Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"How to educate citizens in a society of individuals? To this demanding question Villa dedicates this refined and extremely timely book. Unlike republics, which were not shy in acknowledging the need for and pursuing the project of educating good and honest citizens, liberal democracies are reticent instead, as they want things that seem irreconcilable: making us reason as individuals and behave in public as citizens. This book illustrates masterfully this tension through the analysis of projects of civic and political education in the works of classical authors before and after the French Revolution; it suggests a solution that brings us directly to the pragmatic mind: conceptions of a political education that stress the 'learning by doing' of ordinary citizens."--Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University "Hannah Arendt once wrote (in 'The Crisis in Education') that 'the word education has an evil sound in politics' for the simple reason that citizens are adults, not children. Villa, with his usual clarity and intelligence, here develops that provocative Arendtian thesis into a wonderfully ambitious dialogue with four great figures in the theory canon. Especially illuminating are Villa's insights into how paragons of the liberal tradition betray their own antipaternalistic ideals. He mounts a powerful case that the idea of political theory as pedagogy, while aspiring to build democratic competence, can easily fall into a failure to respect the autonomy of those it aims to teach."--Ronald Beiner, University of Toronto
