A liberal education – exit stage right. Part I: the attack

The liberal education tradition has been largely destroyed by neo-conservative assumptions. Identified with a range of academic disciplines, and pursued for its own sake, it has suffered from association with the life-style of the European aristocracy, the former leisured elite. Despite this, it had important functions in enabling a challenging of inherited beliefs and assumptions, of helping young people to come of age, of enabling critical thought about good lives and good living. It was the only educational answer we had for ensuring that education was about respect for humanity, and making the essential connection between education and democracy.

The idea of a “liberal education” lies at the heart of our intuitions about education and has generated most of what we take to be important to the purpose of education – when we do, indeed, think about education at all these days. This is the conception of education that can be traced back the invention of the concept itself in Classical and Hellenistic Greece over two thousand years ago, and thousands of years after the invention of schooling.

On the whole, it can be thought of as a university undergraduate conception, which works its way down into the high schools in terms of “traditional academic subjects”, so long as they are pursued across a range of arts and sciences. Even alternative educators and the more “alternative” of home-schoolers defer to it when they start to think specifically about subjects of study – they think of maths, literature, history, science and the like. They have an eye to the university disciplines. They know that problems will arise if they narrow the range too much, and if they allow it all to be about cooking, fashion design or computer gaming.

Other competing conceptions of education, such as education as growth, grew out of this idea as well. The idea of “growth”, perhaps reaching its best expression in Dewey’s “growth for the sake of growth” owes a great deal to the development of child study and schooling in the early years, and historically, we can see the emergence of this in theorists such as Comenius and Rousseau. But these too had the idea of direction and content that is still “subject” oriented, and ultimately heads towards those academic disciplines. There was an ideal of the educated person that was captured here too – literate, broad in understanding, cultivated and cultured.

The idea that education should be about life also has a home in the experience of a liberal education. The connection between the idea of a liberal education and the living of a life was strong, if problematic from the beginning. It is not just that a broad understanding of academic disciplines, particularly the humanities but also the sciences, provided a powerful background for many complex professions – from politics and government to military leadership and the law – but also that it was often revelatory of life in personal ways – the nature of the universe which we live in, of human nature within that, and of living well. The traditional study of literature is replete with these issues.

Going to university had a good deal to do with coming of age. Mingling and mixing with all kinds of people there, hopefully influential people, and making connections for life was often as important as whatever else went on in class. But for many generations, the classes, the readings, the tutorials were sources of great challenge to inherited beliefs and prejudices, and an opening up to experience. History, literature, philosophy and political thought broke students out of their narrow provincialism. The sciences confronted them with nature, including their own mammalian world.

There have been many criticisms of this tradition as it applied to schools, of course – that it was too “academic” and “intellectual”, that it did not give sufficient attention to the emotions. Any serious defender of the tradition would deny these claims, however. The criticisms might be true of how the subject matter was often taught, particularly in the schools, but no ideal should be judged by examples of its being badly applied. So much of the study of the arts – literature and the fine arts – have always been about the refinement and cultivation of emotion, not its suppression or avoidance at all. It is about the refinement of sensitivities and sensibilities.

In our day, though, this tradition of education that has done so much to give education its meaning has been beaten into a voiceless corner of the university, if it still exists at all. Proportionately few students are aware of its existence, or go to university to seek it out. Vice-chancellors and university presidents gave up speaking up for it decades ago.

Together with this, talk about education outside the university has lost meaning almost entirely. In any sort of public discourse and most private conversation, education simply means schooling and teaching. It is about any learning agenda (mostly manipulative) that anyone (mostly with power or aspirations for power) wants to promote. Overwhelmingly, it is about shoe-horning people into jobs. Where the longstanding tradition of educational thought and educational ideals lay firmly within the domain of ethics and good living, popular educational discourse and practice is now almost exclusively in another domain altogether. It has made its home with advertising, public relations, propaganda, paternalistic social engineering, surveillance and people management.

This is, of course, a disaster, and despite those who would see the old idea of education off the stage, many of the highly important concerns and issues that it stood to address will never go away. Whatever else we think we can do in the name of education, we will not be able to eradicate the fact that learning is central to our ability to live well, that respecting ourselves and others involves respecting human worth, and that efforts and practices that damage that worth are wrong – deeply, morally wrong and profoundly unjust. The question of what we should learn in order to live good lives will remain, as will the obligation to seek such knowledge in order to live good lives. When we lose this appreciation, we will lose morality itself – the very making of the person that morality is supposed to be about.

