Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill, Villa Dana

In Teachers of the People, Dana Villa takes us back to the moment in history when the people first appeared on the stage of modern European politics. That moment-the era just before and after the French Revolution-led many major thinkers to celebrate the dawning of a new epoch. Yet these same thinkers also worried intensely about the peoples seemingly evident lack of political knowledge, experience, and judgment. Focusing on Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill, Villa shows how reformist and progressive sentiments were often undercut by skepticism concerning the political capacity of ordinary people. They therefore felt that the people needed to be restrained, educated, and guided-by laws and institutions and a skilled political elite. The result, Villa argues, was less the taming of democracys wilder impulses than a pervasive paternalism culminating in new forms of the tutorial state.
Ironically, it is the reliance upon the distinction between teachers and taught in the work of these theorists which generates civic passivity and ignorance. And this, in turn, creates conditions favorable to the emergence of an undemocratic and illiberal populism.