Research
Dissertation
Fostering Freedom: Judgment in Early-Modern Liberal Educational and Political Thought
This project seeks to locate an alternative to personal autonomy—as a guiding standard of liberal education theory—that accommodates the limits of human cognition and the demands of liberal citizenship. To do so, it addresses a neglected Pre-Kantian discourse on individual freedom that privileges judgment as a civic-educational outcome. I examine three thinkers—Locke, Rousseau, and Smith—who each develop a framework for the cultivation of judgment that focuses on the individual’s ability to make informed judgments and engage in self-directed behavior. The concept of judgment that emerges from this study can serve as an alternative benchmark for self-government in liberal education theory.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Tennyson, Timothy T. 2022. “Cicero’s Romulus and the Crafting of Historical Exempla.” History of Political Thought, Vol 43. No. 1: 1-30.
I examine Cicero’s use of Romulus as a historical exemplum in support of his theory of the ideal statesman. I compare Cicero’s characterization of Romulus in De Republica to the Romulus accounts advanced in Livy’s History of Rome and Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities to better understand the character and composition of this historical exemplum. An examination of Livy’s and Dionysius’ more comprehen- sive Romulus accounts reveals Cicero’s omission of character traits and actions that contradict his stateman ideal. By crafting an image of Romulus that largely conflicts with his portrayal in the collective cultural memory, Cicero attempts to re-shape the ‘traditional’ archetype of Roman statesmanship.
Timothy Tennyson and Michelle Schwarze. 2023. “An Honest Man? Rousseau’s Critique of Locke’s Character Education.” The European Journal of Political Theory.
John Locke’s educational program has long been considered to have two primary aims: to habituate children to reason and to raise children capable of meeting the demands of citizenship that he details in his Two Treatises of Government. Yet Locke’s educational pre- scriptions undermine citizens’ capacity for honesty, a critical political virtue for Locke. To explain how Locke’s educational prescriptions are self-undermining, we turn to Rousseau’s extended critique of Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education in his Émile. We argue that Rousseau explains why such an education allows a natural desire to dominate to flourish, rendering children who receive it dishonest and incapable of self-govern- ment. Rousseau’s critique exposes how a liberal education focused solely on autonomy cannot produce the kinds of citizens a Lockean politics requires.
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Working Papers
"Adam Smith on Education, Inequality, and the Symptheic Divide between Classes in Commerical Society."
Contrary to his image as a champion of laissez-faire economics and government non-intervention, Adam Smith is conscious of the flaws inherent to commercial society and the need for government intervention to address negative externalities and market failures. In the past half-century, an explosion of revisionist scholarship has transformed this once controversial claim into somewhat of a truism. Nevertheless, there is still significant disagreement on the character and depth of Smith’s criticisms of commercial society and his prescriptions for addressing its limitations. Several interpreters cite Smith’s endorsement of state-funded parish schools as evidence of his concern for issues of socioeconomic equality and distributive justice (Fleischacker 1999; 2004; Alvey 2001; Rothschild 2001; McLean 2006; Sen 2009; Weinstein 2013; Nussbaum 2019: 141-205). According to this view, Smith intends not only to rectify the cognitive effects of the division of labor, but also to bridge class divides by promoting more egalitarian outcomes in intellectual and moral development. While I am sympathetic to these interpretations, they exaggerate the “egalitarian” aims of Smith’s educational proposal. On the whole, existing discussions of Smith’s educational thought have paid insufficient attention to the deep class divisions in his educational prescriptions. By accepting these divisions, Smith’s proposal fails to bridge the sympathetic gap between classes that he identifies as a source of “corruption” in commercial society. As I will demonstrate, two features of his proposal bear this out: 1) his acceptance of significant inequalities in educational outcomes between classes and 2) his failure to explain how (if at all) the rich and powerful might overcome their lack of sympathy for the poor through moral or political education. My goal in this paper is to temper egalitarian readings of Smith’s educational thought, while simultaneously affirming the progressive character of his proposal in its historical context. While most eighteenth-century social and political theorists endorsed the “utility of poverty” doctrine (Martin 2015: 561), Smith advances a civic education for the least well-off that prioritizes their self-government and citizenship.
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"Critique of Autonomy as an Educational Ideal in Liberal Theory."