Nevertheless the concept of a liberal education that we have inherited, and learned so much from, has become far too problematic in our day.  It always has been significantly flawed in two basic ways.  Firstly, it has always been too tightly allied to a particular conception of the good life. To pursue a liberal education has been to be encouraged to adopt the trappings of the life-style of the traditional European ruling elite – the lifestyle of the “cultivated” and “cultured” gentleman and lady, and for many people, that just does not appeal any more. They want more from education than that, and would rightly prefer something rather more neutral about the sort of life they should choose to live.

The second problem is bound up with the first. The European Enlightenment ushered in a new world view, abandoning the idea that our lives should be determined by “my station and its duties”, as ordained by God, whose views were mediated to us by nobles and clergy from a ruling elite. The new view, building on the protestant emphasis on our personal responsibility for our own souls, established us as being in charge of our own good. We are supposed to figure out for ourselves what we are to make of life, and what we are to do with it. The tradition of a liberal education has always had a good deal to offer this project, but it wasn’t designed for it. In this regard, it is weak and unfocussed, and depends too much on stumbling upon the right teacher, offering the right course in the right way when there are no real guidelines for rightness, no real and coherent overriding purpose to it all. This does not matter very much when the liberal education is a part of a conception of cultivated, lettered gentlefolk. It matters mightily, though, to the Enlightenment project which needed its own serious conception of education – a problem that has never been seriously addressed.

The trouble that has been brewing over these flaws ever since the Enlightenment has finally come to a head. The traditional idea of a liberal education needs to be superseded by a much better guide to the educational that reflects the moral revolution of the Enlightenment. Then its replacement needs to be stood up for as fundamental to justice by anyone and everyone who has a sense of justice at all.

The birth of the concept of education began in conflict in Classical Athens – conflict between the philosophers and the rhetoricians. For the rhetoricians, education was a preparation for the highest pursuit of an Athenian free man – a preparation for politics, and particularly for the oratory that this involved. For the philosophers, education was something valuable in itself, continuous with the pursuit of truth, where this centred on human existence, and living well.

The rhetoricians won, but in an odd way. When Philip of Macedon conquered Athens, He eliminated democratic politics, and ushered in the Hellenistic age. This destroyed the point that the rhetoricians had made of education – its extrinsic value. No longer was there a politics to prepare for – there was no longer an end to which education was a means.

But by then the process of pursuing education had become culturally embedded. Despite the fact that it no longer had a “point”, free people, and particularly those of the dominant elite, had a taste for it, and the qualities that it developed became a part of the “good life”. It became desirable to possess them, one became admired for possessing them and displaying them.

This was not the intrinsic motivation of the philosophers – the pursuit of understanding of ourselves and our world – it was a new intrinsic motivation attached to the content favoured by the rhetoricians. It was preoccupied with text, particularly old text, and its use in oratory and declamation. Oratory depended upon the ability to draw on textual authority. A reference from a famous writer that confirmed or supported your point was the best evidence you could hope to supply. Knowledge of these texts, of language and grammar and the ability to use them in persuasive argument, not just for use in legal disputes or other professional activities but for amusement and entertainment as well, became a mark of the educated person – a part of the manners and presentation of the gentleman, a sign of that most ambiguous expression – “good breeding”. It is this aspect of the idea of education – its deep association with the character and manners and pursuits of the aristocratic ruling classes of Europe that have come down to us, and in our day, this means that the idea of the educated person is fatally tainted with it.

This notion of how the leisured, ruling class was supposed to behave and what they were supposed to devote their leisure to had ideals of the educated person woven through it, and these ideals were larger and more diverse in content than the more narrowly conceived liberal education realized in universities and prepared for in public schools. Despite our fetish with schooling, the domain of education has always been much larger.

If we focus simply upon the curriculum of these institutions in the name of education over time, we would get a perversely distorted picture of the educated people of the ruling class. We might start with the trivium and quadrivium of the medieval university, and even when we reached the nineteenth century, we would still find that the liberal education was something dominated by the study of Latin and Greek, with the natural sciences struggling to find a footing. This would make it impossible to account for the patronage of poets, playwrights like Shakespeare, philosophers, composers and fine artists, and, indeed, scientists throughout the long haul of European history. It would be impossible to account for the development of science in the West if it was not the sort of thing that an educated gentleman might do with his leisure, for its own sake, or to expect, as they did, to be in constant communication with like-minded scientists all over Europe. The accomplishments of educated women, too, fall outside of that traditional academic curriculum, yet they were a vital part of that cultivated life of the ruling class, as Jane Austen’s novels bare witness.

