Can liberal education survive liberal democracy?

Public Interest, Spring, 2002 by Diana Schaub

I certainly do not wish to be perceived as anticapitalist. It seems to me that one can be a firm supporter of a free-market economy while still believing it imperative to insulate some facets of human life from market considerations. I would say the same about the politicization of the classroom. The larger question raised by the intrusion of economics and politics is whether an institution can stand, in a sense, outside of or above the regime. Can a community of learning operate in conformity with principles intrinsic to itself-principles quite alien, in many respects, to the surrounding democratic culture?

The answer to that question is important, since our humanity and happiness may well hinge on it. It may even be that the fate of the nation hinges on it. I have spoken at length of the difficulties that liberal education faces in a liberal democracy. I have asked whether liberal education can survive liberal democracy. But it might also be asked whether liberal democracy can survive without liberal education. Perhaps democracy is dependent on currents distinct from the democratic mainstream. To illustrate, look at how Montesquieu, one of the most perceptive analysts of regimes, characterized monarchy. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu makes the surprising assertion that the nobility-not the king-is the essence of monarchy. The nobility is the counterweight, preventing a monarch from degenerating into a despot. It is the nobles who keep the monarchy in being. They constitute the regime, in the sense of making it a constitutional order. And so, just as rule by one can be defined in terms of the status of t he few, perhaps rule by the many-at least a good form of rule by the many-requires a place of honor for the few. In popular government as well, it is the counterweights, the centrifugal forces, that are crucial.

One such counterweight would be the martial spirit-a spirit often overridden by democratic laxity, but nonetheless essential to the survival of the republic, as we have been reminded daily since September 11. In the same vein as the heroic temper would be the phenomenon of statesmanship, another activity seemingly at odds with democracy but necessary to sustain and justify it. Liberal education would be yet another counterweight that corrects and rights democracy. Paradoxically, it is by transcending the political realm that liberal education fills the office of a true friend of the regime. Liberal education keeps alive an alternative understanding of the word "liberal"-an understanding that points beyond that ordinarily associated with liberal democracy. While liberal democracy offers its citizens a liberated private realm, freed from governmental interference, liberal education explores how that free individual ought to live. It asks what are the activities and the virtues proper to the free individual. In the process, it reveals the many forms slavery can take, from the obvious bodily ones to those far subtler.

Leo Strauss, in a well-known commencement address entitled "What is Liberal Education?", presented a number of striking formulations of the meaning of liberal education: