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Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill

Online ISBN:
9780226467528
Print ISBN:
9780226467498
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill

Dana Villa
Dana Villa
University of Notre Dame
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Published:
18 September 2017
Online ISBN:
9780226467528
Print ISBN:
9780226467498
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Teachers of the People returns to the moment in history when “the people” first appeared on the stage of modern European politics. That moment—the era just before and after the French Revolution—led many major thinkers to celebrate the dawning of a new epoch in the history of mankind. Yet these same thinkers also worried intensely about the people’s seemingly evident lack of political knowledge, experience, and judgment. The book shows how their reformist and progressive sentiments were often undercut by a deep skepticism concerning the political capacity of ordinary people. Differences aside, Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill all thought that “the people” needed to be restrained, educated, and guided—by specific laws and institutions, and by a skilled political elite. The result, the book argues, was less the taming of democracy’s wilder impulses than a pervasive paternalism culminating in new forms of the tutorial state. Ironically, the book argues, it is the reliance upon the distinction between “teachers” and “taught” in the work of these theorists that generates civic passivity and ignorance. This, in turn, creates conditions favorable to the emergence of an undemocratic and illiberal populism.

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