Beyond utility?: Tocqueville on liberal education, and education for liberty

I begin by thanking Alan Kahan for presenting in such clear terms the position, which I will both build upon and beg to disagree with. I take as my point of departure two statements he has made. Let me recall them:

Liberal education will be attacked, and defeated, wherever it is not perceived as essential to this goal [of procuring a well-paid job] – in other words, whenever it is truly liberal.

From Tocqueville’s perspective, it is only a minority in democratic societies who can be, or should be, interested in a liberal education. It is essential that a liberal education of high quality be available to those people, and no loss, indeed a gain, if it is not available to those who don’t want it and don’t need it.

Now, to my mind there is a tension between these two statements. The latter affirms the desirability of liberal or broadly humanistic education in democracy, be it for select minorities only. The former acknowledges that, unless recognized by the majority as something valuable, this kind of education will be inevitably “attacked” and potentially “defeated.” And Kahan argued persuasively that the vitality and appreciation of liberal learning in 20th-century America was largely due to accidental circumstances that seem no longer operative. So if he interprets Tocqueville correctly, there seems to be a problem with Tocqueville’s position: on the strength of Tocqueville’s own claims (and Kahan’s) that humanistic and liberal education is indispensable for balancing the flaws and virtues of democracy, offering liberal arts programs for small self-selected student bodies in elite institutions is unlikely to effect such a balance. The currently debated crisis of the humanities, and of higher education more generally, is clear evidence that the 19^th century idea of a university built on humanistic foundations, and on the pillars of philosophical, historical and philological studies, is on the decline across the broadly understood West and beyond.¹ Against Kahan’s reassurance that all is well and not worth worrying about, I would argue that, in this atmosphere of universal skepticism and sense of global crisis, more needs to be done if humanist and liberal learning is to survive, let alone modulate, the democratic tide. I suggest that, while staying liberal, this kind of education must become democratic. Can this be done? And if so how?

Before addressing these questions with Tocqueville’s help, I will first try to clarify why I believe that Tocqueville believes (or should believe) we need a broader-based program of liberal education.

1. In the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville discusses, not without some irony, “the philosophical method of the Americans.”² What he means by that is not some peculiarly American school of philosophy – in fact, he claims that to date (the date being the late 1830s) there is no such thing. Nor is he trying to envision what America’s contribution to philosophy might look like (though in the event he makes a pretty good guess). Rather, Tocqueville is interested in portraying the frame of mind and the manner of thinking that characterizes the new human type he sees emerging: that of democratic mankind. As Tocqueville sketches them, the “principal features” of the democratic outlook include:

• - rejecting the authority (or “yoke”) of habits, and of family, class and national opinions (or prejudices), and locating this authority in the voice of individual reason alone

• - as a consequence of this, democrats “take tradition only as information”: i.e., as a set of facts that serve not as indication of how things should be, but as an inventory of past mistakes and a “useful study” of what can be done otherwise and better.³

In other words, essential to the democratic mentality is an instrumental or utilitarian approach to the knowledge and achievements of the past. What goes with it is a belief in progress and the possibility of improvement. Tocqueville claims that under the conditions of democracy, from a philosophical method, Cartesian rationalism has become “the common rule of intelligence” – a widespread habit of...