Texts:Rom-E-14-E-RBB

Reading Ben Barber,
or Rousseau as Educator

Published in Trevor Norris, ed., Strong Democracy in Crisis: Promise or Peril? Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016, pp 127-47,

¶1

At the beginning of Schopenhauer as Educator, Friedrich Nietzsche asked, "What have you up to now truly loved, what attracted your soul, what dominated it while simultaneously making it happy?" He explained the principle of all his criticism, “to reflect on one’s own educators and cultivators,” testing how they helped and hindered as liberators, clearing away the entanglements that restrained his struggle, the human struggle, to rise above himself. Nietzsche's method was intensely personal, introspective, a look from within himself at his animating aspirations in order to then rebuke, in a revelatory voice, the cultural underbrush that restrained his pursuit of them, checking his raising himself above himself.

¶2

Nietzsche knew that examining the formative power Schopenhauer had for him as educator would be out of step with the times, but that was precisely why his reflections were important, not as narcissistic self-celebration, but as a corrective to public misapprehensions about the realities of education. People were submitting to molding forces that lacked real educative power. Four selfish sets of influence, impersonal yet prepossessing, purveyed a deceptive, debilitating culture, one fraught with ulterior motives. These were destructive, yet powerful: first, the self-dealing of the acquisitive; second, the instrumental imperatives of the state; third, the exclusivity of the in-crowd; and fourth, the preoccupations of scholarship. To stand against these, to grasp education as the formation of a self-forming self, understanding how “Schopenhauer as educator must actually educate? had exemplary force.

¶3

Nearly a century and a half has passed, and the selfish pedagogies against which Nietzsche warned have expanded vastly in scope, scale, and power. Education is securely in the thrall of commerce, the state, celebrity, and scholarship-precisely those four dangers that Nietzsche decried. The world around abounds with producers of passivity, with teachers and testers, pundits and preachers, anchors and ad men, press agents, writers, flaks, organizers, reporters, bloggers, professors, politicos, entertainers, athletes, personalities, actors-endless feeders of buzz. Ulterior motives pervade it all. Who among these throngs can we celebrate as educator? Might our general dissatisfaction with the state of education, despite its scope and scale, formal and informal, of our vast efforts at it, arise because we have failed to nurture educators? Because we know not what educators do, who they are, or how they work?

¶4

Let us test the potential of this Nietzschean method, turning it outward a bit, by reflecting the presence of a powerful thinker, as educator, in the work of a prominent contemporary. In these essays, we concentrate on Benjamin R. Barber, an accomplished critic and political thinker, a well-defined public presence, who might serve our inquiry well as a probable educatee. Barber’s career and attainments reflect a life of conscious striving, an effort at sustained self-development. He is the sort of person we might expect to be an exemplary educatee, someone who has responded significantly to the influence of another as educator. But in Barber’s case, who might that educator be? Whatever its limitations, Nietzsche’s strategy of reflecting on his own educator had one great simplicity, relative to our more disengaged study of both educator and educatee: Nietzsche could identify his educator with full subjective confidence. Starting our more disengaged inquiry, we need to identify who might have been working as educator with Barber as educatee.

¶5

Of course, we might ask Barber to examine himself and reflect on someone as educator in the way Nietzsche did in thinking about Schopenhauer as educator. Butthat would be to ask Barber to write an essay taking Nietzsche’s as a model. But we seek something more disengaged in which we start as observers with an educatee and seek to discover the educator and to understand the nature of his work as educator in interaction with the educatee. We can query Barber later, as a test of our ability as observers of both educator and educatee. And his testimony might not even be definitive, for one can imagine observers pairing an educator and with an educatee in an illuminating way, which the educatee might strenuously disavow.

¶6

Be that as it may, for us, here in this paper, given Barber as the educatee, we can make a choice, informed but not definitive, of who to take as educator. Our purpose is not biographical, to assert that Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been the dominant shaping influence in Barber’s life and work. We can leave the biographical task to the whims of posterity. Our purpose is to illuminate how persons work as educators, to find what it takes to be an educator. We entertain this purpose because societies around the world are spending treasure and effort on "education” even though they understand poorly how persons work as educators. In an educational inquiry, it is enough that we can consider Rousseau as educator in relation to Barber as educatee. The relation needs to be real and substantial, but neither exclusive nor pre-eminent. Many others might serve as educators for Barber, in addition to Rousseau, and one or more might prove to be more important for Barber as educatee than Rousseau as educator. That would be fine-grist for someone else’s mill-as long as long as we can here learn something valuable from Rousseau and Barber about work as an educator affects another as educatee.

¶7

In what follows, then, we will pursue a two-fold inquiry. First, can we identify Rousseau as educator and Barber as educatee by showing that Rousseau’s thought and example evidently have had a sustained, substantial importance for Barber in a way that we cannot adequately interpret simply by taking Rousseau as one of Barber’s teachers or as a substantial subject of Barber’s work-Barber as teacher about Rousseau. In effect, we start out with two initial criteria, which we can state as general propositions. First, when someone serves for another as educator, his substantive influence may be evident in part as a teacher communicating certain ideas that become part of the student’s stock of knowledge. However, the influence of educator on the educatee proves to be deeper and more extensive that that of direct instruction. Second, the work of an educator may on frequent occasion be among the educatee's explicit writings or instruction, but influence exerted as educator will have a more subtle presence throughout the edu- catee’s work evident in both the ostensible subject at that work and in the pervasive character of it. We need show in the interaction between Rousseau and Barber what these generalities can mean when a thinker has real power as educator.

