Languages of Education: Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

Languages of Education

Elegantly written, with the historian’s attention to archival material, this book enables the reader to understand the complex and different social, cultural, religious, and political context factors embedded in the “thought” of schooling and its objects of scrutiny—its notions of the child and teacher. In this landmark study of the formation of the modern school, Daniel Tröhler argues the value of looking at languages rather than arguments—langues rather than paroles. This method of historical research is used to examine the background of different philosophies, theories, or arguments of education, specifically republicanism and Protestantism. Tröhler’s argument is that such analysis is essential to tracing back educational arguments to the ideological core of their concerns, and thus to understanding in international perspective the historical development of education systems and organizations and to evaluating their different theoretical and political approaches and claims. Distinguished by its original presentation of a transnational archaeology of educational arguments; its combination of historical, analytical, and comparative approaches to education; and its contextualization of educational thought with religious and political languages, Languages of Education is key reading for scholars and students across the fields of history and philosophy of education, curriculum studies, and comparative education. Daniel Tröhler is Professor in Educational Sciences and Director of the Research Unit for socio-cultural research on learning and development at the University of Luxembourg.

STUDIES IN CURRICULUM THEORY William F. Pinar, Series Editor

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Languages of Education: Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations

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Cultures of Curriculum, Second Edition

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Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki

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What Is Curriculum Theory?

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Schooling, The Puritan Imperative, and the Molding of an American National Identity: Education’s “Errand Into the Wilderness”

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Like Letters In Running Water: A Mythopoetics of Curriculum

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Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktic Tradition

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Curriculum as Institution and Practice: Essays in the Deliberative Tradition Queer Theory in Education

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Languages of Education Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations Daniel Tröhler

First published 2011 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Daniel Tröhler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Tröhler, Daniel. Languages of education : Protestant legacies, national identities, and global aspirations / Daniel Tröhler. p. cm. — (Studies in curriculum theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Language and education. 2. Discourse analysis. 3. Education—Social aspects. 4. Protestantism. I. Title. P40.8.T76 2011 370.1’4—dc22 2010045097 ISBN 0-203-82842-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-99508-5 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-82842-7 (ebk)

Contents

Foreword, Thomas S. Popkewitz Preface Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Languages of Education

ix xix xxi 1

PART I

Protestant Fundaments: Education, Economy, and Politics

19

2 The Educationalization of the Modern World: Progress, Passion, and the Protestant Promise of Education

21

3 Protestant Misunderstandings: Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic in America

37

PART II

Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education

59

4 Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism

61

5 Linguistic Turbulences: The American Debates 1776–1788

80

6 American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God on Earth’

98

7 Langue as Homeland: The Genevan Reception of Pragmatism

113

viii Contents PART III

Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung

129

8 The Becoming of an Educational Science: The Protestant Souls and Psychologies

131

9 The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik and the Ideology of Bildung

148

10 Languages of Education Compared: Germany, Switzerland, and the United States

164

PART IV

Linguistic Archeology in Contemporary Debates

179

11 Globalizing Globalization: The Neo-Institutional Concept of a World Culture

181

12 Concepts, Cultures, and Comparisons: PISA and the Double German Discontentment

194

Notes References Index

208 224 248

Foreword Thomas S. Popkewitz

This book provides a major contribution to educational studies. Its importance lies in the deployment of history as a theoretical and empirical practice that brings together and expands multiple fields. Its study moves across different terrains as an exemplar that (a) (re)visions the substantive and methodological roots that lie at the base of Anglo-American historical studies of the modern school; (b) conceptually moves beyond national studies through comparative analyses without succumbing to the universalizing associated with today’s use of globalization; (c) provides an archeology of the cultural production that gives intelligibility to contemporary school reforms; (d) and historicizes the cultural, social and religious connections that order the social and psychological sciences which inform policy, pedagogy, and curriculum of schooling. The interventions that order this book bring with them another element important to escape the intellectual provincialism. That provincialism has an almost incestuous quality in contemporary scholarship where people read well within their own “circles“ (in dissertations it is called “review of literature”) but ignore the interconnections with other scholarship whose substantive and methodological debates are important to an adequate intellectual engagement with the subject of schooling. Tröhler provides a careful reading across philosophy, history, linguistic theories of culture, and sociology to methodologically engage and integrate institutional and epistemological questions. These contributions are outlined below. One fundamental theme that travels through the book is that the knowledge that “we” have about schooling and its objects are the substantive core of its studies. The observer of educational studies might suggest at fi rst glance that the focus on knowledge is not new. It is a legacy of “the hidden curriculum studies” given public credence with Phil Jackson’s (1968) Life in the Classroom and given significance in the 1970s sociology of education in Britain and the United States. But knowledge was not important itself. That scholarship was dominated by Marxist research that made the categories, distinctions, and patterns of communication as an epiphenomena and derivative of social interests.

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These studies still dominate today and are important in making visible the social consequences of the selection, organization, and evaluation of school knowledge. What is important here is that these studies are empty of conceptualizing the questions of knowledge in developing a methodology for inquiring into schooling. The categories of education are taken as immutable Galilean objects inside a Euclidian space (November, ComachoHübner, & Latour, 2010). One such Galilean object is “adolescence” or social class; each given ontological qualities so as to represent kinds of people. Such social phenomena are deposited inside an enclosed space whose dimensions are coordinated and its postulates and the other properties deduced. Research, for example, is to observe kinds of people that serve as the subject of schools, such as the postulates and properties that order the capabilities of the adolescence and the lifelong learner. These subjects are treated as autonomous as they move around in a space defi ned by different social and psychological dimensions. The dimensions are variables that defi ne the spacial elements such as the position of different populations that cause their achievement gaps, the child left behind, and the citizen who inhabits the imagined “Knowledge Society.” By making the knowledge of education unproblematic, the historically produced principles that order, differentiate and divide are re-inscribed as the promise of rectifying social wrongs. The assumption of knowledge about classes of people in schooling, however, is not only the provenance of pedagogical studies but major segments of the educational sociology and anthropology, policy studies, and the history of education. On the surface, the topics of this volume would seem irrelevant to these contemporary concerns of efficiency in one ideological stance and the “savage inequalities” produced by schooling from a different ideological position in education. But that reading would be wrong. The relevance of this book to contemporary studies is in its methods and explorations of the knowledge of education that, in a different register, is argued by Judith Butler who draws on feminist and post-colonial literature. Butler (1993) argues that the unquestioned subject that underlies the hidden curriculum traditions entails multiple issues of power that are hidden in the rhetoric of change. The centering of the subject, she argues, is a particular invention of Western philosophy. Tröhler gives historical nuance and complexity to that subject. This entails, among other, the study of political and religious salvation themes as they connect to education in different European and American contexts. Through these studies it is possible to consider that when the knowledge of the subject is taken uncritically as the locus of struggle about enfranchisement and democracy, such studies re-inscribe from the principles that govern the production of subjects. The politics of accepting this kind of subject is both a consolidation and concealment of those power relations.

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How are the subjects of education made problematic? Tröhler gives attention to the question of knowledge through the concept of languages, viewing languages as historically formed rules and standards from which the things of school are seen, acted on, and felt. Tröhler’s particular and distinctive use of language is in its Saussurian and Whorfian tradition developed through the Cambridge School of History (see, e.g., Pocock, 2003). The questions that Tröhler asks through the study of language are about the a priori historical/political conditions that fashion and shape the given epistemological and ontological boundaries. Tröhler brings this historical understanding as an approach to the study of contemporary complexities, nuances and politics without producing a presentism. The studies are an exemplar of interdisciplinary study. I would normally hesitate to use this category as it is overused and can become trite in the contemporary landscape. This is not so in this volume. In the best sense of the word, Tröhler is an intellectual who has read deeply in philosophy, history, and social and institutional theories in his understanding of educational phenomena. This reading across fields makes, in one sense, the classification of this scholarship less easy to place although it is clearly indebted to European traditions of history and philosophy. The focus on language gives visibility to an important strand of AngloAmerican and continental scholarship in the humanities and what social sciences called “the Linguist Turns,” cultural history, and history of the present, among others (see, Bonnell & Hunt, 1999; Dean, 1994; Neubauer, 1999).1 The scholarship is part of a long-standing international interdisciplinary discussion across the humanities, social sciences, and historical studies that is rarely brought into the field of education. Miguel Pereyra of the University of Granada, Spain, did a citational analysis of the American history of education journals (Popkewitz, Pereyra, & Franklin, 2001, pp. 10, 35). He found that the major historical figures who focused on cultural historical traditions in contemporary debates about historiography received no citations in the history of education. Where there are calls today to pay attention to the knowledge or language of schooling, those calls are empty of any sustained theoretical and conceptual analysis. If I take one of the more important educational historical studies by Tyack and Cuban (1995), they conclude their study of educational reform with the observation that researchers need to give attention to “the grammar of schooling.”2 But that call to study the language of schooling has no discussion about language or substantive exploration about what constitutes a “grammar” as a method of study. While that phrase has been often repeated in subsequent discussions of the history of American education, the representations and system of reason that orders the subjects of schooling are taken as given facts to explore institutional patterns and intellectual histories.

xii Foreword Tröhler‘s sustained studies illustrate the complex ways in which the languages of schooling and its institutional patterns interact. Tröhler focuses on republicanism as a political language. That language inscribes principles and narratives about the purpose of the school, and who the child is and should be. Underlying the study is that the citizen is not born but made. The founders of the modern republics recognized that the new form of political governing required participation and that education was central. The political languages, however, were not monolithic. While overtly about republicanism and democracy, there were varied cultural theses about the citizen that enter into and give direction to schools. The differences are excavated and compared through studies of northern Europe and the United States. At this level alone, the comparative studies are important for understanding that schooling has qualities that circumnavigate as a world system but that system is not universal in its cultural theses about the common good and the individual who is to act as the citizen. The study of the languages of education, however, is to recognize how the particular objects of schooling are assembled through multiple historical trajectories. Let me give one example that relates to the arguments of this book. Many of the intellectuals associated with Progressive education and who embodied republican languages were involved for a short time in The Social Gospel Movement. That movement was to bring Christian (Calvinist) ethics into social policy and the social conditions associated with urban life. Many of the buildings on my campus are named after the social scientists who were members of The Social Gospel Movement, influential in the political and economic reforms associated with Progressivism, and later important contributors to the policies of the New Deal created in response to the Great Depression. Progressive reforms embodied this Protestant reformism. It was directed, among other issues, to The Social Question that gave attention to the conditions of the city and the moral disorders of its populations. The theories and methods of the newly formed domestic sciences, psychologies of education, and community sociology in the United States, focused on mapping the social and psychological qualities of the urban child and family. The theories inscribed Protestant pastoral notions of community to establish the common good and remove the abstractness and alienation associated with modern society. The languages of these sciences, as Tröhler explores, connected elements of early 20th-century Protestant reformism and the classical republicanism. The writings of Dewey and other icons of American Progressive education, then, are not merely projects to produce the democratic citizen or to modernize the school. The pedagogical sciences embodied, as Tröhler continual explores, a particular array of ideas, concepts, and authorial relations. The ideas were intricately linked with the formation of the modern state, the social sciences, and the formation of an expertise associated with

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professionalization. The plausibility of these practices entailed a populist, urban and Protestant reform movement that made possible the modern welfare state. The language of education, then, is more than a technical quality to describe life, a representative of social interests, or the locating of paths to correct social wrongs. The languages of education have a materiality. Tröhler talks about language construing and constructing. That double quality is produced in complex assemblies among diverse social, cultural, political, and religious practices in particular times/spaces. In this theoretical sense of language, the book subtly and forcefully explores the social and cultural contexts through which the “nature” of the child in the sociologies and psychologies of education is made into a subject of education and as paths of change projected as redemptive for society as well as the individual. The limitations of the tendency for the national self-defi nition of schooling are made visible through these studies of the language of education. While schools are typically thought of as modern institutions, they are not universal, monolithic institutions; nor are they adequately understood by provincializing them through national studies. Tröhler’s book challenges this myopia. From the German notion of Bildung to the founding figures of the American Revolution and current international assessments of students, the intersection of political, religious, social and cultural languages provide order and classifications in the rationalities of school practices and its reforms. The limit of provincializing the school can be approached with an almost folkway of American studies. Different variants of the history of American Progressive education tell the story of Progressive movements that won and lost. It is a historical narrative about the utilitarian winning signified by the psychometric concerns of Thorndike and the losing the notion of civic virtue emblematic in the anthological psychology of John Dewey. The arguments of this book make discernible the intellectual simplicity of such conclusions of winning and losing when thinking about the issues of education. It is not that one won and the other lost. What is of importance is how psychologists became the arbiters of the truth of educational phenomena and with that the notion of what constitutes the political culture inscribed as the educated subject. Tröhler’s studies provide an answer to this question. He examines the language of Protestantism in different European contexts and in the U.S. debates in the sciences of education. The languages are treated as cultural practices about the citizen who embodies collective, civic virtue or common good. It is the languages of common good and the virtuous individual/ citizen in the context of American notions of national exceptionalism that traveled in the pragmatism of Dewey and Connectionism psychology of Thorndike. Tröhler’s chapters on American pragmatism and the Chicago School of Sociology at the turn of the twentieth century, for

xiv Foreword example, clearly explore the assembly of particular political cultural theses that travel along with salvational qualities of Calvinist reform movements in the making of the educational subject. I began this forward by suggesting that this book (re)visions the substantive and methodological roots that lie at the base of Anglo-American historical studies of the modern school. The tendency has been to objectify the archive by treating its repository materials as “the real” facts that one mines to tell the historical story. This strand of educational historiography is intellectually indebted to a mixture of English analytical philosophy and German idealism. It emphasizes the truth value of the descriptive and longitudinal structure of events and ideas arrived at through the ordering of archival materials. That view of the source of knowledge itself is as ironic as it is ahistorical. Ahistorical as there is a misrecognizing of the archive as an objective fact and not as an invention of nineteenth-century German idealist historicism. The latter sought to claim that its field was as scientific as the positivist sciences that were challenging its social position. It sees its historical charge as one of the evolution of schooling as an entity moving through a changing space, functioning as Galilean objects whose properties are deposited inside a Euclidian space. While the archive remains important, Tröhler’s study treats the artifacts of the archive somewhat differently. The archival materials become as an event to understand its conditions of possibility and not as data that serve as the ontological objects of knowledge from which explanations are constructed. These studies are more that tracing changes in the evolution of ideas as would an intellectual historian. They also require rethinking the notion of causation that underlies much of contemporary social science and history. That notion of causation appears as placing the practices of schooling as emerging from a single origin—whether the school emerges from formation of the modern nation or as a response to industrialization and/urbanization. The chapters view the production of schooling as part of long-term historical processes whose principles are assembled and connected thought a myriad of different patterns that include religious, political, philosophical, social, and cultural discourses. Let me use one of Tröhler’s studies to illustrate this methodological strategy. He argues that there is “an education reflex”; that is, the deep belief that education is the panaceas for societies’ ills and to correct the deficiencies of other social institutions. This belief underlies one of the more important histories of the American curriculum. Its title, the Struggle for the American Curriculum (Kliebard, 1987) is the forerunner of what has become known as curriculum history in the United States. It opens up the interior of the school by looking at the ideas that organize the pedagogies of schooling. Since its publication, the book provides an important model for historical scholarship. Its analysis, however, reiterates the commonsense of “the education reflex.” Tröhler

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asks about how it is possible to think and act through this reflex. He explores its emergence in the cultural tensions of the long eighteenth century of capitalism, classical republicanism and schooling in a part of Protestant Switzerland and Britain as massive transformations that occurred with a particular form of capitalism that transformed the relation of government and citizens. That transformation placed in the forefront individual private interests that masculinized the female quality of passion as the incarnate of the patriotic citizen who embodied the common good. The language was of Protestant notions of the soul in a psychology of self-examination of the inner self. The education of the soul to public virtue becomes a solution to the conflict between economy and the classical republic. The study of languages of education provides an alternative for thinking about American Progressive education at the turn of the twentieth century. The reform movements of Progressivism connected internationally with Protestant reformism and were given recognition as The Social Question. Rodgers (1998), for example, argues the Progressive Era (approximately 1880–1920) was part of the broader North Atlantic crossing of politics and ideas that stretched from Bogotá to Berlin. The negative state associated with laissez-faire ended as programs to secure a measure of security against old age and sickness and poverty became part of the social political agenda. Protestant Reformers in Denmark, Britain, France, Germany, and the United States sought municipal ownership of streetcars, city planning, risks of wage labor, social reconstruction of the countryside, the construction of modern housing with plumbing and zoning laws to address the problems and needs of industrialization and urbanization. The reforms gave testimony to the growing consciousness of the socially constructed nature of market capitalism and reform politics of a new cosmopolitan type. The reform movements were not of one nation but circulated within the English Fabian Society, German Evangelical Social Congress, the French Musée Social, and the Settlement House movement, the latter as the transatlantic Protestant’s most striking social project (Rodgers, 1998). The latter, the Settlement House Movement in Chicago’s Hull House was important to the influential Chicago School Sociology that emerged at that time as well as to John Dewey and George Herbert Mead which Tröhler discusses in this volume. This methodological approach challenges the commonsense of contemporary studies that, as I suggested earlier, looks for its single origins that evolve into the present. The studies in this book entail the connection and assembly of multiple historical trajectories that are also disconnected from their past. The consequence is not merely the sum of its parts but something that is different. Tröhler recognizes this and provocatively challenges the doxa of the historiography of contemporary schooling through examining the language of education as embodying

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salvation themes. These themes assemble and connect with particular elements of religious movements. Histories of the modern European and North American nations as well as studies about multiple modernities have illustrated the long processes through which the languages of religion were (re)visioned as the sublime in the processes of secularization. The notions of civic culture and the idea of the common good in Western political thought and education, Tröhler argues, (re)vision elements of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.3 Tröhler carefully differentiates, for example, German Lutheran and Swiss Calvinist (and Zwiglian) traditions of “the soul” and its paths of redemption in the political cultures of republicanism in Swiss, Dutch, and American schools; schools contrast to the Lutheran view of the individual translated and secularized in the notion of Bildung. If the studies of this book are approached in this way, it is possible to think metaphorically of the phenomena of schooling as formed by a grid or as Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984) “rhizome” through which things are given intelligibility. The notion of grid is analogous to a recipe for baking a cake. The cake is made through ingredients mixed together. The outcome is the cake, an object or a determinant category that appears as having its own ontological existence! The subject of pragmatism or the current Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development‘s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that Tröhler discuses, functions as a cake; that is, categories that are formed through particular grids that make possible particular kinds of thought and action. The theoretical notion of language that Tröhler uses makes it possible to explore these grids through which the objects of schooling are made plausible and actionable. Its breadth of historical study leaves us with a new form of interpretation and method that is practical—practical not in the utilitarian way of saying what is done and how to use that to order what the future is or should be. Rather, it is practical in the sense of giving a more complex grasp of the conditions of the present. It makes possible considering that what appears as natural, necessary, or inevitable is historical and thus making fragile the seemingly causality of social life. If I return back to ideas of hidden curriculum, it should be evident at this point why it is not sufficient, nor adequate to see knowledge as epiphenomenon to social interests. Ideas of multiculturalism, achievement gap, and world systems, the words that give classifications to contemporary analysis of schooling, are not merely about rationality and who has the best rationality to bring progress—whether more efficiency to provide all children access; or as an ideological debate about whose knowledge is included. These debates are bound and shaped within sets of principles formed in the intersection of different languages. These languages embodied salvation and redemption themes that are never merely about inclusion or difference itself.

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Reading this volume is as reading a modern de Tocqueville whose travels made it possible to see the rationalities of the New World and Europe in ways that were not available before. Tröhler provides ways of seeing things that I had not seen before, makes the facts of everyday schooling into the events of schools to be historically engaged, and provides narratives to revise both our knowledge of schooling and its methodological requirements. All of these different aspects make this book one of the rare, important contributions to the study of education.

References Bonnell, V., & Hunt, L. (Eds.). (1999). Beyond the cultural turn: New directions in the study of society and culture. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discourse limits of “sex.” New York: Routledge. Dean, M. (1994). Critical and effective histories: Foucault’s methods and historical sociology. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1984). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Trans., Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hunt, L. (1989). The new cultural history. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jackson, P. (1968). Life in the classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Kliebard, H. (1986). Struggle for the American curriculum. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Neubauer, J. (Ed.). (1999) Cultural history after Foucault. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. November, V., Camacho-Hübner, E., & Latour, B. (2010). Entering a risky territory: Space in the age of digital navigation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 28, 581–599. Pocock, J. G. A. (2003). Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Popkewitz, T., Pereyra, M. & Franklin, B. (2001). History, the problem of knowledge, and the new cultural history: An introduction. In T. Popkewitz, B. Franklin, & M. Pereyra (Eds.), Cultural history and critical studies of education: Critical essays on knowledge and schooling (pp. 3–42). New York: Routledge. Rodgers, D. T. (1998). Atlantic crossings: Social politics in a progressive age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995) Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tröhler, D., Popkewitz, T. S., & Labaree, D. F. (Eds.). (2011). Schooling and the making of citizens in the long nineteenth century: Comparative visions. New York: Routledge Tröhler, D., Schlag, T. & Osterwalder, F. (Eds.). (2010). Pragmatism and Modernities. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Preface

The intent of this study of the formation of the modern school is to enable the reader to understand the complex and different social, cultural, religious, and political context factors embedded in the “thought” of schooling and its objects of scrutiny—its notions of the child and teacher. I argue the value of looking at languages rather than arguments—langues rather than paroles. This method of historical research is used to examine the background of different philosophies, theories, or arguments of education, specifically republicanism and Protestantism. Except for a great part of the introduction and some paragraphs in later chapters,1 most of the following chapters have been already published individually in some way or another, some in German and some in English. However, all of them have now been revised, updated, and edited in order to fit the outline of this book, which is divided into four sections. In Part I, chapter 2 indicates how Protestantism triggered educational thinking, talking, or writing that was understood as crucial in order to cope with (perceived or imagined) challenges of modernization in the long eighteenth century. Chapter 3 then analyzes the different Protestant denominations, using the example of Max Weber’s thesis on Protestantism. Part II engages with different educational theories arising out of reformed Protestantism in its affi nity with classical republicanism. Chapter 4 deals with one of the heroes of any history of education, JeanJacques Rousseau of Geneva, and Rousseau’s quest for (re-)implementing a republic in the classical sense. Chapter 5 analyzes similar discussions in a newly established republic, the American Republic in the late eighteenth century, whereby the status of the republic (ancient vs. modern) never really was clarified. Chapter 6 analyzes educational Pragmatism as a reformed Protestant reaction towards a classical republican upset with the “excesses” of big industry. The section ends with chapter 7, which closes the circle (starting in Geneva) by demonstrating how congenial the reception of Pragmatism was in Geneva—and how it was rejected in Lutheran Germany.

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Part III concentrates on this Lutheran ideal of education, sometimes by contrasting it to the American or Swiss discussion. Chapter 8 focuses on how the emergence of psychology bears the characteristics of the different Protestant denominations and accordingly influences the educational theories around and after 1900. Chapter 9 reconstructs the origins and peculiarities of the dominant educational language in Germany in the twentieth century, Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik with its ideal of Bildung. In order to accentuate the singularity of this educational language, chapter 10 compares it with reformed Protestant theories. Part IV deals with contemporary debates in which the two dominant strands of Protestantism play a crucial role. Chapter 11 reconstructs how the neglect of the difference between Lutheranism and reformed Protestantism can lead to historical constructions of globalization promoted by neo-institutional sociology, and chapter 12, the fi nal chapter of the book, ascribes the heated PISA debate in Germany to the different denominations of Protestantism.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to colleagues and friends without whom this book would never have become reality. First of all, I have to thank William Pinar (University of British Columbia), who brought up the idea of a book about the languages of education published in his series Studies in Curriculum Theory and encouraged me with his impressive commitment to international research, and with him I want to thank Naomi Silverman, Senior Editor at Routledge, who advocated the publication of this book. All through the last several years, I profited enormously from intellectual exchanges with and support by a number of people; it is an honest pleasure to thank fi rst and foremost Rebekka Horlacher who has accompanied the development of the ideas of this book since its beginning. It is equally a great pleasure to thank Tom Popkewitz (University of Wisconsin at Madison), Fritz Osterwalder (University of Bern, Switzerland), and David Labaree (Stanford University) for their friendship and collegiality. All of them are or were part of the international Research Community Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education at the University of Leuven organized by Paul Smeyers.

Permissions Most of the chapters have been published before in some form or another. I thank the publishers for permission to revise them for new publication in this book. 1. Introduction: Languages of Education [Partly published in 2009 in] Beyond arguments and ideas: Languages of education. In P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Proofs, arguments, and other reasonings (pp. 9–22). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. 2. The Educationalization of the Modern World: Progress, Passion, and the Protestant Promise of Education [Originally published in 2008 as] The educationalization of the modern world: Progress,

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Acknowledgments passion, and the Protestant promise of education. In P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: The educationalisation of social problems (pp. 31–46). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Protestant Misunderstandings: Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic in America [Originally published in 2006 as] Max Weber und die protestantische Ethik in Amerika. In J. Oelkers, R. Casale, & R. Horlacher (Eds.), Rationalisierung und Bildung bei Max Weber: Beiträge zur Historischen Bildungsforschung (pp. 111– 134). Bad Heilbrunn, Germany: Klinkhardt. Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism [New]. Linguistic Turbulences: The American Debates 1776–1788 [Partly published in 2001 in] Der Republikanismus als historische Quelle und politische Theorie des Kommunitarismus. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 47(1), 45–65. Pragmatism, American Culture, and the ‘Kingdom of God on Earth’ [Originally published in 2006 as] The ‘Kingdom of God on Earth’ and early Chicago pragmatism. Educational Theory, 56(1), 89–105. Langue as Homeland: The Genevan Reception of Pragmatism [Originally published in 2005 as] Langue as homeland: The Genevan reception of pragmatism. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Inventing the modern self and John Dewey. Modernities and the traveling of pragmatism in education (pp. 61–84). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. The Becoming of an Educational Science: The Protestant Souls and Psychologies [Originally published in 2010 as] Verwandt und fremd: Die amerikanische und deutsche Pädagogik um 1900. In C. Ritzi & U. Wiegmann (Eds.), Beobachten, Messen, Experimentieren: Beiträge zur Geschichte der empirischen Pädagogik/Erziehungswissenschaft (pp. 211–233). Bad Heilbrunn, Germany: Klinkhardt. The German geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik and the Ideology of Bildung [Originally published in 2003 as] The discourse of German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik: A contextual reconstruction. Paedagogica Historica. International Journal of the History of Education, XXXIX, 759–778. Languages of Education Compared: Germany, Switzerland, and the United States [Originally published in 2005 as] Geschichte und Sprache der Pädagogik. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 51, 218–235. Globalizing Globalization: The Neo-Institutional Concept of a World Culture [Originally published in 2009 as] Globalizing globalization: The neo-institutional concept of a world culture. In T. Popkewitz & F. Rizvi (Eds.), Globalization and the study of education. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education: Vol. 108 (pp. 29–48). New York, NY: Wiley.

