From the backcover:

For the first time ever, the leading figures in today's critical education join forces. The collection, , offers a project in which the leading figures in critical education meet young academics who dialogically relate to each other’s work and critically reflect on their own contribution to Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy. In its nineteen chapters this book reconstructs the history of Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy and presents various and conflicting responses to the possibility of a present-day counter-
education. This collection offers a milestone and a new beginning in the relations between alternative (modern and postmodern) critical theories and critical pedagogies.

Alibi for militarist interventions, sacralization for the tyranny of the
market, ideological foundation for the fundamentalism of the politically
correct: can the ‘symbolic fiction’ of universal rights be recuperated for
the progressive politicization of actual socio-economic relations?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Contemporary appeals to human rights within our liberal-capitalist societies
generally rest upon three assumptions. First, that such appeals function in
opposition to modes of fundamentalism that would naturalize or essentialize
contingent, historically conditioned traits. Second, that the two most basic
rights are freedom of choice, and the right to dedicate one’s life to the
pursuit of pleasure (rather than to sacrifice it for some higher ideological
cause). And third, that an appeal to human rights may form the basis for a
defence against the ‘excess of power’.

Let us begin with fundamentalism. Here, the evil (to paraphrase Hegel) often
dwells in the gaze that perceives it. Take the Balkans during the 1990s, the
site of widespread human-rights violations. At what point did the Balkans—a
geographical region of South-Eastern Europe—become ‘Balkan’, with all that
designates for the European ideological imaginary today? The answer is: the
mid-19th century, just as the Balkans were being fully exposed to the
effects of European modernization. The gap between earlier Western European
perceptions and the ‘modern’ image is striking. Already in the 16th century
the French naturalist Pierre Belon could note that ‘the Turks force no one
to live like a Turk’. Small surprise, then, that so many Jews found asylum
and religious freedom in Turkey and other Muslim countries after Ferdinand
and Isabella had expelled them from Spain in 1492—with the result that, in a
supreme twist of irony, Western travellers were disturbed by the public
presence of Jews in big Turkish cities. Here, from a long series of
examples, is a report from N. Bisani, an Italian who visited Istanbul in
1788:

A stranger, who has beheld the intolerance of London and Paris, must be much
surprised to see a church here between a mosque and a synagogue, and a
dervish by the side of a Capuchin friar. I know not how this government can
have admitted into its bosom religions so opposite to its own. It must be
from degeneracy of Mahommedanism, that this happy contrast can be produced.
What is still more astonishing is to find that this spirit of toleration is
generally prevalent among the people; for here you see Turks, Jews,
Catholics, Armenians, Greeks and Protestants conversing together on subjects
of business or pleasure with as much harmony and goodwill as if they were of
the same country and religion. [1]
The very feature that the West today celebrates as the sign of its cultural
superiority—the spirit and practice of multicultural tolerance—is thus
dismissed as an effect of Islamic ‘degeneracy’. The strange fate of the
Trappist monks of Etoile Marie is equally telling. Expelled from France by
the Napoleonic regime, they settled in Germany, but were driven out in 1868.
Since no other Christian state would take them, they asked the Sultan’s
permission to buy land near Banja Luka, in the Serb part of today’s Bosnia,
where they lived happily ever after—until they got caught in the Balkan
conflicts between Christians.

Where, then, did the fundamentalist features—religious intolerance, ethnic
violence, fixation upon historical trauma—which the West now associates with
‘the Balkan’, originate? Clearly, from the West itself. In a neat instance
of Hegel’s ‘reflexive determination’, what Western Europeans observe and
deplore in the Balkans is what they themselves introduced there; what they
combat is their own historical legacy run amok. Let us not forget that the
two great ethnic crimes imputed to the Turks in the 20th century—the
Armenian genocide and the persecution of the Kurds—were not committed by
traditionalist Muslim political forces, but by the military modernizers who
sought to cut Turkey loose from its old-world ballast and turn it into a
European nation-state. Mladen Dolar’s old quip, based on a detailed reading
of Freud’s references to the region, that the European unconscious is
structured like the Balkans, is thus literally true: in the guise of the
Otherness of ‘Balkan’, Europe takes cognizance of the ‘stranger in itself’,
of its own repressed.

But we might also examine the ways in which the ‘fundamentalist’
essentialization of contingent traits is itself a feature of
liberal-capitalist democracy. It is fashionable to complain that private
life is threatened or even disappearing, in face of the media’s ability to
expose one’s most intimate personal details to the public. True, on
condition that we turn things around: what is effectively disappearing here
is public life itself, the public sphere proper, in which one operates as a
symbolic agent who cannot be reduced to a private individual, to a bundle of
personal attributes, desires, traumas and idiosyncrasies. The ‘risk society’
commonplace—according to which the contemporary individual experiences
himself as thoroughly ‘denaturalized’, regarding even his most ‘natural’
traits, from ethnic identity to sexual preference, as being chosen,
historically contingent, learned—is thus profoundly deceiving. What we are
witnessing today is the opposite process: an unprecedented
re-naturalization. All big ‘public issues’ are now translated into attitudes
towards the regulation of ‘natural’ or ‘personal’ idiosyncrasies.

This explains why, at a more general level, pseudo-naturalized
ethno-religious conflicts are the form of struggle which best suits global
capitalism. In the age of ‘post-politics’, when politics proper is
progressively replaced by expert social administration, the sole remaining
legitimate sources of conflict are cultural (religious) or natural (ethnic)
tensions. And ‘evaluation’ is precisely the regulation of social promotion
that fits with this re-naturalization. Perhaps the time has come to
reassert, as the truth of evaluation, the perverted logic to which Marx
refers ironically in his description of commodity fetishism, quoting
Dogberry’s advice to Seacoal at the end of Capital’s Chapter 1: ‘To be a
well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by
nature.’ To be a computer expert or a successful manager is a gift of nature
today, but lovely lips or eyes are a fact of culture.

Unfreedom of choice

As to freedom of choice: I have written elsewhere of the pseudo-choice
offered to the adolescents of Amish communities who, after the strictest of
upbringings, are invited at the age of seventeen to plunge themselves into
every excess of contemporary capitalist culture—a whirl of fast cars, wild
sex, drugs, drink and so forth. [2] After a couple of years, they are
allowed to choose whether they want to return to the Amish way. Since they
have been brought up in virtual ignorance of American society, the
youngsters are quite unprepared to cope with such permissiveness, which in
most cases generates a backlash of unbearable anxiety. The vast majority
vote to return to the seclusion of their communities. This is a perfect case
of the difficulties that invariably accompany ‘freedom of choice’: while
Amish children are formally given a free choice, the conditions in which
they must make it render the choice unfree.

The problem of pseudo-choice also demonstrates the limitations of the
standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women who wear the veil: acceptable
if it is their own free choice rather than imposed on them by husbands or
family. However, the moment a woman dons the veil as the result of personal
choice, its meaning changes completely: it is no longer a sign of belonging
to the Muslim community, but an expression of idiosyncratic individuality.
In other words, a choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality
of the choice itself: it is only the woman who does not choose to wear a
veil that effectively chooses a choice. This is why, in our secular liberal
democracies, people who maintain a substantial religious allegiance are in a
subordinate position: their faith is ‘tolerated’ as their own personal
choice, but the moment they present it publicly as what it is for them—a
matter of substantial belonging—they stand accused of ‘fundamentalism’.
Plainly, the ‘subject of free choice’, in the ‘tolerant’, multicultural
sense, can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of
being uprooted from one’s particular life-world.
The material force of the ideological notion of ‘free choice’ within
capitalist democracy was well illustrated by the fate of the Clinton
Administration’s ultra-modest health reform programme. The medical lobby
(twice as strong as the infamous defence lobby) succeeded in imposing on the
public the idea that universal healthcare would somehow threaten freedom of
choice in that domain. Against this conviction, all enumeration of ‘hard
facts’ proved ineffective. We are here at the very nerve-centre of liberal
ideology: freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the ‘psychological’
subject, endowed with propensities which he or she strives to realize. And
this especially holds today, in the era of a ‘risk society’ in which the
ruling ideology endeavours to sell us the very insecurities caused by the
dismantling of the welfare state as the opportunity for new freedoms. If
labour flexibilization means you have to change jobs every year, why not see
it as a liberation from the constraints of a permanent career, a chance to
reinvent yourself and realize the hidden potential of your personality? If
there is a shortfall on your standard health insurance and retirement plan,
meaning you have to opt for extra coverage, why not perceive it as an
additional opportunity to choose: either a better lifestyle now or long-term
security? Should this predicament cause you anxiety, the ‘second modernity’
ideologist will diagnose you as desiring to ‘escape from freedom’, of an
immature sticking to old stable forms. Even better, when this is inscribed
into the ideology of the subject as the ‘psychological’ individual, pregnant
with natural abilities, you will automatically tend to interpret all these
changes as the outcome of your personality, not as the result of being
thrown around by market forces.

Politics of jouissance

What of the basic right to the pursuit of pleasure? Today’s politics is ever
more concerned with ways of soliciting or controlling jouissance. The
opposition between the liberal-tolerant West and fundamentalist Islam is
most often condensed as that between, on the one side, a woman’s right to
free sexuality, including the freedom to display or expose herself and to
provoke or disturb men; and, on the other side, desperate male attempts to
suppress or control this threat. (The Taliban forbade metal-tipped heels for
women, as the tapping sounds coming from beneath an all-concealing burka
might have an overpowering erotic appeal.)

Both sides, of course, mystify their position ideologically and morally. For
the West, women’s right to expose themselves provocatively to male desire is
legitimized as their right to enjoy their bodies as they please. For Islam,
the control of female sexuality is legitimized as the defence of women’s
dignity against their being reduced to objects of male exploitation. So when
the French state prohibits Muslim girls from wearing the veil in school, one
can claim that they are thus enabled to dispose of their bodies as they
wish. But one can also argue that the true traumatic point for critics of
Muslim ‘fundamentalism’ was that there were women who did not participate in
the game of making their bodies available for sexual seduction, or for the
social exchange and circulation involved in this. In one way or another, all
the other issues—gay marriage and adoption, abortion, divorce—relate to
this. What the two poles share is a strict disciplinary approach,
differently directed: ‘fundamentalists’ regulate female self-presentation to
forestall sexual provocation; pc feminist liberals impose a no-less-severe
regulation of behaviour aimed at containing forms of harassment.

Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for
otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short,
the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as
it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My
duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not
get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I
should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is
increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist
society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe
distance from others. The same goes for the emergent logic of humanitarian
or pacifist militarism. War is acceptable insofar as it seeks to bring about
peace, or democracy, or the conditions for distributing humanitarian aid.
And does the same not hold even more for democracy and human rights
themselves? Human rights are ok if they are ‘rethought’ to include torture
and a permanent emergency state. Democracy is ok if it is cleansed of its
populist excesses and limited to those mature enough to practise it.
Caught in the vicious cycle of the imperative of jouissance, the temptation
is to opt for what appears its ‘natural’ opposite, the violent renunciation
of jouissance. This is perhaps the underlying motif of all so-called
fundamentalisms—the endeavour to contain (what they perceive as) the
excessive ‘narcissistic hedonism’ of contemporary secular culture with a
call to reintroduce the spirit of sacrifice. A psychoanalytic perspective
immediately enables us to see why such an endeavour goes wrong. The very
gesture of casting away enjoyment—‘Enough of decadent self-indulgence!
Renounce and purify!’—produces a surplus-enjoyment of its own. Do not all
‘totalitarian’ universes which demand of their subjects a violent
(self-)sacrifice to the cause exude the bad smell of a fascination with a
lethal-obscene jouissance? Conversely, a life oriented towards the pursuit
of pleasure will entail the harsh discipline of a ‘healthy lifestyle’—jogging,
dieting, mental relaxation—if it is to be enjoyed to the maximum. The
superego injunction to enjoy oneself is immanently intertwined with the
logic of sacrifice. The two form a vicious cycle, each extreme supporting
the other. The choice is never simply between doing one’s duty or striving
for pleasure and satisfaction. This elementary choice is always redoubled by
a further one, between elevating one’s striving for pleasure into one’s
supreme duty, and doing one’s duty not for duty’s sake but for the
gratification it brings. In the first case, pleasures are my duty, and the
‘pathological’ striving for pleasure is located in the formal space of duty.
In the second case, duty is my pleasure, and doing my duty is located in the
formal space of ‘pathological’ satisfactions.

Defence against power?

But if human rights as opposition to fundamentalism and as pursuit of
happiness lead us into intractable contradictions, are they not after all a
defence against the excess of power? Marx formulated the strange logic of
power as ‘in excess’ by its very nature in his analyses of 1848. In The
Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France, he ‘complicated’ in a
properly dialectical way the logic of social representation (political
agents representing economic classes and forces). In doing so, he went much
further than the usual notion of these ‘complications’, according to which
political representation never directly mirrors social structure—a single
political agent can represent different social groups, for instance; or a
class can renounce its direct representation and leave to another the job of
securing the politico-juridical conditions of its rule, as the English
capitalist class did by leaving to the aristocracy the exercise of political
power. Marx’s analyses pointed towards what Lacan would articulate, more
than a century later, as the ‘logic of the signifier’. Apropos the Party of
Order, formed after the defeat of the June insurrection, Marx wrote that
only after Louis-Napoleon’s December 10 election victory allowed it to ‘cast
off’ its coterie of bourgeois republicans
was the secret of its existence, the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists
into one party, disclosed. The bourgeois class fell apart into two big
factions which alternately—the big landed proprietors under the restored
monarchy and the finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under
the July Monarchy—had maintained a monopoly of power. Bourbon was the royal
name for the predominant influence of the interests of the one faction,
Orléans the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the
other faction—the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in which
both factions could maintain with equal power the common class interest
without giving up their mutual rivalry. [3]
This, then, is the first complication. When we are dealing with two or more
socio-economic groups, their common interest can only be represented in the
guise of the negation of their shared premise: the common denominator of the
two royalist factions is not royalism, but republicanism. (Just as today,
the only political agent that consistently represents the interests of
capital as such, in its universality, above particular factions, is the
‘social liberal’ Third Way.) Then, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx
dissected the makeup of the Society of December
10, Louis-Napoleon’s private army of thugs:

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious
origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were
vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves,
swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers,
maquereaux [pimps], brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders,
rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole
indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French
call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the
Society of December 10 . . . This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief
of the lumpen proletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the
interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal,
refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself
unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrases. [4]

The logic of the Party of Order is here brought to its radical conclusion.
In the same way that the only common denominator of all royalist factions is
republicanism, the only common denominator of all classes is the excremental
excess, the refuse, the remainder, of all classes. That is to say, insofar
as the leader perceives himself as standing above class interests, his
immediate class base can only be the excremental remainder of all classes,
the rejected non-class of each class. And, as Marx develops in another
passage, it is this support from the ‘social abject’ which enables Bonaparte
to shift his position as required, representing in turn each class against
the others.

As the executive authority which has made itself independent, Bonaparte
feels it to be his task to safeguard ‘bourgeois order’. But the strength of
this bourgeois order lies in the middle class. He poses, therefore, as the
representative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense.
Nevertheless, he is somebody solely because he has broken the power of that
middle class, and keeps on breaking it daily. He poses, therefore, as the
opponent of the political and literary power of the middle class. [5]

But there is more. In order for this system to function—that is, for the
leader to stand above classes and not to act as a direct representative of
any one class—he also has to act as the representative of one particular
class: of the class which, precisely, is not sufficiently constituted to act
as a united agent demanding active representation. This class of people who
cannot represent themselves and can thus only be represented is, of course,
the class of small-holding peasants, who form a vast mass, the members of
which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold
relations with one other. Their mode of production isolates them from one
another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse . . . They are
consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name,
whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent
themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same
time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited
governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends
them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the
small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the
executive power subordinating society to itself. [6]
These three features together form the paradoxical structure of
populist-Bonapartist representation: standing above all classes, shifting
among them, involves a direct reliance on the abject/remainder of all
classes, plus the ultimate reference to the class of those who are unable to
act as a collective agent demanding political representation. This paradox
is grounded in the constitutive excess of representation over the
represented. At the level of the law, the state power merely represents the
interests of its subjects; it serves them, is responsible to them, and is
itself subject to their control. However, at the level of the superego
underside, the public message of responsibility is supplemented by the
obscene message of the unconditional exercise of power: ‘Laws do not really
bind me, I can do to you whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty if I
decide to do so, I can destroy you on a whim’. This obscene excess is a
necessary constituent of the notion of sovereignty. The asymmetry here is
structural: the law can only sustain its authority if subjects hear in it
the echo of the obscene, unconditional self-assertion of power.

This excess of power brings us to the ultimate argument against ‘big’
political interventions which aim at global transformation: the terrifying
experiences of the 20th century, a series of catastrophes which precipitated
disastrous violence on an unprecedented scale. There are three main
theorizations of these catastrophes. First, the view epitomized by the name
of Habermas: Enlightenment is in itself a positive, emancipatory process
with no inherent ‘totalitarian’ potential; the catastrophes that have
occurred merely indicate that it remains an unfinished project, and our task
should be to bring this project to completion. Second, the view associated
with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and, today, with
Agamben. The ‘totalitarian’ bent of Enlightenment is inherent and
definitive, the ‘administered world’ is its true consequence, and
concentration camps and genocides are a kind of negative-teleological
endpoint of the entire history of the West. Third, the view developed in the
works of Etienne Balibar, among others: modernity opens up a field of new
freedoms, but at the same time of new dangers, and there is no ultimate
teleological guarantee of the outcome. The contest remains open and
undecided.

The starting point of Balibar’s text on violence is the insufficiency of the
standard Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘converting’ violence into an instrument
of historical Reason, a force which begets a new social formation. [7] The
‘irrational’ brutality of violence is thus aufgehoben, ‘sublated’ in the
strict Hegelian sense, reduced to a particular ‘stain’ that contributes to
the overall harmony of historical progress. The 20th century confronted us
with catastrophes—some directed against Marxist political forces, others
generated by Marxist engagement itself—which cannot be ‘rationalized’ in
this way. Their instrumentalization into the tools of the Cunning of Reason
is not only ethically unacceptable but also theoretically wrong, ideological
in the strongest sense of the term. In his close reading of Marx, Balibar
nonetheless discerns an oscillation between this teleological
‘conversion-theory’ of violence, and a much more interesting notion of
history as an open-ended process of antagonistic struggles, whose final
‘positive’ outcome is not guaranteed by any encompassing historical
necessity.

Balibar argues that, for necessary structural reasons, Marxism is unable to
think the excess of violence that cannot be integrated into the narrative of
historical Progress. More specifically, it cannot provide an adequate theory
of fascism and Stalinism and their ‘extreme’ outcomes, Shoah and Gulag. Our
task is therefore twofold: to deploy a theory of historical violence as
something which cannot be instrumentalized by any political agent, which
threatens to engulf this agent itself in a self-destructive vicious cycle;
and also to pose the question of how to turn the revolutionary process
itself into a civilizing force. As a counter-example, take the process that
led to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Catherine de Medici’s goal was
limited and precise: hers was a Machiavellian plot to assassinate Admiral de
Coligny—a powerful Protestant pushing for war with Spain in the
Netherlands—and let the blame fall on the over-mighty Catholic family of de
Guise. Thus Catherine sought to engineer the fall of both the houses that
posed a menace to the unity of the French state. But the bid to play her
enemies off against each other degenerated into an uncontrolled frenzy of
blood. In her ruthless pragmatism, Catherine was blind to the passion with
which men clung to their beliefs.

Hannah Arendt’s insights are crucial here, emphasizing the distinction
between political power and the mere exercise of violence. Organizations run
by direct non-political authority—Army, Church, school—represent examples of
violence (Gewalt), not of political power in the strict sense of the term.
[8] At this point, however, we need to recall the distinction between the
public, symbolic law and its obscene supplement. The notion of the obscene
double-supplement of power implies that there is no power without violence.
Political space is never ‘pure’ but always involves some kind of reliance on
pre-political violence. Of course, the relationship between political power
and pre-political violence is one of mutual implication. Not only is
violence the necessary supplement of power, but power itself is
always-already at the root of every apparently ‘non-political’ relationship
of violence. The accepted violence and direct relationship of subordination
within the Army, Church, family and other ‘non-political’ social forms is in
itself the reification of a certain ethico-political struggle. The task of
critical analysis is to discern the hidden political process that sustains
all these ‘non’ or ‘pre’-political relationships. In human society, the
political is the encompassing structuring principle, so that every
neutralization of some partial content as ‘non-political’ is a political
gesture par excellence.