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¶8

Through this initial inquiry, we have arrived at the actual subject of this essay, neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin R. Barber- Rousseau as educator and Barber as educatee. We have two related tasks. First, to show that the relationship between Rousseau and Barber goes beyond that of a teacher and student and of a scholar and his subject to one that we can meaningfully consider as an instance of an educator and an educatee. Second, insofar as an educator-educatee relationship proves to be manifest, to understand the characteristics of Rousseau’s work that were essential to his effectiveness as the educator. If we can form a better understanding of the hallmarks of accomplishment as educator, perhaps we can better foster the work of educators in all our efforts at education.

¶9

Can we consider Rousseau as educator and Barber as his educatee? Let us try to pursue this question by surveying the degree to which Rousseau appears as a presence in Barber's life and work as it is so far evident. With that presence in view, we can then ask whether we can fully account for the scope and significance of the interactions between Rousseau and Barber by treating Rousseau as an important teacher for Barber, imparting specific concerns and ideas to him, or by showing how Rousseau serves for Barber as the subject of his scholarship. An educator will be both teacher and subject for his educatee, but if it is meaningful to speak of someone as educator, his influence should not be entirely reducible to that of teacher and subject of study; it should be evident in spirit in the original accomplishments of the educatee.

¶10

Clearly, Rousseau has had a significant presence in Barber’s life and work. We should begin by surveying its extent and character, and we might well start in a lighthearted manner, for this is, as the Latin puts it, a liber amicorum, a book of friends, and as an old friend, I can start surveying Rousseau’s presence for Barber by noting a bit of apocrypha. I heard the tale long ago, soon after it would have happened, and cannot vouch for its truth, but looking back, its source could only have been Barber himself in one of those warm occasions, in vino veritas, in which friends relax and take off their masks of self-seriousness. Whether or not true, the tale shows that Rousseau had at least a special aura for Barber.

¶11

Picture Barber long ago, starting out-a young, charismatic faculty member, teaching political thought at Rutgers, living on New York’s Upper West Side, father of two small children and squire to a small dog, something of a gray mop, to some squirmy and to others cuddly. Naturally, Barber preferred New York to New Brunswick, and he would drive to the latter to lecture, often accompanied by said mop, which would wait in the car, perhaps asleep, perhaps threatening a passing squirrel with its bark. Per usual, this routine took place on a pleasant spring day, when Barber gave his lecture on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We can surmise that he was keyed up to speak with passion and force, for he attached special importance to Rousseau’s thought, and hence preoccupied, he left the car window open a bit too far. A squirrel complacently passed the car with the mop and its futile barking, and the mop-at its most squirmy, not cuddly-saw the opening, grasped the day, and leapt to the chase, free to run, not merely to bark. The next day, Barber’s students were abuzz with speculations why, after giving a really good lecture on Rousseau, he had been seen running from place to place on campus, calling out, “Rousseau! Rousseau! Where are you? Come here, Now!”

¶12

Rousseau was more than a cuddly companion for Barber’s young children, however. Barber had and has an aura of expertise on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and to extract how influence as educator comes about from the interaction between Rousseau and Barber, we should concentrate our attention on this aura of expertise.

¶13

Two aspects of Barber’s presence as an interpreter of Rousseau are particularly revealing, I think, of what enabled Rousseau as educatorto have effects through Barber. At first, my noting these two characteristics of Barber’s expertise on Rousseau may strike some as a bit snarky, but that would be to mishear, to react with the deafness to work as educator so characteristic of our time. Put bluntly, Barber’s aura of expertise on Rousseau seems somewhat unearned, in that he has not really written that much about Rousseau, per se, and it seems somewhat off center, in that he accentuates Rousseau more in a Swiss context than the normal context of the French philosophes. Let’s start with the second of these observations, that relative to most interpreters of Rousseau, Barber’s Rousseau is slightly off center, with the importance of Rousseau’s Swiss context accentuated as an interpretative resource unlike most other interpreters, who accentuate the context of the philosophes, and through them English contract theory, for their understanding of Rousseau.

¶14

Barber's Helvetic bias towards Rousseau is easy to document. We have recently witnessed a fruit of Rousseau’s subtle, anticipatory genius in publishing his two greatest works in his fiftieth year, leading in 2012 to a flurry of tercentennials his birth combined with 250^th anniversaries of Émile and the Social Contract. Barber’s prominent role in these celebrations evidenced his aura of expertise about Rousseau and his sense of the importance of Rousseau’s Swiss background. Indeed, that context has been significant in what Barber has written explicitly about Rousseau. “How Swiss Is Rousseau?” was the central question in one of the two extended essays Barber has published on him. And in the other, Barber reflected on Rousseau’s views about the theater in Geneva, as distinct from elsewhere, as one of several key components to his dramatic imagination. In addition, while Barber's thinking is replete with a wide range of references to historical important political thinkers, Rousseau is his most frequent and varied reference point, and reviewers of Barber's important book, Strong Democracy, would often describe the argument as highly Rousseauean.