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12. The Discomposure of the Inward Certainty: Germany’s Double Discontent with PISA and its Results [New. This paper is being published simultaneously in 2011 in] M. Pereyra (Ed.) (in press). PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, and changing schools. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

1

Introduction Languages of Education

This book engages with the question of how we think, talk, or write about education. The we describes an imprecise and undefi ned community of people predominantly or temporarily occupied with educational issues. This only partially and loosely interconnected community is not limited to scholars or experts in education but includes concerned politicians, parents, and childless citizens as well. It is not constituted by bylaws but by shared convictions that certain social circumstances are to be understood as educational, including the vague or precise idea of the child, the adolescent, and the adult—that is, the citizen—as the aim of education. The notion of education is an inclusive and imprecise one. It includes moral or character education as well as school, continuing, or vocational education and focuses on the subject of education, the child, the pupil, the student, the future citizen, on the objects of education, the curriculum in the broadest sense, on the stakeholders, parents, administrators, or teachers, and on the institutions of education, the family, or the school. And the focus on “how we think, talk, or write about education” does not aim primarily at what we think, talk, or write about education, thus not on single ideas, concepts, or reasoning represented by philosophers, politicians, or educators: How we think focuses more on distinguishable modes or modalities of thinking, talking, or writing about education. These modes or modalities are called languages of education. Engaging with languages of education does not claim to be an exclusive approach nor does it claim to cover all important educational questions. It also does not aim to construct computer software containing a detailed system of analysis providing easy and unerring rational identification of distinct modes or modalities of educational thoughts, talks, or writings. Its ambition lies in the understanding of the question of why people share convictions identifying certain social circumstances as educational issues, or perhaps more empirically, how and why people began to believe that certain social circumstances are to be identified as educational issues including a variety of patterns, and how these patterns of educationalization evolved through the times up to today. Thus, the

2

Introduction

approach is empirical, for it deals with actually used languages of education; it is historical, for these languages once emerged and were more or less dominant in the course of different times and places and evolved over the centuries; and it is analytical, for the identification of the different languages of education provides us with a means of reflection upon our own thoughts. And as a fourth characteristic, the approach is international and comparative, for languages of education do not suffer under the same limits as the children of the nineteenth-century nationalisms do, the educational sciences: The fact, for instance, that school boards—constituted by locally elected laymen with the task to supervise the local school—exist basically only in the United States, some provinces of Canada, and Switzerland is a phenomenon that no educational science in the traditional sense could explain. However, it becomes reasonable if we look at the languages of education that are dominant in those parts of the world.

Languages of Education This book does not cover all imaginable languages of education, nor does it identify every appearance of languages in every possible historical situation up to today. In any case, there are not endless modes or modalities of how to think, talk, and write about education. Rather, it is assumed that there are only a very few languages of education, probably not even a handful. This book is going to deal with two of them, claiming that they have been by far the most dominant languages of education during the last centuries and up to today. Both of them have old roots that in the current educational discourses, as a rule, are hardly recognizable anymore. However, this does not mean that they are not effective, quite the contrary, and it is a matter of this book to uncover them and their influence in the way we think, talk, and write about education. These hidden roots are religious, more precisely Protestant, and they are distinguishable between two denominations of Protestantism, namely, German Lutheranism and Swiss Calvinism. These religious languages are not at all restricted to theological questions such as the nature of God, the church, and the sacrament but include also (and in this book foremost) the question of the earthly organization of life. They thus include ideals of politics and social order, too, and alleged ideal ways to educate the new generation into this order. To relate education to religion often triggers disinterest or the suspicion of having a hidden religious agenda. For the record: This book has neither the intention to evangelize readers nor to demonize religion, and it does not deal with religious education at all. It is not a plea for or against Protestantism and not a call for more or less Christian values. The book is simply committed to the fact that how we think, talk, and write about education—that is to say, our dominant educational

Introduction

3

languages—are in a concealed way indebted to religious and political ideals, and it is the purpose of the book to make us aware of this phenomenon. The very fact that religion affects the way we think, talk, and write about education without visible and identifiable signs does not make it less effective but even more so. The fi rst people to believe that religion does not need any visible signs in order to be strong (that outer signs are rather signs of untrue faith even) were indeed the Protestants of the sixteenth century. God—in this ideal—is not in relation with the individuals because of the visible and tangible intermediation of a Holy Mother Church, its consecrated personnel, and incense, bells, and vestments, but because of the fact that God ‘speaks’ silently to the soul of the individual faithfully reading the Bible and praying. In this context the anti-Catholic notion of the “invisible church” as a congregation of the true faithful believers became popular, and in consequence the Pietists—the reformers of Protestantism in the long eighteenth century—refused to attend any church service or even Communion. The bottom line in Protestantism was always the soul of the individual, and it is not a coincidence that nearly all early psychologists in the nineteenth century were sons of Protestant ministers: They used scientific methods such as the experiment and observation to explore, consciously or not, the core religious idea of their parentage and familial socialization, the soul, to which they had simply given its Greek name Ψυχή (psyché). However, psychologists from Lutheran or Calvinist homes turned out to have different types of psychology, with accordingly different effects on the educational theories. Against this background, explicit practices or verbal utterances prove little about the roots of one’s thinking, talking, or writing; public Christian confessions do not necessarily guarantee a Christian faith. The opposite is true, of course, too. For instance, the fact often mentioned in educational philosophy that John Dewey, upon moving from Ann Arbor to Chicago in 1894, did not join a church community in Chicago, does not mean that he became emancipated from the religious background of his own life and philosophy. His famous My Pedagogic Creed (Dewey, 1897) is a rather easy way to prove that he had not given up his religious background: “Creed,” “I believe,” “true God,” or “true kingdom of God” are undoubtedly religious words pointing at a religious language not only in connection with education. However, the task of identifying a religious background (or language) of educational thinking, talking, or writing becomes much more difficult if an author does not use eyecatching concepts such as “God,” “creed,” or “redemption.” Steven C. Rockefeller (1991) is right to point to the fact that for almost forty years after My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey no longer used the notion of God (p. 234). But does this necessarily mean that Dewey’s way of interpreting social circumstances as educational questions and his educational ideas were no longer influenced by religious conceptions? Does not the way

4

Introduction

that Dewey describes the ideal of the “great community” in The Public and its Problems (Dewey, 1927/1954, p. 143ff.), for example, reflect—at least to a certain degree—the Protestant congregation and its educational implementation under the conditions of modernity? Most of the educational thoughts, talks, or writings of the last one hundred years often pretend or believe themselves to be modern, secular, or rational. The basic challenge is to recognize the educational languages in which these educational thoughts, talks, or writings are performed— the religious heritage they share even though they do not use eye-catching words such as “God,” “creed,” and “redemption” and even though they are not uttered by theologians, priests, or pastors but by educational scientists, politicians, administrators, parents, or childless citizens. The methodological tool to recognize these languages was basically developed a century ago in linguistics and has been applied—rather freely—in recent decades to analyze political languages (for example, see Pagden, 1987). The tool is a perhaps rather simple distinction that goes back to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the Genevan linguist—namely, the distinction between parole and langue, or, in a not really convincing translation, the distinction between spoken (or unspoken) verbal utterances and language.

Parole and Langue Here it is not so much a question of how persuasive Ferdinand de Saussure elucidated the distinction between parole and langue in detail nor how later linguistic research possibly differentiated or enhanced this distinction. The basic idea de Saussure fostered was that language has two distinct aspects—namely, a theoretical regulating system on the one hand, and speech on the other. The former is called langue, the latter parole, and according to de Saussure (1916/2006), research in linguistics is devoted to both of the interrelated aspects: The only problem, if I may say so, is that linguistics covers a vast area. In particular, it is made up of two parts: one which is more concerned with langue, the language system, a passive store, the other which is closer to parole, speech, an active force and the true origin of the phenomenon subsequently perceptible in the other half of language. (p. 196) Langue as “a passive store” is “established socially and does not depend on the individual” (p. 209). Nevertheless, langue has an “individual” dimension, for it is “individuals” who are speaking. In its social dimension langue is an inter-subjective valid institution, or in other words, a system of linguistic habits implemented in the self-understanding of people. In its individual dimension langue is a subjectively internalized

Introduction

5

individual language, the subjective version of the langue. On the other side, parole, too, has a social and an individual aspect. First, it means the concrete speech act, the individual realization of the langue by the individual speaker. At the same time, however, and this is the second aspect, parole in its social dimension is the place where dialogue can generate new linguistic meaning, where langue can be changed. In other words, langue and parole are in a complex relation of mutual interdependence (p. 85ff.). This interdependency between langue and parole advises caution in using another term to describe the distinction between “passive store” (langue) and an “active force” (parole), namely, Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms and theories in the history of science (Kuhn, 1962). At fi rst glance Kuhn’s concept of paradigm seems to be analogue to the concept of langue (and indeed it is, to a certain degree), for both describe a normative structure in which utterances (in Kuhn’s case: theories) are being constructed. However, there is an important difference that appears in a description of Kuhn’s (1983) own academic practice: Probably the thing I do best and certainly the one to which I have devoted most time is climbing from the writings into the minds of dead scientists, figuring out how they thought, why they believed what they did, and how they came to change their minds. (p. 27) This changing of their minds, according to Kuhn, always meant changing the paradigm in which scientists had been generating their theories so far—a characteristic of Kuhn’s approach that was identified by Ian Hacking as scholastic Nominalism, simply constructing the world by naming it, not anticipating the existence outside of the nominal construction (Hacking, 2004). In other words, paradigms are inflexible, not in mutual interdependency with the theories, and thus much more exposed to be replaced (paradigm shift): It is a “disciplinary matrix” (Kuhn, 1977, p. 319). Languages, in contrast, are exposed to adaptations in the interaction between langue and parole and thus more open to modifications—and to prevail over centuries. This is the reason why today the paradigms of physics of the sixteenth or seventeenth century are no longer valid, but religious or political languages of the same centuries are, even though in a modified manner. Languages are not metaphysical entities. Nothing can constitute the langue that has never belonged to parole. On the other hand, parole is only possible as a social product due to the background provided by a certain langue. The crucial thing is that in contrast to parole, langue cannot be “immediately” observed. In other words, langue, although it is the womb of a concrete parole, can only be detected a posteriori of a parole by reconstructing the process of articulation. This linguistic approach has been adapted fruitfully to the sphere of political ideas by

6

Introduction

what is called the Cambridge School. Based on some conclusions drawn from Kuhn’s paradigm theory, according to which dominant paradigms construe linear histories up to the present paradigm and ignore alternatives that historically might have been much more attractive than the histories tell us, the New Zealander John G.A. Pocock started to detect dominant and recessive languages of political discourse. First, Pocock focused on the dominant langues in seventeenth-century England and then on republicanism from Machiavelli to the American Revolution (Pocock, 1957/1987a, 1975). Transforming and expanding both de Saussure’s and Kuhn’s concepts in his discussion of the political sphere, Pocock claims that history is to be understood as the interaction of langue and parole, of political langue and political speech acts. History always deals with the transmission of “acts of speech, whether oral, scribal or typographical” that depend on linguistic conditions “in which these acts are preformed” (Pocock, 1987b, p. 19ff.). In accordance with de Saussure, Pocock (1987b) insists that political actors always depend on a langue to perform a speech act: For anything to be said or written or printed, there must be a language to say it in; the language determines what can be said in it, but is capable of being modified by what is said in it; there is a history formed by the interactions of parole and langue. (p. 20) Political languages are modes or modalities of political thought, not political slogans or concepts but specifically used rhetoric and vocabularies, and they are to be identified as the ideological contexts of political paroles. Two things are important here. First, by virtue of their normative structures framing the parole of the actors, languages are deeds: They construe in a normative way what is perceived as social reality. And second, several langues always exist at the same time, although one usually dominates. In other words, every epoch has its dominant mode or modality of perceiving, analyzing, and discussing political phenomena, and it also has alternative modes that operate in the background or underground. Changes in regard to what is dominant do not come about unless deep crises occur that cannot be described in an appropriate way by the dominant langue, even though they are flexible to a certain degree. In these moments, people can resort to another langue that seems to describe the circumstances in a more appropriate way. In these moments, such langues become dominant, without erasing the former dominant langue (Pocock, 1987b, p. 21; Pocock, 1962, p. 195ff.).1

The Concept of Language Whether or not the concept of langue is today the most appropriate concept to describe de Saussures “passive store” as prerequisite to

Introduction

7

think, talk, and write can be disputed, of course. Paradigm—somewhat detached from Kuhn’s history of science—might serve the same purpose, and the German concept of Weltanschauung could be suitable, translatable maybe as worldview. Ideology would be another very conceivable concept, and architecture as well. Furthermore, the concept of culture comes to mind and also the French notion of mentalité (mentality), or perhaps Max Weber’s “ideal type.” So why “language”? The preference of the concept of language derives not so much from the absolute uncontradicted quality of the concept of language but rather from the objections one might raise to the other concepts. “Paradigm” is strongly connected to the way Kuhn used it (restricted to sciences, and being rather inflexible), and having to explain every time how the concept of paradigm is being used differently from Kuhn seems rather inconvenient. Weltanschauung indeed might seem close to what de Saussure had in mind, but the concept was rather mystical, and it is hardly used in Germany anymore; it is also difficult to translate (worldview, in French conception du monde). Many of the modern languages use also “ideology” for Weltanschauung, and again, this would be a suitable concept and is actually used by the historian Quentin Skinner, for example (Skinner, 1988a). However, in German philosophy the concept of Ideologie is tightly connected to the Frankfurt School, using the concept of ideology in a pejorative way to disqualify the bourgeois thinking—and at the same time by claiming itself to be ideology-free. Furthermore, the concept of ideology entails the idea of “false consciousness” used in contemporary social theories, and with it the idea of “true consciousness” comes along—it is therefore not analytic but normative and thus not really useful for historical research. “Architecture” is a promising concept, too, but (still?) rather unfamiliar in historical research, and perhaps too much focused solely on the logics of arguments within a single text. “Culture” seems to be an ideal concept, but the English term is hardly compatible with the French and the German: The French concept of culture is still often used in connection with agriculture, and the German term Kultur is closely connected with art and with national selfesteem. The notion of mentality, fostered by the French Annales school, is perhaps connected more to non-intellectual activities than to thinking, talking, and writing (albeit these should not be disconnected from the broader context) and certainly has too little transnational success in order to be propagated here. This leaves Weber’s concept of “ideal type,” which is popular in sociology, inserted to systematize the empirical and historical reality, too. However, “ideal types” are unhistorical—that is, fictional ideas that are ‘invented’ by the researcher in order to formulate historical hypotheses, resulting, for instance, in Weber’s Lutheran biased interpretation of English Calvinism in his famous book, Protestant Ethics (1904/05/1930).

8

Introduction

One could still argue that the concept of language is an unfortunate choice, for there are languages—the natural languages—that do not really cover the ideas presented here. However, the existence of these languages such as French or English is rather an advantage, as long as we distinguish them. French, English, or Swahili are natural languages, whereas political or educational languages can be identified as ideological languages (that is how “ideology” creeps back into the discussion). Against that background, the concept of language or langue has three advantages. The idea of language is comparatively old. It is internationally accepted (despite the varieties in the national receptions of what is called the “linguistic turn”). And it becomes evident in the realm of the natural languages: It is thus tangible. One of the first scholars to detect the interrelation between a natural language and the specific way of perceiving the world was the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. By comparing the languages of Native American tribes to English Whorf detected how dependent people’s worldview was on the natural language that they speak—he called it “background linguistic system” (Whorf, 1940/1956). For instance, the language of the Hopi people has no category of time at all, whereas English and other Standard Average European (SAE) (a concept introduced by Whorf) languages do, and this simple fact makes both the world and the cognition/science of the world (such as physics, and thus the development of technology) very different: “It was found that the background linguistic system … of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity” (Whorf, 1940/1956, p. 212). With that, Whorf opposes the exponents of an universal “natural logic” holding “that different languages are essentially parallel methods for expressing this one-andthe-same rational of thought” (p. 208): The natural logic does not see “that the phenomena of a language are to its own speakers largely of a background character and so are outside the critical consciousness and control of the speaker” nor does it acknowledge the difference between “an agreement about subject matter, attained through the use of language,” and the “knowledge of the linguistic process by which agreement is attained” (p. 210) (see also Whorf, 1941/1956). What is tangible and thus rather understandable in the realm of the natural languages such as Hopi or the SAE languages can be translated to the ideological languages, as we can see easily in the field of political languages and, more precisely, in two forms of republican languages. The older language, the classical republican language, is based on public virtues and political freedom. It was fi rst formulated by either Aristotle or Xenophon. It was reinforced and modified by Machiavelli in the beginning of the sixteenth century (Pocock, 1975) and at almost the same time by Huldrych Zwingli during the Swiss Reformation in Zurich. The focus is on the free polis and its concept of the citizen,

Introduction

9

bringing together the political, religious, economic, and military aspects of life in one person, the citizen (citoyen, as opposed, for instance, to the bourgeois)—whereas a monarch is labeled as a tyrant. The ideal citizen is patriotic and his sole passion love for fatherland. His earnings come exclusively from agriculture, because capitalist economy is blamed for sparking the citizen’s passion for his own private wealth rather than for the common good. If necessary, the ideal citizen is willing to defend the republic as a soldier for the sake of its liberty and is thus ready to die: He is a militia man and distains the idea of mercenaries, buyable foreign fighters with love of money rather than with love of fatherland. Whereas towards the end of the eighteenth century this language dominated the political discourse of the Founding Fathers of the United States—blaming the British King for being a tyrant, another mode of republican discourse emerged in the context of the French Revolution, defending the liberty of the individuals and focusing on rationality and sciences more than on virtues. In order to distinguish these two traditions of republican languages, the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin analyzed the Two Concepts of Liberty (Berlin, 1958) in his inaugural lecture at the University of Oxford in 1958. Berlin defends the modern, or liberal, version of republicanism with its concept of “negative liberty,” indicating the liberty of the citizen to be free from constraint in order to allow him to follow his individual or private interests. Berlin’s ideal of liberalism was then challenged in another inaugural lecture in Great Britain in 1998, Liberty before Liberalism, in which the historian Quentin Skinner articulated much more appreciation for the classical republicanism with its concept of “positive liberty” as free to self-govern and its values of solidarity and the common good (Skinner, 1998). “Negative liberty” assumes an independent rational subject as point of origin for any social or political thinking, whereas “positive liberty” departs from the Aristotelian Zoon Politikon, but both focus literally and in accordance with each other on the free citizen in the free republic.

Languages and Foucault’s “Order of Truth” There is, of course, an overlapping of the idea of language with Michel Foucault’s (1977/1978) “order of truth,” for the latter too shares the idea that reality is constructed by discourse: Truth is of this world … it is produced due to manifold constraints and possesses power. Every society has its own order of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: it accepts certain discourses that it allows to act as true discourses. (p. 51; freely translated here) Therefore, within the triangle of language, subjectivity, and power, historical reconstructions focus fi rst on language, because language is not

10

Introduction

understood as a sign system that is supposed to reflect the “real world” but as a system that produces meaning. No doubt, the concepts of the Cambridge School and Foucault are similar. The difference between them shows itself in the emphasis on power and the idea of the human actor. Looking at history, Foucault (1977/1978) accentuates discontinuity: “It seemed to me that … the rhythm of transformation doesn’t follow the smooth, continuist schemas of development which are normally accepted” (p. 113; freely translated here). To Foucault, discontinuity expresses the susceptibility of the sciences to power. However, power is not seen in the traditional way as an external category but is understood in terms of the effect that power has among academic statements—the “internal regime of power” and its modification. Therefore, linguistic analysis is outperformed by the analysis of power: Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be the great model of language (langue) and signs but that of war and battle. The history that bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. (Foucault, 1977/1978, p. 114; freely translated here) Hence, Foucault’s tendency is to focus on historical discontinuities while refraining from explaining them: Taking the example of Gregor Mendel, Foucault (1990/1992) could show that inconsistencies have occurred: Mendel spoke the truth, but he was not ‘in the truth’ of the biological discourse of the time: biological objects and concepts were formed by other rules. The yardstick had to be changed, a whole new level of objects in biology had to be developed in order to allow Mendel to enter the truth and his statements proved (to a great extent) to be right. (p. 24ff.; freely translated here) Foucault traced inconsistencies and discontinuities back to displacements of power, but he refrained from explaining how these displacements occurred. To come back to the example of Mendel, Foucault did not show why and how the yardstick changed. This problem becomes a little clearer if we look at another historical example presented by one of Foucault’s disciples, Paul Veyne. Veyne (1978/1992) deconstructed the traditional assumption that the Christian emperors in Rome ended the gladiator fights. He wrote that history does not occur on the basis of rational or ethical principles, because such principles simply do not exist. All that exists are practices and discourses fabricating illusions about reason and morality. Veyne (1978/1992) interpreted the transition from pagan to Christian emperors as a shift from an emperor of a bestial

Introduction

11

herd to the father of a childish people: “Not on the basis of personal conviction nor due to a caprice, the emperor of the bestial herd transforms into the father of a childish herd. Stated briefly, he does not do it for ideological reasons” (p. 41; freely translated here). In this approach there are no antecedent convictions that can be applied to objects but simply practices in which objects are constructed. The crucial question is then: “Where do the practices come from?” Veyne’s (1978/1992) answer was: Well, simply from the historical changes, the thousandfold conversions of historical reality—that is, from the remains of history, as all things. Foucault has not discovered any new instance with the name of ‘practice’ that has so far been unknown: He made an effort to see human practice as it is in reality. (p. 26ff.; freely translated here) Let us briefly try to adopt a friendly approach to Veyne’s argument, ignoring for the moment the fact that Veyne ascribes to Foucault the achievement of having discovered the path to “reality” (which reality?). Let us focus more on the fact that this approach may be able to reconstruct historical change. There still remains a problem: Veyne’s approach cannot explain such changes, and it does not seem possible to fi nd intellectual alternatives, as we see in the following example: When complaining about the mechanisms of oppression, German feminists, following Foucault, came to the conclusion that the only possibility for future action was a discursive guerrilla war (Seiffert, 1992, p. 282). However, thinking about things in that way implies that guerrilla fighters do not have ideologies that they are ready to fight for, and that even if they did, such ideologies would not have been implemented in reality. The “guerrilla” metaphor reveals the limits of Foucault’s brilliant provocation. Determination is extended to a point that alternatives cannot appear; not even deep economical crisis, for example, seems to be able to trigger a historical change—that is, a new way of ‘seeing’ things. What human action is/involves becomes uncertain, for all actions are determined by the “reality” of the context. According to Foucault, this context can change, but the conversion is simply understood in terms of power and results in menacing phrases such as ‘discursive guerrilla war.’ Human interaction, inconsistencies, and problems are not seen in their productive form but only in their reactive one. As a consequence, education as a field is freed and discharged from ambitions and aims. But what then is left of the educational field, when ambitions and aims are abandoned? Of course, the ambitions and aims of the field grown out of Protestantism, the religion of the empiricists, and the enunciators of the ‘human capital theory’ all deserve critique—but who, against the background of Foucault’s philosophy, is criticizing, and on what grounds? To reject the idea of ambitions and aims in general means

12

Introduction

throwing the baby out with the bath water. There is an alternative, and I want to indicate what this might involve by returning to the work of the Cambridge School. Let us consider an example that is to a certain degree comparable to Veyne’s example above. Taking the example of Machiavelli, Skinner (1988a) asked how and why it was possible that in the context of the Renaissance somebody could seriously claim, “a prince must learn how not to be virtuous” (p. 61). Skinner argued that a historian will fi rst ask whether or not this cynical statement was rather common in Renaissance times or whether it is a more or less singular statement that was directed against the dominant stream of thought. If this is a common statement, one has to read Machiavelli as affi rming the dominant mode of moral attitude towards political power. However, if “a prince must learn how not to be virtuous” is a singular statement, then we can note that Machiavelli wanted to challenge the dominant moral point of view on political behavior. So in a way, it is an empirical question that has to be contextualized culturally: Langues are modes of cultural expression (and that is how the concept of culture creeps in to the discussion again). Against this background Skinner situated his methodological concept between two dominant “orthodox” traditions within the history of ideas. The fi rst tradition is Marxist and involves the recognition “that it is the context ‘of religious, political, and economic factors’ which determines the meaning of any given text”; the other tradition Skinner invoked is based “on the autonomy of the text itself as the sole necessary key of its own meaning” (Skinner, 1988a, p. 29). Skinner argued that both approaches to history produce more myths than knowledge. Following this assertion, Skinner was more critical of the second tradition, which clings to the belief that texts—or paroles, if you will—are timeless or an expression of eternal ideas. He identified his methodological position with reference to the art historian Ernst H. Gombrich, who wrote the epigram “only where there is a way can there be a will” (Gombrich, 1961, p. 75). Therefore, Skinner focused less on the text as text and more on the authors, focusing principally on what they wanted to say through their writing (Skinner, 1988a, p. 31ff.). This turn from the text as text to the intention behind writing indicates that Skinner acknowledged that people are able to formulate ideas against the main dominant paradigms. But at the same time he referred to the exigency of limiting possible interpretations to the variety of discursive contexts. Paroles, in other words, always depend on langues, but to a certain extent authors are free to not choose the dominant langue but to refer to recessive langues. Authors, then, are not heroes or bearers of eternal truths, and such a historiography “leaves the traditional figure of the author in extremely poor health”; however, he is not a fully dependent prisoner of the context either (Skinner, 1988b, p. 276).

Introduction

13

Educational Languages: Protestantism and Republicanism It is perhaps needless to say that the examples of the two political languages, the classic and the modern language of republicanism, have completely different visions of education.2 The English dissenters of the early seventeenth century were early adherents of classical republicanism, and they developed the concept of “school republics,” which they transferred to the Promised Land overseas. The educational idea of becoming acquainted with the customs of unselfish and patriotic behavior within a context of virtuous, mostly non-capitalist societies is crucial within this educational/political language. John Adams in a letter to Mercy Warren in 1776 (as cited in Stourzh, 1970): There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty; and this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. (p. 65) It is no coincidence that in this context, history becomes a crucial element in education, for it is heroic histories that affect the noble sentiment of the (reading) child in order “to convert men into republican machines,” as Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote in 1786, propagating the morally clearly biased instruction “in the history of the ancient republics and the progress of liberty and tyranny in the different states of Europe” (Rush, 1786/1965, pp. 17, 19). Noah Webster (1790/1965) agreed in 1790 on the importance of moral education as prerequisite of a virtuous republic and favored an education as acquaintance with moral models, and therefore “the practice of employing low and vicious characters to direct the studies of youth is in a high degree criminal,” for the evil will—as the good will, too— foster emulation (p. 60ff.). Education turns out to be a risky business but nevertheless the most important one of the republic: “For this reason society requires that the education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention. Education, in a great measure, forms the moral characters of men, and morals are the basis of government” (p. 64). According to the sensual concept of education—getting acquainted with models—history becomes the utmost subject in the curriculum: “As soon as he [the child] opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in her favor” (p. 65). This idea was sustainable, as a history textbook one hundred years later shows: It is focused on “great men” of the country, because the “biographical method” is seen as “teaching the principles of morality.” As history textbook author Edward Eggleston (1889) wrote:

14

Introduction What life could teach resolute patience, truth-telling, manly honor, and disinterested public spirit better than that of Washington? And where will a poor lad struggling with poverty find more encouragement to strictest honesty, to diligent study, and to simplicity of character than in the history of Lincoln? It would be a pity for a country with such examples in her history not to use them for the moral training of the young. The faults as well as the virtues of the persons whose lives are told here will afford the teacher opportunities to encourage right moral judgements. (p. ivf.)

In contrast, the educational language in accordance of the liberal ideology during the French Revolution is essentially built on scientific knowledge and public rationality effectuated by this knowledge. The ideal human being is an individual person that is interconnected with other persons by a social contract based on rational deliberation. According to this view of things, education does not involve fostering virtues but instead focuses on verifiable public knowledge that should be learned in school. The possession of scientific knowledge became the virtue of the new as compared to the old citizen. The French mathematician and philosopher Condorcet was one of the prominent advocates of this educational/political knowledge (Osterwalder, 1992). However, Condorcet had to escape from the Jacobins, and he died in 1794 before his all-embracing school reform was implemented in the French Republic. And as Napoleon did not share this liberal concept of education, it is uncertain in what way this educational language ‘survived’ in the different republics of nineteenth-century France (Osterwalder, 2011), and it is disputable whether or not scholars such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, or Gary Becker adopted this educational language and if so, how. Certainly this educational language did not supersede the language of classical republicanism in its close relation to Swiss Protestantism nor did it supersede another dominant educational language that is associated with German Protestantism, Lutheranism, emerging from the Augustinian and Neo-Augustinian tradition. This language found its way into the anti-Jesuit movement of Jansenism. Jansenism’s most important stronghold was the Parisian convent of Port-Royal—haven of many important authors, including Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, and Blaise Pascal, who focused on the insignificance of the earthly human life: “For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infi nite …” (Pascal, 1670/1995, p. 61). As Osterwalder showed, this Neo-Augustinian tradition exerted a strong influence not only on the French educational discourse but also—mediated by Luther’s Reformation (Luther being an Augustinian monk)—on the German discussion (Osterwalder, 2003, 2006). It gained particularly great popularity when the cultural, scientific, and political backwardness of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation became evident as compared to the French or the British.