Humanitarian purity

It is within this context that we can situate the most salient human rights
issue: the rights of those who are starving or exposed to murderous
violence. Rony Brauman, who co-ordinated aid to Sarajevo, has demonstrated
how the very presentation of the crisis there as ‘humanitarian’, the very
recasting of a political-military conflict into humanitarian terms, was
sustained by an eminently political choice—basically, to take the Serb side
in the conflict. The celebration of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in
Yugoslavia took the place of a political discourse, Brauman argues, thus
disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. [9]

From this particular insight we may problematize, at a general level, the
ostensibly depoliticized politics of human rights as the ideology of
military interventionism serving specific economico-political ends. As Wendy
Brown has suggested apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism
presents itself as something of an anti-politics, a pure defence of the
innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defence of the individual
against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture,
state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations
or instantiations of collective power against individuals. [10]

However, the question is: what kind of politicization do those who intervene
on behalf of human rights set in motion against the powers they oppose? Do
they stand for a different formulation of justice, or do they stand in
opposition to collective justice projects? For example, it is clear that the
us-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in terms of ending the
suffering of the Iraqi people, was not only motivated by hard-headed
politico-economic interests but also relied on a determinate idea of the
political and economic conditions under which ‘freedom’ was to be delivered
to the Iraqi people: liberal-democratic capitalism, insertion into the
global market economy, etc. The purely humanitarian, anti-political politics
of merely preventing suffering thus amounts to an implicit prohibition on
elaborating a positive collective project of socio-political transformation.

At an even more general level, we might problematize the opposition between
the universal (pre-political) human rights possessed by every human being
‘as such’ and the specific political rights of a citizen, or member of a
particular political community. In this sense, Balibar argues for the
‘reversal of the historical and theoretical relationship between “man� and
“citizen�’ that proceeds by ‘explaining how man is made by citizenship and
not citizenship by man.’ [11] Balibar alludes here to Arendt’s insight on
the condition of refugees:

The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human
being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to
believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed
lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were
still human. [12]

This line, of course, leads straight to Agamben’s notion of homo sacer as a
human being reduced to ‘bare life’. In a properly Hegelian dialectics of
universal and particular, it is precisely when a human being is deprived of
the particular socio-political identity that accounts for his determinate
citizenship that—in one and the same move—he ceases to be recognized or
treated as human. [13] Paradoxically, I am deprived of human rights at the
very moment at which I am reduced to a human being ‘in general’, and thus
become the ideal bearer of those ‘universal human rights’ which belong to me
independently of my profession, sex, citizenship, religion, ethnic identity,
etc.

What, then, happens to human rights when they are the rights of homo sacer,
of those excluded from the political community; that is, when they are of no
use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, and
are treated as inhuman? Jacques Rancière proposes a salient dialectical
reversal: ‘When they are of no use, one does the same as charitable persons
do with their old clothes. One gives them to the poor. Those rights that
appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and
clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes and rights.’ Nevertheless,
they do not become void, for ‘political names and political places never
become merely void’. Instead the void is filled by somebody or something
else:

if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact the human rights
that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights
in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the ‘right to
humanitarian interference’—a right that some nations assume to the supposed
benefit of victimized populations, and very often against the advice of the
humanitarian organizations themselves. The ‘right to humanitarian
interference’ might be described as a sort of ‘return to sender’: the
disused rights that had been sent to the rightless are sent back to the
senders. [14]

So, to put it in the Leninist way: what the ‘human rights of Third World
suffering victims’ effectively means today, in the predominant discourse, is
the right of Western powers themselves to intervene politically,
economically, culturally and militarily in the Third World countries of
their choice, in the name of defending human rights [and in the name of democracy, JS]. The reference to Lacan’s
formula of communication (in which the sender gets his own message back from
the receiver-addressee in its inverted, i.e. true, form) is very much to the
point here. In the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the
developed West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third World
its own message in its true form.

The moment human rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with
them has to change: the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil must be
mobilized anew. Today’s ‘new reign of ethics’, clearly invoked in, say,
Ignatieff’s work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization,
depriving the victimized other of any political subjectivization. And, as
Rancière points out, liberal humanitarianism à la Ignatieff unexpectedly
meets the ‘radical’ position of Foucault or Agamben with regard to this
depoliticization: their notion of ‘biopolitics’ as the culmination of
Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of ‘ontological trap’, in
which concentration camps appear as ontological destiny: ‘each of us would
be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint
between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to
be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap’. [15]

We thus arrive at a standard ‘anti-essentialist’ position, a kind of
political version of Foucault’s notion of sex as generated by the multitude
of the practices of sexuality. ‘Man’, the bearer of human rights, is
generated by a set of political practices which materialize citizenship;
‘human rights’ are, as such, a false ideological universality, which masks
and legitimizes a concrete politics of Western imperialism, military
interventions and neo-colonialism. Is this, however, enough?

Universality’s return

The Marxist symptomal reading can convincingly demonstrate the content that gives the notion of human rights its specific bourgeois ideological spin: universal human rights are effectively the right of white, male property-owners to exchange freely on the market, exploit workers and women, and exert political domination. This identification of the particular content that hegemonizes the universal form is, however, only half the story. Its crucial other half consists in asking a more difficult, supplementary question: that of the emergence of the form of universality
itself. How—in what specific historical conditions—does abstract
universality become a ‘fact of (social) life’? In what conditions do
individuals experience themselves as subjects of universal human rights?
Therein resides the point of Marx’s analysis of ‘commodity fetishism’: in a
society in which commodity exchange predominates, individuals in their daily
lives relate to themselves, and to the objects they encounter, as to
contingent embodiments of abstract-universal notions. What I am, in terms of
my concrete social or cultural background, is experienced as contingent,
since what ultimately defines me is the ‘abstract’ universal capacity to
think or to work. Likewise, any object that can satisfy my desire is
experienced as contingent, since my desire is conceived as an ‘abstract’
formal capacity, indifferent to the multitude of particular objects that
may, but never fully do, satisfy it.

Or take the example of ‘profession’: the modern notion of profession implies that I experience myself as an individual who is not directly ‘born into’ his social role. What I will become depends on the interplay between contingent social circumstances and my free choice. In this sense, today’s individual has a profession, as electrician, waiter or lecturer, while it is meaningless to claim that the medieval serf was a peasant by profession. In the specific social conditions of commodity exchange and the global market economy, ‘abstraction’ becomes a direct feature of actual social life, the way concrete individuals behave and relate to their fate and to their social surroundings. In this regard Marx shares Hegel’s insight, that universality becomes ‘for itself’ only when individuals no longer fully identify the kernel of their being with their particular social situation; only insofar as they experience themselves as forever ‘out of joint’ with it. The concrete existence of universality is, therefore, the individual without a proper place in the social edifice. The mode of appearance of universality, its entering into actual existence, is thus an extremely violent act of disrupting the preceding organic poise.

It is not enough to make the well-worn Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that effectively sustain it. At this level the counter-argument (made, among others, by Lefort and Rancière), that the form is never ‘mere’ form but involves a dynamics of its own, which leaves traces in the materiality of social life, is fully valid. It was bourgeois ‘formal freedom’ that set in motion the very ‘material’ political demands and practices of feminism or trade unionism. Rancière’s basic emphasis is on the radical ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the ‘gap’ between formal democracy—the Rights of Man, political freedoms—and the economic reality of exploitation and domination. This gap can be read in the standard ‘symptomatic’ way: formal democracy is a necessary but illusory expression of a concrete social reality of exploitation and class domination. But it can also be read in the more subversive sense of a tension in which the ‘appearance’ of égaliberté is not a ‘mere appearance’ but contains an efficacy of its own, which allows it to set in motion the rearticulation of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progressive ‘politicization’. Why shouldn’t women also be allowed to vote? Why shouldn’t workplace conditions be a matter of public concern as well?

We might perhaps apply here the old Lévi-Straussian term of ‘symbolic efficiency’: the appearance of égaliberté is a symbolic fiction which, as such, possesses actual efficiency of its own; the properly cynical temptation of reducing it to a mere illusion that conceals a different actuality should be resisted. It is not enough merely to posit an authentic articulation of a life-world experience which is then reappropriated by those in power to serve their particular interests or to render their subjects docile cogs in the social machine. Much more interesting is the opposite process, in which something that was originally an ideological edifice imposed by colonizers is all of a sudden taken over by their subjects as a means to articulate their ‘authentic’ grievances. A classic case would be the Virgin of Guadalupe in newly colonized Mexico: with her appearance to a humble Indian, Christianity—which until then served as the imposed ideology of the Spanish colonizers—was appropriated by the indigenous population as a means to symbolize their terrible plight.

Rancière has proposed a very elegant solution to the antinomy between human rights, belonging to ‘man as such’, and the politicization of citizens. While human rights cannot be posited as an unhistorical ‘essentialist’ Beyond with regard to the contingent sphere of political struggles, as universal ‘natural rights of man’ exempted from history, neither should they be dismissed as a reified fetish, the product of concrete historical processes of the politicization of citizens. The gap between the universality of human rights and the political rights of citizens is thus not a gap between the universality of man and a specific political sphere. Rather, it ‘separates the whole of the community from itself’. [16] Far from being pre-political, ‘universal human rights’ designate the precise space of politicization proper; what they amount to is the right to universality as such—the right of a political agent to assert its radical non-coincidence with itself (in its particular identity), to posit itself as the ‘supernumerary’, the one with no proper place in the social edifice; and thus as an agent of universality of the social itself. The paradox is therefore a very precise one, and symmetrical to the paradox of universal human rights as the rights of those reduced to inhumanity. At the very moment when we try to conceive the political rights of citizens without reference to a universal ‘meta-political’ human rights, we lose politics itself; that is to say, we reduce politics to a ‘post-political’ play of negotiation of particular interests.

[1] Quoted in Bozidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of
Western Travellers, London 2004, p. 233.
[2] ‘The constitution is dead. Long live proper politics’, Guardian, 4 June
2005.
[3] Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. i, Moscow 1969, p. 83.
[4] Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, Moscow 1975, p. 149.
[5] Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, p. 194.
[6] Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, pp. 187–8.
[7] Etienne Balibar, ‘Gewalt’: entry for Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch
des Marxismus, vol. 5, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Hamburg 2002.
[8] Hannah Arendt, On Violence, New York 1970.
[9] Rony Brauman, ‘From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, Spring–Summer 2004, pp. 398–9 and 416.
[10] Wendy Brown, ‘Human Rights as the Politics of Fatalism’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, p. 453.
[11] Etienne Balibar, ‘Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible?’,
South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, pp. 320–1.
[12] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1958, p. 297.
[13] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, Stanford 1998.
[14] Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South
Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, pp. 307–9.
[15] Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, p. 301.
[16] Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, p. 305.

I propose that power is characterized by whatever is its source, such that perhaps there can be a power that exists in the natural potential of persons to progress toward human flourishing (telos). This is a natural power of great strength, that unfortunately finds itself in competition with other more apparent versions of power that are attractive to humanity. The natural power of human potential brings a person to fulfillment of Freire’s “unfinished� person I would propose, perhaps Freire’s notion of “becoming.� But the simple problem is that people simply cannot be trusted to pursue that path of power. The power of natural potential is the pathway to true freedom – theologian Karl Rahner’s “Grace in Freedom� and Paul Tillich’s “Courage to Be� come to mind - but the more apparent versions of power promise a seeming freedom which is more obvious, although ultimately false. The only true freedom is the pursuit of human flourishing. The only true power is the freedom to pursue that flourishing. But people must be taught that power. There must be a “pedagogy of power.�

I question whether there is any relativism in what I am proposing. I propose that there is singular human potential for singular human flourishing, a single path, such that all human action can be judged as aligned askew of that path. Can there be many paths to human flourishing? Or is there a unity? Cardinal virtues, or a sublime virtue such as charity, or love? I believe so, and when what Horowitz calls “leftist� platforms are actually calls to the people for their affiliation with the moral direction of the sublime virtue that is love, then Horowitz is the moral relativist. If it can be demonstrated that the “Dirty Thirty� are the skandalon to humanity, attempting to derail them from the sublime virtue, then Horowitz is vindicated. So who is the true voice of love, the sublime virtue, the pathway to human flourishing?

