"Adam Smith on Education, Inequality, and Class Division in Commerical Society."
 

Contrary to his popular image as a champion of laissez-faire economics and government non-intervention, Adam Smith was conscious of 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, for example, cite Smith’s endorsement of state-funded parish schools as evidence of his concern for issues of inequality and distributive justice. 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 equal outcomes in intellectual and moral development. As I argue, these interpretations exaggerate the egalitarian aims of Smith’s educational proposal. Previous treatments 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 does not address the sympathetic gap between classes that he himself identifies as a dangerous source of “corruption” in commercial society.

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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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"Pity, the Sense of Injustice, and the Problem of Inequality in Judith Skhklar's Moral Psychology," with Michelle Schwarze.

 

This article examines the positive role of emotions in the work of Judith Shklar, a 20th-century liberal political theorist renowned for her “liberalism of fear.” Despite her skepticism toward public passions, Shklar recognized the necessary function of emotions as safeguards against the ordinary, yet pernicious, vices of cruelty and injustice. In particular, pity and the sense of injustice provide the affective support necessary to direct attention to victims and motivate intervention on their behalf. Yet, as we argue, these affective processes threaten to undermine Shklar’s secondary commitment to equality. Shklar’s liberalism insists that citizens be equal enough not to fear or experience oppression and to have their claims heard in the democratic process. But this substantive equality is compromised by pity and the sense of injustice, which create relations of inequality between victims considered “less than” and pitiers or sympathizers aware of their superiority. These affective ties generate sticky relations of inequality, especially in situations where individuals or groups are likely to be treated as perennial victims.

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"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.