Introduction

15

The intellectual reaction to these differences can be reconstructed in two interrelated conceptual constructions of the late eighteenth century, providing evidence of Lutheranism in the cultural and educational discourse. One of these constructions concerns the defi nition of the concept Kultur—as superior true inner life form—in contrast to the merely outer and artificial French civilisation. The other construction concerns the educationalization of a formerly non-educational concept, namely, the concept of Bildung (Horlacher, 2004). Both constructions build on the fact (in the Protestant belief) that the decisive elements in life are not visible but invisible, domiciled in the individual’s soul. The two dominant forms of educational languages emerged in the interplay of two different Protestantisms with political and social questions that became more and more virulent during the eighteenth century. One of the educational languages developed as a reciprocal effect of (reformed) Calvinism and classical republicanism, and the other educational language grew out of Lutheranism with its indifference towards ideas of political participation and its focus on pure inwardness. Reformed Calvinism refers to Calvinism as it had been developed in Switzerland and in England but not in Scotland. Whereas Scottish Calvinism underwent no thorough transition towards democracy and survived as Presbyterianism, the English Calvinists were forced to practice their religion in the underground and developed thereby the democratic vision of the congregation. In a more pacific way, the Swiss Protestants headed towards a partial democratic synthesis of Calvin’s theocracy with the classical republicanism of Zurich Protestant reformer Huldrych Zwingli (Formula Consensus of 1675). How different the Lutheran and Zwinglian Reformations were in terms of social order and citizenship can be seen in the low esteem Luther had towards Zwingli’s idea of self-government and with it of the justification of tyrannicide (which became famous worldwide with Friedrich Schiller’s drama William Tell and was further popularized by the opera of the same title by Gioacchino Rossini) by unconditionally defending the right of monarchs, even if they were unjust, to rule over their subjects. The reformed Calvinist language, inscribed in notions of republican socialization and public virtue, is deliberately socially and politically oriented in its educational aim of making the child a future citizen, whereas the inner Lutheran evangelical language is strikingly silent when it comes to social and fi rst and foremost political questions. However, outlining the educational languages such as Protestantism or republicanism bears the danger of constructing ideal types or archetypes of how people think, talk, and write about education (or politics) and of degrading texts as simple documents testifying to these languages. The historical truth is more complex, however; many of the texts are multilingual, without the authors necessarily intending to be. For example, much of Rousseau’s Social Contract reads as a rational,

16

Introduction

liberal plea of a political order, until the second last chapter in the last book about Civil Religion, which in turn refers to classical republicanism. Thomas Jefferson, to name another exponent of the eighteenth century, fostered science and knowledge as rational basis of modern life, yet meanwhile, in a classical republican manner, he accused commerce of corrupting man’s soul. Although educational languages exist, as this book wants to provide evidence of, they are not necessarily incarnated in the sources in a thorough way.

The Historical Approach and the Quality of Educational Research There is a limited number of ways of approaching the educational field, that is to say, the combination of educational thoughts, writings, policies, practices, institutions, and methods. Today, the dominant mode of approaching this combination is called empirical, meaning mostly the quantitative exploration of the educational field by standardized questionnaires resulting in statistically verified statements. A second empirical approach forgoes standardized methods and heads for the qualitative interpretation of the educational field based on observations and interviews. A third important approach is called philosophical and departs from normative ideas or analytical instruments provided by more or less famous exponents in philosophy or education and analyzes and qualifies educational concepts, theories, practices or institutions. The historical approach as a fourth approach is committed to the fact that the educational field is a result of processes and developments that need to be analyzed, whereas the fifth approach, the comparative approach, perceives the differences between the different educational fields and tries to describe or analyze them. The Greek empireira means experience or know-how based on experience, and accordingly, in today’s lexicographical defi nition of the word, empirical denotes information “relying on or derived from observation or experiment” (Editors of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2006, p. 586). Against this background it is interesting to see how today’s empirical research not only ignores the empirical fact that the objects of research are results of experiences but also ignores to large degree that our concerns and (research) questions about the educational fields are bound to what may be called the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, by defi nition a historical matter of fact (Zeit = time). In other words, it is not only ignored that how the educational field is a result of historical processes but also that the way it appears to us is a construction of our worries and concerns that on their part emerge from culturally embedded beliefs and convictions, more precisely from the ideological languages we share. For example, nobody today would think about handing over a young boy to war heroes for a pleasurable

Introduction

17

afternoon, but in ancient Greece this was done, and it was an honor for the child, whereas today, in contrast, we are concerned about child sexual abuse in educational institutions such as homes for children. Or, to name a less disagreeable and unpleasant example, whereas today it is absolutely taken for granted that girls and boys have basically the same curriculum at school, most of the people in the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries did not even think of this as being a noteworthy idea. Or, as a more recent example, during the Cold War and especially after Sputnik in 1957, research and policies on both sides of the Iron Curtain all of a sudden focused on mathematics and sciences and were concerned with the alleged effects of these subjects on technology and economy. To a certain degree at least, the same holds true for the philosophical approach to education. A large part of philosophy of education deals with intellectual or moral authorities—let’s focus on the favorites such as Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Horace Mann, Piaget, Dewey—and imagines them in a timeless chat room, as if they could share their arguments simultaneously by the intermediation of the philosopher of education, who becomes the constructor of Arthur’s Round Table of his favorites in educational thinking. Arguments are juggled, ideas reconstructed and compared, and logic absurdities detected, but the question of how comparable Kant and Dewey actually are is not questioned. For instance, the fact that Kant grew up in a Pietist house and in his philosophy defended the Lutheran idea of the inner dignity (his idea of pure reason) against the growing influence of the sciences clashes with Dewey’s indebtedness towards the reformed Protestant idea of congregation (his defi nition of democracy) even before their arguments of philosophies can be compared on the level of arguments or ideas. This book is committed to the fact that the whole educational field, too—be it the institutions, expectations, curricula, policies, pedagogies, or research questions—is cultural and historical, thus different in times and spaces, and that the quality of educational research depends on the awareness of both the cultural/national plurality and the historicity of the educational field. Against this background, the historical character of this book is not an attempt to write a history of education but to provide educational research with an approach that is rather unrecognized. The advantage in looking at languages rather than arguments— or rather langues than paroles—is at least twofold: First, languages are principally transnational and thus transcend the still dominant national scope in educational research. Second, since there are only a very limited number of languages, the analysis of these fundamental normative attitudes offers a mapping of contemporary and historical sources: proposals, arguments, systems, concepts. This mapping is important to tracing back the mostly committed style of educational arguments to the ideological core of their concerns and is thus an aid to evaluate different approaches and claims in the educational field. By stressing the

18 Introduction methodological character of historiography, this book aims to add to the manifold attempts of educational research and thus to contribute to the quality of educational theories, theories being understood as an interrelated set of knowledge generated by reflected questions and transparent methods.

Part I

Protestant Fundaments Education, Economy, and Politics

2

The Educationalization of the Modern World Progress, Passion, and the Protestant Promise of Education

Nowadays it is a common cultural pattern to allocate perceived social, economical, and other problems to education in general and to the schools and teachers in particular. This ‘educational reflex’ indicates the deep confidence in education and schooling to make up for ascertained difficulties of other social institutions and their developments. Accordingly, social crises trigger politicians, economic leaders, and ‘normal citizens’ to proclaim what education and the schools ought to be doing. A paradox, however, should start us thinking when looking at the last 50 or 100 years: Not the prolongation of compulsory schooling, the massive development and differentiation of our educational institutions, the increasing number of college degrees completed, the hundreds of popular guidebooks about better education published every year, or the increased investments of transnational organizations such as the World Bank in education becalmed the ‘educational reflex’ of modern societies. In fact it is quite the contrary. It seems that the more our time progresses, the more all sorts of problems are identified as educational tasks, and thus the more energy is invested in education. Or is it quite the contrary, that the more the educational fabric grows, the more problems are identified as problems serving the educational logic of the world? This chapter deals with the emergence of this ‘educational reflex’ as one of the most successful cultural patterns in the history of the modern world. It arises out of a tension between the rise of a commercial society in the long eighteenth century and the renaissance of the language of classical republicanism as a reaction to the capitalization of society. It is in this tension that the ‘educational reflex’ was ‘born,’ a Protestant concept promising to overcome these massive cultural tensions between commercialism and classical republicanism. To avoid misunderstandings: Neither commerce nor capitalism was a totally new phenomenon in the long eighteenth century,1 even less classical republicanism, and the educational ‘solution’ that Protestantism was offering was, of course, not new, either. It was not even originally Protestant, but it shared with Protestantism the same roots, namely, neo-Augustinianism of the early sixteenth century. What led to the ‘birth’ of this reflex was the

22

Protestant Fundaments

co-occurrence of all three in one place at one time: in the second half of Protestant Switzerland.

The Ideological Conflict between the Rise of Commerce and the Renaissance of Republicanism around 1700 The great European process that can be called somewhat sweepingly the “capitalization of society” became possible after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the death of Richard Cromwell in 1658, for capitalism builds essentially on trade, and large-scale trade requires peace. This process, about which numerous inspiring studies are available, caused on one side a transformation of the social structure of the European societies involved, and on the other a deep ideological conflict, for since antiquity, views on commerce have always been confl icting. A large part of the discussions of the long eighteenth century dealt with this confl ict; it shaped the “gigantic querelle” between the ideal of the modern entrepreneur on the one hand and the ideal of the virtuous Roman citizen on the other (Pocock, 1980, p. 301). A particularly prominent expression of this process is the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, an event that illustrates the “triumph” of the economy, so to speak. When William of Orange (William III) took the throne in 1688, years of political unrest had depleted public fi nances. The Scottish trader and fi nancier William Patterson proposed the establishment of a creditor association of wealthy private citizens to lend money to the nation, a total of 1.2 million pounds at an interest rate of 8 percent. With the founding of the Bank of England, a successful and long-lived system of public underwriting was created that from then on allowed individual persons and companies to invest in the state. This put owners of capital assets in a position to transform “the relations between government and citizens, and by implication between all citizens and all subjects, into relations between debtors and creditors” (Pocock, 1978/1985, p. 110). The competition between politics and capital was thus decided; politics became—at least to a certain degree—the object of private interests and, through this, morally largely indifferent. These developments, which capitalized people’s relations to the state and among themselves, were associated with the Whig Party majority in the English Parliament. Language ideology and political party were closely tied. The Tories, the political opposition to the Whigs, started to formulate their arguments in a decidedly anti-capitalist langue, which eventually led to a renaissance of the langue of classical republicanism. This revival of the republican ideal made it possible for representatives and exponents of the “commercial society” to be accused of “corruption” (selfishness instead of common-good oriented) and for the ideal of the patriotic citizen to be raised against them (Pocock, 1978/1985, p.

The Educationalization of the Modern World

23

108ff.). The accusation of corruption was based on the reasoning that people whose lives are so utterly shaped by trade and commerce could not make any sound contribution to the common good. The “commercial men” were specialists dedicated to the production and trade of specific goods and who paid other specialists, that is, politicians and soldiers (mercenaries), to lead the country politically and militarily. From the view of the republican language (or ideology), “commercial men” lacked rationality and efficiency, for they were simply subject to their passions: “For these the appropriate term in the republican lexicon was corruption” (Pocock, 1975, p. 464). Against this, the patriotic ideal was the fully moral person able and willing to fulfi ll all his public duties. This ideal is based not on owners of money and goods but on owners of land. At bottom, the main argument against these developments was psychological. It built on the assumption that, as a rule, commerce, or trade, are in connection with passions, passions being seen as the opposite of reason and politics, and the very reason for the corruption of the soul. Passionate people in this sense with social and/or political power were—in the eyes of the critics—the exact opposite of the political ideal they shared, which was the autarkic citizen fi lled with the overarching and only legitimate passion, love for the fatherland. This ideal citizen is oriented towards the common good, not like the entrepreneur that is believed to be always worried about stock markets or the destiny of the trading ships with expensive goods and thus consumed with passionate concern for his own fortune. Obviously, the ideological conflict between reason and passion was not only a political one but also a clearly genderbiased one, for the ideal of the republican citizen had an unmistakable masculine connotation. In the dominant languages of the seventeenth century, economy and passions were feminine attributes, being connected with desires, fantasies, and hysteria. Luxuria as the Greek goodness of indulgence and Fortuna as the moody Roman goodness of fate, both connected with the results of capitalist economy, were challenging the male-godlike logos and thus were set in opposition to the masculine virtú of the (male) citizen. Feminine attributes on the social or political level were connoted with the near end of the world, or at least with war. A solution seemed possible only in an anti-commercial ideological setting, that is, in an agrarian economy. The notion is in this linguistic context that landowners are far less concerned with income than people who invest their monies in the stock markets and thus become nervous and passionate concerning their own interests, for they feared loss of their property by maritime disasters, piracy, or by speculative bubbles. 2 By contrast, landowners are seen in an economical position to put themselves politically fully in the service of the common good. Pocock (1975) writes:

24

Protestant Fundaments The landed man, successor to the master of the classical oikos, was permitted the leisure and autonomy to consider what was to others’ good as well as his own; but the individual engaged in exchange could discern only particular values—that of commodity which was his, that of the commodity for which he exchanged it. (p. 464)

Botanizing Women and Adjusting the Vocabulary: The British Example The ideological tension between the real process of the “capitalization of society” and the growing discursive critique of the consequences of this development caused a need to modify the dominant political language: Money had to be made more ‘socially acceptable,’ so to speak. The problem behind this need was that although the commercial society came to reign, says Pocock (1980), it never succeeded in developing a concept of a person that was as attractive as the image of the patriot whose central passion was the common good. Upon this background, from 1700 on, “patriot” and “investor” stood in dialectic ideological opposition that Pocock (1980) calls the great querelle of the long eighteenth century: The social thought of the eighteenth century has begun to look like a single gigantic querelle between the individual as Roman patriot, self-defi ned in his sphere of civic action, and the individual in the society of private investors and professional rulers, progressive in the march of history, yet hesitant between action, philosophy, and passion. (p. 349) In other words, the dominant mode of economy did not have a dominant language at its side but rather a critical one. This obvious tension caused the need to change the traditional political langue and its vocabulary. It had to give way to a language in which money, capital, and capitalism could no longer be stigmatized—and where passions no longer played any crucial role. Two different strategies can be distinguished: One was to domesticate the female nature, so that economy in the eighteenth century could become a masculine affair, and the other was to replace the notion of passion with the notion of interest, so that the emotions of trading men were ideologically more acceptable. In the core of the fi rst strategy, we fi nd botanical texts that were unequivocally addressed to the female sex (George, 2006). The language of these botanical texts, centered around “reproduction and sexuality, experience and science, classification and order, introspective solitude and public debate,” served to defi ne the intellectual, moral, and social status of women (George, 2006, p. 3). The pioneer of this

The Educationalization of the Modern World

25

discourse based on a new system of hierarchy of orders and classes in botany was the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, or Carl von Linné. Linnaeus was interpreted and used by authors who derived social implications and encouraged women to engage in botany “as an antidote to feminine faults” (p. 6). Following Linnaeus’ logic of order, some of the treatises written by these authors focused on botany as a specific curricular subject for young women, “who were imagined to lack disciple,” (p. 6), so that they would “engage with order and regularity” (p. 6). The most famous of these authors was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote the rather unknown Lettres elementaires sur la botanique 3 in 1771–1773. The Lettres were translated into German in 1781 (J.J. Rousseaus Botanik für Frauenzimmer in Briefen an die Frau von L***), and an English translation by Thomas Martyn, professor of botany in Cambridge, was published in 1785 (Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to a Lady). In the letters Rousseau makes it clear that a young woman should be engaged with nature in general and with the plants in particular, because this will “suppress the taste of vicious pleasures, preempt the break-out of passions and give the soul useful food by fulfi lling it with the most dignified objects of her examinations” (Rousseau, 1781, p. 2; freely translated here). In addition to this botanic-pedagogical domestication of the female passions, many suggestions were made for reading lists containing books for women, called woman’s libraries, in order to allow women to participate in the male world of reason—at least to a certain degree. For the second strategy, Felix Raab’s (1964) study needs to be mentioned, in which Raab demonstrates how the concept of “interest” changed over the last decade of the seventeenth century and bit by bit became the substitute of “passion.” In the sixteenth and, for most of the seventeenth century, the concept of “interest” had a political connotation; that is, it was the notion of the prince’s acquired knowledge, which served to maintain or expand his power. However, shortly before 1700 this changed to a primarily economic meaning (Raab, 1964, p. 237). Albert O. Hirschman (1977), in his famous study, The Passions and the Interests, showed that this transformation was not by chance but rather occurred in order to depict the feared consequences of commercialization, which were seen in the raging passions, more moderately. In the classical dual between reason and passion, “interest” could take an intermediate position, because it was understood to be free of the destructivity of the passions but also free of the ineffectiveness of reason (p. 42ff.). Upon this background it is not surprising that “interest” became dominant in British and to a lesser degree in French philosophy of the eighteenth century as a crucial notion of the social theory (Locke, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Bentham, Hélvétius, Holbach, Condorcet).

26

Protestant Fundaments

The Conflict between Commerce Republicanism around 1750 in Switzerland The very same ideological conflict that occurred in England around 1700 reemerged around 1750 in Switzerland—at about the same time that the notion of “interest” had successfully removed the notion of “passion” and the question of luxury had moved from a moral category to a demoralized economic issue (Berry, 1994). However, the contextual conditions in Switzerland were not the same as they had been in England, which is why eventually another solution to the conflict was found. What had become accepted in England and France only for women, namely, the educational solution to temper the passions, now became the central mean for men as well, although not through botany, of course. The differences between the contextual conditions in Great Britain and Switzerland were not grave but crucial enough to suggest another solution. Like the Scots, the Swiss were (dominantly) reformed Protestants, but the Swiss had a fundamental tradition in traditional republicanism, which the Scots did not share. And compared to England, in Switzerland both the classic republican tradition and reformed Protestantism were much more broadly established and not limited to dissenters and outsiders, all the more that many of the exponents of Protestant republicanism had left England for the New World by 1700 (Woods, 1969; Pocock, 1975). Thus, once again, there was a process at the beginning that can be called the “capitalization of society,” and once again, there was a reaction that led to a renaissance of the republican language. The preconditions were steady population growth and continuous development of “industry” (mainly, spinning and weaving) and trade in Zurich. This development, which had been spared any larger crises, and also a system of duties and taxes resulted in the relatively great wealth of Zurich around 1750. In contrast to the monarchies in other countries, which in the eighteenth century staged an elaborate lifestyle and had a huge need for fi nances, particularly also for their standing armies, the problem for Zurich was not the procurement of fi nances but investment. This can be shown by the rate of interest, which had been set at 5 percent since the Reformation but fell to 3 percent in the eighteenth century. Seeking better investment vehicles for the accumulated monies, Zurich began to consider exporting capital, for there were plenty of interested parties. To this purpose, in 1754 the government of Zurich established a committee to oversee return on investments. This interest rate committee fi rst invested monies from the various city funds in what were called the “Town Hall Bonds” at 3 to 3.5 percent; from 1755 on, also private monies were invested. With the goal to bring in higher returns, the monies were invested in loans to foreign powers but also in loans to trading companies and plantations in Middle and South America (Peyer, 1968,

The Educationalization of the Modern World

27

p. 140f.). Soon six private banks came into being that operated according to the same model. What was decisively new about these allocations of monies was that business was conducted with more or less any interested party, regardless of that party’s political preferences. That means that the credit system that had been previously bound to personal contacts was superseded by (impersonal) loans. Prior to 1750, the giving of credit had been concentrated mainly on interested parties of the same political or religious persuasion (Peyer, 1968, p. 124). Whereas a few loans had been made to large cities, Zurich had been restrained in the case of France, which favored the Catholic parts of Switzerland (p. 130). In contrast to this credit system, the impersonal system of loans came to be dominant after 1755. Profiting from this not least were the countries towards which Zurich, for political reasons, had been very cautious (Fritzsche, 1983): Mediation by the banks not only made the loan business easier but also impersonal. The impersonal investments, loans, and also bonds of private societies were politically neutral; they could be sold also prior to the end of the stipulated period, and because of division into shares, risk was spread more broadly. With the credit market becoming independent, the Zurich government was able, via the interest rate committee, to invest in the English, French, Austrian, Saxon, and Danish national debt. (p. 42; freely translated here) For this reason, the conditions in Zurich around 1750 were not identical to those in England around 1700; however, both experienced comparable commercialization. The Bank of England was established, because the state needed monies; the interest rate committee was founded in Zurich, because Zurich possessed surplus capital. In both cases, a commercial society developed in which political relations were not marked by moral or religious concerns but were instead shaped by the forms of trading. Investments were made not on the basis of political or religious preference but instead in accordance with the impersonal laws of the market. As in England, upon this background Zurich saw a renaissance of the language of classical republicanism. One of the most important exponents of Zurich republicanism was Johann Jacob Bodmer (1698– 1783), professor of history at the Zurich Academy. In the wake of these developments, Zurich’s city parliament began discussing new sumptuary laws in 1755. Bodmer (1755), who was a member of the parliament, comments in a letter to a friend: It is believed that luxury is a consequence of the industry, of the abundance, of the commerce, and that those would suffer if the laws restricted the enjoyment of their fruits. But on the other hand, it is

28 Protestant Fundaments believed that luxury creates a strong break in the spirit of equality and mitigation that is so important in a popular or half-popular state. But a soul depraved by luxury has many other desires and soon becomes an enemy to the laws that confine it. (freely translated here) It is interesting to note that Bodmer’s words here are almost identical to the words of Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 (Montesquieu, 1951, Book VII/2). This makes it clear that Bodmer “speaks” the language of classical republicanism using Montesquieu’s words, or paroles. This language enabled the identification and articulation of a problem—namely, the capitalization of society, interpreted as a cultural crisis. In this way, this language is transnational and to a certain extent transdenominational; Montesquieu was a French Catholic4 and Bodmer a Swiss reformed Protestant. Bodmer’s (1755) letter continues by interpreting the cultural crisis as an educational problem in a corrupted context where the educational idea of classical republicanism, namely, getting acquainted with the practiced customs and patriotic values of the polis is not possible anymore, for they have vanished precisely because of the now dominant commercial attitudes: Only a small part of them seriously seek new sumptuary laws. Vanity is shared by both, the noble and the common. You would not believe how absurd the pomp of clothing, furniture, food, and beverages has become. Who will control those who are assigned to control the people? There is no way to correct corrupted customs all at once. How can fathers lacking of sentiments implant sentiments in their children? What kind of an education can a father give them if he needs it himself? A soul corrupted by luxury has other desires than the love of fatherland. (Bodmer, 1755; freely translated here) The last sentence is again a literal translation of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 (Montesquieu, 1951, Book VII/2), but the crucial question has turned to an educational issue: What can be done with children of an (originally) virtuous republic if their fathers are corrupted by commerce? The answer was to educate the young men to republican heroes who, as virtuous citizens, would later line up the corrupted city back to a virtuous republic—and that is what Bodmer tried to do with his students. This attempt failed, of course, but it made the querelle tangible and the need to fi nd a solution even more necessary: It was educational as well but in another way than the elitist education of young republican heroes. And above that, it was an event in which one of the later most famous educators was socialized, namely, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

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The Education of Republican Heroes as Future Citizens As soon as Bodmer had realized how—in the reality of his langue of classical republicanism—Zurich had become corrupted, he started to assemble students of the Academy in order to read books on ancient and Swiss history and political books such as Montesquieu’s Esprit de Lois. A rather militant elitist republican spirit fermented in the context of the city of Zurich, and several societal groups were formed. One of them proved to be rather effective, despite the fact that it lived only for two and one-half years. It was the “Moral Political and Historical Society,” founded on July 1, 1762, by ten young men between the ages of 17 and 22 to serve their own further education. They were young men who were completing, or had completed, their theology studies at the Zurich Academy, and they were Bodmer’s privileged students. Their ambition was not to deepen their theological knowledge; instead, they wanted to acquire political/ethical knowledge and attitudes. 5 The minutes of their meetings and numerous, further documents of the “Moral Political and Historical Society” make up hundreds of handwritten pages and testify to their heroic (but not really successful) fight against the visible commercialization that Zurich had gone through since the end of the seventeenth century. At the fi rst three of the weekly meetings of the Moral Political and Historical Society, the young theologians and future republican heroes got to work on writing bylaws describing the goals, structure, and organization of their school. For one, they clarified the more formal, learning organization issues, such as defi nition of member categories, conditions for accepting new members, frequency of meeting, and fi nancing. For another, they also laid down specific learning contents, instructional settings, and strategies for monitoring learning. A preamble contains their formulation of their learning goal: The members seek to learn the fundaments of “true political philosophy.” Specifically, the goal was to examine the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of government and to study the history of the fatherland and its value. This rather academic goal is elucidated further with an additional important point. On the basis of the academic education, they seek also to form attitudes through which the young men should become “noble,” “patriotic,” and “of public usefulness.” This education with its comprehensive character was not to be restricted to their own persons; the young men wanted their body of thought, their vision, to “benefit the entire nation” (Müller, 1762, f.o.8r; freely translated here). The means to achieve this goal were formulated in the 24 articles of the statutes of the Society (“Statutes,” 1762). For one, the members specify the fields that they would study, namely, history, politics, jurisprudence, and natural law (Art. 9). However, they forgo formulation

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of the curriculum in the narrower sense, as they do not distribute the subjects according to a schedule or structure the order in which the contents are to be learned. There is no structure of a discipline as one would fi nd in a liberal arts education; instead, the members themselves are to decide on occasion what works they will study (Art. 11). But they do agree that there has to be a kind of indispensable stock of knowledge, a canon, represented by three works: Josias Simler’s Regiment loblicher Eydtgnossschafft [The Regime of the Laudable Confederation] written in 1576, which reconstructed the history of Switzerland’s independence and appeared in numerous subsequent editions, Christian Wolff’s Vernünfftige Gedancken von dem gesellschafftlichen Leben der Menschen [Rational Ideas on the Social Life of Man (also called German Politics)] written in 1720, which examined the varieties of human societies as to accordance with modern natural law, and Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois [The Spirit of the Laws] written in 1748, which examined the characteristics of political laws against the background of the forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy, republic (Art. 9, amendment to Art. 9). Whereas the members handled the decision-taking concerning the contents to be learned rather liberally, the learning setting was defi ned rather narrowly. In addition to reading the texts, the members of the Society had to read aloud papers of their own writing at regular intervals. Copies of these essays had to be provided to the members, so that they could be discussed critically at the following meeting. This criticism represented a form of monitoring learning, conducted by the members themselves, just as they themselves determined the works that they would study. This method was egalitarian as opposed to hierarchical. The members further committed themselves to presenting regular book reports (reviews) (Art. 14) and to giving speeches that would be evaluated mainly on the basis of rhetorical quality (Art. 13). The minutes of the meetings show impressively that the criteria were formulated as a rule very strictly: The meetings were not meant to be sociable gettogethers, but, as a report of August 1763 on the founding of the Society shows, the men pursued their further education “with serious, patriotic manner and conduct” (“Report,” 1763; freely translated here). According to the statutes, the members would hold their discussion “with masculine propriety and instructive seriousness” (“Statutes,” 1762, Art. 10). Behavior norms for the meetings were laid down accordingly: The drinking of coffee, tea, or wine and the smoking of tobacco were forbidden (Art. 2). Some of the members were even spied upon; it was reported, for example, that some members secretly adjourned to a tavern after the meetings. The report complained, “these indifferent republicans, these supposed followers of the example of Sparta’s sons, are slurping down whole bottles of Muscateller and Malvasier …” (as cited in ZehnderStadlin, 1875, p. 249; freely translated here).