¶15

Whether Barber’s unusual interest in Rousseau’s Swiss background makes his insight into Rousseau superior to that of other interpreters of Rousseau’s thought, who may ignore or downplay it, does not matter here. What matters is whether or not Barber’s interest may provide a clue to how Rousseau came to serve as educator for him. We need to distinguish Rousseau as educator from Rousseau as interpretative resource. As a foil for interpreting political theories, Rousseau is available to anyone who might inquire into his ideas, as a child of 18^th-century Geneva turned controversial philosophe of a particular bent, build a reputation as a Rousseau scholar, and then use those ideas to comment on the character of Swiss political practices. But to see Barber as a young political theorist calculating that he could make his reputation by concentrating on Rousseau as a Swiss political theorist would obscure Rousseau as Barber’s educator entirely, turning Rousseau into a mere academic interest of no formative significance. Barber’s relation to Rousseau as a Swiss political thinker was different.

¶16

Barber’s dissertation, published as The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton, helps us understand the difference. In the< acknowledgements, Barber wrote warmly, “Above all, in Switzerland, I owe a profound debt to the late Hans Casparis, founder and long-time director of the Albert Schweitzer College in Churwalden, and to his wife Th6rese Casparis. They introduced me gently to Swiss life when I was barely seventeen, and later made it possible for me to spend several years teaching at Albert Schweitzer College when as a doctoral candidate I worked on preliminary drafts of this study." Now a more prosperous town of ski lifts and hotels, in 1956 Churwalden was a small mountain village, perhaps 15 miles on a straight line from Davos, in eastern Switzerland. At Albert Schweitzer College, a small school, a group of 30 or so students of multiple nationalities in their mid-teens would spend a year reflecting on ethics and culture with the Casparis and a small academic staff.

¶17

As Goethe observed, “the boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him; he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise. It is a fair guess that before finding himself in Churwalden, “barely seventeen,” Barber had done his share of learning sportfully. Barber had grown up in New York City in a family preoccupied by the city's theatrical scene. In boarding school, Barber was precocious, apt but not docile. We can surmise that at Churwalden seriousness came on him by surprise, unexpected in an idyllic, thoughtful refuge. And we can guess further that Rousseau’s living presence became part of Barber’s surprised seriousness.

¶18

Churwalden, and the nurturing milieu the Casparises cultivated, would have been a new and different experience for the young Barber, one that would take on significant meaning for him. Although in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Churwalden in the mid-twentieth century would impress a young reader of Rousseau as an excellent paradigm for the way of life imbuing Rousseau's Julie, or the NewHeloise, his recollections of youth in Chambery, and the sociopolitical context for Émile and the Social Contract. As a youth, Barber would have encountered Rousseau as a thinker who deeply understood an ethos which Barber was experiencing as highly formative in his own inward assessment of his own experience. And this engagement with Rousseau would unfold during the late 1950s, the heyday of the interpretative cliches stigmatizing Rousseau as an historical source of totalitarian dangers. To Barber, his experience of Churwalden countered all that, putting Rousseau's ideas in their authentic, more constructive context, which disclosed deeper moral and political dilemmas. Here was Rousseau as educator, put to work by Barber.

¶19

A curious, essential aspect of work as educator jumps out here. Barber, the educatee, projects the status as educator on its recipient. Nietzsche's subjective recognition of Schopenhauer as educator was not peculiar to Nietzsche's prophetic manner; it is integral to being an educator that the recipient constitutes and controls the interaction. Rousseau is a bunch of yellowing text until Barber and others find that the words therein speak significantly to their prior experiences and find that the text can serve as their educator. Neither church nor state, neither corporation nor academy can invest its surrogates as educators. Only the lone educatee can do that on the basis, not of feelings towards the would-be educator, but on the recognizing the educator has meaning with respect to his, to the educatee’s inner life. When a newly minted Ph.D. goes before a class saying, “I am your teacher for the semester,” it makes sense, but were he to proclaim, “I am your educator,” it would be foolish arrogance. No amount of unction, sweet charm, didactic art, evidence-based technique, or pedagogic authority backed by high-stakes tests will empower anyone as educator. It comes from the educatee.

¶20

In putting Rousseau to work as educator, Barber’s experience gives further insight into what happens when someone does so. In learning something that a person teaches, the exchange is direct. The learner comes to know what has been taught and can apply it by demonstrating mastery of it through a test of one sort or another, or even better by applying it in the world of practice. As a teacher transmits specifics to the learner, an educator may directly transmit some knowledge, skills, and values directly to an educatee. Hence an educatee can both say and demonstrate that he learned important things from the educator. In such situations, the educator-educatee relationship is incidentally direct and instructive, the former to the latter. An interaction becomes essentially one of educator-educatee, not of teacher-learner, when the exchange ceases simply to be direct and becomes transformative, potentially for both educator and educatee. In interaction with the educator, the educatee significantly changes by integrating influence from the educator in such a way that the result is a distinctive derivative from the educator, not a direct transmission. Further, the transformative action can circle back from educatee to educator, disclosing aspects of the educator's achievements that hitherto had been difficult to perceive or understand.