The concept of personal autonomy occupies a privileged position in contemporary liberal education theory. There exists a consensus in the literature that the highest priority of liberal education is to produce “autonomous” individuals with the ability to use critical rationality to independently assess and authentically will their core beliefs, values, and commitments. Leading theorists of liberal education place personal autonomy at the center of their respective projects and shape their educational prescriptions to meet this aim. Yet, the concept of personal autonomy exhibits several shortcomings that challenge its practicality and normative validity as an educational standard: 1) it imposes excessive cognitive and epistemic burdens on individuals by requiring high-level rationality, “independent” and “authentic” introspection, and a significant knowledge base, 2) it is impractical and normatively questionable as a standard for formal education, and 3) it is in tension with other liberal commitments like reasonable pluralism and civic education. In this paper, I begin by describing the core features of Kantian moral autonomy that persist in contemporary personal autonomy models. Then, I critique autonomy-centered theories of liberal education. More specifically, I examine three broad categories of autonomy models: comprehensive, minimalist, and substantive. My goal is to respect the diversity of these models, while also demonstrating their common deficiencies as educational standards. I conclude by suggesting a turn to judgment as a more empirically grounded and normatively defensible standard for liberal education.
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"Playing the Victim: Pity and Equality in Judith Shklar’s Moral Psychology," with Michelle Schwarze.
What is the value of pity in liberal politics? Although scholars have increasingly sought to “bring the passions back in” to liberal theories of justice, whether compassion is beneficial or harmful to liberal democracies is far from obvious. We explore the complex moral psychology of pity in the political thought of one of the 20th century’s most skeptical liberals, Judith Shklar. Shklar, like Rousseau before her, highlights the potential promise of pity for liberal politics, going so far as to call it the “cure” to cruelty, the of her liberalism of fear. She also rightly recognizes, at least in her incisive work on Rousseau, that pity creates an unequal relationship between pitier and victims that threatens the political equality liberal democracies require. We explore Shklar’s moral psychology of victimhood here to elucidate the tension in employing pity as the affective means to combat cruelty.
"Rethinking Machiavelli’s Civic Religion," with Dan Kapust.
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Machiavelli scholars, despite disagreement on a range of topics, generally agree that he has a positive view of Roman civic religion in the Discourses. Civic religion played a key role in social and political cohesion, not to mention Rome’s imperial expansion; Roman civic religion, in turn, is depicted quite favorably in light of Machiavelli’s criticisms of Christianity and the Catholic Church. Absent a worldly, active, and god-fearing civic religion, it is difficult to see how Machiavelli’s republicanism could work in the first place. Yet Machiavelli’s apparent embrace of Roman civic religion and, in particular, the fear it produced in the Roman masses sits uneasily with a fact that has come to be of increasing importance to Machiavelli scholarship: his knowledge of, and his debts to, the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius insists that the gods are not to be feared because they play no role in our lives; instead, we are to emulate their own contentment and disinterest in worldly affairs. Moreover, Lucretius depicts the Roman gods, conventionally understood, as tyrannical figures whose arbitrary power causes individuals to live lives of discontent and anxiety. If the gods are anything like their depiction in conventional Roman religion, they represent precisely the sort of authority that republicanism rejects. Machiavelli’s republicanism would seem, then, to endorse a form of authority that is incompatible with republicanism itself. While Machiavelli’s praise of certain aspects of Roman civic religion are well-documented, this observation, in the least, complicates the consensus view. What are we to make of this puzzle? In our paper, “Rethinking Machiavelli’s Civic Religion,” we argue that Machiavelli’s embrace of Roman civic religion is far more ambivalent than scholars have appreciated. Indeed, we suggest that Rome’s gods appear to be an obstacle to the security and liberty that Machiavelli so prizes. In the Discourses, the Roman elite frequently use their knowledge of “natural things” to exploit the people’s fear of the gods and, in doing so, neutralize the very popular agitation that is so central to Machiavelli’s vision of a free republic. Far from being the vital glue that holds the republic together or the spark that animates its pursuit of imperial greatness, we suggest that civic religion serves as a depoliticizing force in Machiavelli’sDiscourses, undermining the people’s role as the “guards of freedom” against elite domination.