This ruling class life with its arts, its sciences and its politics, its country estates, its London seasons, its manners and courtesies, its field sports paralleling its military obligations – all of these are parts of the particular, class-based conception of the good within which the idea of the educated person was embedded. The liberal education of the public schools and the universities drew on that life, supported it, and is intimately bound up with it, but is much more limited.

The real peculiarity of all this now is amazingly hard to see. Our contemporary world is much more clearly heir to the European Enlightenment, four hundred years ago. If the educational battle in the ancient world was won by the rhetoricians, the modern moral battle was won by the philosophers – the moral battle over the traditional authority of the aristocratic ruling class, its privilege and the founding of its legitimacy based on its capture of the will of God. Beginning with Hobbes, but particularly from Rousseau and through Kant our moral intuitions have increasingly come to depend upon respect for the equal intrinsic worth of each human being, and the attempt to ground authority on the will of God mediated by an aristocratic clergy has been replaced by a responsibility, going back to the Reformation, but coming to fruition in the Enlightenment, to reason out our lives together in the best ways that reason can. Our moral and political ideals are embedded in the Enlightenment enfranchisement of all people; our educational ideals are embedded in the aristocracy.

This shift in authority should have overturned that ancient victory of the rhetoricians – passing it back to the philosophers. It should have placed an enormous burden on us – a philosophical burden – to rethink education to meet this radical new need. It should have involved a widening of that philosophical victory, a capturing of education by philosophy over the victory of its old rivals. It should have involved a huge impetus to create an education that problematized good living, both individually and in terms of the good or well-ordered society, and done so in a way that was fitting to our new world, and that opened up the possibility of addressing its issues. But apart from Rousseau’s courageous attempt – which was, at least, bold enough – virtually nothing was done that would even count as a challenge to the liberal education tradition. Instead, we have limped on into modernity, trying to make something of a conception of education profoundly tainted with its aristocratic roots and with a conception of the good life we have increasingly come to reject.

In 1988 the New York Review of Books published an article by Noel Annan entitled “Gentlemen and Players”. In it, Annan recounted the neo-conservative “story” of the decline of British industry and commerce which attributes it directly to the sway that the idea of a liberal education had long held over educational thought and practice in the UK.

            For  some years now critics of Britain have attributed the decline of British industry to this division (between “Gentlemen”  and “Players”) within it.   But the causes of decline  . . .  are  said to lie in the education and culture that generations of intellectuals have foisted on the nation – a culture that is said to be antagonistic to  entrepreneurs in general and industry in particular.  This fable is now used by Margaret  Thatcher’s  government  to justify its punitive policies toward the  universities  and the life of the mind.

             The  thesis runs like this.   British industry has been managed by boards of directors from the upper classes.  Their ambition was not primarily to make profits.  It was to make sufficient profit to enable them to do what English gentlemen traditionally did:  own country  houses,  preserve partridges, and invite their neighbours to shoot them; at any rate, to live a life in which leisure and enjoyment were the reward for the harsh business of running an industry.   Some industrialists who rose to the top were self-made men.   But the  industrialist who was a Player had all the more need to make  himself  respectable  by  following these pursuits.  Gentlemen  did not hustle,  gentlemen distrusted  management techniques  as a misguided attempt to professionalise  their activities, gentlemen tried to eliminate competition because it  meant  hustling;  so,  as far as  possible,  competition inside Britain was reduced by mergers.  When the great oil companies  Royal Dutch and Shell merged, Royal Dutch took control because its president,  Henri Deterding, was single-minded in his pursuit of profit whereas Marcus Samuel had other ambitions.   He wanted to be Lord Mayor of London and devote himself to public service.     . . .

            The rural life of the gentlefolk was so hostile to urban Britain that poets and writers idealized the countryside of hedgerows and lanes and rolling fields. Stanley Baldwin set himself up as a country squire. Neville Chamberlain was a bird watcher. Harold Wilson bought a farm. Rural simplicity was to be favoured over the artificiality of city life, and the money conscious vulgarity of American industriousness was to be deplored.