¶21

Barber’s Death of Communal Liberty shows this transformative relation with Rousseau. As throughout Barber’s writing, he makes passing reference to Rousseau, along with other figures in the historical pantheon of political thought. But in addition, here Barber used Rousseau’s ideas in more complex ways, having them serve two distinct roles. In one role, Rousseau was “an invisible presence” throughout the book. Barber did not explain this invisible presence, but it was, I feel confident, his internalization of a Rous- seauean sensibility enabling him to make sense of a communal politics very different from the principles of American representative governance. He did not build an interpretative apparatus from Rousseau’s work with which to explain communal liberty in Grau- bunden, or Raetia as it was called prior to incorporation into the Swiss federation. Instead, at a few junctures he drew on Rousseau to help explain his understanding of the Raetian political practices, observing how a 19^th-century historian of the canton had found its traditions harmonious with Rousseau’s ideas and expressing a bit of surprise “how like” one another an old characterization of the Raetian peasantry and Rousseau’s description of the Genevans’ sensibility were.2 in his role of invisible presence throughout the book, Rousseau as educator had enabled Barber to transform himself—the young political theorist creating his place in an academic arena dominated by Anglo-American liberal democratic theory-into a thinker who could explicate the genius and travails of Swiss communal politics against the conventional assumptions.

¶22

Towards the end of the book, Barber summed up his understanding of direct democracy as he had derived it from the case of Graubiinden. He described his view of direct democracy as “essentially Rousseauean” and quoted a substantial passage from The Social Contract to enumerate the conditions he had found essential for the Raetian political practice to work. In doing so, he was not capping an argument that Rousseau’s teachings provided the principles that explain Swiss communal liberty. Rather the reverse: Swiss history demonstrated what Rousseau really had in mind.

¶23

Rousseau really served two roles for Barber in the book. As we have seen, Rousseau was that invisible presence, established we suspect during or soon after Barber’s boyhood experience in Churwalden. Barber used Rousseau's ideas and example to help make sense of his experience in Switzerland and perhaps in the whole of life. But in addition, another aspect of Rousseau as educator and Barber as educatee was central to The Death of Communal Liberty. In it, having recognized Rousseau as educator and drawn from insight and inspiration from Rousseau, Barber reversed the direction of influence between educator and educatee, and used his insight to revise the perception of Rousseau as political thinker held by Anglo-American academics.

¶24

During World War II and its aftermath in the Cold War, influential commentators stigmatized various thinkers as pathogenic and contagious sources of totalitarianism. Karl Popper anathematized Plato, Hegel, and Marx as dangerous enemies of the open society, and he included Rousseau's concept of the general will, long suspect by liberal political thinkers, among the dangerous ideas against which sound thinkers would inoculate those who were susceptibly naive. At the same time, Bertrand Russell published his history of Western philosophy with a prejudicial capsule of Rousseau's life and thought, including an often quoted observation that “those who considered themselves reformers have been divided into two groups, those who followed [Rousseau] and those who followed Locke. Sometimes they co-operated, and many individuals saw no incompatibility. But gradually the incompatibility has become increasingly evident. At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.” A few years later, J. L. Talmon probed 18^th-century French thought to find The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. He demonstrated in detail how the concept of the general will, pre-eminently as developed by Rousseau, was the fateful idea that duped people into believing that totalitarian democracy, the merging of the individual into the all-powerful state, would be expedient and legitimate. Political practice seemed to have divided into two hostile possibilities: liberal, representative democracies, best on an Anglo-American basis tracing back to Locke, versus totalitarian statism, either of the right or the left, tracing back to dangerous sources, among them Rousseau.

¶25

These critiques, spiced with virulently adhominem denigrations of Rousseau’s character were still commonplace as Barber did his graduate work. Fair-minded scholars tried to give Rousseau his due, often by weighing both sides with some care, as in Rousseau-Totalitarian or Liberal? by John W. Chapman. Others, like Judith N. Shklar in her distinguished book, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory tried to rise above anachronistic and adhominem critiques of Rousseau, dealing with his thought and his life almost exclusively by a close and full reading of the sources, reflecting on them in Matthew Arnold's spirit of sweetness and light, and ignoring controversy, pro or con. Shklar’s scholarship was representative of an outpouring of scholarship on Rousseau that has taken place from the mid-1960s on, which has swamped facile efforts to anathematize a thinker as complex and interesting as Rousseau.

¶26

Barber subsequently made interesting contributions to the wave of careful scholarship on Rousseau, particularly with his papers on Rousseau’s complex ideas about theater and on Rousseau as a distinctively Swiss thinker. But what Barber did with his educator, Rousseau, in The Death of Communal Liberty was both different and important. He fundamentally dissented from critiques of Rousseau as a proto-totalitarian thinker, for those relied on forced distortions of Rousseau’s thought in order to link him to an interpretation of twentieth-century political experience that was tendentious and deceptive. The result of these ill-founded critiques was an adjustable orthodoxy depicting uses proponents of sound-thinking liberal democracy and them as deluded totalitarians. This either-or left no room for the formation of significant political alternatives within one side or the other.

¶27

In his first significant publication in 1969, Barber had taken up the concept of totalitarianism and showed that it was a Protean concept of convenience, useful in engineering consent and stifling dissent at the cost of oversimplifying political realities and attenuating possibilities. Conceptual critique, however, would not loosen the hold of the totalitarian concept on political imagination; detailed comparative analyses building up more nu- anced conceptual resources and the comprehension of their connection to a variety of specific practices might eventually lead to a more fruitful understanding of the relation between freedom and power. Barber followed up and dealt with this tension between liberty and coercion as the central problematic in his 1969 collection of essays, Superman and Common Man. The dominant twentieth-century orthodoxy understood liberty as a Hobbesian absence of constraint and reduced democratic practice to periodic voting for representatives to permit further political development. Barber’s analysis spoke to a juncture long past, but it clarified the problem animating his long-term concern: “Democracy seems to many within the system to have become an ideology of permanent vested interests who use it to secure the sanction of a manipulated majority insensible to the oppressed and unresponsive to the needy. Hence, the dilemma: democracy reduced to a crass majoritarianism no longer answering the demands of minorities or the claims of justice, but democracy too potent to be vulnerable to revolutionary restiveness."

