In this slim but learned volume, Bob Pepperman Taylor examines the nature, purpose, and value of liberal education in a democratic society. After canvassing three rival conceptions—one focused on vocational training (chapter 2), another on civic virtue (chapter 3), and a third on philosophical transcendence (chapter 4)—Taylor proposes an amalgam. In his view, a liberal education must simultaneously provide students with practical skills, civic competencies, and a taste for philosophical reflection (5). In developing his position, Taylor enters into thoughtful dialogue with a wide range of interlocutors, including John Henry Newman, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Alexander Meiklejohn, Stanley Fish, and Danielle Allen. Liberal Education and Democracy hence provides a succinct outline of major trends in educational philosophy. Yet Taylor’s aim is not principally to survey, but rather to synthesize—to integrate the distinctive merits of the views he discusses.

It almost goes without saying that Taylor’s book is timely. The question of the place of liberal education in a democracy has taken on a new urgency because, in the United States and elsewhere, colleges and universities are under attack from those who see them as sites of political indoctrination, or pointless navel-gazing, or (oddly) both. What’s more, these attacks seem to be succeeding. Distinguished academic departments have been eliminated, research funding has been disrupted, and new “accountability” mechanisms have been inserted into academic life. Given such conditions, a fresh clarification and defense of liberal education is most welcome.

Of course, the salience of these matters tends to encourage the idea that the challenges to liberal education are new. Yet one of the merits of Taylor’s book is that it demonstrates that the uneasy relationship between liberal education and democratic politics has occupied thinkers since at least Plato. To put this tension in a nutshell: on the one hand, for democracy to thrive, citizens must manifest certain aptitudes and sensibilities; on the other hand, a natural upshot of democracy is the kind of value pluralism that renders any particular conception of the requisite aptitudes and sensibilities essentially contestable. Democracy’s flourishing depends upon an educated citizenry, yet democracy’s pluralism threatens to undermine the project of establishing a cohesive educational program. Once detailed, any conception of the content and purposes of a liberal education will inevitably strike some as sectarian, biased, elitist, exclusionary, and thus at odds with its own democratic pretensions.

With the core issue formulated like this, one sees the rationale for thinking that education should aim exclusively at market goals. The thought is that the economic necessities of life—the need to earn a living—are common across the citizenry’s divides over questions of value. Taylor presents Dewey as the main proponent of vocation-based education (41), and while I don’t think that’s correct as a matter of Dewey exegesis, he correctly observes that the strictly vocational perspective is too narrowly fixated on the immediate, thus unable to address the larger questions of purpose and value (54). The difficulty then becomes that of framing an alternative to this purportedly brass-tacks economic perspective.

This draws Taylor to views that place civic virtue at the center of the enterprise. Here, he embraces much of what is characteristic of the “great books” tradition (84), while jettisoning its rigid notion of what makes a book great, and relaxing its causal claims about virtue and exposure to great books (91). In turn, the resulting gap between liberal learning and virtue is addressed by Taylor’s third element: the cultivation of a philosophical sensibility, which Taylor understands as the capacity for “guided reflection” on the truths that allow a person to live a “free and satisfying” life (96). This philosophical plank is meant to temper the other two insofar as it points to the intrinsic rather than instrumental value of learning, the “delight of the true and the beautiful” (125).

I suspect that most people who are inclined to read this book will find Taylor’s position generally agreeable, at least in the abstract terms in which Taylor presents it. Surely an educational program fit for a free, self-governing society must attend to practical (including vocational) concerns while also equipping people both for responsible citizenship and a life of appreciation of things beyond their immediate circumstances. Who would dispute that?

However, difficulties lurk in the details. The three elements of Taylor’s proposal are internally fraught, and the problem of synthesizing them does not emerge as a concern until the book’s Conclusion. There Taylor notes that the incorporation of vocational training into his vision of liberal education is “grudging and partial” (127). He recognizes that emphasis on the skills needed for gainful employment tends to crowd out fascination with, say, Homer; or, as Taylor puts it, the “vocational demands” can “imperially threaten to subsume” the other elements (127) and hence “threaten the university’s very conception of itself” (129).

Taylor treats this as a problem of keeping the vocational element in check, of constraining its “imperial” tendencies. But the problem runs deeper than that. Market-driven impulses are not so easily constrained. Once the university adopts the idea that its core mission is partly to provide credentials that lead to economic advantage, it has embraced a retail model of its relation to the students (now essentially customers). One need not accept the implausible position Taylor attributes to Zena Hitz (133) that true education must be entirely divorced from economic concerns in order to see that the “imperial” tendency of the vocational element is a much larger problem than Taylor recognizes.

But that’s not all. Taylor seems to think that the vocational element is the only troublemaker in his trio. It isn’t. Each element has its own “imperial” tendencies. The view that liberal education aims to produce responsible civic participants will tend either to crowd out interest in, say, classical composition or else seek to reorient it into a branch of cultural studies. Or, to take an example from my own discipline, observe the ascendant tendency to append the terms “social” and “political” to the names of traditional subfields: political epistemology, social philosophy of mind, political philosophy of language. The idea that these subfields could stand as areas of philosophical inquiry without an explicit civic component is now widely regarded as defunct. Accordingly, established problems in those subfields that seem to be about knowledge, minds, and words apart from their social dimensions are now considered passé. Finally, consider the philosophical element of Taylor’s proposal. To see liberal education as partly aimed at appreciation for and reflection on life’s Big Questions (let’s call them) is to risk adopting the perspective that everything else is quite small, insignificant.

The trouble is that each plank of Taylor’s proposal comes with its own internal negative appraisal of the significance of the other two. Taylor appears to think that the resulting turmoil is productive, as it at least drives us to reject any monolithic view of liberal education. Adopting Taylor’s tripartite vision does not settle anything. It instead complicates matters. Maybe that’s progress.