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But it was not only these organizational elements that represented classical republicanism. So did the subjects of the talks that were given at the meetings during the fi rst six months. According to the minutes (Minutes, 1762–1764, f.o 97r-116v), some of the topics were (freely translated here): • What we can learn from history (21 July 1762) • On natural and civic freedom (28 July 1762) • On the meaning of the history of the fatherland for republicans (4 August 1762) • Love for the fatherland (11 August 1762) • On morals and politics (18 August 1762) • Is a state without religion possible? (25 August 1762) • The virtuous citizen (1 September 1762) • Military service abroad (8 September 1762) • The character of a good historian (15 September 1762) • The character of a virtuous man (September 1762] • Character of a patriotic ruler (3 November 1762) • The emergence of the civil societies (10 November 1762) • The foundations of political laws (17 November 1762) • The route to bliss (24 November 1762) • The wealth of the individual in a republic (1 December 1762) • On the arts and sciences (8 December 1762) • Comparison of the despotic, aristocratic, and democratic forms of government (15 December 1762) • Punishment of moral vices (22 December 1762) • Structure and clarity in written and oral presentations (29 December 1762) • Education of the republican citizen (29 December 1762) The “Moral Political and Historical Society” was not a success, for it was dissolved in December 1764. The reasons were plenty (for details, see Tröhler, 2009a), and one of the most important one was the fact that parents, citizens, and rulers hardly had the impression that they needed to be rescued from corruption. Quite the contrary, they started to get more and more aware of the underground activities of their next generation. In his opening address in July 1, 1762, the president of the Society could point out that the Society met with the approval of “honorable men,” that “all upright people … applaud us,” and that “conscientious fathers” were yearning, even, for the Society to succeed (Müller, 1762, f.o. 10r.; freely translated here). However, this changed dramatically already in November, 1762—not even a half year after the foundation of the educational society—when two of Bodmer’s students wrote a furious accusation of corruption and abuse of office against a land administrator

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(bailiff). The letter starts out angrily and reveals the republican heroic courage: “It is with great dismay that I put pen to paper to write to you tyrant, villain, hypocrite, blasphemer, perjurer” (Lavater & Füssli, 1762/1763; freely translated here). The letter goes on to demand compensation for the injustices. But the bailiff did not respond, and despite the fact that his misdemeanors were more or less known in the political circles of the City of Zurich, he believed that he was safe, as his father-inlaw was, after all, the reigning mayor of Zurich. This situation induced the two young hotheads to bring the issue before the public. At the end of November, in the darkness of night, they printed and distributed to prominent members of parliament a leaflet with the title “The Unjust Landvogt: Or, Complaints of a Patriot about the Unjust Government.” As the title shows, the target was not only the bailiff but rather also the plutocracy of the political elite of the city that had not responded to the long familiar accusations of corruption. The first sentence of the accusatory letter points again to the language origin of the critique: “Woe is me that I live among a folk whose bailiffs are tyrants &: whose judges exercise injustice, who will hear my plea &: redress this? Are there then no Patriots any more in Zurich” (Lavater & Füssli, 1762/1763; freely translated here). There is no need to say that the proud citizens of Zurich did not appreciate being accused of corruption by their sons’ generation. The young men’s misbehavior and disobedience were immediately linked to their lacking religiousness—a professional “death sentence” for young theologians in a Zwinglian republic such as Zurich was. In this tense condition, the two authors were strongly reprimanded and told to leave the country for an extensive educational stay abroad, from which one of them, Johann Heinrich Füssli, never returned: Füssli started painting in London under the name Henry Fusely and was soon to create excitement in the art scene in Europe and to have a decisive influence. The other was Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1802), who returned to Zurich and became a famous nonconformist preacher and would attain great fame with his book, Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–1778) (Essays on Physiognomy, 1792).6 An incident in spring 1767 shows how alert the political elite was towards the radical activities of the young republican heroes: When the former president of the “Moral Political and Historical Society,” Christoph Heinrich Müller, wrote a leaflet against the sending of military troops from Zurich to Geneva, he had to flee the country. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who was suspected of having co-authored the leaflet, was put in jail for three days and was in addition required to pay for the wood that had been used for the public burning of the leaflets.

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The Educationalization of the Modern World: The Protestant Promise As mentioned above, in the linguistic world of classical republicanism the core argument against commerce is a psychological one: The commercial man will become passionate about his one private fate and forget the only legitimate passion, the love of fatherland and thus his commongood orientation. In the lexicon of classical republicanism he, or better his soul, is corrupted; he is a bourgeois and not a virtuous citizen. It is here that the Protestant idea of the soul comes into play, for in Protestantism it is not—as it would be in Roman Catholicism—a formal institution such as the Holy Mother Church, its sacred members, the ordained priests, or the rituals, incense, bells, and costumes—that mediate salvation. In Protestantism, faithful listening to or reading the Holy Bible or praying reveals God in the inner soul of the faithful and by this mediates salvation. Reform, in the language of Protestantism, is at the beginning always directed to the individual’s soul.7 In their self-conceptions, the citizens of Zurich after 1750 were clearly patriotic, that is, virtuous in the sense of classical republicanism. They were assembled in dozens of moral, patriotic-economical, ethical-political societies and organized the political life in the way the republican constitution had foreseen: elected by men who had to vow publicly to elect the most virtuous and not the richest men as members of Parliament. Many of them participated in these traditions and joined the cultural activities without contesting too much the present way of life, which, after all, was very convenient, but some of did not just walk past the tangible effects of commerce after 1750 that had triggered the radical youth movement around 1760. They started to think about solutions in the querelle between commerce and classic republicanism that were less radical than the solutions of the young. One of the most important authors in this discussion was Johann Kaspar Hirzel,8 physician to the city of Zurich, whose work, Der philosophische Kaufmann [The Philosophical Merchant], was published in 1775. In this work, Hirzel fi rst seeks to demonstrate, in contrast to the accusations of the radical classic republicanism, that one’s profession per se does not impair the person or his soul. Hirzel emphasizes explicitly that “in the profession of the merchant the moral virtues and correct taste for the good and beautiful can be present as much as in any other profession” (Hirzel, 1775, p. 53; freely translated here). In other words, contrary to the diverse ideological accusations, merchants are not any more strongly subject to the passions than people in other walks of life. This comment is equivalent to a de-moralization of the professions. Hirzel, however, does not formulate it in order to rationalize a liberalcapitalist state but rather a republic with the ideal of the virtuous citizen. This is thus Hirzel’s attempt to resolve the querelle.

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It is characteristic that Hirzel’s Der philosophische Kaufmann does in fact not describe the practice of a “philosophical merchant” at all but instead lays out educational maxims for the prospective merchant. The work is thus an educational work, even if it is not apparent in the title. The book culminates in the conclusion that a person aspiring to be a “philosophical”—meaning moral—merchant must be educated to virtue already early on. This education takes place alongside actual training for the profession in bookkeeping, correspondence, and foreign languages. It targets the “soul,” which is to be educated to be virtuous (Hirzel, 1775, p. 84ff.). The means of doing so—and this is where Protestant psychology fi nds expression—is self-examination.9 The philosophical merchant-to-be should be taught, from the earliest youth onwards and each and every day, to subject his inner self to permanent self-examination and to justify his motives (p. 119). The soul that emerges from this, tested and justified, is the guarantor of a virtuous commercial republic. Hirzel’s concept was not unique but instead represented the opinion of the elite in Zurich, who wanted to profess their faith in both the principle of the republic and of commerce. This is shown by a most explosive case of censorship that occurred in the face of the translation into German of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s (1763) Entretiens de Phocion. Mably’s work is an anti-capitalist tract of classic republicanism, a plea for an agrarian republic (it was published also as Phocion’s Conversations: Or, the Relation between Morality and Politics in London in 1769). The translator of the work into German in Zurich, Hans Conrad Vögelin, came into confl ict with the censor because of the passage in which Phocion, in accordance with agrarian republicanism and the ideal of the landed man, espouses the opinion that tradesmen should not be allowed to participate in government. It would take a miracle to “turn them into just, clever, and courageous people,” for which reason it would not be wise to allow them to participate in government (Mably, 1763/1764, p. 109; freely translated here). The censor objected to this passage, as Vögelin recounted in a letter, because it was “directly opposed to” Zurich’s economic structures and would therefore cause “civil commotion” (Vögelin, as cited in Zehnder-Stadlin, 1875, p. 664; freely translated here). For this reason, Vögelin added a note to the German translation, stating that the corruption of tradesmen noted by Phocion did not lie in the trades per se. There was no reason why a tradesman could not be virtuous: “Why shouldn’t they be industrious and moderate, why shouldn’t they be able to have a desire for fame and religion?” And opposing the opinion that agriculture was a considerably more favorable basis for a republic than the trades, Vögelin wrote further: “What then is especially virtuous about the plow, more so than the hammer?” Vögelin’s conclusion regarding Phocion’s criticism of tradesmen is as follows: “The nobility are good, tradesmen are good, commerce is also good, as long as it

The Educationalization of the Modern World

35

can be correctly modified” (Vögelin, as cited in Mably, 1763/1764, p. 111; freely translated here). This modification, the education of the soul to (public) virtue, here becomes an attractive solution to this fundamental confl ict between modern economy and classical republic, between commerce and the citoyen. This is shown also in the book Schreiben eines Vaters an seinen Sohn, der sich der Handelschaft widmet [Letter of a Father to His Son Who is Devoted to Trade] (Iselin, 1781), written by Isaak Iselin, council secretary of Basel, another commercial republic in Switzerland. Whereas the book depicts farming the land as an especially noble occupation, following closely at second place is the occupation of merchant. However, Iselin warns his son against choosing that occupation simply in order to enjoy privately the “pleasures and delicacies” that “the stupid mortal buys with money, often to his doom.” Iselin therefore goes on to advise his son to apply the “eight principles” that underlie any occupation—also the occupation of merchant (p. 392ff.; freely translated here). To ensure that his son submit to these good intentions (p. 420ff.), Iselin, in a supplement at the end of the book, draws up a procedure designed to serve “Preparation in the Morning, Examination in the Evening.” Following this procedure, his son should start the day by recalling his great duties to God and humanity, with Reason, which makes him in God’s image. Only insights into good and evil should adorn his soul. He should treat the poor well, fight against the depravities, and refrain from pride and malice. He is to treat women “respectfully” and not bother them with “criminal passions”; hard work, restraint, gentleness, and fairness should be the central virtues. Vanity and garrulousness are to be avoided, as is hedonism; flattery should be avoided (p. 423). Then, as the day draws to a close, his son should ask himself the following question: “From what fault have you freed yourself today? What evil have you conquered? To what extent have you improved your soul?” (p. 425; freely translated here). Educating the young towards self-examination thus appeared as key to the resolution of the confl ict between ideals of classical republicanism and the modern economy, as guarantor of an ordered modernity that does not fall prey to the passions but instead will ensure economical progress and social justice. In Switzerland, the notion of “interest” was not able to replace the one of the passions—“interests” hardly exists even in the moderate reform discussion. Even the most moderate exponent of Swiss republicanism, Iselin (1764), in a speech accusing the radical republicanism of Bodmer’s disciples in Zurich, accepted passions as artifact. By demarcating sound patriotism from radical patriotism, Iselin’s defi nition of “enlightened patriotism” bases on rational considerations, and the true patriot is neither proud nor disheartened; he is steadfast. According to Iselin (1764), if the patriot “believed” his efforts to be

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fruitless, he would resign, but he “knows” the “eternal truths of virtue,” he “knows” that good deeds are immortal, he knows himself as “tool of felicity,” and he is strong against “passions”—“nothing is able to keep him from doing things of which he knows that they are truly good” (p. 147; freely translated here). A free man, a citizen, in other words, a man living in a free republic, fi rst has to be free from passions, for passions turn every man into a slave (Münch, 1783, p. 25)—slave being the fundamental opposite of the citizen or citoyen. This is exactly the point Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762/1979) made in Book V of Emile, where he discusses political issues and ideals of citizenship and fatherland as if he had never announced in Book I of Emile that these two words should be deleted from the modern vocabulary: Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man. He takes it with him everywhere. The vile man takes his servitude everywhere. The latter would be a slave in Geneva, the former a free man in Paris. (p. 473) However, before examining Rousseau’s (educational) republicanism more closely (chapter 4), some rather common misunderstandings between Lutheran and (reformed) Calvinist Protestantism will be analyzed beyond the questions of education, using the example of Max Weber’s famous thesis on Protestantism.

3

Protestant Misunderstandings Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic in America

Protestantism and Capitalism Heading home from McAlester, the Oklahoma state prison, released on parole after serving four years for a manslaughter conviction, Tom Joad fi nds his parents’ farm deserted. His family is at his Uncle John’s and is in the process of selling everything that they own. Years of repeated crop failures and the ruthless capitalistic agricultural system of the large landowners have left the family—like so many other tenant farmers in Oklahoma—in debt, insolvent, and defenseless. They are forced to leave the home that their grandparents had created when Oklahoma Territory was opened for settlement in 1889. From this John Steinbeck (1939/1992) takes his plot and drafts the epic, The Grapes of Wrath, describing the mechanized agricultural system in its brutal anonymity and monstrous power: The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. (p. 37) The rational logic of the modern industrialized world, which had developed fi rst in the cities of America—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago—rolls with unbridled force over the entire country, destroying not only man-made structures but also disregarding what had been natural obstacles, the hills and gulches. The economic system pushing the farmers from the land appears faceless and impersonal; progress is as unstoppable as these diesel tractors flattening anything

38 Protestant Fundaments in their paths, the farmhouses, fences, and garden plots. The men driving the tractors are dehumanized and soulless—just like the builders of these machines and the investors. They are part of the machine that is leveling the land for large-scale cultivation of cotton: The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat. (…) [He] could not control it— straight across the country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him—goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. (Steinbeck, 1939/1992, p. 37) The settled tenant farmers, with their land foreclosed by the banks, have no choice but to leave; the large landowners enforce eviction through paid custodians of the law. With no alternative but to migrate, the displaced tenant farmers follow the directions, namely, westward, on the colorful handbills from California growers advertising for agricultural labor. The handbills promise a golden future in California, which lacks nothing but workers. That the displaced farmers are being lured as strikebreakers to move to the west, where tenants and day laborers stand in protest against the Californian large landowners, is not mentioned in the handbills. The golden future will prove to be pure illusion, which provides the stuff for the rest of the novel that would make Steinbeck famous worldwide immediately after its publication. Just one year after its fi rst publication, The Grapes of Wrath appeared in German (Früchte des Zorns) in Zurich in 1940. It received the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie that same year by the eminent Hollywood director John Ford, starring Henry Fonda in the role of Tom Joad. Woody Guthrie, who saw the film in 1940, wrote the ballad Tom Joad (1940). Fifteen years ago, another giant in the American music scene was inspired by Steinbeck’s story: Bruce Springsteen wrote The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). In The Grapes of Wrath, there is no limit to the humiliation of “decent” people; corruption of the soul pervades large parts of society, not only the robot-like men driving the tractors, who themselves are often former tenant farmers who need the money in order to migrate. Craving for money also affects the local secondhand dealers, who, knowing the farmers’ desperation, buy their possessions far below value. At the same time, the auto dealers profit by selling their used vehicles at prices far above value. The Joad family, forced to migrate, is left with little cash for the difficult, 2,000-mile journey over the Rocky Moun-

Protestant Misunderstandings 39 tains; their dependency becomes even greater, as they are forced to seek work immediately upon reaching California. After clearing and selling their household goods, just a small pile of old junk that nobody wants to buy is left on the ground in front of the house: “The rest? Leave it—or burn it up.” These personal items left behind have no meaning for the new life: “The women sat among the doomed things, turning them over and looking past them and back. This book. My father had it. He liked a book. Pilgrim’s Progress. Used to read it. Got his name in it” (Steinbeck, 1939/1992, p. 92). Pilgrim’s Progress, which in this scene appears to represent what was meaningful only in the past, is the most-read book worldwide in the English language and one of the most widely translated books of all of world literature; like no other it represented and reinforced the Puritan mentality. The fi rst part of the book was written in 1678 in the wake of the English Restoration (1660) by tinker and Baptist John Bunyan while imprisoned in London for violations of the act that prohibited Dissenters from preaching. The second part was published in 1684. In the fi rst part, Bunyan tells of Christian, who makes his way, beset with numerous temptations and hazards, from the “City of Destruction” to the “Celestial City” of Zion, as the original title already indicates: The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which is to Come: Delivered under the similitude of a dream wherein is discovered, the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey; and safe arrival at the desired countrey. In the second part, Christian’s wife, Christiane, and their sons, follow his path, with the title stating: Wherein is set forth the manner of the setting out of Christian’s wife and children, their dangerous journey, and save arrival at the desired country. This paternal/ familial religious structure, which is nourished by uncompromised faith in God’s promise and persistence in the face of hostility, accords with English Pietism, which had to develop alongside the dominant officially established Church of England (Deppermann, 1993, p. 33ff.). The Pilgrim’s Progress fed the vision of the Puritans on their way to the North American colonies, where they hoped to fi nd, or to found, the Kingdom of God. It is this fundamental, future-oriented vision, which in contrast to the view of German Pietism did not aim at inwardness but rather at reality, that now lies in the heap of the Joads’ discarded goods that have no use for the future, the stuff only of the past and memories recalled— unsaleable and superfluous. “The rest? Leave it—or burn it up”: Was this then Puritan resignation in the face of all-encompassing capitalism?

Protestant Ethic vs. Capitalism Publication of The Grapes of Wrath brought Steinbeck not only worldwide fame but also angry criticism, particularly in California and Oklahoma.1 The book was banned from some libraries and publicly burned,

40 Protestant Fundaments and John Steinbeck was accused of communism (see Shockley, 1944), whereas intellectuals, the American liberals, celebrated the book and its author (see, for example, Lee, 2000). “There is no doubt left that John Steinbeck is one of the ablest, if not the ablest writer in the present scene” (Simmons, 2000, p. 56). Despite the accusations, however, Steinbeck’s criticism of capitalism was not based politically and ethically on communism; Steinbeck was too strongly shaped by the Protestant milieu of his family. His paternal grandparents met in 1853 on a mission to Palestine, now Israel (seeking to convert Jews to Christianity but fi nding very few). And his maternal grandparents (wonderfully described in East of Eden, written in 1952) were Protestants from Northern Ireland (see Parini, 1995). The Pilgrim’s Progress, as Steinbeck certifies in his autobiographical introduction to The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), was, along with Shakespeare and the Bible, a part of the common knowledge of the Steinbeck family settled in Salinas, California, near Monterey. Steinbeck grew up in a milieu that can be called the culturally dominant one in the United States of the time, even though by then the majority of immigrants had for some time no longer come mainly from northern European Protestant countries. This milieu embodied a Protestant view of the world that through the course of the nineteenth century—among other things, through the reception of the theory of evolution—became de-dogmatized and thus de-theologized, or in other words, “liberalized” and “ethicized.” This “discourse shift” corresponded at the theological level with the tendencies of liberal theology, which in the late nineteenth century spread from the intellectual centers in Boston, Andover, and Chicago across the land, just as capitalism spread across the world of work. The aim was transformation of Calvinist theology into a religion of social action (Williams, 1941/1970). This “turn” is symbolized in The Grapes of Wrath at first by the figure of former preacher Jim Casy, whom Tom Joad meets on his way from the prison to his family. Jim Casy had for decades served the families in the region as pastor, baptizing among many others Tom Joad, but he had gone missing in recent years. It is hardly a coincidence that his initials are J.C. (Jesus Christ), nor is it by chance that Casy refuses to preach ever again. When Tom Joad comes upon Casy on the road, he finds him singing these words to the tune of “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”: Yes, sir, that’s my Saviour, Je–sus is my Saviour, Je–sus is my Saviour now. On the level ‘S not the devil, Jesus is my Saviour now. (Steinbeck, 1939/1992, p. 21).

Protestant Misunderstandings 41 When Tom Joad recognizes him to be the preacher he had known, Casy speaks as follows: “I was a preacher,” said the man seriously. “Reverend Jim Casy— was a Burning Busher Used to howl out the name of Jesus to glory. And used of get an irrigation ditch so squirmin’ full of repented sinners half of ’em like to drownded. But not no more,” he sighed. “Just Jim Casy now. Ain’t got the call no more. Got a lot of sinful idears—but they seem kinda sensible.” (p. 22) 2 The play on words with “sinful” but “sensible” ideas symbolizes the loss of meaning of the Old Testament that was central for Calvinists (and Presbyterians) in the United States and the turn to the New Testament Gospel of love, freed of theological superstructures. Sharing a pint at the side of the road, Casy tells Tom Joad about a conversation he had had with himself, which is led in the tradition of Puritan self-justification: I says, “What’s this call, this sperit?” An’ I says, “It’s love. I love people so much I’m fit to bust, sometimes.” An’ I says, “Don’t you love Jesus?” Well, I thought an’ thought, an’ fi nally I says, “No, I don’t know nobody name’ Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people. An’ sometimes I love ‘em fit to bust, an’ I want to make ‘em happy, so I been preachin’ somepin I tought would make ‘em happy.” (Steinbeck, 1939/1992, p. 25ff.) That with this form of religious spirituality a traditional preacher job is no longer possible for Casy is also clear to Tom Joad, because people cling to the idea of a higher, transcendental power that they strive to be fi lled with. As Joad explains to Casy: “People would drive you out of the country with idears like that. Jumpin’ an’ yellin’. That’s what folks like. Makes ‘em feel swell” (p. 26). Casy does not refute this, knowing only too well that people have a need for transcendence, but he still refutes the sense of a ritual church service, because serving God must be practiced permanently. No longer should a distinction be made between “above” and “here below”; the task is to weld the “above” together with the “here below.” Jim Casy believes in no such dualism—and Tom Joad will later follow him in this—but instead follows the notion of liberal theology that everything is unity: “I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe’, I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all woman we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang’” (p. 26). John Dewey had not expressed this any differently five years earlier in A Common Faith (1934); for if everything is religious, then nothing that is religious can be seen as separate from this earth. Jim Casy continues, telling Tom:

42

Protestant Fundaments “Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.” Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a sudden—I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it. (p. 26)

In that light, Casy accompanies the Joad family on their trip of despair to California, which will demand many a sacrifice; Granpa Joad dies before they cross the Oklahoma state line; Granma Joad dies when they enter California; the family breaks apart bit by bit, until there are left only Pa Joad, weakened, Ma Joad, strong, Uncle John, Tom’s brother Al, his pregnant sister Rose of Sharon, who has been left by the father of her child, and Tom himself. Tom is forced to go on the run, but he swears to the family that he will be everywhere, wherever they look, wherever injustice occurs. Tom Joad is the spiritual heir of Jim Casy, who at the end of the story is brutally murdered by corrupt policemen. 3

Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Max Weber was one of the few intellectuals in Germany around 1900 who was not simply filled with negative prejudices against the United States. Weber’s works in the history of religion and in sociology made clear to him, under the premise of renouncing “judgments of value or faith” and a preference for “judgments of historical imputation” (Weber, 1904–05/1930, p. 89ff.), what Zwingli had repeatedly reproached Luther for, namely, that Lutheranism and Catholicism were not so very different when it came to human activity. As to Calvinism, Weber writes in The Protestant Ethic: “A purely superficial glance shows there is here quite a different relationship between the religious life and earthly activity than in either Catholicism or Lutheranism” (Weber, 1904–05/1930, p. 80). To demonstrate this difference, Weber refers to the last song of the epic poem Paradise Lost, written by English Puritan poet John Milton in 1667, in which the archangel Michael says to Adam: … only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love By name to come called Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier far. (Milton, 1667/1992, p. 439; lines 581–587) Weber shows that under such premises the real world must become paradise and that men have a duty to erect it. Weber therefore cites the last lines of Paradise Lost:

Protestant Misunderstandings 43 They looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms; Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon, The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and providence their guide; They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way. (Milton, 1667/1992, p. 441, lines 641–649) For Weber, it is this mentality or culture of active problem solving that distinguishes Calvinism from both Lutheran and Catholic doctrines. This is what, although it does not create capitalism and never made capitalism a goal, reinforced (“mitbeteiligt”) capitalism in a certain sense unintentionally (Weber, 1904–05/1930, pp. 88ff.). To deliver proof of this thesis, Weber, following the methodological considerations outlined in his essay, The Objectivity of the Sociological and Social-Political Knowledge (1904), constructs a Puritan ideal type that is composed of a (theo)logical argument and a psychological process (see Ringer, 2004, p. 118ff.), a correlation that forms the foundation of his thesis. Weber begins with a discussion of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, the significance of which “must certainly be rated very highly” (Weber, 1904–05/1930, p. 98ff.). According to Weber—who makes this monumental historical reference only in the second, revised edition of The Protestant Ethic of 1920—this teaching concludes: That great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic [disenchantment 4] from the world which had begun with the old Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin. (Weber, 1904–05/1930, p. 105) For Weber (1904–05/1930), however, Calvinism contains not only no magical but also no means whatsoever for man to make himself worthy of God’s grace (p. 105). From this theological dogma and the uncertainty of God’s grace, Weber draws conclusions about the effect on the soul of the believing Calvinist: “this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual” (p. 104). The loss of magical means of attaining God’s grace and the inner isolation of the individual led to the “fundamental antagonism to sensuous culture of all kinds” and:

44

Protestant Fundaments forms one of the roots of that disillusioned and pessimistically inclined individualism which can even today be identified in the national characters and the institutions of the peoples with a Puritan past, in such a striking contrast to the quite different spectacles through which the Enlightenment later looked upon men. (p. 105ff.)

The greatest difference between Lutheranism and Calvinism was that Calvinism did away with confession completely. Weber (1904–05/1930) writes that this is “a symptom of the type of influence this religion exercised. Further, however, it was a psychological stimulus to the development of their ethical attitude” (p. 106). As the most illustrative example of this deep inner isolation, Weber calls John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as a witness: … wife and children cling to him, but stopping his ears with his fi ngers and crying, “life, eternal life,” he staggers forth across the fields. No refi nement could surpass the naive feeling of the tinker who, writing in his prison cell, earned the applause of a believing world, in expressing the emotions of the faithful Puritan, thinking only of his own salvation. It is expressed in the unctuous conversations which he holds with fellow-seekers on the way, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Gottfried Keller’s Gerechte Kammacher. Only when he himself is safe does it occur to him that it would be nice to have his family with him. (p. 107) However, Weber asks how this—in his view—totally individualistic Puritanism can be connected with “the undoubted superiority of Calvinism in social organization” (Weber, 1904–05/1930, p. 108). It follows dogmatically, writes Weber, that the world must be made to serve the glorification of God: But God requires social achievement of the Christian because He wills that social life shall be organized according to His commandments, in accordance with that purpose. The social activity of the Christian in the world is solely activity in majorem gloriam Dei. (p. 108) Calvinism made it “an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of selfconfidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace” (p. 111). Based on this dogmatic aspect, Weber distinguishes once again the psychological impact that now leads to the specific ascetic attitude to work. Whereas in Lutheranism, the sinful are promised grace if they trust themselves to God in penitent faith, in Calvinism there are only “those self-confident saints whom we can rediscover in the hard Puritan

Protestant Misunderstandings 45 merchants of the heroic age of capitalism and in isolated instances down to the present” (p. 112). Whereas Lutheranism holds on to mysticism and maintains the “purely inward emotional piety” (p. 113), Calvinism demands “not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system” (p. 117). Under what Weber (1904–05/1930) called the given disenchantment of the world (again, this term is found only in the second, revised edition of 1920), there followed a rationalization of the world, which itself demanded of each individual person complete and active self-control of the status naturae (p. 118); “only a life guided by constant thought could achieve conquest over the state of nature … It was this rationalization which gave the Reformed faith its peculiar ascetic tendency,” (p. 119), which rested on the work ethic serving the glory of God and on “that respect for quiet self-control which still distinguishes the best type of English or American gentleman to-day” (p. 119), which Weber contrasts with the Lutheran “typical German quality often called good nature (Gemütlichkeit) or naturalness” (p. 127). The central difference in conduct between Anglo-Saxon and German Protestants for this reason “clearly originated in the lesser degree of ascetic penetration of life in Lutheranism as distinguished from Calvinism” (p. 127), which Weber ascribes to the absence of the doctrine of predestination in Lutheranism (p. 138ff.). It was this fundamental ascetic attitude—arising from the dogma that “unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace” (Weber, 1904–05/1930, p. 159)—that, according to Weber, corresponded with the spirit of (modern) capitalism and contributed decisively to the shaping of the market economy order of the world in such a way that there is today no alternative to the capitalistic way of life, because the process of rationalization had developed its own dynamic. “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so”; care for external goods became an “iron cage.” Capitalism today no longer needs the support of religious asceticism; it has become mechanized, and with this has made the religious basis of man obsolete (p. 181).

Weber and American Protestantism Had Steinbeck been a cynic and had he known of Weber’s thesis, it could perhaps be supposed that the Joads’ leaving Pilgrim’s Progress behind at the farm that was soon to be flattened by the tractors symbolizes precisely this superfluousness of Protestant ethic against the background of mechanized capitalism unleashed. But Steinbeck cannot be said to have been a cynic, and it is hardly likely that he knew of Weber. But it is at the least ironic that Weber, who suffered from deep depression between 1897 and 1901 and again from 1903, regained his love of life in precisely that country that he had, against the background of his

46

Protestant Fundaments

theory, interpreted as an accumulation of lonely individuals. Accepting an invitation from Hugo Münsterberg, a German professor of psychology at Harvard, to deliver a paper at the Congress of Arts and Science at St. Louis as a part of the 1904 World’s Fair, Weber, his wife Marianne, Ernst Troeltsch, and others embarked for America, arriving in New York. His wife writes: “Weber could hardly wait for the landing procedures and customs inspection; he strode from board ship with long, bouncing steps—leaving his faithful companion behind—like an eagle set free that can fi nally take to the sky” (Marianne Weber, 1926/1950, p. 318; freely translated here). And at the end of their American travels, she reports: “This faithful companion sometimes has the feeling that she is bringing home a man who has recovered, who has become conscious of a slowly gathered stock of strength” (p. 345; freely translated here). How Weber experienced the land of capitalism inflated by Protestantism in reality can be read in further passages of his wife’s travel journal. Marianne Weber (1926/1950) writes that on the one side, Weber was fascinated by “the obvious traces of the organizational powers of the religious spirit” in the colleges, to which he attached great importance in the biographies of the graduates: The whole magic of memories of youth lies alone just in this time of life. Lots of sports, pleasant forms of social activities, endless intellectual stimulation, and long-lasting friendships are the yields, and especially, far more so than our students, they are trained in the habit of work. (p. 325) However, Weber saw signs of decay (p. 326ff); not in the colleges themselves but in American society as a whole, whose uncomplicated social gatherings he apparently greatly appreciated. To blame for the decay were, on the one hand, “the Germans,” who were accused of religious indifference and doing harm to the influence of the actually exemplary church communities (p. 328), and on the other hand, capitalism. Feeling at ease in rural Oklahoma, Marianne Weber writes with sadness: It is too bad: before the year is out, this will look like Oklahoma [City], that is, like any other city in America. With absolutely rapid haste, everything that stands in the way of the capitalistic culture is crushed to a pulp. (p. 332) This almost seems to anticipate Steinbeck’s monster machines on the fields of Oklahoma in The Grapes of Wrath.

Protestant Misunderstandings 47

Political Protestant Ethic and Anti-Capitalism Over a hundred years of diverse and inestimable discussion on Weber’s “Protestant ethic thesis” as a rule looks at it not as a source but rather continues to view it as a thesis requiring verification or falsification. This dehistorization accords largely with Weber’s own way of approaching history, which is seen in his more than dubious thesis of a direct effect of theological dogma (doctrine of predestination) on man’s soul (asceticism). Also the ideal type itself, the picture of the lonely Protestant individual, is an untenable construction historically, as the objection should be raised that the spread of Protestant thinking hardly took place via theological tracts but instead through the varied devotional, edification literature. Moreover, these writings for religious edification are hardly distinguishable from denomination to denomination, because they were frequently copied from one another. 5 Hartmut Lehmann has rightly pointed out that Weber based the formulation of his Protestant ideal type on literature that was written at the time after the English Restoration (after 1660) (Lehmann, 1996a, p. 20ff.). In the main Weber cites three works, namely, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory (1673), and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678 and 1684). However, neither Weber nor Lehmann consider the time prior to the Restoration, which is usually dismissed in an undifferentiated manner as “civil war” and Cromwell’s dictatorship that led to the Commonwealth; it is examined merely in terms of assumed psychological consequences, that is, represented as a disappointment that led many Puritans to withdraw voluntarily from politics and to focus, from then on, on religious edification and fulfi lling occupational duties and tasks (Lehmann, 1996a, p. 20). The crux, it appears, is religion, or the religious ascetic ideas, which is separated from politics to the greatest possible extent. Only in this way does the Protestant ethic thesis remain plausible. The remarkable thing about this entire construction is the narrowing psychological interpretation by Weber, which can be explained by the great attractiveness of psychology around 1900 on both sides of the Atlantic (this phenomenon will be discussed as Protestant ambition in chapter 8). Issues concerning religious organization remained marginal, and if they are implied, as in the last passages of The Protestant Ethic, then Weber (1904–05/1930) states: “The next task would be rather to show the significance of ascetic rationalism … thus for the types of organization and the functions of social groups from the conventicle to the State” (p. 182). Thus the theology, that is, the doctrine of predestination, remains the primary thing, the source, and its impact is seen in the asceticism; the consequences of asceticism for social organization are to be investigated. In his strict causal pattern, Weber does not seem to

48 Protestant Fundaments consider that Calvinism fundamentally developed in the hundred years after Calvin, both theologically and in the form of the religious selfunderstanding, and that Calvinism in England, in the face of the dominance of the Anglican Church, had in any case to become transformed and was therefore open to other influences. This process, which it seems to me has not yet been studied to the full, did not simply “produce” Puritans as radicalized Calvinists but rather caused a reformulation of the Protestant doctrine in which the reception of the teachings of Zwingli, which Weber assesses as insignificant, plays a crucial role.6 Of specific importance is Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), Zwingli’s companion and successor. When Queen Mary I restored Catholicism in 1553, many Calvinists escaped from England, not few of them to Switzerland, and Bullinger hosted several of them in his home, being informed by a more republican (and less theocratic) form of government, ideas that the Puritans brought back home when Queen Elisabeth I, half-sister of Mary I, came to power in 1558. The fear of Mary I had been for good reason, for “Bloody Mary” had almost 300 religious dissenters burned (“Marian Persecutions”) (Duffy, 2009). One of the prominent victims of these prosecutions was the churchman John Hooper, who had been in close contact with Bullinger and received important ideas about social organization (Raath & De Freitas, 2003). According to McCoy and Baker (1991), it was most of all the teachings of Bullinger that shaped “the tacit dimension of our culture, the part of our lived patterns that is not explicitly known yet continues to permeate and shape the structures of our thinking and action” (p. 64) (see also Baker, 2000). After 1558 classical republicanism, the political language of Zurich’s Reformation, became the ideal form of political rule—in exact opposition to British monarchy and the Episcopalian Anglican Church that was strengthened after the death of Elisabeth I in 1603. During the reign of her successor, King James I of England, the fi rst Puritan settlers were exiled to the colonies overseas. The Puritans’ drive to change the real world, confirmed by Weber, was fundamentally political. This means that the “civil war” touched upon only briefly by Weber and in the Weber literature was not only a brief excursus into politics, from which one rapidly disassociated oneself: The establishment of the Commonwealth in 1648 accorded with the vision of erecting a just political, social, and economic order, the Kingdom of God on Earth—it was, after the Old Swiss Confederation and The Netherlands, the third republic north of the Alps. It cost the life of the successor of King James I of England, his son Charles I, in 1649. Classical republicanism lent itself to Puritans of various persuasions, because like Calvinist Protestantism, it starts out from the fundamental equality of men, makes of citizens magistrates and soldiers, just as in the Puritan parishes laymen were allowed to preach, and because a similarly rigorous ethic dominated that was expressed in “steadfastness,” which

Protestant Misunderstandings 49 went through a certain revaluation in the seventeenth century. Dominant in classical republicanism was patriotism, that is, love of the (selfgiven) laws, steadfastness in war, and the fight against softening due to luxury goods—and with this, a frontline was formed against commerce, or capitalism. This canon of virtues lent itself to the Puritans, because through it they shaped the political organization not only as something external but transposed Calvinism altogether: It is not by chance that Congregationalism was so dominant among the Puritans. The Puritans did not change any of this also after 1660—that is, those Puritans who stayed in England and did not migrate to the American colonies, even though in the face of the Restoration caution was advisable as to anti-monarchy and anti-Anglican convictions. It was no coincidence that Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan published in 1651 during his exile to Paris, raised two demands for the civil peace that the forces behind the Restoration could base on: Namely, and first, religion was declared to be a absolutely private matter that could never be made a public one, and second, all political rights were to be comprehensively transferred to one single person, the king. But decrees are one thing, and actions are another; the intractableness of the Puritans already became evident when Bunyan refused to uphold the ban on preaching: He was then thrown into prison, where he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. John Milton, on the other hand, who had a government post during the English Republic and was one of the leading intellectuals of the time, did not write “pure” political tracts on the one hand and then “pure” religious papers on the other—the ideal was and remained the republican Puritan community (see Gebhardt, 1988, p. 539ff.), which is evident also in Paradise Lost (1667) that Weber cited, as Armand Himy (1995) and David Norbrook (1999) showed.7 It was this language that left its mark in the American colonies (Stavely, 1987), which at the time of the secession from England understandably placed even stronger emphasis on the republican rhetoric (see chapter 5). It was anti-monarchic, anti-Episcopal, anti-commercial and thus anti-capitalist, and “anti-individualistic.” This means that it was to a certain degree egalitarian, communalistic, agrarian, and patriotic.

The Protestant Ethic in America Upon this background, Steinbeck’s portrayal of the worthlessness of Pilgrim’s Progress’ in the face of industrialized agriculture is a political/ethical charge against capitalism. In the American discussion, this was noticed already in the fi rst years after the book appeared. Frederic I. Carpenter, for example, noted as early as 1941 that The Grapes of Wrath transcended the dark, Calvinistic world of sin and evil “to preach a positive philosophy of life and to damn that blind conservativism which fears ideas” (Carpenter, 1941, p. 315). Here Carpenter comes

50 Protestant Fundaments to speak not by chance of the forerunners and exponents of Pragmatism. He ascribes to Steinbeck a connection with the “mystical transcendentalism of Emerson, … the earthy democracy of Whitman, and the pragmatic instrumentalisms of William James and John Dewey” (p. 316); a construction that must have honored Dewey, who had written in a letter to his wife on 16 April 1887: “I have been reading Walt Whitman more and find that he has pretty defi nite philosophy. His philosophy of democracy and its [sic!] relation to religion strikes me as about a thing” (Dewey, 1887). Thirty years later, Dewey expresses admiration for Whitman for his exemplary welding of democracy and religion that could place limits of the capitalism that had been unleashed. In his great political tract, The Public and its Problems, in which he defends the republican ideology against Walter Lippman, Dewey (1927/1954) writes: When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication. (p. 184) This gets right to the core of American thinking, which encompassed and welded religion, philosophy, politics, and education, as Carpenter illustrates: “Jim Casy translates American philosophy into words of one syllable, and the Joads translate it into action” (Carpenter, 1941, p. 316). Six years later (1947), Chester E. Eisinger expanded Carpenter’s theses in a paper with the title Jeffersonian Agrarianism in The Grapes of Wrath and puts them in a nutshell as follows: Eisinger argues that the epic signifies “a new kind of Christianity” that was closely bound to the goal of democracy: “We must seek another road to the independence and security and dignity that we expect from democracy” (Eisinger, as cited in Heavilin 2000, p. 10). Eisinger’s reference to Jefferson leads right into the agrarian ideology of republicanism of the Spirit of 1776, which always saw itself as vulnerable to the threat of capitalism. Jefferson wrote: Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independant, the most virtuous & they are tied to their country & wedded to it’s liberty & interests by the most lasting bonds. (…) I consider the class of artificers as the panders of vice & the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned. (Jefferson, 1785/1984a, p. 818) Jefferson (1785/87/1984c) saw, as did all exponents of classical virtue republicanism, the threat to republican society posed by capitalism, which in the pertinent jargon was called commerce:

Protestant Misunderstandings 51 I repeat it again, cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independant citizens (…) But the actual habits of our countrymen attach them to commerce. They will exercise it for themselves. Wars then must sometimes be our lot. (p. 301) Virtue stands in the foreground of this political ethic, which whereas it is located “within,” has decisive political and social importance. In a speech commemorating the fi fth anniversary of the Boston Massacre of 1775, Joseph Warren, physician and later militia officer, said: Britain … may be the seat of universal empire. But should America, either by force, or those dangerous engines, luxury and corruption, ever be brought into a state of vassalage, Britain must lose her freedom also.… I must indulge a hope that Britain’s liberty, as well as ours, eventually be preserved by the virtue of America. (Warren, as cited in Metzger, 1999, p. 370) In 1939, the same year that The Grapes of Wrath appeared, John Dewey published, in the face of the totalitarian European states, his political and ethical reflections in Freedom and Culture. In this work, Dewey (1939/1988) defends American democracy, which he traces back to Jefferson and defends against English natural law theorists such as Locke, Bentham, or Mill, as only Jefferson had connected democracy and virtue, politics and ethics: “Jefferson’s formulation [of democracy] is morality through and through: in its foundation, its methods, its ends” (p. 173). In this connection Dewey is referring to a work that he had written eleven years previously, The Public and its Problems (1927/1954), in which he had also praised Whitman (see above), in that he includes a long quotation stating that democracy must also begin at home and that “home” must be understood as the “neighborly community” (p. 213). The vision of Pragmatism was not individual isolation but rather “unity,” which in order to be realized required social exchange—as a political ideal and a means of education. Jane Addams, for example, was convinced that “social intercourse could best express the growing sense of the economic unity of society” (Addams, 1895, p. 207). When Jane Addams reiterated these anti-capitalist theses in The Newer Ideals of Peace in 1907, the book was reviewed by George Herbert Mead. In his review, Mead strengthened the criticism of the social isolation of both the workers in the labor unions and the political establishment in their villas, the return of politics to “purely repressive and legal” foundations, and connected with this, the missed opportunity for “more organic community control.” Mead thus subscribed to the main thesis of Addams’ book, “that social control, that government, must arise out of these immediate human relations,” which Mead characterized as “sympathetic contact with men, women, and children” (Mead, 1907,

52 Protestant Fundaments pp. 123f., 128). The vision of Pragmatism was not lonely individuals but instead the Kingdom of God on Earth with a republican imprint, which especially in the face of the dangers of capitalism needed to be fi nally realized rapidly (see chapter 6). The title The Grapes of Wrath refers not coincidentally to a religious/republican source: For the fi rst edition, Steinbeck “forced” the publisher, Pascal Covici, to reprint all verses of the republican “Battle Hymn of the Republic” of the Northern states that was born during the Civil War, written by the Unitarian Julia Ward Howe (Benson, 1990, p. 387). Here is the fi rst verse: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword His truth is marching on. (italics added) The chorus follows: Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. (Howe, 1862)

The Doctrine of Two Kingdoms or God’s Kingdom on Earth Weber’s “blind eye” to the political dimension of English Puritanism may stem from his Lutheran provenance, which may have been made stronger by the fierce confl icts in the “Kulturkampf” (“confl ict of cultures”) against German Catholicism, waged in Germany with great vigor from 1871 to 1877, gradually calming down from 1878 to 1891.8 Whereas Weber loathed the cult around Luther and Lutheranism, he admired Luther, as can be seen in The Protestant Ethic when he claims that Luther’s conception of the calling (Beruf) was a decisive influence on the English Puritans (see here Lehmann, 1996b). Weber expresses his admiration of Luther in a thank-you letter of February 5, 1906, to Adolf Harnack for sending him the second edition of Harnack’s Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (1906) (there is an English translation of the fi rst edition of 1902, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, in two volumes, 1904–1905). In the letter, Weber writes that towards Harnack’s Lutheranism he has a different “value judgment”: “As much as Luther towers over all others,—Lutheranism is for me, I do not deny, in its historical manifestations the most terrible of

Protestant Misunderstandings 53 the terrible” (Weber, 1906/1990, p. 32; freely translated here). Looking to the future with little hope, Weber (1906/1990) continues: even in its ideal form, in which it represents itself in its hopes for future developments, it is for me, for us Germans, a structure about which I am not absolutely convinced how much power to permeate life could come out of it. (p. 32; freely translated here) Weber (1906/1990) thus sees “the Germans” in an “inwardly difficult and tragic situation,” because they could not be sect people, that is, they could not be Quakers or Baptists, which both rejected state or Land churches. “Each of us must recognize the superiority of—basically after all—institutionalized churchdom, as measured by non-ethical and nonreligious values” (p. 33; freely translated here). Weber believes that the time of the sects had run out, but regrets deeply that the Germans had never gone through “the school of strict asceticism”; this circumstance was: the source of all that which I fi nd odious about it [the German nation], and assessed completely religiously—and I see no way to around this—the average member of a sect in America stands just as high above the state church ‘Christians’ in our country as Luther, as a religious person, stands above Calvin, Fox e tutti quanti. (p. 33; freely translated here) In a religious respect, then, Luther is placed above Calvin, organizationally the state church is placed above the free congregation; only in asceticism are the Germans inferior to the Americans. This remarkable assessment is not further explained in Weber, for which reason it can only be elucidated with a hypothesis that is based, in addition to consideration of Weber’s enthusiasm for Luther, on Weber’s ambivalent attitude towards Karl Marx, whose moral evaluation of capitalism Weber shared but whose material causal determinism he rejected (see Ringer, 2004, p. 113ff.). The hypothesis is the following: If the Lutherans had had the same religious ‘permeation of life’ as the Calvinist Americans, then the monetary economy that had become dominant would have never degenerated into capitalism—capitalism used here pejoratively. In other words, the hypothesis is that in Weber’s thinking, Luther’s conception of the calling had arisen within a convincing (Lutheran) theology, but in Germany it had had (too) little effect as a religious form of life, whereas in England it arose within a less convincing (Calvinist) theology but produced a strong religious lifestyle—whereby this combination had produced capitalism as an inhuman form of life, albeit unintentionally. In reverse, the conclusion would have to be drawn that if all

54 Protestant Fundaments Lutherans were as religious as the Calvinists, then capitalism would not be a problem insofar as true Lutheran religiosity does not at all permit corruption through the monetary economy. Weber did not himself formulate this hypothesis, but it can be found ten years later in the work of another Lutheran, the Nobel Prize recipient Rudolf Eucken. According to Eucken (1914), the “greatness of the German character” lay in that it was a “folk of deep inwardness” (p. 10), which, in the face of the ever more materialistic world had crucial “world historical importance” (p. 22). Eucken acknowledges that Germany—like France, England, or America—had experienced tremendous economic growth in the nineteenth century, but for Eucken the crucial difference was, however, that in Germany this development did not corrupt the true character of the German people: Did we then fall away from our own selves when we turned to the visible world, when we developed our forces on land and water, when we took the lead in industry and technology? Have we thus denied our true, inner nature? No, and once again no! (p. 8; freely translated here) In contrast to all other peoples, the German folk, thanks to its inwardness, had remained truly religious and for that reason had world historic importance: “In that regard, we may say that we form the soul of humanity and that the destruction of the German nature would rob world history of its deepest sense” (p. 23; freely translated here). This interpretation can make clear why Weber traces Puritanism back to work only and not to politics. Luther and German evangelical Protestantism insist on a dualistic, two-kingdom doctrine,9 according to which in the one kingdom, Christ rules through word and sacrament, mercy and forgiveness are practiced, and there are no differences among people. In the other kingdom, in contrast, the Emperor reigns with the sword; there is no mercy and no equality. But the worldly kingdom still has a purpose: in that, namely, the prince curbs the evil in men—even if through violence, peace is established, and thus conditions are created for proclaiming the Gospel (Luther, 1523/1983, p. 41ff.). Logically, ideas like political participation, which are characteristic of the Baptist church and Congregationalism, are foreign to Lutheranism. This political indifference of Lutheranism makes it understandable why American Lutherans (together with Presbyterians) did not take part in the liberal turn of theology and had little presence in the Social Gospel movement or other anti-capitalist or anti-monopoly movements, that is, why they were, in the words of Hutchinson (1992), the “most resistant to change” (p. 114ff.).

Protestant Misunderstandings 55

The Ghost of Tom Joad Establishing the Kingdom of God on Earth was the mission of the Puritans, who, in the context of the theological transformation around 1900 (of which the most visible expression was liberal theology) became more and more de-dogmatized. This liberal reformed Calvinist theology, divested of dogma, is represented in The Grapes of Wrath in the characters of Jim Casy and Tom Joad. When Jim Casy, who is present at the strike of the exploited agricultural workers of California, is brutally murdered by policemen, Tom Joad, acting under extreme emotional distress, kills one of the murderers. As he takes his fi nal leave from his mother prior to going on the run, the following conversation takes place: Ma said, “How’m I gonna know ‘bout you? They might kill ya an’ I wouldn’ know. They might hurt ya. How’m I gonna know?” Tom laughed uneasily. “Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one—an’ then––” “Then what, Tom?” “Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re madn an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talkin’ like Casy. Comes of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes.” “I don’ un’erstan’,” Ma said. “I don’ really know.” “Me neither,” said Tom. “It’s jus’ stuff I been thinkin’ about.” (Steinbeck, 1939/1992, p. 439) This the intellectual circles in America understood. Too impressive was the plot, which hit the religiously imprinted nerve of the educated and intellectuals and showed, for all the world to see, the ambivalence that exists between capitalism and republican Protestantism. The subsequent fi nal scene, with its unsurpassed religious symbolism, may have helped here. The remainder of the family, completely starving, humbled, homeless, and weakened by illness, must now also endure the loss of son Tom. When they find a new refuge in an abandoned boxcar by the stream, the stream begins to rise in the incessant rain that threatens to flood them out. Pa Joad and Uncle John begin to throw up a bank of mud as a dam. At this point, Rose of Sharon, who is ill with fever, goes into labor and gives birth to a stillborn baby. Despite all of Pa Joad and Uncle John’s efforts, the water begins to rise to the boxcar, and they are

56

Protestant Fundaments

forced to move on. Uncle John is supposed to bury the stillborn child, even though it is against the law: “They’s lots of things ‘gainst the law that we can’t he’p doin’.” Shovel in hand, carrying the dead baby in an apple crate, John wades through the hip-high waters. This is followed by a scene that deliberately summons up the Old Testament, but replacing a live child with a dead child. For a time he stood watching it [the stream] swirl by, leaving its yellow foam among the willow stems. He held the apple box against his chest. And then he leaned over and set the box in the stream and steadied it with his hand. He said fiercely, “Go down an’ tell ‘em. Go down in the street an’ rot an’ tell ‘em that way. That’s the way you can talk. Don’ even know if you was a boy or a girl. Ain’t gonna fi nd out. Go on down now, an’ lay in the street, Maybe they’ll know then.” He guided the box gently out into the current and let it go. It settled low in the water, edged sideways, whirled around, and turned slowly over. The sack floated away, and the box, caught in the swift water, floated quickly away, out of sight, behind the brush. (Steinbeck, 1939/1992, p. 467ff.) Fleeing to higher ground, the Joad family, soaked to the skin, fi nds a dry barn. In the barn they meet an old, sick man who is starving to death: She [Ma Joad] looked at Rose of Sharon huddled in the comfort. Ma’s eyes passed Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and then came back to them. And the two women looked deep into each other. The girl’s breath came short and gasping. She said “yes”. Ma smiled. “I knowed you would. I knowed.” (Steinbeck, 1939/1992, p. 475) Rose of Sharon—not forfeiting her sense of modesty despite the adverse experiences—asks that everyone leave the barn, and Ma Joad herds them out the door, closing the door behind her: Rose of Sharon has milk that can save the stranger’s life—at least for now: For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes [of the starving man]. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fi ngers moved gently in his

Protestant Misunderstandings 57 hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously. (p. 476) Steinbeck’s editor protested that this fi nal scene and Rose of Sharon’s offer of her breast to the starving stranger occurred too abruptly, that it needed leading up to. It would be unsatisfying to the reader, because the stranger was not built into the structure of the book and the novel thus had no literary climax. Steinbeck opposed the objection, saying that building the man into the story would “warp the whole meaning of the book,” especially because it was not written to satisfy the reader but “to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness” (Steinbeck, as cited in Heavilin, 2000, p. 1ff.). Steinbeck’s refusal to ‘treat the reader like a child,’ that is, his insistence on shaping the composition of the novel in such a way that the recipients must discover the meaning themselves, has an equivalent in the Congregational and Baptist skepticism towards the state or Episcopalian church. The issue is, as in all of liberal reformed Protestantism in America, the individual’s willingness to grasp current events and, according to the ethical foundations that form the basis of the anti-capitalist criticism, to change them—that is, not to wait for the hereafter. Tom Joad, or his spirit, as goes the promise that Wood Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen renewed in 1940 and 1995, will stand by them as they do so.

Part II

Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education

4

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism

Chapter 2 focused on the emergence of an ‘educational reflex’—defi ning social problems as educational—and located it in a specific context, where three different elements came together: commerce, classic republicanism, and Protestantism. The merging took place in the Zwinglian republic of Zurich after 1750, which experienced republican youth unrests triggered by the tangible commercialization of the republic and eventually found the solution of educating the Protestant soul exposed to modern life, an idea that had counterparts in other Swiss commercial Protestant republics, such as Basel. Using the example of Weber’s thesis of the Protestant work ethic, chapter 3 discussed the fundamental differences and misunderstandings between Swiss/American Protestantism (Calvin, Zwingli) and German Protestantism (Luther). One ‘victim’ of this misunderstanding is certainly Jean-Jacques Rousseau in general and Rousseau’s educational theory in particular. As Rousseau was born in the hometown of Calvin, the German historiography had no scruples about integrating Rousseau’s Emile (1762) into a historiography starting with Rousseau and becoming essentially German after 1800—the same historiography had also no scruples about following the German nationalist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who in 1808 declared Pestalozzi, who was born in the hometown of Zwingli (Luther’s adversary), a “German soul” in the grandeur of Martin Luther (Fichte, 1808/2008, p. 119; freely translated here). The beginning of modern education—if we follow the dominant historiographies and philosophies of education—can be precisely dated, namely, in the year of 1762, the year of publication of Rousseau’s Emile. This assessment is true not only for continental historiography and philosophy of education but also represents a transcontinental view, as we can see, for example, in the very successful Text-book in the History of Education of 1905, by Paul Monroe, who was an influential professor of the history of education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Monroe wrote:

62 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education Finally, it is to be noted that in Rousseau’s teachings, notwithstanding their extravagance, is to be found the truth upon which all educational development of the nineteenth century is based. Rousseau was the prophet denouncing the evil of the old; foretelling, yet seeing vaguely and in distorted outline, the vision of the new. (p. 572) There is an old and a new, and the line of demarcation is the publication of the educational novel Emile in 1762.

Rousseau in the Educational Historiography: A Genetic Analysis Rousseau’s exceptional position in the development of education was constructed in the fi rst comprehensive history of education ever published. It appeared in 1813 and was written by Friedrich Heinrich Christian Schwarz, son of the conservative Lutheran minister Johann Georg Gottlob Schwarz. Schwarz himself was a Lutheran minister and a professor of theology at the University of Heidelberg and was responsible at the same time for teacher education as well. This fi rst history of education contained the topoi of the historiography of education that has remained more or less constant ever since. According to this stock theme, Michel de Montaigne and John Locke had raised the central pillars of modern education, and in the eighteenth century, Rousseau had been the fi rst to bring them into a “system” of education, thus establishing the “foundations of modern education” “with genius and in a beautiful form” (Schwarz, 1829, p. 450; freely translated here). However, Schwarz warned against overestimating the genius of this “French classical” (sic!) educational theorist. We should not seek in Rousseau’s work the depth that was sometimes assumed, for it had been only with [the German] Basedow that Rousseau’s system found further development, and it was Pestalozzi who had raised that system to a higher level (Schwarz, 1829, p. 450).1 The “system” attributed to Rousseau is restricted to • • • • •

accordance with nature, negative education, natural punishment, exercise of the senses, learning reading and writing through external incentives,

whereas the religious, gender, and political education in the fourth and fifth books of Emile are left out entirely. Schwarz’s comments in his description of Rousseau’s system reveal the mixed feelings with which Rousseau was received at the time. First, Schwarz (1829) mentions Rousseau’s difficult character (p. 451, p.