¶28

Throughout these early analyses, Rousseau as proto-totalitarian troubled Barber, for he saw that meme as a telling symptom of the political sterility of liberal theories of freedom and representative democracy. Where, when, how, and why could men assent to being force to be free? This was Rousseau’s great question and the question that people in the twentieth century were ineffectual in dealing with. Superman and Common Men was an overblown but courageous attempt to state where he stood by a young scholar at a time when the play of events invited all to make such declarations, while few responded. The Death of Communal Liberty took the same position with less flamboyance, more precision, and a promise of eventual effect.

¶29

Barber addressed the problems of freedom and democracy in introducing The Death of Communal Liberty. Throughout the West, a desiccated practice of freedom, an absence of constraint, and an attenuated practice of democracy, periodic election of representatives, had long been established. Theorists like Rousseau, who offered alternative conceptions of freedom and democracy, conventional thinkers were holding to be beyond the pale, for history as their critics claimed showed that such views led to the destruction of liberty and democracy. To change the prevailing terms of discourse, real historical examples were necessary. “To combat the authority of actual political life, of a tradition that for all of its inadequacies has been a practical success for several centuries across two continents, requires something more than the rehearsal of adversary arguments in the abstract. We need instead the weight of arguments embedded in their own historical traditions, carrying the authority of an actual political experience.” The historical experience of communal liberty in Raetia could do so, thereby not proving the validity of alternative arguments, but suggesting “the alternatives while disestablishing the claims to exclusivity of constitutional liberals."

¶30

This purpose was “essentially Rousseauean.” Rousseau excelled at suggesting alternatives and disestablishing claims to legitimacy and exclusivity. Barber ended Communal Liberty with a long quotation from The Social Contract, not to show that Rousseau had been the proper interpreter of Raetian politics. His conclusion was really the reverse, a conclusion that the Raetian political experience exemplified Rousseauean ideas about the relation of liberty and democracy, freedom and coercion, embedded in a historical tradition that was clearly not totalitarian. Barber restated the Rousseauean conditions for direct democracy in his own words:

... A community limited enough in size to make possible a face-to- face political life; a simplicity of life austere enough to guarantee natural consensus through a natural community of interests; an insularity that protects simplicity and facilitates self-sufficiency; an economic equality pervasive enough to make authentic political equality feasible; a devotion tocitizenship and the integration of private and public life that immunizes the community to materialism, private greed, and wayward mobility. We may sum these conditions up under the general terms intimacy, simplicity (rusticity), autarky, equality, and public-spiritedness (the politics of virtue versus the politics of interest).

¶31

Neither Rousseau nor Barber thought a political life with the qualities of “intimacy, simplicity (rusticity), autarky, equality, and public-spiritedness” could be easily institutionalized in the historical world in which most people lived. These qualities provided no blueprint for prescriptive implementation. Instead they described an ideal type, a conceptual fiction indicating a point of aspiration, one the Raetian experience showed to be evidently within the scope of human possibility, characterizing conditions under which the human person and public citizen could thrive in one body without alienation from one another. These criteria become grounds for criticizing diverse claims to normative authority, saying what is wrong. Further, they become standards for evaluating the relative merits of competing alternatives for action, saying what could be right. The educator that Barber saw in Rousseau was a person of many talents yearning to use them among people he recognized with sympathy (intimacy), on matters essential to all (simplicity), without effort drained into external sinks (autarky), with all sharing fully in both benefits and burdens (equality), and with betterment measured through what serves all in common (public spiritedness). We can see Barber as educatee carrying Rousseau’s commitments forward, not slavishly as disciple, but extending them, disclosing further possibilities in which the educator is often again that “invisible presence.”

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¶32

Rousseau as educator is evident throughout Barber's work. Our purpose here is two fold. First, we need to observe the scope of the work and the interaction between Barber and Rousseau within it. In observing that interaction, our aim is neither to show that Barber is a correct or exemplary interpreter of Rousseau, nor that Rousseau is key to the success or failure of Barber's ideas. Rather our purpose is to note the scope and character of the interaction in order to assess what Barber as educatee gains from Rousseau and discloses about him. Then, second, we can step back and reflect on the problematic of the educator in contemporary education in light of what we have learned about Rousseau as educator in Barber’s experience.

¶33

Every person's life has an actuality that is subject to many different constructions, depending on the interest taken in it. Looking at Barber's experience with an interest in Rousseau as educator, we can say that the basic relation between educator and educatee was set with the publication of Communal Liberty in 1974. Roughly ten years of consolidation and further gestation followed, resulting in several books reiterating Barber's critique of liberal theories of politics and exploring ways in which more participatory principles could be given some historical reality. By the mid-1990s, Barber's agenda coalesced into a series of commentaries on contemporary life, critiquing the significant consequences of liberalism in political and economic life. These reached a wide audience through publications and an influential one through consultation, but with little historical movement towards Barber's underlying Rousseauean convictions. Currently, Barber appears to be rethinking how those convictions might possibly impinge on historical realities, advancing a more visionary sense of how a globalized urbanism might conduce to conditions of “intimacy, simplicity (rusticity), autarky, equality, and public-spiritedness.”

