The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, and: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (review)

reviews 165 To hold together this intricacy of postulates, Giroux uses what he caUs "a notion of transcendence," which for him "speaks [refers] to an affirmative vision regarding the devdopment of a new society, a democratic notion of sodabUity, and the development of social conditions that maximize individual and sodai possiblities to expand what [has been caUed] the 'rich individuaUty· ofaU people" (241). I think Giroux's "affirmative vision" may be the same sort of thing as his "Utopian impulse and legacy, with its underlying faith in dream, fantasy, and transcendent possibility" (125). Vision and impulse are apparently to be realized by means of "critique," which in this context may be taken to refer to something Uke a mental process—or, I sometimes thought as I tried to sort a meaning out of its various occurrences, an intrinsic endowment, not subject to growth, experience, or education —that has as its "ultimate porpose . . . critical thinking in the interest of social change" (18). Here "critical thinking" probably means constant examination of what Giroux thinks are "the often-overlooked complex relations among knowledge, power, ideology, class, and economics" (170), to the end of providing teachers with emanripatory ideas, "the tools they need to reclaim their own Uves, histories, and voices" (227). Reading Theory and Resistance in Education, I kept having eerie memories of the Cambridge Platonists and their Right Reason, theCandle ofthe Lord, fitfidiy flickering in postlapsarian humanity. I once wrote a rather unsuccessful seminar paper on immanence in Henry More and Wordsworth; but that was the immanence of God and Nature and therefore comparativdy easy to deal with. Like the Cambridge Platonists, Giroux inhabits a universe I cannot penetrate, and for much the same reason, I suppose. I just don't think as they did, or as he does. The difference can perhaps be got at by looking at a comment Giroux makes on education in classical Greece. It was, he says, "seen as intrinsicaUy political, designed to educate the dtizen for intdUgent and active partidpation in the civic community" (168). But what education has he in mind? In Athens, or in Sparta? And what of the little cities of rustic Boeotia? And what of women? In spite of thdr position in Homer and the dramatists, they were hardly a part of the "civic community." How were they educated? Or were they? And what happened with the slaves, the metics, the people living outside thepolis in surrounding districts? Is it of any importance that, typicaUy, the polis was not involved in schooUng? What of the narrow, disdpUne-ridden, driU-bound training of the young? Does Giroux think it was intended "to cultivate the formation ofvirtuous character in the ongoing quest for freedom" (168)? Or if he is thinking of the education through Uterature that Isocrates preached and of Plato's more austere and phUosophical sort, then ought he not to remember that both Isocrates and Plato worked with bright young rentiers, or the sons of such? He also should remember the famous dymologies of "school" and "schooUng." I have no idea what schooUng Alcibiades had. As a youngish man, he was of course, an intimate of Socrates. Nothing I have ever heard or read about him suggests that he was much interested in any "continuing struggle for a more just and decent poUtical community" (168), such as Giroux suggests is a constant in Greek history. Giroux's vision of education in dassical Greece exists in his mind and has Uttle connection with historic Greece. "What is this thing they caU phUosophy in Boston," Wordsworth once cried, after reading something by Emerson. I can echo him: What is this thing they caU theory in Oxford , Ohio. Reading Giroux I became positively Burkean in my feeUngs about abstract theory, and longed for the orderoffacts that can be found in the eighteenth century reports to the Board of Agriculture in England. Is it too much to ask that there be some evidence, as wdl as pure argument, in the exposition of a theory? WALLACE W. DOUGLAS Barbara Ehrenrdch. The Hearts ofMen: American Dreams and the Flightfrom Commit- 166 the minnesota review ment. New York: Doubleday, Anchor Press, 1983. 206 pp. $5.95 (paper); $13.95...