Thomas Delaney
University of Minnesota

It is a lovely honor that has been granted to me this evening, to deliver the John Dewey Lecture. [1] And I am very grateful to Maxine Greene and Mary Anne Raywid and the other members of the selection committee for the generosity of the invitation.
I had the pleasure of knowing John Dewey during the last few years of his life and of talking with him on any number of occasions. I shall never forget the first time I met him, when he was ninety. We had a mutual friend in Sing-nan Fen, who had translated Dewey's works in China and had then come to the United States to study philosophy of education and in the process had come to know Dewey. (Fen, incidentally, now teaches at the University of Nebraska.) Fen asked me quite unexpectedly one evening whether I would be willing to deliver a package for him to the Dewey apartment on my way home, and I said of course I would. The Deweys at that time lived in an apartment at 97th Street and Fifth Avenue. I went on up and rang the bell and Mrs. Dewey came to the door and graciously accepted the package and asked whether I would like to meet Professor Dewey. I said it would be a privilege and was promptly ushered into the study, where Dewey was pecking away at an ancient typewriter, using two fingers. He looked up, smiled, greeted me warmly, said he was working on an article dealing with the improvement in his concept of interaction that the term "transaction" had made possible, and then asked quite bluntly, "What do you think, Mr. Cremin?" It was one of those occasions when the lips move but the words have trouble coming out. The words did come, and the point is we had a lively conversation for about a half-hour, in which at the age of twenty-three I was treated as an absolute equal. As I said, I shall never forget it.
Most of my other opportunities to talk with Professor Dewey came at the Old Shanghai Restaurant at 125th Street and Broadway. The Deweys had adopted two young children named John and Adrian, and Dr. and Mrs. Dewey and the youngsters would dine frequently at the Shanghai on Sunday evenings. Fen was often with them, and through Fen's invitations I came to join them. I must tell you that whatever the emphasis on the social and the communal in Dewey's writing, it was rampant individualism in that Chinese restaurant, and I may be the only person living who learned to use chopsticks fighting over fried rice with John Dewey.
I could go on but I shall not. Permit me instead to turn to the text of my lecture. I would like to take up three matters: first, I would like to point to a fundamental problem in the progressive theory of education, namely, the posit­ing of a polarity between school and society that does not sufficiently par­ticularize the educational situation as it actually exists; second, I would like to propose a revision of the progressive theory that I believe details the situation more effectively; and third, I would like to suggest some implications of that revision for public policymaking in education.
First, the fundamental problem of the polarity. One can locate it in John Dewey's Democracy and Education, which is, of course, the classic statement of the progressive theory. Recall Dewey's argument in the early sections of the work. The most notable distinction between living beings and inanimate things, he tells us, is that living beings maintain themselves by renewal. Among human beings, that renewal takes place through a process of cultural transmission, which Dewey refers to as "education in its broadest sense." Education in its broadest sense is a process that is continuous, ubiquitous, pervasive, and all-powerful—indeed, so powerful that Dewey draws the moral that the only way in which adults can consciously control the kind of education children get is by controlling the environment in which they act, think, and feel. [2]
Then, in a crucial leap, Dewey goes on to tell us that there is a marked dif­ference between the education everyone gets simply from living with others and the deliberate education offered by the school. In the ordinary course of living, education is incidental; in schooling, education is intentional. In developing the argument, Dewey takes the familiar early twentieth-century tack of going back to the origins of institutions in some primordial state of society. The family, he tells us, began in the desire to gratify appetites and secure the perpetuity of a line. Religious associations, he continues, began in the desire to ward off evil influences and obtain the favor of supreme powers. And work began in the simple enslavement of one human being to another. Any education that might have derived from participation in these institutions, he points out, was at best incidental. And, indeed, he tells us by way of illustration that savage groups have no special devices or materials or institutions for teaching the young, with the exception of initiation ceremonies. For the most part, they depend on the kind of incidental learning that derives from shared activity. [3]
As civilization advances, however, life becomes more complicated, and much of what adults do is so complex that simple participation no longer suffices for the transmission of culture. At this point, Dewey suggests, inten­tional agencies, called schools, and explicit materials, called studies, come into being. And the task of transmitting particular aspects of life is delegated to a special group of people called teachers. Dewey is careful to point out that schools are an important means for transmitting culture, but only one means among many, and when compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means. Nevertheless, schools are the only means adults really have at their disposal for going systematically and deliberately about the education of the young. [4]
Once this leap is made, it is decisive in Dewey's argument. Though Dewey returns at a number of places to what he calls the "social environment," the remainder of the book is not about families or churches or work, but rather about schools. Dewey's theory of education is ultimately a theory of school and society. And while Dewey was primarily concerned with reconciling the dualism between school and society, I would stress the fact that he may have created the theoretical polarity in order to effect the reconciliation. To say this is in no way to deny that the schools of Dewey's time were abstruse, formalis-tic, and in need of reconciliation with society. It is rather to suggest that Dewey may ultimately have been victimized by the very polarity he set out to recon­cile. [5]
That polarity had prodigious consequences for the discussion of education and politics during the 1920s and 1930s. We can see it in the two quite different arguments put forward within the progressive camp during the early years of the Depression. On the one hand, George S. Counts asked, "Dare the school build a new social order?" and called upon teachers forthrightly to indoctrinate children in the values of democratic socialism as their contribution to the de­velopment of a reconstructed American society. To Counts's argument, how­ever, Dewey replied that, whether or not teachers dared build a new social order in that particular way or some other, they probably couldn't. In a modern industrial society, with its multiplicity of political and educative agencies, the school could never be the main determinant of political, intellectual, or moral change. The best the school could do would be to form the understanding and the dispositions necessary for movement toward a changed social order. [6]
On the other hand, the group that prepared The Educational Frontier, of which Dewey was a member, went in the opposite direction. Far from daring the school to build a new social order, they despaired of the school making any appreciable difference whatever until the larger social ambience within which the school carried on its work had been fundamentally altered. Hence, Robert Bruce Raup called upon teachers to enter the political lists and struggle for a better life in order to create a more hospitable and productive world in which to educate. "When the type of character desired by the school is so dependent for support upon conditions in the whole culture," Raup maintained, "and this support is not forthcoming, the educator's responsibility moves out into society to agitate and to work for that support." Here too, however, though Dewey was a working member of the yearbook committee, he demurred, contending that his advocacy of educators assisting in the development of a changed social order was in no way an advocacy of the school throwing itself into the political arena and taking the side of some particular party there. [7]
Now my interest is only incidentally in locating Dewey with respect to the problem I have posed. It is primarily in explicating the problem itself. For, in the last analysis, the Progressives ended up on the horns of a dilemma: either they could politicize the school, remaining dubious about their efforts since the school was so powerless, or they could abandon the school and enter the political lists, seeking gradually or cataclysmically to change the entire social ambience in which youngsters came of age. Dewey revealed the dilemma beau­tifully in an address he gave to a conference on early childhood education at Teachers College in the spring of 1933. The address began with one of Dewey's great aphorisms: "The most Utopian thing about Utopia is that there are no schools at all." Education in Utopia, Dewey went on to say, is carried out without benefit of schools, since children learn what they have to know in informal association with the adults who direct their activity. So far, so good. But Dewey did not go on from that point to describe a Utopian society whose values were so pervasive and whose institutions were so cohesive as to form the young through the very process of living. Rather, he went on to describe a society in which there were schools, but essentially activity schools of the sort Dewey and his daughter Evelyn had written about in Schools of To-Morrow. In 1933 Dewey was still trying to reconcile the dualism between school and soci­ety, but he was for all intents and purposes the victim of his own theoretical polarity. And, indeed, that polarity persists right down to the present time. We see it in the ambivalence of the educational reform movement of the 1960s, with its free-school proponents on the one side and its de-school proponents on the other. And we see it also—and in a more dangerous form perhaps—in the vast pendulum swing of American opinion during the 1970s, from a century-long overreliance on schooling as a general instrument of social aspiration to a period of widespread disenchantment with schooling. Whether or not we like Dewey and the Progressives, we are heirs to their formulations, and the irony is that an age that has all but forgotten Dewey is still governed by his analytical categories. [8]
Permit me to move on to my second point, the proposal of a revised version of the progressive theory that I believe gives us a more effective approach to the educational situation. The crucial point at which Dewey went awry, it seems to me, is the point in his discussion of incidental versus intentional education where he dwelled on the origins of institutions rather than their functions. What matter that the family may have begun in the desire to gratify appetites and secure the perpetuation of a line? What matter that religious associations may have begun in the desire to ward off evil influences and secure the favor of supreme powers? What matter that work may have begun in enslavement to others? For one thing, we can't really know how they began; for another, the question of origins may not be central to the argument. The important fact is that family life does educate, religious life does educate, and work does educate; and, what is more, the education of all three realms is as intentional as the education of the school, though in different ways and in different measures.
Every family has a curriculum, which it teaches quite deliberately and sys­tematically over time. Every church and synagogue has a curriculum, which it teaches deliberately and systematically over time—the Old and New Testa­ments, after all, are among our oldest curricula, and so are the Missal and the Mass, and so is the Book of Common Prayer. And every employer has a curriculum, which he teaches deliberately and systematically over time; and the curriculum includes not only the technical skills of typing or welding or reaping or teaching but also the social skills of carrying out those activities in concert with others on given time schedules and according to established ex­pectations and routines. One can go on to point out that libraries have curricu­la, museums have curricula, boyscout troops have curricula, and day-care centers have curricula, and most important, perhaps, radio and television sta­tions have curricula—and by these curricula I refer not only to programs labeled educational but also to news broadcasts and documentaries (which presumably inform), to commercials (which teach people to want), and to soap operas (which reinforce common myths and values).
To specify this range of institutions is to save us from the Deweyan polarity of all life being broadly educative and overwhelmingly powerful and the school being intentionally educative but not very powerful at all. Rather, we have a theory of education in which each of the major educative agencies performs a mediative role with respect to the others and with respect to society at large. The family mediates the culture, and it also mediates the ways in which relig­ious organizations, television broadcasters, schools, and employers mediate the culture. Families not only engage deliberately and systematically in the teach­ing of knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, and sensibilities, they also screen and interpret the teaching of churches, synagogues, television broadcasters, schools, and employers. Similarly, the school not only engages deliberately and systematically in the teaching of knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, and sen­sibilities, it also interprets the teaching of families, churches, synagogues, tele­vision broadcasters, and employers. One can go on and work out all the per­mutations and combinations. What is more, these various institutions mediate the culture in a variety of pedagogical styles—think of the differences between what Jerome Bruner has called enactive education, ikonic education, and sym­bolic education, and the different combinations of these styles that pertain in different situations at different times. Further, these various institutions mediate the culture via different technologies for the recording, sharing, and distributing of symbols. In effect, they define the terms of effective participa­tion and growth in the society. Remaining within the broad Deweyan context, we can posit a new formulation: the theory of education becomes the theory of the relation of various educative interactions and institutions to one another and to the society at large. [9]
Now, permit me to go on to my third point, namely, the implications of this analysis for policymaking in education. I would put forward three assertions: first, that we have to think comprehensively about education; second, that we have to think relationally about education; and third, that we have to think publicly about education. Let me take each of these up in turn.
First, thinking comprehensively. We have traditionally assumed in the United States that the public school for more than a century created and recreated the American public, virtually singlehandedly, and endowed that public with its unique capability of working cooperatively on social problems, despite its ethnic, racial, religious, and class heterogeneity. The assumption, of course, is not without foundation. The public school has labored mightily over the years to nurture certain common values and commitments and to teach the skills by which a vastly variegated society can resolve its conflicts peacefully rather than by the methods of guerrilla warfare. Indeed, the public school has actually come to symbolize the quest for community in American society. But the public school has never functioned alone or in isolation. Where it has suc­ceeded, it has functioned as part of a large configuration of institutions, includ­ing families, churches, Sunday schools, and reform schools, committed to es­sentially complementary values. When the configuration has disintegrated, however, as it has from time to time in our larger cities, and when the cen­trifugal forces of heterogeneity have overbalanced the centrifugal forces of community, the public school has been less successful. My assertion is not the powerlessness of public schooling—far from it—but rather the limitations of public schooling. And the moral is simple: The public school ought never to take the entire credit for the educational accomplishments of the public, and it ought never to be assigned the entire blame.
The fact is that the public is educated by many institutions, some of them public and some of them private, and that public schools are only one among several important public institutions that educate the public. There are, after all, public libraries, public museums, public television, and public work proj­ects, the most pervasive, perhaps, being the military services. Other societies, of course, have used quite different agencies to educate the public. The Soviet Union, for example, has used the Komsomol, a network of youth organiza­tions, as an important instrument of public education, while the People's Re­public of China has used communes in public factories and on public farms in similar fashion. And the Indians, the Australians, and the Venezuelans have used public radio to teach the skills of literacy in areas too remote for schools.
A kind of obverse of these propositions is the recognition that all educational transactions have both private and public consequences. Family nurture that encourages independence, church teaching that condemns family planning, television news programs that dramatize the human consequences of military ventures—these are but a few examples of private educative efforts with pro­found public impact.
In sum, then, to think comprehensively about education, we must consider policies with respect to a wide variety of institutions that educate, not only schools and colleges, but libraries, museums, day-care centers, radio and tele­vision stations, offices, factories, and farms. To be concerned solely with schools in the kind of educational world we are living in today is to have a kind of fortress mentality in contending with a very fluid and dynamic situation. Education must be looked at whole, across the entire life span, and in all the situations and institutions in which it occurs. Obviously, public policy will not touch and ought not to touch every situation with equal intensity—that only happens in totalitarian societies, and even in totalitarian societies it never happens quite as efficaciously as the leaders would prefer. Indeed, there are some situations which public policy will not touch at all. But it must consider each so that wise choices can be made as to where to invest what effort to achieve which goals with respect to which clienteles. The United States Congress al­ready does this when it decides to allocate so many dollars to children's televi­sion rather than schooling, and incidentally in dealing with children's television it inevitably affects the family. And local communities already do this when they decide in a period of budgetary stringency to close a public library rather than a public school. I would only insist that the range of possibilities be understood far more explicitly than it has been in the past and that public authorities approach these questions of allocation rationally rather than whim­sically, and with a full awareness of educational consequences.
First, then, we must think comprehensively about education. Second, we must think relationally. To do this means in the first instance to be aware of the problem of allocation of financial and human resources, as indicated above, and of resultant educational outcomes. And it means in the second place that wherever an effort goes forward in education, it must go forward not in isola­tion from other educative institutions but in relation to them. From the vantage point of the school, this is a significant point. Given the thrust of my argument, I am occasionally accused of downgrading the school and being uninterested in schoolteachers. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I am interested rather in making schools and schoolteachers more effective. And they will not be more effective until they become aware of and actually engage these other educators.
In some subject areas, of course, the school originates much of what it teaches. Mathematics is an example. In mathematics, the student learns much of what he needs to learn for the first time in the classroom (though with the new mathematics series now being produced for television by the Education Development Center, that may become less and less true). But in other realms, in languages and literature, for example, or in social studies or hygiene, or the arts, or the domain of values and morals, the child has his first learning and possibly his most persuasive learning earlier and elsewhere. In these realms, it may be that the best the school can do is engage the instruction of the other educators and seek to strengthen or complement or correct or neutralize or countereducate, or, most importantly, perhaps, try to develop in students an awareness of the other educators and an ability themselves to deal with them.
What I have argued with respect to the school also goes for the other educators. For day-care workers, pastors, editors of children's encyclopedias, and directors of senior citizen's centers, the message is the same: Whatever is done, to be effective, must be done with an awareness of what has gone on and what is going on elsewhere. Incidentally, the principle has special relevance for evaluation and accountability because whatever judgment is made of any particular educational program must always be made in light of what is going on elsewhere that affects that program. This to me is the real message of James Coleman's study of equal educational opportunity, not that the school is power-less but that the family is powerful. What often happens is the same thing that happens when negative numbers are added to positive numbers: An immense contribution by the school is frequently reflected in a comparatively modest showing on an achievement scale, since with respect to the understanding or behavior being measured by the achievement scale, the child started out not at ground zero but with a deficit, at least as defined by the scale. Or, conversely, as is frequently the case with highly selective institutions, a very modest con­tribution by the school is reflected in an admirable showing on an achievement scale, since the child has already learned elsewhere a good deal of whatever it is the scale is measuring.
First, then, we must think comprehensively; second, relationally; and third, publicly. By this I mean several things. To begin, it means we must be aware that public thinking about education and public policymaking for education goes on at a variety of levels and in a variety of places. It goes forward at the local, state, regional, federal, and international levels, and it proceeds in legis­latures, in the courts, in executive agencies, and in private and quasi-public civic organizations. The intense political struggles this past year in Boston, and Kanawha County, West Virginia, are excellent examples, as is the battle to get the Federal Communications Commission to adopt more stringent rules for the governance of children's television. What's more, the growing reliance on the courts during the past quarter-century to develop policies through the defini­tion, assertion, and claim of certain social and educational rights is also pro­foundly relevant. It is an oft-repeated truism that the courts have been our most influential agencies of educational policymaking since World War II. But as John Coons recently pointed out in a discussion at Teachers College, courts tend to stress our differences: They tend to affirm the rights of individuals or groups to dissent from agreed upon policies. Legislatures, on the other hand, tend to deal with the definition and advancement of that which is common. And hence the growing recourse to the courts in matters of educational policy is fraught with significance for substance as well as procedure. And it is fraught with significance for the policy itself. As my former teacher Henry Steele Commager, certainly second to none in his insistent espousal of the cause of civil liberties, pointed out some years ago in a discussion of Majority Rule and Minority Rights, recourse to the courts, particularly in the realm of constitu­tional law, is an immensely powerful tool in a democratic society for the achievement of short-term goals, especially with respect to the redress of civil and political inequity. But recourse to the courts short-circuits certain pro­cesses vital to a democratic society. There is, after all, little opportunity for ap­peal once the court of last resort has handed down its ruling, and there is precious little political education for the public in appellate proceedings. This is not to say that the Warren court and the Burger court have not tried at many points to educate the public with respect to the bearing of the Constitution on education. It is only to argue, with Commager, that the legislative process and the public debate surrounding it is a surer and more fundamental long-range educator of the public than the judicial process. [10]
I should add quite explicitly at this point that nothing here should be taken as a criticism of the political outcomes of recourse to the federal and state courts, from Brown in 1954, to Serrano in 1971 and Robinson in 1973, to Goss in 1975. It is merely to argue that the process of public education resulting from court decisions is very different from the process that leads to the enactment and implementation of legislation. And the current turmoil in Boston, the failure of the legislatures of California and New Jersey to accomplish the mandated re­forms of their respective state systems of school finance, and the puzzlement that has followed in the wake of the more recent Goss ruling on the rights of pupils, are illustrative of this fact. [11]
The distinction between the politics of the courts and the politics of legisla­tures brings me to my final point, namely, that given the range and variety of institutions that educate the public, some of them public, some of them quasi-public, and some of them private, simplistic notions of "public control" be­come untenable. Control, after all, varies in character and intensity from the kind of direct supervision one sees in the management of public school systems or public libraries, to the kind of regulation exercised over the television indus­try by the Federal Communications Commission, to the kind of influence tax policy exerts on the size and structure of families, and hence on the character of familial education. And if one looks at the power of the educative agencies farthest removed from the public reach, one is led not to deny the need for effective public regulation of public schools, public libraries, and public televi­sion, but rather to affirm the need for public discussion in the realms beyond the reach of direct public control. And hence we are thrown, inevitably, back to the politics of persuasion and to the public dialogue about educational means and ends that is the essence of the politics of persuasion.