¶34

From the start of 1973 through the end of 1983, Barber was extending his command of political thought, historical and contemporary through his work founding and editing the journal, Political Theory. In addition, through this period, Barber published substantial articles and reviews on Bertrand Russell, John Rawls, Michael Oakeshott, Robert Nozick, and Alasdair MacIntyre; and a fanciful “play on words” with characters actual, historical, and fictional. In 1988, these were republished with a newly written introduction and a 1985 article on “The Politics of Judgment”, as The Conquest of Politics. This collection reiterated the basic theme of Barber's first widely-noted book, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics fora New Age, which came out in 1984, contending that liberalism in political theory sublimated politics as elites managed the interplay of interests, making genuine politics, based on broad participation, impossible.</ref>i>Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics fora New Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, [1984], 1990.</ref>

¶35

In Communal Liberty, Barber had argued that Swiss practice in mountain communes showed that Rousseau's ideas about what was politically possible and desirable did not necessarily lead to repressive political practice. In Strong Democracy Barber essentially reversed the flow of argument, suggesting that liberal political arrangements, “politics as zookeeping," in his telling phrase, was inimical to human fulfillment and that a package of specific changes could, if taken together, prove far less alienating. The first half of the book criticized liberalism and its human effects, taking it to task for atomistic assumptions about the human person, an abstract, mechanistic way of reasoning about their interactions, a failure to recognize social relations among persons as a locus of their fulfillment. Barber summed up a telling critique:

If, in the Western world, hope is accompanied by despair, if along with freedom there is meaninglessness, purposelessness, and anomie, if a too-active bureaucracy has left citizens in a torpor and too-active courts have usurped the law-making functions of frightened legislators who in turn distrust their own constituents, then it may be that liberalism has come face to face with itself. It may be that it now confronts the weakness built into its strength, the selfishness built into its privacy, the passivity built into its tolerance, the anarchism built into its liberty, the bureaucratism built into its realism, and the indifference to citizenship built into its enervating and antipolitical instrumentalism.</ref>ibid., p. 111.</ref>

¶36

In the second half, Barber laid out a parallel case for strong democracy based on assumptions that make participation primary, that privilege purposefulness in thought and action, that understand the person as a social being whose self-realization depends on citizenship within a meaningful community. He concluded his case for strong democracy with a set of twelve ways in which people could develop institutions of strong democracy from within the contemporary world. These aimed at “strong democratic talk (deliberation, agenda-setting, listening, empathy); strong democratic decision-making (public decision, political judgment, common policy-making); and strong democratic action (common work, community action, citizen service).”

¶37

Commentators on Strong Democracy often described it as a Rousseauean argument and even more frequently subsumed it under the label of communitarianism. Although Barber mentions Hobbes more often than he does Rousseau, he uses Rousseau much more than Hobbes in critiquing thin democracy and in supporting strong democracy. In explaining his views, Barber draws on both historical and contemporary thinkers in a substantive way, integrating their thinking, not just their names, into the way he develops an argument. What stands out about Barber's use of Rousseau is not so much how he uses Rousseau's ideas in developing one or another point, but in how he marshals his own overall view. Clearly, in interacting with Rousseau, Barber has greatly clarified his own ideas about what he favors and opposes and about the pitfalls that he needs to guard against in presenting his own position. In particular, in presenting his case for institutional innovations conducive to strong democracy, Barber takes unusual care to be both explicit and concrete so that his ideas will not be dismissed as vulnerable to abuse in ways that Rousseau's had been.

¶38

Nevertheless, the label of communitarianism, which Barber used very sparingly in the work, was all-too-easily attached to strong democracy. This is not to say that strong democracy would not be, speaking loosely and relatively, more communitarian than modern liberalism. But Barber recognized that to gain an effective hearing, thinking about strong democracy had to be concrete and institutional. For the strength of liberalism, as a set of ideas, rested to a remarkable degree on their being concretized and institutionalized in the present-day world. Calling it all “communitarianism” short-circuits Barber's strategy, for it makes it all an ism, a few essential principles floating in rhetorical space. As Barber becomes a communitarian among other communitarians, his relationship to Rousseau ceases to be one thinker working concretely in interaction with another. Instead, it becomes a connection over time between two communitarians whose ideas should be the same, perhaps with minor adjustments for changes in circumstance.

¶39

This doctrinal relationship is basic to W. Jay Reedy's long article on “The Relevance of Rousseau to Contemporary Communitarianism: The Example of Benjamin Barber.” Reedy looks in detail for convergence and divergence between Rousseau and Barber, taking each as if he was seeking to propound a consistent set of ideas called Communitarianism. He finds many agreements between the two and significant points of divergence, with Rousseau the better exemplar of the doctrine and Barber more inclined to deviate from it. For our purposes, the study is useful in helping to show the difference between thinking about Rousseau as teacher, not Rousseau as educator. When the student diverges from the teacher, it indicates some sort of failure in the exchange of ideas, either because the teacher is unable to get his thought across or because the student is incapable or recalcitrant. In the interaction of educator and educatee, the particular ideas are less important. Barber uses his understanding of Rousseau, along with many oth- ers-Aristotle, Burke, Dewey, Hobbes, James, Jefferson, Kant, Locke, Machiavelli, Madison, Marx, Tocqueville, and on. What he gets from Rousseau is not doctrine, but the recognition of some basic concerns.

