Hannah Arendt has been criticised for the sharp distinction she drew between the social and political realms, and her application of this distinction to schools. In this paper, I demonstrate that this distinction can be interpreted as a heuristic that Arendt developed to address a tension that she had encountered in her attempt to understand…

This paper studies how Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' offers a meaningful account of political and moral self-education in Western democracies. Emerson's moral perfectionism involves an ethical, political and democratic individualism that needs to be reconsidered. This paper explores a perfectionist interpretation of the modern forms of self-education…

This article analyses utopian and dystopian literature and its role in political education in order to make the case for imparting a 'utopian aspiration' that nurtures hope for the pursuit of political ideals. I note an 'anti-utopian' theme in both literature and political philosophy, a theme that emerges in a particularly fascinating pair of…

Criticisms of autonomy-based justifications of toleration as an educational aim and as a political principle assume that personal autonomy can provide only a partial justification of toleration and that it serves as a basis for illiberal educational enforcements of a particular conception of the good. In this article, I defend an autonomy- and…

This article takes up Foucault's politics of human rights and suggests that it may constitute a point of departure for the renewal of HRE, not only because it rejects the moral superiority of humanism--the grounding for the dominant liberal framework of international human rights--but also because it makes visible the complexities of human rights…

The interview, which took place on the eve of the 2012 American presidential election, coincides with the publication of three major works by or about Hilary Putnam. It begins and ends with the topic of science, drawing attention to science's profound importance but also to its contemporary forms of distortion. It explores Putnam's…