We live in an age that affirms individuality and plurality, and given what governments, including democratic governments, have done with their power in our time, one can understand and sympathize with the attractiveness of such affirmations. Yet, if Dewey taught us anything, it was that the public good is something more than the sum total of private goods, and that a viable commun­ity is more than a collection of groups, each occupying its own turf and each doing its own thing. Indeed, Democracy and Education is as much a work of social theory as it is of educational theory, and Dewey's own position is strik­ingly clear: There must be ample room in a democratic society for a healthy individualism and a healthy pluralism, but that individualism and that pluralism must also partake of a continuing quest for community. In fact, individuality itself is only liberated and fully realized as the individual interacts with an ever-widening variety of communities. Recall Dewey's classic paragraph:
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests. [12]
How do we achieve the educational balance between individualism and community suggested in this formulation? I have a very simple starting point, to which I think there is no alternative: We talk. The proper education of the public and indeed the proper creation of publics will not go forward in our society until we undertake anew a great public dialogue about education. In fact, I would maintain that the questions we need to raise about education are among the most important questions that can be raised in our society, particu­larly at this juncture in its history. What knowledge should "we the people" hold in common? What values? What skills? What sensibilities? When we ask such questions, we are getting at the heart of the kind of society we want to live in and the kind of society we want our children to live in. We are getting at the heart of the kind of public we would like to bring into being and the qualities we would like that public to display. We are getting at the heart of the kind of community we need for our multifarious individualities to flourish.
Two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote that when we educate we aim at the good life; and since men and women disagree in their notions of a good life, they will disagree in their notions of education. It's as true today as it was two thousand years ago. Obviously, men and women of good will are going to dis­agree about education. What's important about public education is that we work through to certain agreements about values and policies. We don't simply Balkanize the world; we also decide on common ground. We do that in the public schools, in public libraries, and over certain programs on public televi­sion because we have a notion of the kind of society our children are going to grow up in and live in. It's not that we're going to do away with different life-styles and different beliefs or with the educational institutions—both public and private—that keep those different life-styles and beliefs alive. It's that we must practice those different life-styles and beliefs within a common framework of mutual respect and understanding. So often in recent years we have cast the choice as one between a full-blown and segregationist ethnicity on the one hand and some plastic, lowest-common-denominator community on the other. I would reject both in favor of new modes of thought that permit—nay, encourage—maximum variation within certain common policies. I think we have the models in the alternative programs that have grown up in our contem­porary public schools, public libraries, and public television systems, and I think we should develop, share, and publicize those models. In the last analysis, the most important dimension of the politics of education is the busi­ness of debating and defining the various forms those models might take and the various curricula they might teach. Moreover, the public debate itself over what knowledge, what values, what skills, and what sensibilities we might want to nurture in the young and how we might want to nurture them is more important than the particular decisions we happen to arrive at during any given time. For the debate itself educates, and that education will affect the entire educational apparatus of the society and therefore the principal apparatus for creating the public.
My conclusions, of course, are vintage Dewey. You may recall that, in the pedagogical creed he wrote for The School Journal in 1897, he argued that "education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform" and that "all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanic or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile." In the last analysis, the fundamental mode of politics in a democractic society is education, and it is in that way over all others that the educator is ultimately projected into politics. You will recognize here the an­cient prophetic role, which Dewey himself had in mind when he wrote in 1897 that the teacher is always "the prophet of the true God" and "the usherer in of the true kingdom of God." The millennialist tone of these phrases has always left me a bit uncomfortable, but the insight is nonetheless profound. Prophecy: in its root meaning, the calling of a people to their noblest traditions and aspirations. Prophecy, I would submit, is the essential public function of the educator in a democratic society. [13]

NOTES

[1] The formulations reported here have been developed in the course of a larger research project on the history of American education that has been generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
[2] John Dewey. Democracy and Education. New York, N.Y.: Macmillan, 1916, p. 3,
Public Education and the Education of the Public
[3] Ibid., pp. 7-8.
[4] Ibid., pp. 8-9.
[5] Ibid., pp. 12-27 and passim.
[6] Georee S. Counts. Dare the School Build a New Social Order? New York, N.Y.: John Day Company, 1932; John Dewey, "Education and Social Change," The Social Frontier, Vol. 3, 1937, p. 237; and John Dewey, "Can Education Share in Social Reconstruction?" The Social Frontier, Vol. 1, 1934, pp. 11-12.
[7] William H. Kilpatrick, ed. The Educational Frontier. New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933, p. 100; Dewey, "Education and Social Change," op. cit., p. 236.
[8] Dewey's remarks were excerpted in The New York Times, April 23, 1933, under the heading "Dewey Outlines Utopian Schools." I am indebted to Dr. Jo Ann Boydston, director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, for the reference.
[9] Jerome S. Bruner. The Relevance of Education. New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1971, pp. 7-8, 18; David R. Olson. Cognitive Development: The Child's Acquisition of Diagonality. New York, N.Y.: Academic Press, 1970, pp. 193-197; David R. Olson, ed. Media and Symbols: The Forms of Expression, Communication, and Education. Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press, 1974, Chs. i and vi; Lawrence A. Cremin, "Notes Toward a Theory of Education," Notes on Education, No. 1, June 1973, pp. 4-6; and Lawrence A. Cremin, "Further Notes Toward a Theory of Education," Notes on Education, No. 4, March 1, 1974, pp. 1-6.
[10] Henry Steele Commager. Majority Rule and Minority Rights. New York, N.Y.: Oxford Uni­versity Press, 1943, Ch. ii.
[11] Brownv. Boardoj"Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1964); Serrano v. Priest, Cal., 487 P2d 1241 (1971); Robinson v. Cahill, 62 N.J. 473 (1973); Goss v. Lopez, 42L Ed. 2d 725 (1975).
[12] Dewey, Democracy and Education, op. cit., p. 101.
[13] Martin S. Dworkin, ed. Dewey on Education. New York, N.Y.: Teachers College Press, 1959, pp. 30, 32.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume 77 Number 1, 1975, p. 1-12
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 1260, Date Accessed: 4/13/2006 9:31:39 PM

�Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that Republicans have succeeded in framing the issues to their advantage. Tax "relief," tort "reform," regulatory "burden," and "opportunity society," for example, have all defined public debate in a way that benefitsthe GOP. But, though Democrats have finally started talking about how they can recast their ideas to best appeal to the public, they've failed to realize that the rhetorical challenge they face is deeper than simply finding the right words and phrases. For Democrats to win back the heart and soul of the electorate, they have to speak to the basic stories that have defined and animated the United States since its founding. For most of the last century, they did this instinctively, but, over the last ten years or so, they have tended to speak in technocratic terms while conservative Republicans have mastered the art of the political narrative and, in doing so, exiled Democrats from politics itself.

There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.

The Triumphant Individual. This is the familiar tale of the little guy who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor. It's the story of the self-made man (or, more recently, woman) who bucks the odds, spurns the naysayers, and shows what can be done with enough gumption and guts. He's instantly recognizable: plainspoken, self-reliant, and uncompromising in his ideals--the underdog who makes it through hard work and faith in himself. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is the first in a long line of U.S. self-help manuals about how to make it through self-sacrifice and diligence. The story is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that "the value of life is to improve one's condition." The theme was captured in Horatio Alger's hundred or so novellas, whose heroes all rise promptly and predictably from rags to riches. It's celebrated inthe tales of immigrant peddlers who become millionaire tycoons. And it's found in the manifold stories of downtrodden fighters who undertake dangerous quests and find money and glory. Think Rocky Balboa, Norma Rae, and Erin Brockovich.The moral: With enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in the United States.

The Benevolent Community. This is the story of neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good. Its earliest formulation was John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered on board a ship in Salem Harbor just before the Puritans landed in 1630--a version of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, in which the new settlers would be "as a City upon a Hill," "delight in each other," and be "of the same body." Similar communitarian and religious images were found among the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. "I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low," said Martin Luther King Jr., extolling the ideal of the national community. The story is captured in the iconic New England town meeting, in frontier settlers erecting one another's barns, in neighbors volunteering as firefighters and librarians, and in small towns sending their high school achievers to college and their boys off to fight foreign wars. It suffuses Norman Rockwell's paintings and Frank Capra's movies. Consider the last scene in It's a Wonderful Life, when George learns he can count on his neighbors' generosity and goodness, just as they had always counted on him.

