Tocqueville Lecture Series - Martha Nussbaum

Every year, the Tocqueville Program sponsors a course and brings prominent public intellectuals to Furman's campus with the aim encouraging serious and open engagement with the moral questions at the heart of political life.

The program takes its name from Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the greatest student of modern democracy, who understood both the difficulty and the necessity of reminding citizens of a decent and prosperous regime about questions of truth, nobility and eternity. These questions are not always comfortable to discuss and are never easily resolved; but, as Tocqueville understood, these questions cannot be ignored by human beings who seek to live lives of freedom and dignity.

For the next two years, the Tocqueville Program will focus on the theme of Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy. From the beginning of the American Republic, our best statesman and thinkers have seen an essential connection between liberal democracy and liberal education. According to Thomas Jefferson, the extensive educational plan he proposed for his native Virginia was a necessary means for "rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty." The rigorous education in politics and history Jefferson envisioned, however, has little relation to what is taught in American universities today. In spite of a price tag that strains the limits of middle-class credulity, our universities and colleges often offer curricula with little apparent coherence and seem increasingly incapable of articulating the high and noble purpose of liberal education in a democratic society. Now is thus an auspicious moment to take up the question at the heart of this year's program, "What is liberal education?"

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She has been a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and member of the board of the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published more than fourteen books and close to three hundred articles. Her writing has garnered numerous awards. Her books include Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Cultivating Humanity, The Fragility of Goodness, and Hiding from Humanity.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Furman
• Furman University
• Tocqueville
• Nussbaum
• politics
• political science
• liberal education
• liberal democracy

[gungrave386]

Great lecture ! More please