¶40

In 1992, Barber published An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America, the first of several books that primarily addressed topical public concerns. Rousseau is still there as an invisible presence, but the bulk of the text is a commentary on the current public discourse about education, how American history should be presented, the degree of political correctness to be required, whether critical theory and post-modernism had gone overboard, and the canon wars. Barber’s views on all this were basically commonsensical, and as a counselor on pedagogy and practice, John Dewey had far more clout than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet, for all the commentary, Barber really wrote to advance his ideas about teaching democracy through community service, an idea he had previously introduced as the ninth of his specific ways for advancing strong democracy. Of his ideas for advancing strong democracy, this was the one that had had the most resonance. He described the model program he had been able to institute at Rutgers and laid out the case for the importance of universal community service, essentially to reconnect the citizen's sense of rights and obligations. This was a deeply Rousseauean concern, which Barber had long before internalized, and he has made it a continuing point of emphasis in his efforts as an educator and publicist.

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For us, thinking about Rousseau as educator and Barber as the activating educatee, the books that follow, starting with Jihad vs. McWorld in 1995, through Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole in 2007, are very significant, even though Rousseau's ostensible presence in them may not seem central. For us, these books, as well as talks and articles associated with them, indicate two interesting developments. First, they broaden Barber's diagnosis of 21st-century public ills, while keeping the diagnosis true to a Rousseauean spirit. Second, Barber backs off from his effort to suggest a course of practical actions that could possibly counter the sociopolitical pathologies that he diagnoses: there are some latent powers for democratic practices, civil society, and material abundance to bring about real improvements in life, and some possibilities for reinvigorating citizenship, but they lack specificity as an agenda, a hallmark of Barber’s work on strong democracy.

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Jihad vs. McWorld shows singularly well how the educatee can bring out surprising aspects of his educator's concerns. Barber's interpretation is striking and original for the way it complicates our understanding of the tension between fundamentalist Islam and materialist democracies. Barber does a very thoughtful job countering geopolitical perception that a basic clash of civilizations-secular, Western democracy versus fundamentalist Islam-is building up. Barber argues that the conflict is ultimately a human tension and therefore a global problem that requires a global solution. Jihad and McWorld do not represent the conflict of irreconcilable ideas or beliefs. At bottom, the conflict pits two deeply human responses against one another.

If McWorld in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal greed- one that is achieved by an aggressive and irresistible energy, Jihad in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal fear propelled by anxiety in the face of uncertainty and relieved by self-sacrificing zealotry-an escape out of history. Because history has been a history of individuation, acquisitiveness, secularization, aggressiveness, atomization, and immor- alism it becomes in the eyes of Jihad's disciples the temporal chariot of wickedness, a carrier of corruption that, along with time itself, must be rejected.... Jihad tends the soul that McWorld abjures and strives for the moral well-being that McWorld, busy with the consumer choices it mistakes for freedom, disdains. Jihad thus goes to war with McWorld and, because each worries the other will obstruct and ultimately thwart the realization of its ends, the war between them becomes a holy war.

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These opposed responses are the extreme polar reactions that the human sensibility can take in responding to circumstances.

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Barber's mood in Jihad vs. McWorld, in Fear's Empire, and in Consumed was one of deep worry about the political harm the interplay of these reactions could wreak. His mode of analysis in examining such interactions was always fundamentally Rousseauean. In operation, would the interaction of proposed principles (laws as they might be) work for people living in concrete conditions (for men as they are)? Would the principles reconcile the felt expectations of the person and of the citizen living in the actual polity? What led to disharmony between the man and the citizen would lead to a sense that constraints were illegitimate, requiring some forceful or manipulative intervention to maintain them. What led to greater harmony would give rise to a constructive polity. Barber's interventions aimed to create better conditions, one’s that would discourage a dialectic of illegitimacy and harmonize the personal and civic constraints people felt.

The voice of civil society, of citizens in deliberative conversation, challenges the exclusivity and irrationality of Jihad’s clamor but is equally antithetical to the claim of McWorld's private markets to represent some aggregative public good. Neither Jihad nor McWorld grasps the meaning of "public," and the idea of the public realized offers a powerful remedy to the privatizing and de-democratizing effects of aggressive tribes and aggressive markets.⁴⁴

¶45

Prevailing conditions of political quiescence brought about by pervasive consumer materialism and authoritarian command, justified by a dialectic of fear made meaningful citizenship nearly impossible. Barber's diagnosis disclosed a vicious circle: “Liberty understood as the capacity to make public choices (in Rousseau's terms to engage in 'general willing*) is a potential faculty that must be learned rather than a natural one that is exercised from birth. Rights are certainly moral claims, but their effective exercise rests on competence and hence on learned skills of citizenship.” Yet the prevailing conditions from which people were learning the skills of citizenship were corrupting. Barber professed a faith in democracy at the end of Jihad vs. McWorld,

If the democratic option sounds improbable as a response to Jihad (it is!), think of the “realist” solutions currently being debated....

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at the end of Fear’s Empire,

Real power today lies in being able to will common global laws rather than in asserting individual national sovereignty. The logic of liberty and the logic of security can be joined: their buckle is democracy.

