ABSTRACT
In her book, Undoing the Demos, the American political philosopher, Wendy Brown (2016: 175–200) refers to the increased access to a liberal arts education for a wider American public during the 1940s. Such education included literature, drama, art, music and the humanities, and was influenced by the philosophical work of Adam Smith, John Dewey, Alexis de Tocqueville and others. A similar expansion emerged in Europe after the war, becoming most evident in the 1960s. A liberal arts education provided a wider public with studies that considered other cultures and traditions, encouraged students to develop individually, collectively and convivially, promoted participation in civic responsibility to develop a social conscience for collective development, and introduced students to different modes of expression, communication and socialisation, with a view towards developing skills and forms of knowledge for a world to come. Brown draws a correlation between this radical shift in educational accessibility to the liberal arts and an increase in what we might call democratic or emancipatory movements for workers’ rights, civil rights, women’s studies, feminism, LGBT recognition, environmental protection, child-labour issues and more. She continues to argue that this extension of a democratic project, which is always incomplete and which today seems more distant, demands an educated public to continue and nourish its evolution. If the mode of education, i.e. the liberal arts, required for the evolution of civic rights, collective values and responsibilities, is curtailed or marginalised then we might view this as a direct attack on democracy itself. I claim that we are witnessing this today in many contexts due to the perceived lack of relevance of the liberal arts to the goal of neoliberal rationality and the production of human capital. Here I am speaking of democracy in John Dewey’s (1916; 1927) terms, a project that depends upon and is enriched by difference and the ability to develop convivial, sometimes challenging, forms of negotiation for individual and collective development. The work involved to sustain and enrich this project appreciates and welcomes individual difference for the contributions such difference can make to the vitality and evolution of the democratic project.
