What do democratic citizens require in the way of civic competency, and what (if anything) can liberal states do to teach these requisite capacities? As Dana Villa points out in this fascinating and comprehensive rereading of four major thinkers in the modern European tradition—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G. W. F. Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill—questions of political education are coterminous with the rise of popular sovereignty. All four thinkers feared that “[w]ithout the rudiments of political knowledge, the cultivation of political judgment, and the inculcation of civic virtue, the people’s ever-widening participation in the political realm was likely to end in disaster” (p. 4). In a world where some nations struggle to navigate perilous transitions from authoritarian rule to popular governments, and even long-established democratic regimes tremble in the face of populist movements that defy liberal principles, it may be worth looking to the tradition of Western political thought for guidance.

On first impression, the landscape of contemporary political theory hardly suffers from lack of talk about political education. And yet as Villa notes, the two major approaches both suffer blind spots. On the one hand, liberal political theory extolls the goods of individuality, skepticism, autonomy, and an informed sense of justice, but often without accounting for where citizens equipped to practice these liberal virtues are supposed to come from. On the other hand, civic republicans or communitarians plead for the value of moral or civic education. But it is too often education under the guise of religious moralization, if not outright indoctrination, or what Villa calls “intellectual self-lobotomization.” Villa thinks such rote patriotism is “unbecoming to adult individuals” (p. 16). Neither contractarian liberals nor communitarians, it seems, explain how we can mold the kind of stolid, autonomous, and free-thinking citizens a healthy liberal democracy takes for granted.

The author’s starting point is the so-called Rousseauian paradox—a political conundrum not so different from the one parents face in rearing children. Liberal education rests on a chicken and egg problem: “[A]n autonomous or self-governing people must [first] be taught to be autonomous and self-governing” (p. 29). Peoples—like children—are not self-constituting. Their “raw material” has to be shaped into coherent political communities—distinguishable like Rousseau’s Poles or Corsicans from others around them by unifying cultural, moral, and historical characteristics (pp. 32–38). Once their peoplehood is firmly established, they also have to be taught to rule themselves. The difficulty, following Rousseau, is that this process of moral and civic education demands stern tutelary guidance, if not “thoroughgoing paternalism” (p. 29). As for Tocqueville, paternalistic institutions serve as “leading strings” guiding a people down the path to autonomy and self-government (p. 217, 254). And yet the whole point of political education is to create mature citizens who are free, autonomous, and self-governing—that is to say, not constrained by paternalism or tutelary influence! Whether it is a matter of mythical ancient lawgivers or Emile’s manipulative tutor (Rousseau), concentric spheres of civil society (Hegel), traditional aristocrats and their modern institutional surrogates (Tocqueville), or a caste of technocratic elite schoolmasters (Mill), Villa demonstrates that all four thinkers are obliged to rely upon extrademocratic, if not antidemocratic, institutions to lay the groundwork for democracy.

The contrast among these distinctive approaches suggests a helpful typology. Thinkers can be classified according to whether they see political education as emanating from formal or informal instruction, that is to say, top-down in the guise of tutelary legislators (Rousseau and Mill) or largely bottom-up from informal institutions and mores of civil society (Hegel and Tocqueville). They also differ in terms of whether they see that political knowledge conveyed by “doing” in the sense of ordinary citizens engaged in participation (Rousseau and Tocqueville), or rather by “understanding” (Hegel and Mill) through “a more passive exposure to, and absorption of, enlightened, informed or ‘universal’ views” (pp. 6–7, 88). What is at stake is nothing less than the nature of political knowledge—whether one learns the art of politics by thinking or by doing, as theoria or phronesis.

In addition to illuminating the main themes of popular sovereignty and political education, these four chapters also serve as synoptic overviews of each thinker’s political theory. Even experts will pick up new insights from Villa’s critical exegesis. Another virtue of the book is that the author resists the temptation to indulge in a morality tale of heroes and villains. While highlighting their respective insights and relative successes in overcoming the paradoxes of political education, Villa is abundantly critical of their ostensible solutions.

One abiding criticism is that Tocqueville’s political theory is irremediably conservative, distrustful of mass democracy, and that it lacks any room for real struggle, conflict, or change. The irony, Villa contends, is that notwithstanding Tocqueville’s keen appreciation of the tyrannical possibilities of democratic public opinion, the “nostalgic” Frenchman appeals to a moralizing version of Christianity congenial to concord and homogeneity. “[I]t is hard to escape the conclusion,” Villa notes, “that Tocqueville proposed to fight the political form of the tyranny of the majority with a social form of the tyranny of belief” (p. 211). Villa is correct to identify the centrality of religion to Tocqueville’s project, and furthermore he is right to fear the many ways in which efforts to “moralize” the public sphere come at a cost to individual agency and moral autonomy. At the same time, however, his understandable concerns about hortatory appeals to religion tend to obscure the subtlety of the Frenchman’s position.

First, Tocqueville does acknowledge a place for agonistic conflict and change in political life. In Democracy in America (I.1.ii), his characterization of the political sphere as a domain of agitated contestation and uncertainty, one where almost everything is up for grabs, is the very reason why he posits the sphere of religion as affording some informal rules, boundaries, and limitations. But this appeal to religion as a countervailing power hardly amounts to neo-Puritanical moralism. We can be free in political life—that is to say, we can afford to treat citizens like adults rather than children—because we can take for granted that they have been acculturated into a moral tradition. Put differently, people can be free politically because they possess moral self-control—whether this is the effect of organized Christianity or the legacy of Anglo-American mores. We see this in Tocqueville’s striking example of the Puritans’ gratuitous legal code: Mores, and not draconian laws, render certain crimes unthinkable. Conversely, where morality subsists, laws can afford to be relaxed or nonexistent.

Likewise, it seems a big interpretive leap to view religion as “something to be celebrated because it neuters everything in Christianity that might shake the established social order” (p. 245). Tocqueville specifically cites religion as one of those factors operating as a check on the vagaries of public opinion. Its sense of certitude and the transcendent encourages people to think beyond the shifting winds of tyrannical majoritarianism and gives them courage to act in the face of unpopularity. One thinks here of abolitionism or the Civil Rights movement and their steadfast opposition to slavery or racism, notwithstanding public opinion’s willingness to condone such abuses.

Besides these minor interpretive quibbles, the only real weakness of Teachers of the People is that by demonstrating the failures and contradictions attending each of these four approaches to political education, Villa perhaps tends to reinforce the intractability of the dilemmas he highlights. Rather than drawing upon his brilliant, fine-grained interpretations of these thinkers, the Conclusion is more cautionary than visionary, offering modest suggestions about the importance of better schools, the ills of money in politics, and assertions that inequality represents the primary challenge to contemporary democracy. Even so, all scholars of modern political thought will gain much by reading this erudite, subtle, and illuminating book.