Millian Radical Democracy: Education for Freedom and Dilemmas of Liberal Equality

Bruce Baum

Political Studies, 2003, vol. 51, issue 2, 404-428

Abstract: This paper returns to J. S. Mill to draw out democratic conceptions of education and equality that challenge still‐current conceptions of intractable human inequalities. Mill acknowledges that individuals differ in abilities. Nonetheless, he develops a broad conception of ‘education for freedom’ and insists that only ‘wretched social arrangements’ prevent virtually all people from exercising capacities for self‐government in citizenship, marriage, and industry. In the same breath, he qualifies his democratic egalitarianism with reference to a sub‐class of working people whose ‘low moral qualities’ leave them unfit for such self‐government. Modern liberal states largely dismiss Mill's more radical democratic impulse. Meanwhile, they reiterate and refine his exclusionary one through new practices for constructing and managing inequalities – for example, IQ tests, educational ‘tracking’, and social science categories like the ‘underclass’. I reconsider this divided legacy of Mill's egalitarianism as a basis for rethinking the limits of today's ‘meritocratic’ egalitarianism.

Date: 2003
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