively control the activities of scientists and in some cases to get rid of the humanities altogether. This can only be understood as part of the effort to undermine the mission of the Humboldtian University to educate people to be self-governing, part of the drive for economic globalization and the drive to undermine the core institutions upholding the nation-State as an autonomous democratic community.164 But the battle is not over. Economic globalization associated with neo-liberalism and neoconservatism not only threatens the destruction of democracy and the impoverishment of vast numbers of people; it threatens the global ecosystem and the future of humanity. It is now becoming apparent that people throughout the world are rallying around the banner of democracy to oppose neo-liberalism, neoconservatism and economic and corporate globalization. The nature of this economic globalization is now much better understood. It is dominated by transnational corporations legally recognized as persons with far greater rights but almost none of the responsibilities of ordinary people.165 These are penetrating and taking control of the institutions of the nation-State, creating a new kind of State which is no longer a nation-State but an apparatus to facilitate penetration of all facets of life by the market while keeping the losers under control.166 David Korten in his book When Corporations Rule the World characterized this as 'a market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money.'167 Later, drawing on Mae-Wan Ho's post-mechanistic biological theories, he 164 Not that this is formulated as a conscious intention; it is an alignment of careerists with a feel for the game, aware that to get on they must serve those who have most power, so that, as Pierre Bourdieu put it, 'strings of' "moves" ... are objectively organized as strategies without being the product of a genuine strategic intention' (The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, p.62). 165 See Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, London, Constable, 2004. 166 See William I Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2004, p.94. 167 David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, West Hartford, Kumarian Press, 1995. p.12. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Concrescence 2005 Vol.6 pp. 3-27 ISSN 1445-4297 © Arran Gare, 2005. 27 noted that the reference to capitalism as a cancer is 'less a metaphor than a clinical diagnosis of a pathology to which market economies are prone in the absence of adequate citizen and government oversight.'168 While many of the non-democratic left have joined this pathology, embracing economic globalization (or simply denying the possibility of opposing it), there has been a convergence between those still committed to gaining democratic control over the economy on what must be done. Essentially, as Herman Daly and John Cobb argued, the world needs to be organized as communities of communities subordinating the market to the quest for the common good, with power devolved downwards as much as possible to local communities.169 The nation-State has a central place in this. Those whose thinking is closest to Castoriadis, the libertarian socialists, who have always been most committed to democracy but skeptical of the nation-State, are appreciating the need to defend and reform institutions of the nation-State in conjunction with efforts to develop local participatory democracy.170 Communists in Kerala, India, and Swedish social democrats, who have traditionally upheld a major role for the nation-State, are now calling for participatory democracy to complement State control of the economy.171 Attacking the 'Globalism' of neoliberals, John Ralston Saul, following Hedley Bull, has called for a 'system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty'. He has presented a vision of Europe as 'a continent of peoples, separate and interwoven' rather than dissolved into a union, and called for a revival of 'positive' 168 David C. Korten, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, West Hartford, Kumarian Press, 1999, p.15. 169 Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, 2nd ed. Boston, Beacon Press, 1994, Introduction and ch.9. 170 See Robin Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy, New York: Routledge, 2005, esp. p.280ff. Takis Fotopoulous, however, believes that nothing can be salvaged from the nation-State. See 'The Inclusive Democracy project – A rejoinder', The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Issue 3, 2005, pp.1-45. 171 On Kerala, see Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy, p.359ff. On Swedish social democracy see Magnus Ryner, Capitalist Restructuring, Globalization and the Third Way: Lessons from the Swedish Model, London, Routledge, 2002. nationalism.172 Such a strategy is being successfully pursued in South American by Venezuela which provides a model for the world. Looking back for inspiration to the liberator of South America, Simon Bolivar, nationalism has been revived along with direct democracy, using the power base generated by this direct democracy to overcome the corruption of the institutions of State and to reclaim them for the nation. At the same time Venezuela has promoted an extended Latin American nationalism to create a South American community which will be able to protect the democracy of nation-States while calling for the democratization of the United Nations.173 It is clear that in the coming struggle between proponents of corporate globalization and proponents of democracy that a major battleground will be over control of the institutions of the State, including schools and universities. It is not enough to live in the ruins of the Humboldtian University. The Humboldtian University should be fought for and brought back to life. However, it is unlikely that this will be achieved except by upholding the radical enlightenment, now advancing as the new alliance between the sciences and the humanities underpinned by process metaphysics. On this basis, we can then reaffirm Alfred North Whitehead's proclamation: 'The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue.'174 172 John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, Camberwell: Penguin, 2005, p.279. 173 Given the importance of nationalism in this struggle and the contempt for nationalism by the cosmopolitan left, it is worth noting that Anthony D. Smith, as noted, one of the foremost theorists of nationalism, concluded one of his more recent books with the argument that 'the nation and nationalism remain the only realistic basis for a free society of states in the modern world.' (Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995, p.147). 174 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, [1938] New York, The Free Press, 1966, p7.