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and at the end of Consumed:

Democracy is always aspirational rather than a done deal, more of a continuing journey than a found destination.... Yet as always, it is a history we have made for ourselves.

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Yet these professions of faith were far from empty, for they pointed to the need for a more radical vision. The seeds of it were evident in these books, and Rousseau continued to have a surprising, however consistent role in its formulation.

¶49

Throughout his work, Barber has reiterated Rousseau's contention that political arrangements based on substantive citizen participation would work effectively when the conditions were appropriate. Conditions needed to enable participants to understand and empathize with one another; to distinguish essential issues from the peripheral; to recognize that they exercised substantive control, responsible for the consequences to themselves and others; to do so as equals, as peers cooperating together; and to value common, public matters as the matters of primary importance for each and all. Like Rousseau, Barber combines a strong recognition that historical circumstances make a great difference in determining what range of options are available for constituting a citizenry committed to self-governance through participatory democracy. The great dilemma for both Barber and Rousseau, and for the rest of us with them, is that the prevailing conditions are highly inimical to such democratic practice. To change the conditions, citizens must do it through their democratic self-governance; to realize democratic selfgovernance people must change the conditions undermining their political capacities. How can people slip this dilemma?

¶50

At the end of Fear's Empire, Barber introduced a organization he founded, CivWorld and explained his concept of “preventive democracy.” He included a “Declaration of Interdependence,” which expresses its key purposes. Preventive democracy seems to ignore all that Barber, following Rousseau, had said about the role of the right conditions in realizing a sound democratic practice. It espouses commitment to spontaneous democratic movements as a check forestalling the authoritarian assertion of either radical change or the beneficiaries of the status quo. CivWorld sought to mobilize the commitment of “citizens without borders,” people everywhere willing to work directly and through nations and communities for very basic goals: justice and equality for all; a sustainable global environment; priority for children in the distribution of common goods; primacy of what is common to all in governance; the expression of human commonality combined with the protection of cultural diversities. The chapter ended with a litany of reasons why preventive democracy was not wholly unrealistic. Among them, Barber observed without elaboration that “a society of global cities is well suited to global democratic leadership....”

¶51

This, I think, was the initial sprouting of Barber's further vision, which shows Rousseau as educator yet more subtly at work. For several years, Barber has been hard at work on If Mayors Ruled the World, which is nearing publication. It is, of course, impossible to anticipate his argument in detail, but its basic features are evident from talks he has given about it. According to a preliminary table of contents, the book's structure will be much like Barber’s main works since Strong Democracy. It will have two parts, the first will give a theoretic analysis and critique. The second will lay out what can and should be done in light of his theoretical ideas. In an era of the Internet and significant globalization, with cities having become home for a majority of people, people's engagement with urban conditions has become far more conducive to cultivating democratic political virtue than is commonly recognized. These insights suggest the possibility of an emerging democratic practice in cities, the main features of which he will develop in the second half of the book. Our purpose, here, is not to assess the pros and cons for Barber's views to be advanced in a yet unpublished work But this turn in Barber's thought raises interesting considerations for our reflections on Rousseau as educator and Barber as educatee.

¶52

Rousseau railed against the conditions of urban life, which threatened the health and vitality of human virtue. And one can read Barber's work up through Consumed as sympathizing with Rousseau's distrust of city life. He did not say much about urban politics in these works. The values he praised and the tastes he rebuked were largely consistent with the likes and dislikes Rousseau expressed in his distrust of urbanity. Jihad vs McWorld showed how Jihad was a version of a broader anti-modernism, parochial simplicity naturally reacting to cosmopolitan sophistication, which Barber recognized as both Rousseauean and anti-urban in character. “Rousseau's acerb portrait of eighteenthcentury capital cities captures the visceral force of the parochial critique: 'In a big city,' thunders Rousseau, 'full of scheming, idle people without religion or principle, whose imagination, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great needs, engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes'.” Will Barber still be Rousseau’s educatee when If Mayors Rule the World is published?

¶53

Here again we encounter the difference between the letter of the teacher versus the spirit of the educator. A student thinks what a teacher taught because the teacher was effective at imparting it. Absorption, not assent, is the hallmark of what the student does. The educatee assents to the educator. The educatee assents, not to the literal truth of someone's word, but to its intelligibility, to the idea that the educatee can understand and make sense of it. Barber's turn to the city as the locus of a democratic future is not a departure from his commitment to thinking in the spirit of Rousseau, for the city he envisions embodies the conditions of a humane, participatory democracy that he saw Rousseau articulating at the outset of his career.

¶54

Let us wrap up the characteristics of the educator as we have seen them through Rousseau as educator and Barber as educatee. The educatee identifies another as his educator and then, if the educatee is able and the educator is enabling, the educatee can extend the work and influence of the educator. This relation has great importance in promoting the vitality and growth of a culture, something we see exemplified in looking at Barber’s work. Seeing how he made Rousseau his educator and comprehending the transformative exchange of ideas that then results, we gain deeper insight about why it is so difficult to find educators at work in our vast efforts at education. First, all the formal and informal educational efforts rife in our time rarely approach their countless recipients as if they were fully autonomous participants performing essential roles in constructing the process. All those selfish agencies of education about which Nietzsche warned have their programs of instruction planned, their techniques laid out, their intended outcomes specified. As a result, we have much education without many educators. And second, in the age of buzz, few sustained relationships can emerge over time between ready educatees and educators of complexity and substance.