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 63 454ff.). He then takes exception to Rousseau’s exclusive focus on man’s “base nature” (p. 456) and criticizes sharply Rousseau’s refusal to give Emile religious instruction in childhood and adolescence. Nonetheless, Schwarz certifies Rousseau’s great, although somewhat negative, impact, stating: In Rousseau, man’s religious basis goes completely unrecognized, which is the main reason for the meanness of the new education, which through this was dragged down to miserable bareness (p. 456). It was Schwarz who determined the pattern of the reception of Rousseau within the historiography of education, or pedagogy. 2 The central aspects of this reception are • Montaigne and Locke as forerunners, • the assertion that Rousseau’s pedagogy was novel and identification of this with the ‘discovery of childhood,’ and éducation naturelle, or négative (which are often not seen separately), • Rousseau’s seductive eloquence, • further development and perfecting of this new pedagogy through Basedow, Pestalozzi, and German pedagogy of the eighteenth century, • Rousseau’s difficult character (for example, his relationships with women, his so-called irreligious education, his treatment of his own children), • criticism of (the lack of) religious education in the fi rst three books of Emile, • widespread ignorance of the fourth and fifth books of Emile. In diverse historical accounts through the course of the nineteenth century, the evaluation of these individual aspects varies, but all in all, we fi nd a great doctrine that is shaping a tradition. From 1840, the historiography becomes clearly more nationalistic and Rousseau thus more and more problematic but ultimately indispensable, after all, as the initial inspiration for German education. Leading the way for the entire German historiography was the four-volume Geschichte der Pädagogik (1843–1847) by the German nationalist and pietist Karl Georg von Raumer. Following the German nationalist and evangelical orientation, von Raumer’s chronology of pedagogical heroes lists Rousseau as the last of the foreigners (Pestalozzi is understood as German). Here recognition of Rousseau’s groundbreaking ideas is impeded by his difficult character (Raumer, 1843/1889, II. Teil, p. 153ff.), which von Raumer sees as expressed also in the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in Emile, which von Raumer suspects of Pelagianism (p. 171ff.). Although von Raumer demotes Rousseau to a simple critic of France, that “civilization that has gone to rot,” in the conclusion he compares Rousseau to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Lighthouse of Alexandria,

64 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education lighting the way for the French in politics and for the Germans in education (p. 212). In von Raumer’s history, and later in Schmidt’s four-volume Geschichte der Pädagogik (1860–1862), and then in all of the historiography of education booming from 1870 onwards, Rousseau has the highest status that can be achieved by a non-German: He is held to be the initiator of modern education. Emile is called the signpost of the world historical development of pedagogy (Schmidt, 1861, p. 500), but Rousseau is also criticized in his character for his “irreligion” (p. 470). According to Schmidt (1860), Rousseau’s one-sidedness had only been fi nally overcome with “German philosophy” at the turn of the nineteenth century, which not only provided an alternative to “French Freethinking,” but also, in its greatness, was comparable only to the Age of Plato and Aristotle (p. 44). Upon this background, the Zwinglian Pestalozzi is made again the educational theorist of German Lutheran philosophy, the “father of education,” who had attempted to “form man … from the inside” (p. 45). These strivings, however, had found their completion and perfection through another person, who “like Pestalozzi, had a heart for humanity,” namely, the German nationalist Friedrich Froebel (p. 46; freely translated here).3

Emile’s Basic Problem in the Language of Classical Republicanism According to the German Protestant historiography of education, the new view that Rousseau propagated was a turnaround towards the child. “The old” view of education had focused on the demands of the church or the state towards the young resident and future citizen, whereas “the new” of education was to take the natural development of the child as guiding principle. Unmistakably, a sharp dualism was drawn between society and the child, society being bad, corrupt, and evil and the child being good by virtue of birth: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man,” says Rousseau (1762/1979, p. 37) in the very fi rst sentence of the novel Emile. In the novel, it seems Rousseau designs a new concept of education in order to challenge the degeneration of society in order to transform it to morality and justice. The initial dualistic position of bad society and good child, which was very attractive to the dualistic Lutheran philosophy, has some crucial consequences. If the child is good by nature, and if education should basically follow the natural development of the child, then this development must take place outside of environments that are considered to be vicious, for vicious contexts could harm the natural development of the natural faculties of the child. In the framework of the sharp dualism between (bad) society and the (good) child, the only non-corrupt

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 65 environment of the natural development of the child is outer nature, a natural place far away from any (corruptive) civilization. Unspoiled outer nature and the natural potential of the development of the child are the two major ingredients of the educational concept of what was called natural education or éducation naturelle. However, the idea of éducation naturelle would have hardly been successful, if it had not included moral elements, too. In accordance with a general shift in the eighteenth century towards understanding nature as sublime—with notions about the “Noble Savage” as nature’s gentleman—Rousseau leaves no doubt that this naturalness in growing up is morally valuable. Although he refrains from formulating it, the reader gets the impression that this kind of natural education will somehow be morally useful for the moral regeneration of the degenerated society. Rousseau is aware of the social relevance of education, even when his model, Emile, is educated in isolation and remote from any civilization: “But what will a man uniquely raised for himself become for others?” (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 41). The alternative would be, as Rousseau says, public instruction, if that were still possible, but “public instruction no longer exists and cannot longer exist, because where there is no longer fatherland, there can no longer be citizens. These two words, fatherland and citizens, should be effaced from modern languages” (p. 40). Public instruction would lead to the (virtuous) citizen, but a citizen is the political man in a (virtuous) republic, and there is no virtuous republic in which future citizens could be acquainted with the customs and values of the republic anymore, Rousseau seems to suggest. The natural man is the alternative to the presently impossible citizen but with the lack of social (and moral) relevance. Rousseau (1762/1979) speculates, “If perchance the double object we set for ourselves could be joined in a single one by removing contradictions of man, a great obstacle to his happiness would be removed” (p. 41). Could it really be joined? His answer is to read the whole book of the novel and see how Emile will turn out to be: “In order to judge of this, he would have to be seen wholly formed” (p. 41). Rousseau seems to leave no doubt that his book Emile presents the solution to the degenerated societies of the Ancien Régime in Europe, by the drawing of an unclear alliance of nature and morality. And indeed, in a remarkable way the readers did combine nature and morality, despite the Christian tradition that had claimed for almost 1800 years that morality is certainly not nature but rather its transcendency. Nature, the child, and salvation had become, by the middle of the eighteenth century, a combined earthly affair. The moral relevance of éducation naturelle is expressed in a second educational principle. This principle caused some irritation for over a century, as we have seen in Paul Monroe’s account. It is the principle that the best moral education is to refrain from any moral instruction. Rousseau (1762/1979) continues his speculation about the harmony of nature

66 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education and morality: “To form this rare man, what do we have to do? Very much, doubtless. What must be done is to prevent anything from being done” (p. 41). This is the educational principle of negative education, éducation negative. Therefore, the paradoxical situation is twofold: The natural man raised in isolation is socially relevant, and the morally indifferent education is morally significant. Whether this double paradoxical setting makes sense at all will be—according to Rousseau—revealed at the end of the novel, “when one has read this writing,” says Rousseau ambiguously (p. 41). Against the background of this rather unclear and maybe ludenic point of departure and the promise to fi nd answers at the end of the book, it is more than a paradox that not even half of the novel Emile caught the attention of those involved in education, for they almost entirely focused primarily on the fi rst three of the five books of the novel (making up less than 50 percent of the pages). Not infrequently, Emile was even published in editions that were restricted to the fi rst three books only or even just excerpts from those fi rst three books. The moral relevance of Rousseau’s educational idea was somewhat provided as blank check by the readers, the interest was in the method and not in the result that Rousseau had promised at the end of the book. This contraction holds true especially for the English editions. The fi rst English translation of Emile was published 1784, and the next was published over a hundred years later, in 1889 in Boston, following a 1889 French edition by Jules Steeg (for the history of all publications of Emile, see Sénelier, 1949, p. 119ff.), selecting apparently crucial passages of the fi rst three books only. The preface states, “We have brought this volume to an end with the third book of ‘Emile’. The fourth and fi fth books which follow are not within the domain of pedagogy” (Steeg, 1891, p. 7ff.). The fi rst integral translation of the novel in the English language after 1784 followed almost 200 years later: Translated by Allen Bloom, it was published in 1979. The obvious reduction of Rousseau’s educational Œuvre to basically one novel and not even to the whole novel but more or less to the fi rst three books of this novel mirrors the specific interests of the educational field in educational questions.4 It tells us a lot about what these interests are and thus how the educational field is pre-structured in a normative way. As with any other work, the reception of Rousseau’s Œuvre has been deeply predetermined by contemporary interests and gives little attention to the circumstances in which Rousseau wrote. Very rarely have the educational scholars used information in order to situate Rousseau in his very own linguistic context, the langue of classic republicanism, which against the background of the emerging capitalist society experienced a Renaissance in the long eighteenth century (see chapter 2).

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 67

Education Negative and History as Moral and Political Education As mentioned above, Emile was published in 1762, the year in which the Jesuits were expelled from France. This expulsion left a severe gap in the educational system in France, for the Jesuits had been in charge of higher education across the country—almost every single famous French philosopher had been educated in Jesuit colleges. The politically motivated expulsion of the Jesuits triggered a broad discussion about national education, a discussion, however, in which Rousseau’s Emile played hardly any role at all. This becomes evident in one of the very famous contributions within this debate, in a little book called Essai d’éducation nationale [Essay on National Education] published in 1763 by the public prosecutor of Brittany, René-Louis de Caradeuc de La Chalotais. La Chalotais was one of the leading actors against the Jesuits and their influence in France. In an essay on the future of the educational system in France, La Chalotais (1763/1996) mentions Rousseau’s Emile only briefly; he adds a footnote to the section “About history” in his curriculum proposal in which his resistance to Rousseau becomes evident: “Monsieur Rousseau excludes history from the child’s instruction” (p. 57, footnote; freely translated here). La Chalotais states that Rousseau, being obsessed with the delusion that everything must be based on one’s own experience, had overlooked the fact that man can also learn from the experiences of others, in particular from history (p. 57). It is correct that in the widely received fi rst three of the five books of Emile, in the context of édcuation naturelle and éducation negative, Rousseau (1762/1979) excludes the study of history, simply because he understands history to be a moral teaching aid: One imagines that history is within their [the children] reach because it is only a collections of facts. (…) Can anyone believe that the true knowledge of events is separable from that of their causes or of their effects and that the historical is so little connected with the moral that one can be known without the other? (p. 110) However, in the second part of Emile—starting with book four and in which both the educational and pedagogic method change dramatically—history is defi nitely introduced into the educational curriculum. Rousseau (1762/1979) begins this second part of the novel with the following sentence: “We are, so to speak, born twice: once to exist and once to live; once for our species and once for our sex” (p. 211). At the age of puberty, the natural man becomes a sexual partner and thus a social man. Emile’s awakening puberty emphasizes Emile’s social character and entails a shift in the educational concept: “It is therefore time

68 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education to change method” (p. 215), because the entry into society at one and the same time is a shift into the “moral order” (p. 235), and morality and politics are shown to correlate. “Society must be studied by means of men, and men by means of society. Those who want to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of either of the two” (p. 235). This close interrelation between morals and politic is a conviction that refers to the classical tradition of the republic of virtue, to classical republicanism. The change in the method of teaching is a rejection of the pedagogical sensationism5 of the fi rst three books, according to which the human senses have to be trained and strengthened naturally and according to which any cognition is the result of the sensual encounter with the outer world. As to the issue of how Emile could be taught to understand man’s moral nature, sensationism is an inadequate method, and Rousseau distinguishes two alternative methods: • one method involves close observation of men who are fi lled with prejudices and corruption (for instance, in Paris) • the other method is instruction through abstract principles (for instance, by discussing Aristotle’s Politics or Ethics) However, both of these alternatives entail two crucial dangers: With the fi rst method there is the risk that Emile, through constant encounters with depravity and corruption, will no longer be able to believe in the goodness of man. And the danger entailed in the second method is that the pedagogical shift from sensationism to rationalism, or from “sensible objects to intellectual objects” would be too crass, and Emile could not profit from it. The solution that Rousseau (1762/1979) advocates is as follows: “This is the moment for history” (p. 237). The study of history would overcome the disadvantages of both of the described alternative methods: “It is by means of history that … he will read the hearts of men … as their judge and not as their accomplice or as their accuser” (p. 237). The study of history lies, pedagogically spoken, between the child’s sensual empiricism and the abstract moral instruction by the teacher. However, Rousseau rejects all new histories, for he accuses them of being more lurid than descriptive. He clearly prefers the classical histories of antiquity. Of all the ancient historians, he favors Thucydides and Plutarch, the latter for his inimitable ability to write biographies. Plutarch was Rousseau’s favored reading material already during his childhood, for it formed him as a republican, as he emphasizes in Confessions: Plutarch presently became my greatest favorite. The satisfaction I derived from repeated readings I gave this author, extinguished my passion for romances, and I shortly preferred Agesilaus, Brutus, and Aristides, to Orondates, Artemenes, and Juba. These interest-

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 69 ing studies … produced that republican spirit and love of liberty … Incessantly occupied with Rome and Athens, conversing, if I may so express myself with their illustrious heroes; born the citizen of a republic, of a father whose ruling passion was a love of his country, I was fi red with these examples; could fancy myself a Greek or Roman. (Rousseau, 1782–89/1959, p. 9) (the citation refers to the French edition; the English translation is from the Internet at http:// www.gutenberg.org/fi les/3913/3913-h/3913-h.htm) With history, Rousseau (1762/1979) aims to make of Emile a virtuous person who is in control of himself, respects the elderly, is no chatterbox, and has the courage to seek the truth. The comparison, or ideal, that Rousseau depicts is enlightening and uncovers his langue of classic republicanism: It is the virtuous Roman citizen: “Such were the those illustrious Romans who, before being admitted to public offices, spent their youth in prosecuting crime and defending innocence, without any other interest than that of instructing themselves in serving justice and protecting good morals” (p. 250). Obviously, the educational ideal is not the isolated natural man but the citizen in the sense of classical republicanism. At the end of the novel, when Emile is happily married and the owner of his own land (and certainly not a commercial man!), the governor reminds Emile of precisely these history lessons, reminding him not to forget the fate of the fatherland in the face of private happiness: But, dear Emile, do not let so sweet a life make you regard painful duties with disgust, if such duties are ever imposed on you. Remember that the Romans went from the plow to the consulate. If the prince or the state calls you to the service of the fatherland leave everything to go to fulfill the honorable function of citizen in the post assigned to you. (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 474) Having read the novel to the end, as Rousseau suggested in the beginning, his polemics in the beginning of the novel against the notions of fatherland and citizen—they are to be effaced from the contemporary vocabulary (Rousseau, 1979, p. 40)—appear in another light and raise more questions about Rousseau’s political philosophy. And reading other books than only Emile proves that in fact he still believes in republics. But what contemporary republic did Rousseau have in mind?

Rousseau’s Geneva: The Ideal Republic? The notion of the citizen is a core notion within the language of republicanism and opposed to the notion of the bourgeois. It not only describes a male adult resident but rather certain moral qualities and the political context of this adult resident. To be called a citizen implies a free

70 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education republic and the common-good orientation of its residents; everything else is corrupt, especially the monarchies with their unfree residents. Education in such a monarchic context will not create a citizen in the sense of classical republicanism, but “a Frenchmen, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing,” as Rousseau noted in the introductory passages to Emile (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 40). The linguistic borderline becomes clearer: Politically and morally good is the free republic and the citizen; politically bad are the Monarchies and the bourgeois. In The Social Contract, published in 1762 as well, Rousseau (1762/2002) defi nes what cities and citizens are: The real meaning of the word [city] has been almost completely erased among the moderns; most people take a town for a city and a bourgeois for a citizen. They do not know that houses make the town and that citizens make the city. (p. 164) In other words, Emile is an educational scenario in a specific degenerated context, in the context of a vicious capitalist monarchy, and not a context that would be found in a free republic. If Rousseau says at the beginning of his novel: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man” (Rousseau 1762/1979, p. 37), he does not say that everything has to degenerate in the hand of man (whatever the readers wanted to read) but only that man himself is responsible for a happy or a degenerated world—a typical argument in the linguistic world of classic republicanism, where the free citizen is the architect of the fortune of the polis and thus of all the citizens. But the prerequisite is the free republic, which in Rousseau’s own context—he was in France while writing Emile—was not given. How Rousseau conceived of an ideal education in a republic is depicted in some of his other writings, where the ideas of a natural and negative education are not even mentioned. We can fi nd outlines of such a political education in his encompassing advices to the rulers of Poland (Rousseau, 1782/1947), and in his own entry in the Diderot’s and D’Alemberts famous Encyclopedia, “On Political Economy,” published in the mid1750s. However, most of all we fi nd a theory of public education in Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert, published in 1758. It is no coincidence that this book was hardly ever read by educators, even though its educational theory is undoubtedly Rousseau’s favorite one. Rousseau wrote Letter to d’Alembert as a response to an entry in the famous encyclopedia by the famous French philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. The lemma was—of all things—Genève, published in the seventh volume of the encyclopedia in 1757 (d’Alembert, 1757). In it, among other things, d’Alembert, at the suggestion of Voltaire (residing in Geneva), had called for the establishment of a theater in Geneva. However, in the eyes of classical republicanism theater is a symptom of

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 71 corruption, because actors are not authentic and they can affect wrong fantasies of a world full of wealth, intrigues, and luxury in the people’s minds, not to mention the permissive lives of the actors. Rousseau immediately reacted to this entry in Letter to d’Alembert, which is a stunning testimony to Rousseau’s republicanism, including a theory of public education. In his impressive reply Rousseau pulls out all the stops, defending republicanism in general and Geneva in particular by separating accurately the simple moral world of the free republic from the corrupt abundant monarchy. This becomes evident already in the frontispiece of the apology: The “Citizen of Geneva” addresses the famous French philosopher and member of manifold monarchic academies: “de l’Académie Françoise, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris, de celle de Prusse, de la Société Royale de Londres, de l’Académie Royale des Belles-Lettres de Suède, & de l’Institut de Bologne.” In his apology Rousseau (1758/1995) does not condemn theater all in all. He approves theater in rich cities such as Paris, because theater appears to him to be less corruptive than other leisure activities. However, for simple and poor people—Rousseau thinks of Geneva—the introduction of a theater means nothing less than the downfall of the city. The difference between Paris and Geneva is not simply monetary, however, but political and moral in a broad cultural sense. Geneva, Rousseau argues, is a republic and not a monarchy, and the amenities in a republic needed to be “something simple and innocent, qualified to republican customs” (Rousseau, 1758/1995, p. 91; freely translated here). In contrast, monarchic metropolises such as Paris are “full of conniving people, guises without religion and without principles,” places where customs and honor are nothing” (p. 54; freely translated here). Well arranged countries—he is talking about republics in general— needed good customs, and these customs resulted from good usages. The prime example of a republican usage were, according to Rousseau, the circles in Geneva, a social hoard of male military chums and thus of republic-patriotic socialization,6 the true place of public education: “Our circles preserve between us some of the customs of antiquity,” says Rousseau, and notions such as “fatherland” and “virtues” are being used and do have a meaning. Sociability, military practices, swimming, and hunting—“these honorable and innocent institutions” served to “make these people friends, citizens, soldiers, and, in consequence, all these things suitable to a free people” (p. 96; freely translated here). Of course, this ideal of education has nothing to do with the idea of natural and negative education in the fi rst three books of the novel Emile at all, but nevertheless it is Rousseau’s true ideal: Boys, the future citizens, need to become acquainted with the moral, political, and military customs of the virtuous republic. In remembrance of his youth in Geneva, Rousseau (1758/1995) says:

72 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education The rustically educated boys had no reason to try to keep their skin pale and had no fear of the inconveniences of the weather, for they were hardened early on. The fathers took them out to hunt, to the country, to all exercises and societies. (p. 102ff.; freely translated here) These exercises were “toughen up games,” military exercises, swimming, and hunting (p. 96). Accordingly, the boys were not concerned with their hair or dress, and they wanted to engage in footraces, wrestling, and boxing with each other (p. 103). Precisely these republican usages and customs are threatened by the introduction of theaters, Rousseau (1758/1995) says, for that would corrupt the simple and innocent life of the republic: “However, as soon as there are theaters, goodbye to the circles!” (p. 91; freely translated here), or: “Two years of theater, and everything is upside down” (p. 101; freely translated here). To be sure, Rousseau rejects the establishment of a theater but not public events. At the end of his apology he pleads for more events in which the residents grow together to form one unity. Open-air folk festivals with tournaments and singing tie the people together: Out of many societies there will be one; everything is common to everybody: It would be the picture of Sparta’s tables, if there was not a little bit more abundance. But even the abundance is adequate, and the sight of the plenty makes the sight of liberty even more affecting. (p. 116; freely translated here) It is evident how deeply Rousseau is committed to the ideal of the free and virtuous republic, its citizens, and educational practices. So why, then, does he want to ban the notions of the “fatherland” and the “citizen” in the beginning of his novel Emile, and why does he isolate Emile from his family and his peers?

Education Outside of a Fatherland Rousseau’s Genevan friend, a medical doctor named Theodore Tronchin, wrote Rousseau on November 13, 1758, after having read Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert (as cited in Leigh, 1967, p. 219ff.). Tronchin congratulates Rousseau on his book and assures him that he shares most of his ideas. Indeed, only most of them, he continues, for he knew Geneva much better than anyone else (as cited in Leigh, 1967, p. 219). He tries to get his point across that the republic of Geneva should not be identified with the ancient republics and refers to the majority of craftsmen, who had played no role in the political life in antiquity (p. 220). Tronchin points out to Rousseau that the inhabitants of Geneva were already quite extensively bourgeois and certainly no longer citoyens

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 73 in the classical republican sense. In particular, there was no socializing “éducation publique” as in ancient times but rather, of necessity, ”éducation domestique,” because the young Genevans—most of them artisans—had to be trained to take up their occupations lest the city be robbed of its economic basis (p. 219ff.). This, in turn, would mean: “Geneva would starve” (p. 220; freely translated here). In this context Tronchin instructs Rousseau that the circles were not the same hoard of innocence they once had been; from four o’clock in the afternoon until late at night there was playing, drinking, and smoking, and the children were without control and more and more victims of their passions—“the customs of our people dwarf noticeably” (p. 220ff.; freely translated here). In other words, the only corrective was “domestic education.” In an answer to Tronchin on November 26, 1758, Rousseau defends the moral integrity of the Genevan craftsmen who—in comparison with their colleagues abroad—were much more reasonable and more educated and not limited to the scope of their job. Despite some abuses of these circles, their effects in terms of education and socialization were still considerable. However, Rousseau recognizes Tronchin’s distinction between an ancient republic and the Genevan republic. This recognition led Rousseau to revise the fi rst passages in Emile, for at the time of the discussion with Tronchin he was reworking Emile. The discussion with Tronchin led him to introduce the antagonism between the education of a human being and the education of a citizen in the beginning of the manuscript; a passage that had not been there prior to his exchange with Tronchin (Jimack, 1960, p. 114ff.). Rousseau states that a newly born human being is principally in need of education. Then Rousseau defines three instances of education, namely “nature,” “men,” and “things.” Then he formulates two premises: First, education by nature— “the internal development of our faculties and our organs” (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 38)—cannot be affected by any of the two other instances, and second, a good education is defi ned as harmony between the three instances. In other words, a good education is an education in which men and things as educational instances adjust themselves to nature. Rousseau is well aware that these instances are different, but a fundamental problem arises when they are contradictory. This contradiction is evident in any society, for in any society young human beings are always educated ‘for others’ rather than for themselves. In his eminent magnum opus, The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu (1748) had reminded the public of Aristotle’s distinction between different forms of government and their idiosyncratic practices of education.7 The whole fourth book of The Spirit of Laws deals with the thesis “That the Laws of Education Ought to Be in Relation to the Principles of Government.” In accordance with sensationism, Montesquieu starts the fourth book by saying: “The laws of education are the fi rst impressions we receive; and as they prepare us for civil life, every private family

74 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education ought to be governed by the plan of that great household which comprehends them all”—the “great household” being the state or the type of government (republic, monarchy, or despotism).8 “The laws of education will be therefore different in each species of government: in monarchies they will have honor for their object; in republics, virtue; in despotic governments, fear” (book 4, chapter 1). In other words, the citizen of a monarchy should become honorable, the citizen of the republic virtuous, and the citizen of a despotic government fearful. And this is Rousseau’s point: Education is always directed to a political whole, and that is why among the three instances of education “harmony is impossible” (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 39). Analytically, two different options are possible: Either the young man is educated towards becoming an independent natural man, lacking any social awareness, or he is forced to live as social being in a social context. However, this second option has two normative sub-options; namely, the bourgeois and the citizen. These two sub-options are derived from the two possible social and political contexts, namely, monarchy and republic. However, for the former, the monarchy and its bourgeois are morally inadmissible to Rousseau; he discusses only one moral sub-option, the citizen, and the one analytical option, the independent natural man. In the fi rst three books of Emile, he starts with the independent natural man and then turns somehow to the education of the citizen by teaching him history and political principles. Against that background, it is rather incomprehensible why the readers limited Rousseau’s educational theory to one part of one of his novels, not taking into account the whole novel or Rousseau’s other attempts to formulate an educational theory. Maybe they just did not like the end of the novel, when Emile’s wife is chosen for him and he is unable to take responsibility for the education of his child. As soon as he knows his wife Sophie is pregnant, he runs to his educator telling him about his fortune. He tells his governor about his incapability of being an educator himself: … remain the master of the young masters. Advice us and govern us. We shall be docile. As long as I live, I shall need you. I need you more than ever now that my functions of a man begin. You have fulfi lled yours. Guide me so that I can imitate you. (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 480) Having had an independent man as his vision, this result is devastating, of course. And what is more, the story ends in total disaster, as reported in Rousseau’s hardly ever read, unfinished novel Émile et Sophie ou les Solitaires, for both Sophie and Emile have to move to Paris, the Gomorrah per se in the language of republicanism of the eighteenth century. It was bound to happen that in this degenerated environment Sophie, who

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 75 was educated differently than Emile, is unfaithful to him and becomes pregnant by another man. In response, Emile flees France, gets kidnapped during his escape, and fi nally ends up in Algeria as a strong and therefore almost independent head slave, a slave thus being ideologically the exact opposite of the free citizen (Rousseau, c. 1762/1969).