The Mob at the Gates. In this story, the United States is a beacon light of virtue in a world of darkness, uniquely blessed but continuously endangered by foreign menaces. Hence our endless efforts to contain the barbarism and tyranny beyond our borders. Daniel Boone fought Indians--white America's first evil empire. Davy Crockett battled Mexicans.The story is found in the Whig's anti-English and pro-tariff histories of the United States, in the antiimmigration harangues of the late nineteenth century, and in World War II accounts of Nazi and Japanese barbarism. It animates modern epics about space explorers (often sporting the stars and stripes) battling alien creatures bent on destroying the world. The narrative gave special force to cold war tales during the '50s of an international communist plot to undermine U.S. democracy and subsequently of "evil" empires and axes. The underlying lesson: We must maintain vigilance, lest diabolical forces overwhelm us.

The Rot at the Top. The last story concerns the malevolence of powerful elites. It's a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility in high places--of conspiracy against the common citizen. It started with King George III, and, to this day, it shapes the way we view government--mostly with distrust. The great bullies of American fiction have often symbolized Rot at the Top: William Faulkner's Flem Snopes, Willie Stark as the Huey Long-like character in All the King's Men, Lionel Barrymore's demonic Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, and the antagonists that hound the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. Suspicions about Rot at the Top have inspired what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in U.S. politics--from the pre-Civil War Know-Nothings and Anti-Masonic movements through the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts. The myth has also given force to the great populist movements of U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson's attack on the Bank of the United States in the 1830s through William Jennings Bryan's prairie populism of the 1890s.

Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the tales Americans have been telling each other since our founding--the two hopeful stories rendered more vivid by contrast to the two fearful ones. But the challenge isn't just to find a good speechwriter or a cunning political consultant, or to mine focus groups and polls. Candidates must say what they believe and speak the truth as they see it. (Americans can spot a fake thousands of miles away.)

These four mental boxes are always going to be filled somehow--if not by Democrats, then by Republicans--because people don't think in terms of isolated policies or issues. If they're to be understandable, policies and issues must fit into larger narratives about where we have been as a nation, what we are up against, and where we could be going. Major shifts in governance--in party alignments and political views--have been precipitated by one party or the other becoming better at telling these four stories.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, progressives and Democrats filled all four boxes. They accused leaders of big business of being the Rot at the Top. They argued that the large industrial concentrations of the era, the trusts, were stifling the upward mobility of millions of potential Triumphant Individuals and poisoning democracy. During his 1912 campaign, Woodrow Wilson promised to wage "a crusade against powers that have governed us ... that have limited our development, that have determined our lives, that have set us in a straightjacket to do asthey please." The struggle to break up the trusts would be nothing less than "a second struggle for emancipation," by a national Benevolent Community intent on restoring freedom and democracy. Wilson's Mob atthe Gates, meanwhile, was composed of the large, bellicose states of prewar Europe who posed similar challenges to democratic freedoms. Wilson grimly rallied Americans to "defeat once and for all ... the sinister forces" that rendered peace impossible.

Theodore Roosevelt, of course, shared Wilson's antipathy toward trusts, but, by the 1920s, Republicans were mostly apologists for big business and Wall Street. That was OK with Americans as long as the economy roared, but it left the Grand Old Party vulnerable in harder times, which soon came. Their approach to foreign policy was mainly to avoid the Mob at the Gates--close the doors to immigrants, erect tariff walls, and isolate the nation. They celebrated the wealth of Triumphant Individuals but didn't champion upward mobility or equal opportunity, and they offered no particular view of the United States as a Benevolent Community. As such, they stayed firmly in the minority most of the first half of the twentieth century.

Indeed, the Great Depression and World War II presented the United States with palpable illustrations of the Democratic stories. By the 1930s, the Rot at the Top included Wall Street as well as big business. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned against "economic royalists" who had impressed the whole of society into service. "The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor ... these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship," he warned. What was at stake, he concluded, was nothing less thanthe "survival of democracy."

To cope with the Depression, Americans needed a national Benevolent Community. "I see one-third of our nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," FDR told a nation whose citizens clearly understood they were all in this together. He described the purpose of the New Deal as "extending to our national life the old principle of the local community." "We are determined," Roosevelt said, "to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern." The Social Security Act was not just a social insurance scheme, but the very symbol of national solidarity. Henceforth, all American families would share the risk of becoming unemployed or losing the family's breadwinner or retiring without adequate savings. And then, of course, came Adolf Hitler's war, which cemented this national unity as FDR led the country into battle with the most fearsome Mob at the Gates it had ever encountered, over the objections of Republican isolationists.

Democrats managed the transition from Depression and world war to postwar prosperity and the cold war with only slight alterations in story line. The Benevolent Community remained at the core of Harry S Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The upwardly mobile Triumphant Individual depended on federal provisions--the G.I. bill, government-backed mortgages, a guarantee of equal civil rights. Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their assault on the Mob at the Gates, but now the Mob was the dangerous and expansive Soviet Union. Truman stopped the communists in Korea. Kennedy stopped them in Berlin and during the Cuban missile crisis. And he tried to stop them in Vietnam, which he saw as "the finger in the dike" holding back the Soviets. Johnson, of course, tragically tried and failed to erect a dam against the North Vietnamese and their patrons. While Republicans continued to wrestle with the isolationists and nervous Nellies--such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio--Democrats spoke of paying any price and bearing any burden to protect the United States.

But, in the '60s, the Rot at the Top gradually dropped out of the Democratic message. Gone were tales of greedy businessmen or unscrupulous financiers. This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity allowed the middle class to explode in size and the gap between rich and poor to shrink. White-collar workers were now abundant, and blue-collar workers got generous wage increases that could be absorbed bythe huge postwar market. Rot at the Top rhetoric was also a casualty of the Vietnam War, which spawned an anti-establishment and antiauthoritarian New Left and split Democrats down the middle. For many liberals, the Rot came to be personified by Johnson, his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, and even the federal government itself. (Ironically, Richard Nixon's White House and the Watergate scandal would hurt the Democrats, too, by confirming that the Rot at the Top was to be found in government rather than among business elites.)

The Vietnam War also undermined Democrats' confidence about the Mob at the Gates. Soviet communism remained dangerous, to be sure, but the McGovern wing of the party had no clear plan of action. Indeed, its approach seemed redolent of the Republican isolationists of the earlier part of the century, who wanted the United States simply to turn its back on the Mob. And, after President Carter and the hostage crisis, even when Democrats did try to tell this story, they seemed uncertain of themselves. In short, Democrats and progressives came off as confused and conflicted about the dangers the United States faced. They stopped talking both about the Rot at the Top and about the Mob at the Gates, and thus ceased giving Americans convincing stories about what the nation was up against.

Enter Ronald Reagan, master storyteller, who jumped into the conceptual breach that Democrats had left open. For Reagan, the Mob at the Gates was not merely a Soviet Union that needed to be contained, but an Evil Empire that had to be destroyed. The Rot at the Top was big government--Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats who stifled Triumphant Individuals--and the Benevolent Community's foundation was not New Deal-style programs but small, traditional neighborhoods in which people voluntarily helped one another, free from government interference. (Social spending could be cut, therefore, without threatening the mythology of benevolence.) The Triumphant Individual, meanwhile, was no longer the little guy in need of a helping hand, but the business entrepreneur who would spawn new companies and industries if unencumbered by government regulations and taxes. Through the alchemy of supply-side ("trickle-down") economics, his self-enriching triumphs would, it was said, help us all. Reagan's overall message was as hopeful and upbeat as FDR's: "America is back and standing tall," Reagan said in 1984. "We've begun to restorethe great American values--the dignity of work, the warmth of family, the strength of neighborhood, and the nourishment of human freedom."

Democrats never regained the capacity to tell their versions of the stories. Even when the implosion of the Soviet Union ended one of the Republicans' most powerful stories and temporarily left the United States without a Mob at the Gates, the stories American politicians told remained Republican stories. The Rot at the Top was still big government. To be sure, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 promising to "fight for the forgotten middle class" against the forces of "greed," but Clinton inherited such a huge budget deficit from George H.W. Bush that he couldn't put up much of a fight. And, after losing his bid for universal health care, Clinton himself announced that the era of big government was over--and he proved it by ending welfare. Clinton's Benevolent Community remained, as it was under his Republican predecessors, a nationof volunteers; Clinton appointed a commission on volunteerism and encouraged the private sector to of fer jobs to former welfare recipients. And he urged would-be Triumphant Individuals (who were working harder than ever with no appreciable increase in pay and benefits) to embrace a new covenantof personal "opportunity and responsibility."

Under George W. Bush, the stories have changed somewhat, but all continue to reflect Republican values, crowding out Democratic interpretations. The September 11 terrorist attacks, of course, powerfully revived the Mob at the Gates tale, and, although Bush never quite connected the dots between global terrorists and his Axis of Evil (including Saddam Hussein), the basic story line he offered was familiar enough to give the Bush presidency a compelling mission. By Bush's second inaugural, that mission had grown even larger--a battle against tyrants and oppressors all overthe world, similar to those Wilson had railed against almost 90 years before, and perfectly fitting the mental box Americans have always reserved for the Mob at the Gates.

Bush's Triumphant Individual, meanwhile, is a property owner who achieves the "dignity and security of economic independence" by getting rich off his assets, as Bush put it in his second inaugural. The "ownership society" is intended, as Bush explained, to make "every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny." In this universe, there is no more need for national benevolence. In fact, Social Security--which had been the very symbol of FDR's Benevolent Community--is to be turned into private accounts that Triumphant Individuals can use to gain personal wealth. In Bush's retelling, the Benevolent Community is found in religious congregations--in "faith-based" organizations that "rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty and hopelessness, a daily battle waged house to house and heart to heart." Not even the Indian Ocean tsunami initially deserved much by way of official government aid. U.S. benevolence found expression instead in the voluntary contributions of corporations and private citizens. "The greatest source of America's generosity is not our government," Bush explained when he appointed his father and Clinton to head a relief commission. "It's the good heart of the American people."

But it is in the retelling of the story about the Rot at the Top that the younger Bush and his cohorts have departed most from preceding Republican versions. Rather than big government, their Rot is lodged in America's "cultural elites"--depicted as influential liberals in prestigious coastal universities, the upper strata of New York and Hollywood, and the media. This Rot disdains ordinary working Americans, rejects religion and patriotism, celebrates Hollywood's licentiousness, and seeks to impose sexual permissiveness--including abortion and gay marriage--on good, God-fearing Americans. A TV advertisement aired in 2003 by a conservative group duringthe Democratic primary campaign described this new Rot as a "tax-hiking, government-spending, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show," and, inthe general election campaign, Republicans repeatedly attacked John Kerry as a "Massachusetts liberal" who was part of the "Chardonnay-and-brie set." Bush mocked Kerry for finding a "new nuance" each day on Iraq, drawing out the word "nuance" to emphasize Kerry's French cultural elitism. "In Texas, we don't do nuance," he said, to laughter and applause. House Republican leader Tom DeLay opened his campaign speeches by saying "Good morning, or, as John Kerry would say, 'Bonjour.'"