            If the object in life was to become a gentleman, the purpose of education was to guarantee that one did so. [1]

Annan’s story recalls the Victorian struggle to expand a liberal education to the broad range of liberal arts and sciences that were common into the late Twentieth Century – particularly the inclusion of the sciences and the call for studies more relevant to contemporary life – but he confuses this struggle with the economic struggle to replace any educational agenda with programmes to meet the needs of industry. The latter expansion did not take place in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Britain, but the former did. Not only were the sciences included, but the social sciences and many further studies of the arts as well. In America the expansion, drawing on the ancient roots of education, included even physical education, which has a place in academia unknown in universities inspired by the British model. Students brought their horses to the university I attended – to the stabling there, and undertook their equestrian courses in a large, indoor arena. Young Dianas would sit in lectures, prepared for their next class with their quivers of arrows. Physical education was not just a recreational, extra-curricula aspect of a full university life – it was a requirement.

But as Annan tells the neo-conservative story, the Victorian struggle was that of a failure to replace the stuffy intellectualism of the gentleman who doesn’t want to talk about money with engineering and other vocational subjects – the mechanical arts. Mill and Newman admitted the importance of these things to the wealth of the nation, but felt that they should be kept quite separate from “education properly so called”.

The disastrous aftermath of these Victorian struggles (so the story continues) was the effort to impose a liberal education on the whole population, so that they could have the benefits that their masters had enjoyed. This, apparently, is why the British industrial empire failed. The whole population was ill-prepared for industrial work, and imbued with the sense that trade was important, but not too important. There are more important things than money, and it is undignified to hustle. How blessed we are, then, that Margaret Thatcher could ride in on her white charger, slay the dragon of Western educational tradition and replace it all with the abundant vocational education that was to save our lives. Annan largely agrees with the story, insofar as it is a criticism of the liberal education tradition. He doubts, however, that the story is sufficient in itself to explain the decline of British industry, and spent the rest of his essay enriching that picture and discussing other factors.

But Mill and Newman were right. Vocational education is not education at all. The simple test, which we should apply every time we are offered an educational proposal, is “would we do this with slaves, if we had slaves?” The answer with vocational education has to be a resounding and unequivocal “yes!” An industrial economy based on slaves would have extensive vocational “education”, and nothing else except that which supported their placid compliance.

In order to retrieve vocational education from this invidious position that it cannot escape when it is undertaken alone, it needs to be firmly contextualized within an educational framework. It must be subordinate to a larger educational undertaking and point of view that protects the learner from being prepared for slavery, and it must be responsible to that undertaking, doing nothing that violates educational principle and doing everything to consciously equip learners against the potential for harm that an enslaving process would induce.

This is something that we should know and understand very well, because these things were well understood within the traditions of the ruling classes where a liberal education had its life. The ruling classes too, had their professions. One son inherited the estate, another went to the military, yet another to the clergy. Law and medicine, too, were favoured professions. Nobody of inherited means in these classes would have pursued these things without a solid background in the liberal arts. That was a social expectation, and a wise one. Its parallel, in our time, is the practice – at least in America – of first taking an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts, and a vocational degree at the graduate level.

I have already made the point that Western science could not have developed as it has done without the liberal education tradition that Annan and the neo-conservatives scorn. Without the tradition of disinterested intellectual pursuits in the European ruling classes, without the knowledge of philosophy, stretching back to the ancient world, and without the particular interest in texts, and in mathematics and logic, modern science could not have arisen as it did in the Renaissance, and been sustained. Without these things industry, in turn, could not have arisen. No neo-conservative government agency was around to make funding possible (and if it had been around, it would have denied the funding).

Equally significantly, the Enlightenment could not have happened. The Enlightenment is crucial to the neo-conservative story, because that story is a story of displacement of the theocratic  authority of the aristocratic ruling class, by scientific and industrial rationality. In this way, the neo-conservatives (and Annan) are children of that Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was made, however, by a class of liberally educated gentlefolk and the liberally educated philosophers whom they supported. It was built from the intellectual materials that liberally educated people had available to them.

