Regime and Education : A Study in the History of Political Philosophy

This volume is an inquiry into the history of political philosophy by way of the general theme of education. Each contributor addresses the relationship between a particular political philosopher’s broad teaching on the best political order and that political philosopher’s teaching about education. The unifying contention of the work is that each political philosopher considered in the volume promotes a certain kind of political regime and therefore a particular mode of education essential to that regime. Each chapter, written by a separate contributor, is distinguished from the others primarily by the political philosopher being considered. The book has a chapter dedicated to each of the following political philosophers: Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche. The volume provides a survey of educational models by some of the greatest thinkers of the West, while continually demonstrating that the two themes of politics and education are inseparable. Acknowledgements 6 Contents 7 List of Contributors 9 Introduction 10 The Limits of Regimes: Education and Character Formation in Xenophon’s Political Thought 20 1 Introduction 20 2 The Limits of Regimes in the Case of Cyrus 23 3 Cyrus’s Persian Education 25 4 The Nobles’ Doubts and Cyrus’s Transformation of the Persian Regime 30 5 A Laconic Digression 37 6 Conclusion 42 The Beautiful and the False: An Introduction to Plato’s Hippias 44 1 Why Hippias? 44 2 The Beautiful and Its Lie 48 3 Hippias the Beautiful 52 4 Hippias the False 56 The Connection Between Moral Virtue and Politics in Aristotle’s Ethics 62 1 Introduction 62 2 Moral Virtue and the Question of Method 66 3 Moral Virtue’s Dependence on the Intellect 71 4 Prudence and Moral Virtue 76 5 Particulars and Universals in Practical Matters 81 6 Architectonic Prudence 83 7 The Transition to the Politics, Reconsidered 88 Machiavelli’s Revolutionary Classical Education 90 Bacon’s Transformation of Philosophy: An Introduction to the Education of Bacon 113 Liberalism’s Approximation to the Rule of Wisdom 138 1 Chapter 7: Absolute Rule 140 2 Book 8, the Rule of (Locke’s) Wisdom 145 3 The Regime’s Education 151 4 Part 1, Play and Habit 152 5 Part 2: Liberal Reverence (§§31–99) and Temper (§§100–133) 154 6 Part 3, The Good Man (§§134–216) 158 7 Conclusion 163 Education and Regime in Rousseau’s Social Contract 165 1 Politics and Slavery 165 2 The Direct Addressee 168 3 The “Scientific” Analysis of Regime 177 4 Elective Aristocracy Disguised 186 Tocqueville’s Defense of Aristocratic Literature 191 1 Aristocratic Literature and Democratic Man 193 2 The Poetic Ideal of Democratic Man 199 3 Plato’s Teaching on the Human Soul 206 4 Plato’s Teaching on Politics 213 5 The Recovery of Aristocratic Virtue 218 Nietzsche and Political Education 221 Index 245