The ‘Naturalness’ of the Natural Education The distinction between the free man and the slave leads to my last remarks. Usually, and I have been following this tradition so far, Emile is separated into two parts, the fi rst part including the fi rst three books and the latter including books four and five. This distinction is appropriate when we reduce the educational theory to the cognition theory behind the educational setting and the educational relation between the governor and Emile. The cognition theory of the fi rst three books is basically sensationism; the cognition theory of the last two books is rationalism. And whereas in the latter part the educational setting is characterized by official subjection of Emile to his governor, in the first part the educational relation is mostly indirect, mediated by natural things that the governor arranges in order to develop Emile’s natural faculties. Against the background of a republican theory, this strange educational setting in the fi rst part of the book becomes explainable on the dualistic foil of slavery and freedom in classical republicanism: A child cries at birth; the fi rst part of this childhood is spent crying. At one time we bustle about, we caress him in order to pacify him; at another, we threaten him, we strike him in order to make him keep quiet. Either we do what pleases him, or we exact from him what pleases us. Either we submit to his whims, or we submit him to ours. No middle ground; he must give orders or receive them. Thus his fi rst ideas are those of domination and servitude. (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 48) The problem with this situation is, that it causes dangerous passions: “It is thus that we fi ll up his young heart at the outset with the passions which later we impute to nature and that, after having taken efforts to make him wicked, we complain about fi nding him so” (p. 48). Within republicanism, there is only one legitimate passion, and that is love of fatherland. Any other passion will harm the love of fatherland and create slaves and tyrants; both being the opposite of the free citizen. According to Rousseau (1762/1979), these passions stifle the naturalness of the child and prevent it from becoming happy: Finally, when this child, slave and tyrant, full of science and bereft of sense, frail in body and soul alike, is cast out into the world,

76 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education showing there his ineptitude, his pride, and all his vices, he becomes the basis for our deploring human misery and perversity. (p. 48) This is the reason why Rousseau proposes not interfering directly with the child: The fi rst tears of children are prayers. If one is not careful, they soon become orders”—and that is how “from their own weakness, which is in the fi rst place the source of the feeling of their dependence, is subsequently born the idea of empire and domination. (p. 66) Therefore, Rousseau asks us to omit any personal encounter in which the will of the governor is dominant: “As long as children fi nd resistance only in things and never in wills, they will become neither rebellious nor irascible and will preserve their health better” (p. 66). The human will could create passions and destroy the child’s happiness: “How could I conceive that a child thus dominated by anger and devoured by the most irascible passions might ever be happy? Happy, he! He is a despot!” (p. 87). The moral concepts of “obey and command will be proscribed from his lexicon, and even more so duty and obligation” (p. 89). This proposition is by no means a plea for something called an anti-authoritarian educational theory, for this would lead to an opposite of a free citizen devoted to his fatherland. Ambiguously Rousseau (1762/1979) adds: “But it must always be borne in mind that there is quite a difference between obeying children and not thwarting them” (p. 66). The educational secret, then, is to master the young child without his knowing, and this is by controlling the outer nature: While the child is still without knowledge, there is time to prepare everything that comes near him in order that only objects suitable for him to see meet his fi rst glances. (…) You will not be the child’s master if you are not the master of all that surrounds him. (p. 95) Ironically or not, the educational principle of the fi rst three books of Emile is a theater production with paid actors behaving exactly the way the governor wants them to, just to prevent himself from interfering with Emile’s will. The educational act in the fi rst part of the novel—the one that educational research has primarily focused on, believing in modernity of education—is in fact an educational arrangement that tries to replace a missing republican context by a setting in which the body and the natural faculties are strengthened without affecting the will of the child. Exactly because the empirical context of the republic is not experienceable through the senses, in order to acquaint the young with the virtuous customs of the republic, education has to wait to instruct rationally

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 77 republican principles. The educational means in the first part of his education must thus be illusion and delusion: Let him always believe he is the master, and let it always be you who are. There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom. Thus the will itself is made captive. (…) Do you not dispose, with respect to him, of everything which surrounds him? Are you not the master of affecting him as you please? (…) Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want only what you want him to do. He ought not to make a step without your having foreseen it; he ought not to open his mouth without your knowing what he is going to say. (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 120)

Calvinist and Zwinglian Protestantism When The Social Contract was published in 1762, one of Rousseau’s closest friends in Zurich, Leonhard Usteri,9 was upset by the last chapter, titled “Civil religion,” in which Rousseau mutually excludes true Christianity from republicanism: “But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; each of these two words excludes the other” (Rousseau, 1762/2002, p. 251). On October 1, 1762, Usteri praised The Social Contract in a letter to Rousseau but mentioned that he could not “digest” the part on civil religion (Usteri, as cited in Leigh, 1971, p. 145). After the publication of Rousseau’s letter sent to Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris (1763), Usteri (as cited in Leigh, 1972a) takes up the problem again: “Here you sanctify of being born in the most reasonable religion and the one that is the most sociable, and in The Social Contract you say, that you know nothing more opposite to the social spirit than Christianity” (p. 76). On April 30, 1763, Rousseau answered by explaining that the notion of the “patriotic spirit” was an “exclusive” one, making out of non-citizens foreigners. In contrast, Christianity was related to all human beings, understanding all of them as brothers, for they were all God’s children. Christian love prohibits drawing a line between citizens and foreigners: “It is neither designed to make republicans nor soldiers, but only Christians and human beings” (Rousseau, as cited in Leigh, 1972a, p. 127ff.). This radical view of Christianity was hardly acceptable for Rousseau’s friends in Zurich, albeit they identified themselves with Rousseau’s classical republicanism. Letters were sent forth and back in 1763, until Usteri, at least apparently, agreed with Rousseau (Usteri, as cited in Leigh, 1972b, p. 250). However, in Emile, published the same year as The Social Contract, Christianity or Protestantism plays a crucial role—and not coincidentally in the context of educational questions. This goes as follows: Puberty is the beginning of the social life of Emile due to his awakening passions, and the natural and innocent amour de

78

Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education

soi (self-love) runs the risk of becoming perverted into amour propre, a vain and selfish form of self-love that arises only within the social life. One day the governor directs Emile to the most beautiful and dramatic space in nature. Here, the governor addresses the young man, making a speech that is neither calm nor rational but seeks to touch Emile’s heart, because “cold arguments” may change human opinions but not their actions. In his speech the governor explains to Emile that now the time has come in which all the efforts hitherto to educate him could become useless and destroy the meaning of his life—the life of the governor, for he has sacrificed all of his life for Emile’s happiness: You are my property, my child, my work. It is from your happiness that I expect my own. If you frustrate my hopes, you are robbing me of twenty years of my life, and you are causing the unhappiness of my old age. (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 323) Under these circumstances Emile cannot help but to ask the governor to protect him and gives his solemn oath in which he assigns all his selfdetermination to the governor: O my friend, my protector, my master! Take back the authority you want to give up at the very moment that it is most important for me that you retain it. (…) I want to obey your laws; I want to do so always. This is my steadfast will. (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 325) After having met his big love Sophie—well arranged by the governor, too—Emile wants to marry her immediately. The governor objects to this plan, for he wants to take Emile on a two-year educational journey. The reason for this journey is twofold. First, parting from his great love means for Emile that he must master his private passions, and this means freedom and virtue. “Now be really free. Learn to become your own master. Command your heart, Emile, and you will be virtuous” (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 445). The second reason is for Emile to learn enough information about the different cultures and political systems and thus to provide a basis for the decision as to where Sophie and Emile want to live in their common future. Emile is not delighted about this idea at all and refuses to separate from Sophie. The answer by the governor is: “You have not forgotten the promise you made to me. Emile, you have to leave Sophie. I wish it” (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 449). However, the second reason proves to be pretense, for Emile does indeed contains reflections about the advantages of traveling (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 450ff.), but there is no description of the alleged trip at all, and thus the reader does not know which countries Emile has been visiting. In some way this makes sense, for in truth Emile and Sophie do not chose where they are going to live: They will stay in the place where

Rousseau’s Classical Republicanism 79 they were born—in other words, they will not go to live in a republic but stay in a monarchy. Hence, the only reason for the two-year trip is simply to master private passions—and political freedom becomes suddenly a political chimera and is in a Protestant way transferred to the inward life of the person: “Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man. He takes it with him everywhere” (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 473). The solution for the lives of Emile and Sophie, in other words, does not lie in the womb of a virtuous republic, for it is the heart of the man that needs to be free—and not the outer form of government. The free man takes his free heart with him everywhere. And “the vile man takes his servitude everywhere. The latter would be a slave in Geneva, the former a free man in Paris” (Rousseau, 1762/1979, p. 473). The inward freedom, this Protestant heirloom, is the republican answer to a non-republican context, the best solution in a bad world that is dominated by commerce and monarchies. It is this dualistic opposition between the (inner) good and the (outer) bad that was attractive in Germany, not understanding, however, the scope of Rousseau’s republican concern. Against that background, it is understandable why Emile was read only partially and why the sequel has been ignored. It is because in Rousseau’s solution the educational novel as a whole proves to be a drama, as the fate of Emile—becoming an inwardly free and steadfast head slave in Algeria—shows (Rousseau, c. 1762/1969). There is no real alternative to Rousseau’s radical republicanism and its educational concept of getting acquainted with the virtuous customs; that is, there is only a disastrous one. The turnaround to Protestant concepts is only apparently a solution but is in truth a requiem for a republican dream of a citizen without a fatherland.

5

Linguistic Turbulences The American Debates 1776–1788

At the time when ideas of the secession from England became popular in the thirteen American colonies, Rousseau was suffering from persecution mania and writing Reveries of a Solitary Walker. The Reveries were the last writings in a series of autobiographical texts starting with the Confessions (1770), not coincidentally aligned to St. Augustine’s Confessions—Augustine being the crucial church father for Calvin and Luther (but not for Zwingli). The Reveries remained unfi nished, for Rousseau died on July 2, 1778. Like most Europeans, he had been aware of the war between the colonists and the English, all the more so because in order to gain French support against England, the Confederation of the thirteen colonies sent Benjamin Franklin as ambassador to Paris in 1776, where Rousseau had lived again since 1770. There are few references to what Rousseau, who was absorbed in his own affairs, thought of the events across the Atlantic. Thomas Bentley visited Rousseau on August 6, 1776, and in his travel journal there is one indication of Rousseau’s sympathy for the Americans. According to Rousseau, the Americans “had not the less right to defend their liberties because they were obscure or unknown.” And then Bentley’s journal quotes Rousseau: “‘It was not known some time ago’, (said this philosopher), ‘that these Americans were able to defend themselves; but it appears now that they are more able to do this than you imagined’” (Rousseau, as cited in Leigh, 1982, p. 259).1 And indeed, the nature of the liberty that was being fought for was “obscure or unknown”; it became the subject of heated debates and helped a new political language to emerge, modern republicanism. In the early 1770s the colonies had each erected their own parliaments for codetermination in the political decisions concerning the colonies. As the English opposition to this participatory institution became violent, military skirmishes followed in 1775. Obviously, the colonists were becoming more and more upset with the English monarchy (King George III) and its establishment. The question was how to legitimize the commotions intellectually and politically. A comparison with the English Civil Wars 1642–1651 suggested itself, for it was mostly Puri-

Linguistic Turbulences 81 tan Parliamentarians who had fought the monarchy successfully and established the Commonwealth (1649). The restoration of monarchy in 1660, the re-establishment of the Church of England as the official state church, and with this the intolerance against religious Dissenters2 had caused thousands of Puritans to leave England for the American colonies. The Puritan Parliamentarians were the forefathers of the colonists facing exploitation by the English crown in the 1770s. Against this background, it is not surprising that the political language in which the upset with the English monarchy was formulated was similar to the language that had dominated the English Commonwealth, and this language was classical republicanism: The monarch is a tyrant, money leads to debauchery and corruption, and self-government is an ideal for which one is ready to die (virtue of patriotism). Thus, the parole “liberty” in this langue means to be free from foreign governance, and independence from (corrupt) England is a moral obligation for virtuous men. However, if we look at the United States Declaration of Independence, we fi nd arguments that do not fit precisely into this language of classical republicanism, for it relies on modern natural law according to which man is by nature equal: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If men are equal by nature, and if they cannot alienate their natural rights, then society can only be thought of as being constructed by a contract. Inhabitants of a country are then self-interested contractors, each defending their rights. Thus, the parole “liberty” means here the scope of action of the individual, and this parole belongs to the langue of modern republicanism, or liberalism (in the European sense). The idea of a social contract between inhabitants of a country had been promoted fi rst in Leviathan by the monarchist Thomas Hobbes in 1651 during his exile in Paris, then again in Two Treatises of Government by John Locke in 1689, and not long before the Declaration of Independence in The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762. However, Rousseau had himself contested his whole construction of a social contract by the insertion of the chapter about “civil religion” and the importance of the “sentiments of sociability” (Rousseau, 1762/2002, p. 252) which contradict to a certain degree the idea of natural freedom and self-interest of the contractual partners: Why should they have “sentiments of sociability” and from where do they arise? This conflict was not only Rousseau’s ‘private’ problem but the problem of an age seeking new political fundaments. The natural law philosophy was attractive for attacking monarchy (as attractive as classical republicanism was), but what are the ties that bind people together beyond the contract? Classical republicanism argued with patriotism and virtues, and modern, natural law-based republicanism argued—especially during the French

82 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education Revolution—with knowledge and an enlightened public. Both were educationally relevant; the former as socialization into the virtues of the republic, the latter as education in the modern sciences. The American debates around and after 1776 are—besides many other aspects, of course—an expression of the competition between these two languages, agreeing on the indefensibleness of monarch but disagreeing on the question of social integration: Was it the institutional balancing of self-interested people or love of fatherland? What is the nature of the (new) citizen of the (new) nation, and how should he be made? There were sympathies for both, and the result of these linguistic turbulences was not a uniform language that would prevail but rather a mixed status with different focal points. Whereas the Constitution of the United States uses paroles of the modern, liberal form of republicanism, the justification of the secession, the emphasis of the new nation, and the educational discourses ‘spoke’ the language of classical republicanism. This linguistic ambivalence that characterizes the time around and after 1776 seems to prevail until up to today, as we can witness for instance in the debates between communitarians and liberals in the 1980s and 1990s (see, for instance, Sandel, 1982; Mulhall & Swift, 1992; Etzinoi, 1993; Tam, 1998). It was fi rst Charles Taylor and then Michael Sandel who reminded us that the intellectual roots of the communitarian movement were in fact in classical republicanism (Taylor, 1989; Sandel, 1996).

The Classical and Modern Republican Language in 1776 The Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Constitution of the United States in 1787/88 have often been understood as decisive milestones of the breakthrough of the political liberalism (in the European sense) and its modern natural law language and thus the idea of a social contract without any civil religion and “sentiments of sociability.” The Declaration of Independence, drafted by jurist Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia seems to use paroles of the liberal language. Especially the second part of the first sentence is used to provide evidence of modern liberalism in the Declaration, fostering the idea of a self-interested individual (“unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”). This set phrase refers, as the advocates of modern republicanism (or liberalism) as the major language of 1776 say, to John Locke’s modern natural law trilogy of “Life, Liberty, and Property,” as part of further numerous concurrences with Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, as put forward by Zuckert (1994, pp. 19, 323), for instance. However, in Jefferson’s set phrase we fi nd “happiness” instead of “property,” which could be of importance, if we look at how “happiness” was used in the colonies at the time. Exemplary is a defi nition by Founding Father John Adams (1776), who in a letter to

Linguistic Turbulences 83 Mercy Otis Warren 3 on January 8, 1776, wrote in the language of classical republicanism, connecting happiness with public virtue: As Politicks … is the Science of human Happiness and human Happiness is clearly best promoted by Virtue, what thorough Politician can hesitate who has a new Government to build whether to prefer a Commonwealth or a Monarchy? (Adams, as cited in Stourzh, 1970, p. 63) This example shows how intertwined the languages were and that the discussion was certainly not clearly the unchallenged beginning of modern republicanism. Of course, to what extent Thomas Jefferson was a Lockeian and what this would mean in terms of the dominant political languages is debatable. In any case, Peter Laslett, the eminent Locke researcher, doubts whether Jefferson’s alleged liberal Lockeianism would have found a majority in the American context. In a careful way Laslett (1960) writes: Thomas Jefferson may have been a Lockeian, in somewhat the sense that political scientists have used that expression, as is evident from the coincidence of phrases between the Declaration of Independence and Two Treatises…. But it would seem that not many of his contemporaries went with him. (p. 14, footnote) Of course, the fi rst sentence of the Declaration of Independence follows Locke in some way or another, but what did this mean in 1776, when the people were formulating their upset with England almost entirely in the language of classical republicanism? As early as in the 1760s on the occasion of new taxes raised by the British authorities, England was labeled as spoiled and “corrupt.” Letters sent home from Americans on a stay in England ‘testify’ that the British had degenerated into luxury, extravagance, and vitiation (Morgan, 1964, pp. 524, 530); these letters are not so much evidence of the British behavior as they are, of course, testimony to the rise of the republican language among the colonists. The British customs officers in the colonies fostered this rise: First, they were labeled as “corrupt,” because they abused loopholes for their private enrichment, and second, they moaned about too little security, which led the British government to deploy more forces to the colonies (Morgan, 1964, p. 529). This, in turn, was seen as an act of the British crown to extend its sphere of absolute control, and for that purpose to buy foreign soldiers in order to suppress the colonists—mercenaries being the exact opposite of the virtuous militia citizen of classical republicanism (Metzger, 1999, p. 347ff.). So how was the Declaration of Independence understood at the time? To believe that Jefferson was a Lockeian and that the people read the draft of the Declaration and then

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turned from classical republicanism to modern republicanism is not a sound suggestion historically, if we take a further look at the linguistic performance in the context of the events. What was called the Boston massacre of March 5, 1770—in reality ‘only’ five persons died—fomented the rhetoric of classical republicanism and strengthened the perception of the ‘corrupt’ British. Joseph Warren (as cited in Metzger, 1999), medical doctor and later militia officer, said on the second anniversary of the massacre in 1772: May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the world in one common undistinguished ruin. (p. 370) This is pure classic republicanism. Three years later, in 1775, the speech went on in the same langue: Britain … may be the seat of universal empire. But should America, either by force, or those dangerous engines, luxury and corruption, ever be brought into a state of vassalage, Britain must lose her freedom also. … I must indulge a hope that Britain’s liberty, as well as ours, eventually be preserved by the virtue of America. (p. 370) The paroles used here in order to demonize the British and praise the colonists are clearly from the classical republican langue: The British are labeled as corrupted by luxury and thus as un-free, whereas the colonies are seen as the hoard of virtue (and thus of freedom). And furthermore, the missionary hope is expressed that Britain would improve in moral matters with the help of “the virtue of America.” The language of the upset was classical republicanism, and the increased tensions and war activities triggered the idea of dissociation from England was probably only a matter of time. However, calling for dissociation and legitimizing it rationally are two different things. When Rousseau mentioned to Thomas Bentley that the American ideal of liberty was “obscure or unknown” (Rousseau, as cited in Leigh, 1982, p. 259; see above), he referred to the fact that the Americans could not draw upon old chartered rights that had been violated or upon a free polis that had been conquered by a tyrant. The political philosophy of the Puritans—and the ideal in Rousseau’s The Social Contract—had been limited to ideals of local self-governance that extended at best to the colony. The fi nancial, political, and military pressure that was put on the thirteen colonies by England reinforced the political language closest to reformed Protestantism, classical republicanism, to express the disgust, but this classical republicanism did not seem to provide an adequate instrument to legitimize the dissociation from Great Britain. Since

Linguistic Turbulences 85 liberty was not to be found in old chartered rights, it had to be identified in the nature of man. Religiously spoken, this identification was not in contradiction to reformed Protestantism, but it enabled another political language, the language of modern republicanism, to penetrate the linguistic world of the colonists. It is probably not a coincidence that the decisive publication speaking out on the virulent idea of dissociating from Great Britain was not written by a colonist but by an English person, the Quaker4 Thomas Paine in 1776. Paine’s publication Common Sense was an absolute bestseller, and over 100,000 copies were sold within a few weeks’ time. This is a wonderful example of how a written work can embody the feelings of people who feel embattled and how the language of the work can alter the intellectual scope of the embattled people. In a very unique way, namely, Common Sense blends the two languages, modern, liberal republicanism and classical republicanism. The aim of the publication, dissociation from England, is at first clearly reasoned in the language of modern natural law. Paine (1776/1989) argues that governments are necessary because people lacked virtues and because they needed an authority to protect the freedom and security of its individuals (p. 4f.). Following Rousseau’s distinction between the social and political contract, Paine propagates the original equity of all human beings in such a way that any monarchy appears to be illegal (p. 8), whereas hereditary monarchy is especially corruptive (p. 11). The use of the notion of corruption pricks up the ears, and indeed, all of a sudden the language of classical republicanism appears. Paine criticizes the British politician Sir William Meredith (and with him indirectly Montesquieu, whose preference for England’s mixed constitution had been known since the Spirit of Laws of 1748): It is somewhat difficult to fi nd a proper name for the government of England. Sir William Meredith calls it a republic; but in its present state it is unworthy of the name, because the corrupt influence of the crown, by having all the places in its disposal, hath so effectually swallowed up the power, and eaten out the virtue of the House of Commons (the republican part in the constitution) that the government of England is nearly as monarchical as that of France or Spain (…) Why is the constitution of England sickly but because monarchy hath poisoned the republic, the crown has engrossed the commons. (p. 15) Paine’s turnaround from modern to classical republicanism is highly visible. Indeed, Paine then uses arguments that cannot be assigned to one single language only. This becomes evident in two examples where Paine praises the two European model republics, the Netherlands and Switzerland and their power of laws:

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Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority; perfect equality affords no temptation. The republics of Europe are all (and we may say always) in peace. Holland and Switzerland are without wars, foreign or domestic. (p. 26)

And here: But where, say some, is the king of America? I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain. (…) For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to BE king, and there ought to be no other. (p. 28) In these lines, the proximity to classical republicanism is evident, and at the same time they express the distance to commerce and possessive individualism that goes back to Locke’s modern natural right and according to Paine destroys the two pillars of the republic, the militia and patriotism: In military numbers, the ancients far exceeded the moderns; and the reason is evident, for trade being the consequence of population men became too much absorbed thereby to attend to anything else. Commerce diminishes the spirit both of patriotism and military defense. (p. 34) In other words, the paroles of the dissociation of America from the mother country in 1776 can be identified as belonging to the langue of modern republicanism, whereas the linguistic motive for the dissociation refers to the language of classical republicanism, creating a specific disgust towards the British crown and a specific patriotic feeling. John Adams used this language when he explained to Mercy Otis Warren on April 16, 1776: There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty; and this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. (Adams, as cited in Stourzh, 1970, p. 65)

The Debates after the War in 1783 Thomas Jefferson’s writings provide good examples to demonstrate how several languages can exist at the same time not only in a society but also in one text by a writer. This becomes evident in Jefferson’s only full-length book that was published during his lifetime, Notes on the

Linguistic Turbulences 87 State of Virginia, fi rst published in 1785 in Paris. 5 Notes was something like a remittance work, for it responded to a request by a French ambassador in Philadelphia in 1780 for state governors to submit information about the political, geographic, economic, demographic, and historical situation of the new independent colonies in order to support the allied French troops in their fight against the British. Jefferson seems to be the only one to comply with this request, doing so for his republic, Virginia. Subsequent to longer passages that are of little interest in the present analysis, chapter XIX, The present state of manufactures, commerce, interior and exterior trade, shows evidence of how Jefferson was embedded in classical republicanism and expressed himself in this language while also using the modern natural law language. This becomes evident when Jefferson writes of the ideal of the citizen, which is clearly connected to the landed man, the “yeoman.” Jefferson (1785–87/1984c) bemoans the corruptive influence of commerce: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue” (p. 290). As the radical republicans in Zurich had feared some twenty-five years before, Jefferson sees the decay of morality in labor situations in which dependency on others becomes dominant, particularly in commerce: “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phænomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.” In contrast, “dependence” on the moods of customers leads to “subservience” and thus to “venality,” (p. 290) or in other words to corruption; “it suffocates the germ of virtue” (p. 290f.). Commerce is defi ned as contrary to a republic depending on virtues and customs: “It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution” (p. 291). The crucial argument is, that the laws alone—and thus the idea of a contract—cannot steer the action of the people but that a republic needs virtues and manners resulting not from laws. It needs, as Rousseau had said, some kind of “sentiments of sociability” (Rousseau, 1762/2002, p. 252). Defenders of the thesis that the American Revolution was basically a milestone of liberalism based on the modern natural law have, of course, discussed these passages by Jefferson. Pangle (1988), for instance, tries to relativize these passages with others in which Jefferson pleads, for example, for the freedom of trade: “Jefferson seems himself to bow to— nay, to embrace—the very forces of which he warns. … The truth is, Jefferson never seriously opposes, he in fact fosters—sometimes with enthusiasm—an ever more prosperous, growth-orientated economy” (p. 99). This is true. However, Pangle’s quotations of Jefferson to support his interpretation are not really happily chosen, for in turn we can easily fi nd other passages that refer clearly to the classical republican langue. Pangle quotes the end of Jefferson’s query 17 (Pangle, 1988, p. 99), in

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which Jefferson warns that the after the war a government that does not depend on the help of the people might forget their rights. As a consequence, then, the people would forget to see themselves as a people and would be interested only in making a lot of money and disinterested in social association. That is why, Jefferson says, the chains that constrain the people will continue to exist after the war (Jefferson, 1785– 87/1984c, p. 287). Pangle quotes this long passage leaving out Jefferson’s introductory sentence that has to be read as a moral plea: “It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fi xing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united” (Jefferson, 1785–87/1984c, p. 287). In other words, the virtues of the rulers and the mores of the people are the prerequisite of the legal system. The modern law-based republic depends on “sentiments of sociability,” to use Rousseau’s terms, and in the eyes of Jefferson and many others this is a question of education. It is interesting to see that when it comes to educational issues,6 Jefferson—who founded the University of Virginia in Charlottesville—uses almost entirely paroles of the classic republican language, as for instance in his letters from Paris to John Bannister, Jr., who had been educated at Middle Temple in London the 1750s. After independence, England was no longer considered to be a decent place for education, so while he was in Paris, Jefferson looked for better alternatives. He concluded that only two cities came into question, and they were not Paris or Amsterdam but the two traditional cities of classical republicanism, Rome or Geneva. One aspect speaking against Calvin’s city was the fact that the aristocratic residents had undermined the republican constitution of the city and won their fight against the citizens7: “The late revolution has rendered it a tyrannical aristocracy, more likely to give ill, than good ideas to an American. I think the balance in favor of Rome” (Jefferson, 1785/1984b, p. 838).8 The advantage of the analysis of languages becomes evident, for historical situations are not always—and perhaps never—characterized by unambiguousness. People in difficult situations use paroles that seem appropriate at the moment, without asking to which language they belong. There is not ‘true’ of Jefferson in terms of his linguistic homeland, for he simply compiles the two languages. Here is another example of Jefferson’s (1785–87/1984c) classical republicanism: I repeat it again, cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens. It might be time enough to seek employment for them at sea, when the land no longer offers it. But the actual habits of our countrymen attach them to commerce. They will exercise it for themselves. Wars then must sometimes be our lot. (p. 301)

Linguistic Turbulences 89 And here is another example, from a letter sent in 1785 to John Jay, who served as Secretary of Foreign Affairs under the Articles of Confederation government: Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independant, the most virtuous & they are tied to their country & wedded to it’s liberty & interests by the moast lasting bonds. (…) I consider the class of artificers as the panders of vice & the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned. (Jefferson, 1785/1984a, p. 818)

The Constitutional Debate of 1787 The Articles of Confederation of the thirteen republics that had come into effect in 1781 represented to a large degree the Protestant localism that dominated the discussion up to the mid 1780s. In The Social Contract (Book III, Chapter IV) Rousseau had prominently expressed the republican conviction that a precondition of democracy is the limited geographical space. Interestingly enough, it was a severe problem of commerce that caused a stronger federation of the republics: the conflict with Spain about trade that led to tensions between the northern and southern republics that were discussed at the Annapolis Convention in 1786. This convention was shattered by the rebellion of financially burdened farmers in rural western Massachusetts, who assembled as a small army under Daniel Shays, a former captain of the Continental Army. The Shays’ insurgents showed quite plainly that harmony, equity, and virtue were quite limited to the rhetorical. The masses, freed by the independence, asked for their rights, and the rich feared the loss of their privileges. Shay’s Rebellion led to a decisive turnaround on the question of the fundaments of politics. Hitherto, the circumvention of too much power was the utmost aim—the King of England as tyrant, but now the tyranny of the masses threatened the visions of many Americans. Under these conditions, the meeting in Annapolis became a constitutional convention, and at its end in September 1787 in Philadelphia, the Constitution of the United States was drafted that needed to be ratified by the single republics.9 Similar to the one of the Declaration of Independence, the language of the Constitution is primarily modern republican. The relation between the people, its representatives, government, and judiciary is not based upon virtue but on the system of checks and balances, deriving from the individual’s private interests and trying to find a balance between these. In the middle of this attempt to balance is a law system that regulates the mutual relations. The language is clearly non-republican in its classical

90 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education sense but liberal in the sense of the modern natural law: It is not the common good, not the patriotic virtue, and not the duty towards the fatherland that are in the center but the right of the individual to pursue his own interests, as long as he does not interfere with the (same) rights of others. In the language of classical republicanism, this new state was not a common good of the citizens but a guarantee of the bourgeois. According to Appleby (1995), the Americans realized much later that the Constitution had officially introduced modern republicanism or liberalism (p. 54), and culturally it never replaced the language of classical republicanism. Most of the political publications of the 1780s had never promoted natural law theories, anyhow. Donald Lutz demonstrated that John Locke, for instance, played a much lesser role between 1760 and 1805 than traditionally believed; Locke was simply ‘used’ to criticize the ‘tyrant’ King of England (Lutz, 1984, p. 192ff.). The most often cited author in the 1780s was Montesquieu, followed by the almost forgotten William Blackstone, whose comments on the Glorious Revolution had more effect than those of Locke (Strourzh, 1989, p. 148). These findings once again question the dominance of the Locke’s natural law theory: There is good reason to treat Locke’s influence with greater care. Even though the motto Locke et praeterea nihil as it applies to eighteenth-century American political thought has been thoroughly discredited by historians, there is probably still a tendency to overestimate his importance. And apart from that, when people read Locke, they read his cognition theory rather than the Second Treatise. (Lutz, 1984, p. 196) The quarrel about the Constitution is storied as controversy between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, whereby the Federalists advocated the Constitution and its stong(er) emphasis on central power. Contrary to unchallenged assumptions, the winning Federalists were not simply liberals in the sense of the modern natural right whereas the Anti-Federalists defended classical republican ideals. Kramnick (1990, p. 261ff.) demonstrated that an assumption like this is more an expression of a decontextualized historiography, and Lutz (1984) showed that republican authors such as Mably were important for the arguments of the Federalists and that it was rather the Anti-Federalists that used the natural law of Locke, Pufendorf, or Vattel: Grotius and Mably are the only other [besides the ‘leading’ Montesquieu] Enlightenment figures mentioned prominently by the Federalists, whereas the Anti-Federalists use Delolme, Beccaria, Mably, Price, Vattel, Pufendorf, and Locke to their advantage. Among Whig writers, the Federalists favor Trenchard and Gordon, Temple, and Sidney, whereas the Anti-Federalists favor Price, Addison, and