Perhaps the most important achievement of the Enlightenment, though, was political and moral, not industrial. It replaced theocratically justified feudal authority with the authority of reason potentially available to everyone, and with a powerful ethic that levelled the value of everyone to that of moral equals. This was taken up, firstly, by propertied classes as applying only to themselves (all men are created equal, said the American Constitution, though women and slaves were invisible to it at the time). Yet the principles have been recognized and fought for by disenfranchised and oppressed group after group, widening their application towards the genuine, practical inclusion of all human beings as their logic suggested – in a process that is not yet complete. Neo-conservatives, themselves, have depended on them.

Throughout this enlarging process, group after group have recognized that their struggle for freedom, for respect, and for fair access to the political, civil and economic resources of their own countries has depended upon their access to the ideas that acknowledge their dignity, and with which they can make their case. That is why nineteenth century working class movements, struggling under the oppression of laissez-fair capitalists – the neo-conservatives of their day – sought out education for themselves, attempting to gain access to the materials and methods of a liberal education that their masters enjoyed and that they were denied. It was not because they sought country estates or wanted to go hunt’n to hounds.

Similarly, as recently as the nineteen sixties, black South Africans sought access to the materials and tools of the European liberal education instead of their impoverished Bantu education, because they wanted access to the ideas and principles which justified their freedom, and their humanity. They shed their blood for it in Suweto.  This is what the neo-conservatives would deny and destroy, securing everyone instead in their proper place in the commercial machine.

The neo-conservative assault on liberal education is not, then, just a piece of class warfare against the culture of the gentry. It is a form of class-warfare against all other classes with the purpose of subjugating them to the entrepreneurial class represented, in Britain, by Margaret Thatcher. This can be seen quite clearly on the opposite side of the planet, where the parallel to Thatcherism was Rogernomics, after Roger Douglas, neo-conservatism’s leader in the New Zealand revolution.

Prior to the neo-conservative revolution, New Zealand had a very “flat” social system and range of income distribution which, while by no means “classless”, as the myth portrayed it, would have been the envy of any society with egalitarian ambitions. Though some few of the earliest settlers of the largest alpine sheep-runs saw themselves as a landed aristocracy, their pretensions are little more than quaint. Those who turned to the country didn’t do so to retire to their “country estates”; they did so to struggle with the land. The heritage is pioneering, not feudal.

Despite the fact that there is no aristocratic class in New Zealand and that there are no “landed gentry”, this did not stop the neo-conservatives from destroying liberal education – indeed from annihilating education itself. A huge tertiary industry of vocational education has been created. Many polytechs with no tradition or facilities for liberal education have been relabelled “universities”, and those that haven’t have been granted the power to confer degrees. Private providers abound and high schools have been turned into job shops.

Humanities subjects have been defined as a “private good” – as opposed the supposed “public good” of a job qualification. To study literature, history or philosophy is the intellectual equivalent of embellishing one’s life with lace – or buying fashionable clothes, jewellery, or bling. Because of this private luxury, fees for studying them are higher. In addition, because there is now a certificate, diploma or degree for just about every job, studying the liberal arts in the hope that an employer will see something of value in them has been rendered largely vain. They have been managed into something a student could only want for its own sake.

Where university education used to be very inexpensive – nearly free – so that it was quite possible to work your way through university by working in the summer, the massification of vocational education, particularly at the university level has made this impossible. The cost must now be born by the student in terms of huge fees, so that large student loans are now a necessity. Together with the higher fees, this makes the study of the liberal arts an unreasonable course for any but the wealthy.

Certification in the “right” vocation is essential now because few careers are available without them. The only way in which this huge system differs from the old soviet planned economies is that the risk and the cost are both transferred to the student. Students have to take huge student loans – hardly any careers are available without them – and it is the student who has to gamble that there will be a job at the end of it. If they pick a field that is oversupplied when they graduate, they won’t be able to afford another round. If they do find a job, they will be stuck with it and repaying their student loan for many years to come. In a world where the expectation is that we may have to change careers at least three times in our life-time, they face moving from loan to loan, and probably with declining expectations. This transfer of the cost of training from industry to the student is, indeed, a cunning plan. It isn’t chattel slavery, because the potential slave-holder here need not take any care for an asset in which they have not invested. It is, instead indentured servitude.

Few students are aware of how deeply this system of fees and loans exploits them. Even students who pay fees to get teaching degrees or degrees in business management have a portion of their fees transferred to fund the more expensive science and technology schools. As a result, in the subsequent years when they labour to repay their loans, they are paying – not just for themselves – but for those who have chosen careers in science and technology. Humanities students, when they repay their larger loans, are subsidizing everyone else. The Soviets were just not entrepreneurial enough in their planning.