What were Democrats to do? All their stories had been replaced. In the 2004 election, Kerry argued forcefully that Bush's Iraq policy would not succeed against terrorism and that Bush's tax cuts forthe wealthy should be repealed in order to generate enough revenue for a modest step toward universally affordable health care. But Kerry failed to placethese and his other policy prescriptions into the four stories that Americans had always heard and that made sense of the world they knew. As a result, Kerry's policies lacked context and meaning. Where did Kerry want to take the United States? What did he stand for? Absent a clear narrative about the Mob, the Rot, the Benevolent, and the Triumphant, his policies were just ... policies. As such, they were no match for Bush's convictions about what America should do--no match, in other words, for Bush's recasting of the Mob at the Gates as vicious terrorists that had to be killed or would kill us (and against whom, he said, Kerry could not be trusted to use force);of the Triumphant Individual as people free to pursue individual wealth (whom Kerry would smother with taxes); of the Benevolent Community as a collection of religious people with heart (of whom Kerry was contemptuous); and of the Rot at the Top as an arrogant cultural elite (of which Kerry himself was a member).

The challenge for Democrats and progressives is not simply to manufacture a new set of stories but to find and tell stories that match their convictions. The stories must also resonate with what Americans sense to be the truth. Democrats might say, for example, that the Mob at the Gates isn't global terrorism and it's not despotic tyrants. Terrorism is a technique, and tyrants exist all over the world (are we going to invade China?). There is a Mob out there, though. They are global gangs of thugs like Al Qaeda--and they are dangerous. They must be met by force. They must also be policed--their movements monitored, their access to dangerous weapons denied, their ranks infiltrated. But the United States can't police them alone. We need a new global alliance against terrorist organizations, led by the United States. (Democrats created nato; maybe now it's time for gato, a Global Anti-Terrorist Organization.) Meanwhile, America's potential Triumphant Individuals depend critically on two things to prosper inthe new economy: a good education and good medical care. (This was the subtext of the riveting story Senator Barack Obama told at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.) Almost every American family is struggling to obtain them. Yet, if we join together in a Benevolent Community to provide them to every American citizen, all of us stand to gain. The rising tide of productivity and wealth will lift the nation as a whole.

In this retelling, the main thing holding us back is the Rot at the Top--concentrated wealth and power to a degree we haven't seen in this nation since the late nineteenth century. Mammoth corporations and hugely rich individuals have abused their power and wealth to corrupt our democracy, take over much of our media, give executives stratospheric pay packages while firing workers, and pad their nests with special tax breaks and corporate welfare. In this, they have been helped by a Republican Congress and White House whose guiding ideology seems less capitalism than cronyism, as shown time and again through legislative sops to the pharmaceutical industry, the credit card companies, and Wall Street. (Indeed, with its mounting ethical troubles, the GOP's congressional leadership is fast becoming another example of Rot at the Top--an example the Democrats could seize on as Gingrich and company did in 1994.) Or, as Al Gore said in 2000, in a remarkably prescient speech, George W. Bush was bankrolled by "a new generation of special interest power brokers who would like nothing better than a pliant president who would bend public policy to suit their purposes and profits."

Gore came in for a lot of criticism after his defeat from Democrats who felt uncomfortable with his description of a nation divided between "the people" and "the powerful." But Al Gore was on to something. After all, he got the most votes.�

http://www.liberationtheology.org/library/providence-edu-theology-page.htm

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii
Contributors ix

Introduction: From Re-action to Action in Contemporary Social Sciences? 1
Olli-Pekka Moisio and Juha Suoranta

I. Historical Transformations

1. The Fate of Humanity in the Post-Trinitarian World 9
Zygmunt Bauman
2. Biotechnology, Democracy, and the Politics of Cloning 23
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner
3. The Globalization Effect 55
Sakari Hänninen
4. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and the Quest for Omnilateral Liberation 73
Chris Ford

II. Global Politics

5. The Ambivalent Virtues of Mendacity 91
Martin Jay
6. A Global Culture of Terror: A Marxist Riposte 109
Peter McLaren
7. How to Remember the Holocaust? 131
Tuija Parvikko
8. Are Suicide Bombings Morally Justifiable? 153
Richard Wolin

III. Critical Education

9. Driving as a Manifestation of the Essence of the Current Historical
Moment 161
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev
10. Six Theses on Class, Global Capital and Resistance by Education
and Other Cultural Workers 191
Dave Hill
11. The World as a Playground of Self-Builders 219
Petteri Niemi
12. Critical Pedagogy and Ideology Critique as Zeitgeist Analysis 243
Olli-Pekka Moisio and Juha Suoranta

See:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/9077874178/qid%3D1143002472/sr%3D1-2/ref%3Dsr%5F1%5F0%5F2/203-8880476-9811161

Professor Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Bemis Professor of Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talks about his new book in BBC 4 Radio (link below).

The Culture of the New Capitalism
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030010782X

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/thinkingallowed_20060118.shtml

The European discovery and subsequent conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exacerbated the conflict between those who saw ideal communities as hierarchical and necessarily hegemonic in structure, with those who saw the ideal community as a convention of equals, organized around a central belief in certain truths. In the sixteenth century another Dominican scholar, Bartolomé de Las Casas, would utilize philosophical argument to advocate for the humanity of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In his Memorial de Remedios, Las Casas described his vision of an ideal community in which free indigenous farmers lived and worked alongside Spanish colonists (Keen, 1977). He attempted to establish this ideal community in Venezuela, but failed owing to ceaseless opposition from neighboring encomenderos. Nonetheless, Thomas More’s later published Utopia would bear similarities to Las Casas’ description of free communities in the Memorial de Remedios, and one historian has asserted that More actually based his visionary Utopia upon Las Casas’ description of the community in a manuscript conveyed to Moore by Erasmus. Four centuries later, Paulo Freire would concern himself with the liberation of the oppressed through the development of knowledge within communities, especially in the method of culture circles. In a 1999 paper, John Elias recognized the potential continuity of Friere with Thomist philosophy, and while Freire was not a categorical neo-Thomist like Maritain, it is worthwhile to consider whether Freire also poses a continuity of, and possibly an innovation in, historical notions concerning the ideal community.

Freire’s employment of culture circles for literacy instruction seems to be the most promising entry to connections with predecessors who were also concerned with ideal human community. To Freire, these dialogical communities were founded upon love, humility, hope, faith, and confidence, all dispositions traditionally identified with the virtues. The pedagogy employed with these communities recognized that truth is to be discovered as an insight by persons and communities, not to be imposed from outside. Centuries ago, Plutarch proposed that the mind is a fire to be ignited, not a vessel to be filled. Later Aquinas would describe the task of the teacher as facilitating the student’s own movement into previously unknown truths, and that the self-discovery of truth is superior to mediated truth. Freire would also recognize the teacher as a facilitator, or instrumental cause of learning, rather than as a superior who imposes truth.

The culture circles were also contextualized in the work of the community, much as Cassian and others described of the rural cenobite communities that emerged in the Middle East in the fourth century, populated by those seeking an escape from the economic, political, and moral oppression experienced in the urban centers of the day. Thomas Merton described of these communities, “The society they sought was one where all men were truly equal, where the only authority under God was the charismatic authority of wisdom, experience, and love� (The Wisdom of the Desert, p. 5). The similarity between what Freire describes as elimination of the oppressor from personal consciousness has striking parallels in the quest for “purity of heart� (puritas cordis) described by Cassian. Both the cenobite communities and the cultural circles were organized around the quest for discovery of truth in the word. To the cenobite communities there came seekers of the verbum salutis, the liberating word of salvation, and to the culture circles likewise came those who sought liberation in the truth of shared words. Both engaged in synaxis, the gathering of the community around a central socially equalizing principle – truth.

In 1960, Merton saw the cenobites as actualizing the highest ideal community in their own time, while leaving for us the task of finding our own ideal community. Merton wrote, “We cannot do exactly as they did. But we must be as thorough and ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God" (The Wisdom of the Desert, p. 24). Not “exactly as they did,� Bartolomé de Las Casas sought to establish the Kingdom of God in the Americas through the establishment of egalitarian communities that liberated the indigenous peoples from the spiritual chains and alien compulsions of oppressive colonialism. Freire’s work stands in continuity with what amounts to a historical and global quest for ideal human community, a search that is as critical, and yet as promising, for the urban centers of North America and Asia as it is for the rural villages of Central and South America. Just as Merton challenged his audience, Freire too provides no prescription for an ideal community, but asserts that it must organically grow in its own place and time in order to be authentic for its human participants. Indeed, for both Merton and Freire, this is the very process of humanization.

Thomas Delaney, Ed.S. (Ed. Psych.), M.A. (Theo.)
Institute on Community Integration
University of Minnesota

Sociologist and journalist Todd Giltin of Columbia University will lecture on "Access Journalism and the Crisis in Washington." Professor Gitlin's lecture will begin at 2:30 with a Q&A/discussion period at 3:30. A reception will follow at 4:30.

Monday, February 27, 2006
2:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Room 100
Murphy Hall
Minneapolis Campus

Tuesday, March 7, 2006
2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Room 402
Walter Library
Minneapolis Campus

Contact:
Department of Chicano Studies 19 Scott Hall 612-624-6309

Join Department Chairs Earl Scott, Patricia Albers, Josephine Lee and Louis Mendoza, of the Departments of African and African American Studies, American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies Minor and Chicano Studies, Graduate Students of Mas(s) Color and undergraduate students for a forum presentation and discussion on the role of Ethnic Studies in the 21st Century. Forum participants will discuss the personal, social, theoretical, and political challenges and benefits of advancing social justice and learning in an era of demographic transformation. Reception to follow. This event is in collaboration with the Council on Public Engagement (COPE) Place-Based Education Working Group.