University funding, too is now tied to government control of research. Universities must produce, and do so in the light of government research priorities. Gone are the days when universities were defended as the conscience of society. There is no ground left on which to stand. Work such as I am attempting to develop here would never be funded. Nor would conventional work in the humanities. Under these conditions, humanities departments have just been wasting away.

It has been sad to watch humanities departments themselves contribute to this destruction of the very idea of education, as it was maintained and preserved in the liberal education tradition. They could not have worked harder to discredit themselves. First there were the culture wars – the attacks on the history of the very ideas that enabled the very possibility of the expansion of respect for diversity of culture and difference. Then there was the imperialistic presumption across English departments that they were doing “philosophy” and theory – a deeply ironic presumption in an educational tradition in which rhetoric had already defeated philosophy. Philosophy undertaken without philosophical breadth, undisciplined, unskilled and largely unreadable. Where I will always advocate the study of literature for its unique power to illuminate life, I do so cautiously now, because I am ambivalent about the chances of students finding illumination in those departments that once did so much to challenge my own life and experience.

As a result of the neo-conservative revolution, the disparities in income are now huge. Ten percent of the population have captured ninety percent of the wealth, middle New Zealand has been driven down, and an angry, destructive and violent underclass has arisen and become an accepted part of the social system. We apparently lead the world in child abuse – murdering our own children being a specialty, and domestic violence is also something at which we excel. In addition to token programmes to “address” these problems which cannot be solved by such tokens, since they are systematic, the best that neo-conservatives can offer the electorate is that they might cut taxes yet again – a benefit which is the greater the more tax you pay – and these tax cuts are achieved by cutting services (such as medical services) which we “can’t afford”. If you are one of the ten percent that owns ninety percent of the wealth you can probably buy a hospital.

Everything is geared to wealth creation, but when the economy goes well and wealth is created it is not shared. Wages and salaries for all but the top are fiercely kept down while costs continue to rise. And neo-conservatives keep on getting elected – the vast majority of voters voting against their own interests. During elections we have a prime minister. The rest of the time he is chairman of a rather different board, and the population are farmed. What Rousseau said of the English can apply just as well, today, of New Zealanders – that during elections they are free, and then for the rest of the time they lapse into slavery. His remark was not just descriptive, it was prescient.

This clear peculiarity of our “democracy” can easily be explained, however. Democracy and education have always gone hand-in-hand. It is impossible for a democracy to work if the citizenry are incapable of participating intelligently in the democratic process. The only model for such an education that has ever been in place (poor enough as it was) has been a liberal education. That is one of the reasons why the British attempted to extend it to the entire population. Now it has been scorned and eliminated, with nothing educational to replace it at all. Several generations have grown well into adulthood without any education to equip them for democratic participation. We should no be surprised at the results.

When the neo-conservatives worked so hard to put their revolution into place they declared their intention that it never be reversed, Here, in the destruction of education, is one of the ways in which they sought to achieve that end. Even the so-called “left” dare not be so bold as to really challenge the system that has come to exist. They seem not to mind that whole generations are growing up ignorant of the issues of freedom, particularly of the struggles of working people, as neo-conservative governments, now decades later, continue to roll back labour protection from the cold wind of tooth and claw capitalism.

At the end of his article, Annan appeals to a novel – Howard’s End – another crashing irony, as Annan now reveals himself as a believer that works of literature could possibly have lessons in life for us after all. He alludes to the cunning, entrepreneurial, Gradgrinding Wilcoxes – “selfish, self-deceiving, insensitive . . . businessmen not above a dishonest trick or two” – pointing out that it is on the wealth created by such people that the luxuries of others depend. As we look back today at the obscene distribution of wealth our new masters have achieved, and at the tax-payer bailouts of banks “too big to fail”, with their rash of consequent foreclosures and the economic pain and devastation that they have caused, we should also be reminded that such people have created our poverty.

 .[1]    Annan, Noel.  “Gentlemen vs. Players”  review of The Pride and the Fall: The Dream and Illusion of Britain as a Great Nation, by Corelli Barnett.  The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXV, No. 14, September 29, 1988, p.63.

Tags: Theory, Justice, Neo-conservatism