Linguistic Turbulences 91 Trenchard and Gordon about equally… Despite these differences, the most interesting fi nding is how similar the Federalists and AntiFederalists are in their citation patterns. (p. 195) The analysis of the debates concerning the ratification of the Constitution confi rms that classical republican arguments were dominant. It is not a coincidence that the most important exponents of the Federalists, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, published their arguments in favor of the new constitution using the pseudonym “Publius,” in reference to Publius Varelius Publicola, who, together with Brutus the Elder had overthrown the Roman monarchy with its corrupt king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, and erected the Roman Republic in 509 bc. Although he was rich and powerful, Publius distinguished himself through his virtuous life and wise laws and was thus very popular. He is one of the undisputed heroes of classical republicanism.10 The existence of two effective languages is not only evident in the Federalist Papers but also in the texts by the leading Federalist spokesman, James Madison, and even in the probably most often quoted tenth article of the Federalist Papers (November 22, 1787), with its emphasis on a procedural (and thus modern) republic and refraining from considering virtue as crucial. The hardly noticed point is that the very problem that is discussed in the tenth article of the Federalist Papers originates in classical republicanism—the fear of a factious spirit: By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community [italics added]. (Madison, 1787/1999, p. 161) Whereas modern liberal law republicanism counts on the diversity of individual and group interests and develops procedures of balancing them, classical republicanism fears factions: In the language of classical republicanism, factions are an expression of selfishness and corruption, endangering the whole society. Madison (1787/1999) sees the solution of the classical republican problem in the establishment of modern law (and not educationally with the quest for patriotism to guarantee uniformity) with negotiation between these divided interests: A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation,

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Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. (p. 162)

The prevention of possible negative consequences of this diversity— mostly the dominancy of few powerful people—is the modern republic. Madison prefers the republic as opposed to the democracy, for the republic is organized by representation (and not by direct voting), which is more suitable for large countries.11 The large size of the new country was by no means seen by Madison (1787/1999) as a disadvantage, for small democracies were seen as places where small majorities can more easily dominate others for their own advantage (p. 165): “If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control”; only long distances and thus the principle of representation can be relied on (p. 164).12 It is interesting to note that the solution of a problem of classical republicanism is not achieved by means of classical republicanism and not by means of the power of a rational deliberative public but by strong law and representation. However, only a few years after the Constitution was ratified, Madison expressed more of the language of classical republicanism, as he had already in The Federalist No. 14 (November 30, 1787). Here, Madison stated that the Americans were not primarily interconnected by means of the laws but by the feelings of the happiness of a family. Opposing the Anti-Federalists’ criticism that the new constitution would divide Americans, Madison (1787/1999) wrote: Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens of one great, respectable, and flourishing empire. (p. 172) According to Madison’s classical republican argument, the peculiar strength of the Americans was not the law but the common history that made one family out of the settlers: No, my countrymen, shut your ears against this unhallowed language. Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys; the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their Union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies. (p. 172)

Linguistic Turbulences 93 And in The Federalist No. 15, Hamilton (1787/2008) added that the decline of the constitution would sever “the sacred knot which binds the people of America together” (p. 72). It is obvious that when it came to legitimizing the separation from England and winning over the people for the new Constitution, there was a conjuncture of the classical republican language, even if the Constitution itself—as basis of the future—dominantly used another language. Was there a bias in which the elites used the langue of classical republicanism because they thought the people not enlightened enough? The educational discussion of the time does not, however, provide evidence of dissemination of the rational langue of the modern republic, quite on the contrary. According to the Protestant and classical republican background, the citizen to be made for the new republic had to be a virtuous man. As sociologist Robert Bellah stated in 1967, Americans believed in “civil religion” without having necessarily read Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was simply their dominant culture.

The Educational Discussion During the Formative Years Evidently, educational questions did not play an important role in the context of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the new Constitution. However, using the example of two representative texts we can detect an awareness of the importance of education in a republic and discover that the favored educational conception corresponded with the often implicit education of the classical republican tradition, as shown with Thomas Jefferson above. The fi rst example is of utmost importance, as the author, Benjamin Rush, was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and is thus easily assigned to the Whiggish history as a pioneer of modern liberalism (in the European sense). This assignment can be underlined by the fact that in 1786 Rush published A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge, in which he pleads for the establishment of a public school system with four successive levels for the common diffusion of knowledge (Rush, 1786/1965). The Plan has an appendix—twice as long as the Plan itself—with the title Thoughts upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic. In explicit accordance with the Spartans, Rush emphasizes the fact that a republican education may not take place abroad, but has to take place at home: “The principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice, and it is well known that our strongest prejudices in favor of our country are formed in the fi rst one and twenty years of our lives” (Rush, 1786/1965, p. 9). According to Rush (1786/1965), who grew up with this grandfather, the Presbyterian preacher and participant of the First Great Awakening,

94 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education Samuel Finley, the basis of republican education is religion: “Without this, there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments” (p. 10). In accordance with American Calvinism, Rush preferred any religion to none, but, of course, he advocated Christendom over any other religion, and Christendom was—in the eyes of most Americans at that time— more or less synonymous with reformed Protestantism. In contrast to Rousseau, Rush stated: “A Christian cannot fail of being a republican” (p. 11). Against that background, the Holy Bible is the most important textbook in school, because it is full of truths essential for both the republican government and the individual citizen. Besides reading the Holy Bible the school should focus on patriotism: “Next to the duty which young men owe to their Creator, I wish to see a supreme regard to their country inculcated upon them” (p. 13). The notion of “country” is understood as the personal social context of the individual and property, but: Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it. (p. 14) According to Rush (1786/1965), a good citizen is not neutral when it comes to his country, and he has to be opposed to any factions—here we come back to the problem that Madison was debating in his tenth article. However, patriotism is a positive good and not characterized by hostility towards other people in the world. Rush does not oppose the accumulation of property nor occasional amenities, as long as the citizen is aware that his life is “not his own” when the safety of his fatherland requires him: “These are practicable lessons, and the history of the commonwealths of Greece and Rome show that human nature, without the aids of Christianity, has attained these degrees of perfection” (p. 15). Rush is an exponent of classical republicanism, referring less to Harrington (landholding as prerequisite of virtue, skepticism towards commerce) than to Milton (antique and early Christian, e.g., Puritan forms of republicanism). Rush’s (1786/1965) emphasis on school subjects such as “eloquence” (rhetoric) (“It is well known how great a part it constituted of the Roman education”; p. 19) or history (“history of the ancient republics and the progress of liberty and tyranny in the different states of Europe”; p. 19) are clearly classical republican, whereas Rush’s indifference towards commerce is founded in his favoritism of direct democracy and the fear of land-aristocracy:13 If we consider the commerce of our metropolis only as the avenue of the wealth of the state, the study of it merits a place in a young man’s

Linguistic Turbulences 95 education, but, I consider commerce in a much higher light when I recommend the study of it in republican seminaries. I view it as the best security against the influence of hereditary monopolies of land, and, therefore, the surest protection against aristocracy. (p. 19) The second representative text differs in some respects from the one by Rush, for it accentuates the importance of the Holy Bible to a much lesser extent, but it basically uses the same classical republican argumentation. This is important, as the author—Noah Webster—as an advocate of the Constitution in 1787 had opposed the use of the concept of virtue in the Constitution (see above). However, Webster’s text On the Education of Youth in America, published in 1790, indicates that Webster understood virtue as a prerequisite of a modern Constitution. In a similar way to Rush, Webster (1790/1965) emphasized the importance of knowledge and then moved on to the meaning of virtues (“uncorrupted heart” and “improved head”) and of “polished manners” (p. 53). Webster points out that it is not a question of playing off the virtues against the manners but of combining them by focusing fi rst on virtues: A genteel address … may be acquired at any time of life and must be acquired, if ever, by mingling with good company. (…) The goodness of a heart is of infi nitely more consequence to society than an elegance of manners; nor will any superficial accomplishments repair the want of principle in the mind. It is always better to be vulgarly right than politely wrong. (p. 53ff.) Greek and Latin are of meager importance in the curriculum of the public school as compared to the importance of vocational preparation, whether agricultural or commercial. Webster (1790/1965) holds that the character of the teacher is of utmost importance: “The practice of employing low and vicious characters to direct the studies of youth is in a high degree criminal” (p. 60ff.), for every encounter with the evil will foster imitation. Here it becomes clear why Webster deemphasized virtue in the Constitution. Laws and sermons may aid the oppression of the sins but do not aid real modifications in behavior. The only way “to reform mankind is to begin with children, to banish, if possible, from their company every low-bred, drunken, immoral character” (p. 63). In explicit accordance with Montesquieu, who advocated the rules of education according to the principles of the government (Montesquieu, 1951, p. 261ff.), Webster (1790/1965) concludes: “For this reason society requires that the education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention. Education, in a great measure, forms the moral characters of men, and morals are the basis of government” (italics added, p. 64) and thus the prerequisite of a legislator. This is precisely the reason why education is the most important task of the state, and

96 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education that task is not limited to implementation of a sound school system but also implies the selection of morally worthy teachers (p. 64). “Morally worthy” is close to political virtues, and therefore Webster defines the national history of the United States as one of the most important school subjects, a subject that exposes young Americans to the heroes of republican liberty: “As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in her favor” (p. 65). It is no surprise, then, that Webster—in accordance with Rush and Jefferson—is opposed to educational trips abroad, for they could lead the young to lose their patriotism (p. 73ff.): “A tour through the United States ought now to be considered as a necessary part of liberal education” (p. 77). Evidently, liberal education was not a part of the rational liberalism of modern republicanism but was quite compatible with expectations of education that included visions of values, ethics, and civic engagement.

Effects With the ratification of the Constitution in 1787/89, the modern natural law-based republicanism or political liberalism (in the European sense) made its way without articulating its own precondition, and from there it exerted a major impact on the cultural self-understanding of Americans, always having the Constitution to argue for individual rights and privileges. However, this legal title did not entirely transform the American culture from reformed Protestantism and classical republicanism into a rational liberal republic but instead created a peculiar blend, allowing the country and its citizens at times to emphasize the one or the other language. Against this background, Gordon Wood’s (1969) conclusion is persuasive that the “victory” of liberalism was only possible because classical republican arguments were used: In effect they [the Federalists] appropriated and exploited the language that more rightfully belonged to their opponents. The result was the beginning of a hiatus in American politics between ideology and motives that was never again closed. By using the most popular and democratic rhetoric available to explain and justify their aristocratic system, the Federalists helped to foreclose the development of an American intellectual tradition in which differing ideas of politics would be intimately and genuinely related to differing social interests. (p. 562) The American Constitution, then, was at one and the same time the acme and the challenge of classical republicanism and its concept of public virtue (p. 606ff.).

Linguistic Turbulences 97 In The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock (1975) confi rms that the Federalists used the republican language and knew quite well that the idea they fostered on a political level would abandon virtue (p. 525). However, Pocock refuses to speak of an end of the classical republican period, because there was not all of a sudden a new generation that would have accepted the divulgation of virtue. On contrary, the dichotomy between virtue and commerce/corruption—the crucial element of the classical republican discourse—continued to exist (p. 526ff.). This became evident not only a few years after the ratification of the American Constitution, when in the presidential election of 1800 John Adams and the Federalists lost against Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans (who were joined by the former exponent of the Federalists, John Madison),14 but also some 100 years later, when Pragmatism emerged out of a Protestant/republican protest against commerce and capitalism.

6

American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God on Earth’

The American debates between 1776 and 1790 on secession, the Constitution, and education reveal certain ambiguities in the American culture that are expressed in the peculiar blend of two languages, classical and modern republicanism. Whereas the language of classical republicanism dominated in the realms of national identity and education, modern republicanism was expressed in the Constitution. For a long time these two competing languages did not collide, because of the overall dominant culture of reformed Protestantism and the uniting emphasis of American exceptionalism, which blended freedom, representative democracy, religion, and national integration into a unique whole. This singularity was interpreted in a reformed Calvinist way as predestination not only to build the city upon the hill, or to regain the lost Paradise (John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, and Paradise Regained, 1671), but also to show the world its path to salvation. The self-assurance of being a chosen people is best expressed in the interpretation of the technological progress in the nineteenth century, interpreted as American Technological Sublime (Nye, 1994). The idiosyncratic self-interpretation—or construction, as many would say today—is best seen in international comparison. Whereas European intellectuals were skeptic or even hostile towards technological innovation, the Americans interpreted it as a part and an expression of a sublime political and moral development: “The English were prone to view industrialization in terms of satanic mils, frankensteinian monsters, and class strife; the Americans emphasized the moral influence of steam, and often sought to harmonize nature and industrialization” (Nye, 1994, p. 54). Technology and mass production, as the Americans perceived them, had some problematic effects, by all means, but at the same time and fi rst and foremost they had the potential to enhance the aesthetic and ethical qualities of a mutually interacting developing society, which interpreted itself as precursor and translator of religious-morally sound global democracies (Tröhler, 2010a). The American adaption of Hegel’s philosophy foremost by the St. Louis Philosophical Society, founded in

American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God’ 99 1866, and the society’s Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1867–today), matches this millennial self-interpretation exactly. However, by the time the devastating social conditions of the workers in the city became more and more apparent—towards the end of the nineteenth century—the mismatch between technological and industrial progress and the ideal of a mutually interacting democratic society became apparent. It is here that different social and intellectual (protest) movements emerged, for example the Social Gospel Movement, a religious blend of mostly liberal theology and rather conservative social ideals. Another expression of this reaction towards the apparently changed living conditions was American Pragmatism, which is not by accident a philosophy (and philosophy of education) that was built on the tomb of Hegelianism. Certainly, the precise meaning of the “tomb of Hegelianism” is disputed. Based on Dewey’s own explicit explanations of having broken with both traditional philosophy and (more precisely having “drifted away” from) Hegelian philosophy (see, for example, Dewey, 1930/1984, p. 154) and educational theories developed in nondemocratic contexts (see, for example, Dewey, 1916/1944, Foreword), scholars such as Jürgen Oelkers (1993, 2000) defended the idea of Pragmatism as being a radical new beginning in philosophy and education, facing challenges of modernity. In contrast, other scholars, such as Johannes Bellmann (2007) and Jim Good (2005, 2006), argued that unmistakably the Hegelian deposit in Dewey’s thinking was never replaced to the degree that Dewey himself thought, so that the thesis of a radical new beginning is a misleading suggestion. Whether there was a radical “break with” or a “deposit of” Hegelianism is not so important here; more important is the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century Hegel’s optimistic philosophy of history with the Americans as ‘managing directors’ of the World Spirit (Hegel had called Napoleon the World Spirit on horseback—but only until the French troops, after defeating the Prussian troops, plundered his private home in Jena 1806) was no longer defendable. What was the intellectual culture of the criticism of the living conditions, and how was the solution—Pragmatism—intellectually founded?

Chicago at the Fin de Siècle: The Perils of Metropolis It is hardly possible to prove that Chicago was the place on earth where the phenomena of metropolis were omnipresent and tangible, but we have enough data showing how dramatically life conditions were changing at the border of Lake Michigan during the fi fty years between 1850 and 1900. We see this when we look at the growth of the population of Chicago within a hundred years (Philpott, 1998, p. 6):

100

Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education 1840:

4,470

1890:

1,099,850

1850:

29,963

1900:

1,698,575

1860:

102,260

1910:

2,185,283

1870:

298,977

1920:

2,701,705

1880:

503,185

1930:

3,376,438

Within these ninety years the population increased 800 times. Within ten years, between 1880 and 1890, it doubled, and within the next twenty years, between 1890 and 1910, it doubled again. For city government or companies to cope with these numbers in terms of infrastructure—road construction, electricity, transportation, food supply, education, and so on—was a tremendous task, not to mention the ethnic and cultural differences and the communication problems. But the metropolis grew not only quantitatively—life changed totally. Whereas in 1840 most of the 4,000 inhabitants made a living by farming, trading, or running small enterprises, the steel and meat industries began to dominate economic life after 1860, when Chicago became the center of the railroad system.1 Among the large integrated steel works we fi nd Union Mill, founded in 1863, U.S. Steel South Works in 1881, Acme Steel in 1907, and U.S. Steel in nearby Gary, Indiana, in 1908. At its peak about 200,000 people were employed in Chicago in the steel mills and other industries related to steel (Bensmann & Wilson, 2004, p. 424ff.). The railroad enabled Chicago to become not only the hub of the American railroad system but also the “Porkopolis” of the United States during the Civil War. 2 The Union Stock Yard opened in 1865 and became the center of meatpacking in the United States; from 1893 onwards no year passed in which fewer than 15 million head of livestock were unloaded at the stockyards, then slaughtered, packed, and shipped—mostly to the big cities on the East Coast: that makes 50,000 head of livestock a day.3 Ironically or not, the big fi re of 1871, which destroyed the homes of almost a third of Chicago’s population, can be seen as a new driving force in generating even more development (Sawislak, 1995); financial men like Henry Greenebaum spread out in the Western world to successfully promote investment in the destroyed city (Sawislak, 1995, p. 321). Economic developments such as those in Chicago led to unequal distribution of profit. Wealth—the opposite of the poverty often described by concerned contemporaries—became tangible along the shores of Lake Michigan: The fi rst skyscraper initiated in 1885 was the Home Insurance Building on Addams Street, and it had a fi reproof metal frame. The Masonic Temple with twenty-one stories followed in 1892, and the Tower Building in 1899 (Condit, 1964). After the fi re of 1871, hotels that had been destroyed were rebuilt—the Grand Pacific Hotel in 1872, then the Palmer House, the Tremont, and the Sherman House, adopting

American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God’ 101 the commercial palazzo style of architecture, all fi reproofed, boasting of grand lobbies, monumental staircases, elegant parlors, cafes, ballrooms, and so on (Berger, 2004). For private residences, architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright developed a style of their own, blending different impulses in the architecture. How much the modern architecture reflected the self-confidence of the privileged classes of society4 can be seen in the monumental Plan of Chicago, proudly presented in 1909 by the former Director of Works for the World’s Columbian Exposition (also called The Chicago World’s Fair) (Brunham & Bennet, 1909). Accordingly, entertainment clearly began to fragment along class lines and added to the separation of classes (McVicker, 1883; Erenberg, 2004). On the other side of the coin, the masses of immigrants—in 1890, three-quarters of Chicago’s residents claimed foreign-born parentage— did not enjoy safe housing, or Hautevolee’s French Cuisine, or dignified work, or sanitary conditions—at least that was the way the dark side of this era of development was described by concerned contemporaries. Muckraker journalist and socialist Upton Sinclair described contemporary life within the stockyards in his famous The Jungle, published in 1906. In this fictional report, Sinclair shows how corruption was endemic, helpless people were exploited, and their humiliation became ‘normal’ parts of life in this big city. The Jungle tells the story of a Lithuanian immigrant family whose American dream turns into a nightmare not because of ill fortune or contretemps but as a result of thoroughly corrupt conditions caused by the privileged people. Crime, alcohol, and prostitution are consequences of these life conditions among the lower classes. How ready the contemporary audience was to read stories like this tragedy is apparent from the book sales figures. Within a year of its publication, The Jungle had sold more than 100,000 copies. Its publication caused the debates that led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. However exaggerated and polemic Sinclair’s account was, in many respects the story included facts of city life that were observable for the public and thus (half) well known. Countless bars and saloons had opened (Duis, 1983), nightclubs were founded, and prostitution flourished; by 1900, the Levee, bordered by 18th and 22nd Streets, “was one of the nation’s most infamous sex districts” (Blair, 2004). Chicago became famous for ‘commercialization of sex.’ This was bemoaned, among other complaints, in Robert O. Harland’s The Vice Bondage of a Great City; or, The Wickedest City in the World the Reign of Vice, Graft and Political Corruption published in 1912. Publications like these consolidated publicly the impression that life in Chicago and other big cities at the fi n de siècle was no bed of roses for most of their residents. It certainly was not rosy for the thousands of young children and young people who were unsupervised by their hard-working parents and were often themselves earning money at risky jobs. A concern for the welfare

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Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education

of workers triggered a Protestant urban moral awakening movement that noted the moral decay of the cities (Boyer, 1978, p. 162ff.). In New York City, Presbyterian minister Charles Henry Parkhurst accused officials of corruption and of being responsible for alcohol abuse and prostitution, and in Chicago it was the son of a Congregational minister, William Thomas Stead, who led the moral crusade against the conditions of city life with books like If Christ Came to Chicago (Stead, 1894). Books like the famous In His Steps by Congregationalist minister Charles Monroe Sheldon (1896) demanded of tens of thousands of middle-class Protestants “What would Jesus do”? This became a popular slogan, with Jesus being a moral example rather than a savior figure. Obviously, there were people who described Chicago around 1900 as a booming city with the fi rst skyscrapers, sophisticated hotels, and developing cultivated entertaining and residential architecture. But there were also people who described the “same” Chicago as primarily a city of exploitation, humiliation, and corruption. The social and economic conditions in Chicago had provoked broad indignation and disgust. In the eyes of many people, the metropolis had become an overwhelming moral and political problem. 5 Chicago Pragmatism was at the same time constructing these problems by interpreting the social environment according to a reformed Protestant language and formulating strategies and solutions in the same language, too. The language of reformed Protestantism does not indicate a specific theology but rather a (linguistic) mode of perceiving a world order: local-congregational, democratic, social-interactive, anti-factious, and by that committed to worldly redemption. The line between the sacred and the secular had disbanded, in the eyes of the concerned for it ignored “the very process by which the kingdom of this world is becoming the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.”6

The Reformed Protestant Network at the University of Chicago It is this linguistic world of a network of reformed Protestants that constructed Pragmatism as response to perceived problems at the newly funded University of Chicago. In 1891, the donator of the University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller, who was a Baptist, entrusted the president, Baptist theologian William Rainey Harper, with the great task of building up the university. Harper was looking for a star to head his philosophy department, and William James recommended Charles Peirce, but the appointment fell through when a member of the Harvard philosophy department expressed doubts as to Peirce’s character (Menand, 2001, p. 285ff.) In the meantime, Harper hired a certain James Hayden Tufts, one of his own former students from Yale Divinity School. At the time, Tufts had been working as an instructor in the University of Michigan

American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God’ 103 philosophy department, headed by John Dewey. Harper offered Tufts the Chicago position on the condition that Tufts fi rst go to Germany to earn a doctorate in philosophy. Tufts’s departure left a hole in Dewey’s philosophy department at Ann Arbor, which was to be filled by George Herbert Mead. Mead was the son of Congregationalist minister Hiram Mead, who had joined the faculty at the Oberlin Theological Seminary as professor of Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology in 1869. George Herbert Mead studied at Oberlin College, completing his bachelor’s degree and forming a close friendship with Henry Northrup Castle, the son of a Protestant missionary in Hawaii. When Castle and his sister, Helen, traveled to Europe and settled temporarily in Leipzig, Germany, in 1888, Mead, too, went to Leipzig in order to pursue a PhD in philosophy and physiological psychology, where he studied mainly under Wilhelm Wundt. In 1891, Dewey’s offer of an instructorship in philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan interrupted Mead’s work on his degree (interestingly, he never did complete his PhD). One year later in 1892, Tufts, now equipped with a German PhD, became a member of the University of Chicago faculty. He urged Harper to invite Dewey to chair the philosophy department. Dewey accepted the post on the condition that Mead also be brought to Chicago as an assistant professor. Thus, in 1894, the Dewey-Mead-Tufts trio became the core of the group that William James would later call the “Chicago School,” a local and closely linked network of intellectuals whose understanding of themselves as academicians was shaped by the idea that science and knowledge must have practical utility and must guide our living activity. Their shared Protestant social doctrine, as we will see, certainly informed their understanding of social issues. All of them became involved with the work of Jane Addams’s settlement house, Hull House. This affi nity with Addams was not surprising, since Addams, too, was raised in a devout Protestant family, her father imparting to her strong sense of moral responsibility, purpose, and charity—traits characteristic of his Quaker faith. In addition, Tufts was an active member of the City Club of Chicago Committee on Housing Conditions for many years, even serving as chairman in 1910. Mead and Dewey were active in the League for Industrial Democracy, a social political movement founded in 1905 by Upton Sinclair and Jack London and aimed at the radical democratization of society (it was originally called the “Intercollegiate Socialist Society”). The ideal held up by Dewey and his colleagues was the socially responsible academician, and their primary object was social justice guided by a spirit of democratic Protestantism. This network of colleagues, over time, formed even stronger professional and interpersonal relations. For instance, George and Helen Mead published Dewey’s early progressive education papers under the title The School and the Society in 1900, and their only child, whom

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Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education

they named Henry Castle Albert Mead (after Helen’s brother), later married Irene Tufts, daughter of James Hayden Tufts and Cynthia Whitaker. When Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904, Tufts was promoted to professor and succeeded Dewey as chair of the philosophy department. In 1908, several years after Dewey had left, Dewey and Tufts coauthored Ethics, and they published a completely revised edition in 1932. After Helen Mead’s death, Dewey arranged for Mead’s appointment as a professor at Columbia University for the 1931–1932 academic year; before he could take up that appointment, however, Mead died in Chicago on April 26, 1931.

Calvinism and the Modern Age At the end of 1893, around the time that Dewey was hired by the University of Chicago, he wrote a letter to James Rowland Angell, the son of James Burrill Angell, a devout Congregationalist and president of the University of Michigan. The elder Angell had hired Dewey at Ann Arbor on the recommendation of George Sylvester Morris, and the younger Angell had studied under Dewey at Ann Arbor and was in Halle, Germany, when Dewey wrote to him (he would later also come to Chicago and set up the new department of psychology there; in 1921 he became president of Yale University). In his letter, Dewey undertook to clarify the difference between German and American thinking.7 The Germans, Dewey wrote, had in the main developed an unsurpassed philological expertise, while at the same time building remarkable scientific laboratories. He doubted whether Americans could ever rival the Germans in the art of philology but doubted also that efforts to do so would be justified, for it would not make sense according to the principle of the division of labor: What we can do, perhaps, on the historical side is to interpret the history of thought more from the anthropological and political standpoint—as a social phenomenon … I think that even the “Ideas” have yielded and turned out not “metaphysical” but aesthetic-political products. (John Dewey to James Rowland Angell, May 10, 1893) The separation of idealism and reality that characterized German thought was intellectually attractive to the Americans, as is indicated by their interest in and study of German philosophy. But such a dualistic starting point, premised as it was on the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms,8 provided little tangibility with which to understand and address the multitude of social, political, and economic problems at the turn of the century.9 Dewey, like many others, was seeking a “unified language,” as he wrote in 1892 in a letter to Joseph Villiers Denney,

American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God’ 105 professor of English and dean of the College of Arts, Philosophy, and Science at Ohio State University: The “unified language” seems to be the most complete expression of what the ‘‘idea’’ does in thought, how religion has one language, philosophy another, science another, literature another & so on. Seeing the common objective fact, we get the unified language — the language of action. This is democracy—the appropriation of the store of spiritual wealth in all directions by the whole & common people. Slang unifies with philosophy, theology & poetry. This unified language is the breaking down of barriers & rigid separation to my mind. (Dewey, 1892) This idea of an all-inclusive language, encompassing not only disciplinary and ideological thoughts but also thinking and acting, demonstrates just how far from liberal, in the current philosophical sense, these exponents who belonged to the “liberals” of the time actually were. The following assertion by Daniel Coit Gilman, founding president of Johns Hopkins University, illustrates this point: “American universities should be more than theistic; they may and should be avowedly Christian—not in a narrow or sectarian sense—but in the broad, open and inspiring sense of the Gospels” (Gilman, as cited in Hart, 1992, p. 107). These Protestant academics believed in teaching the Gospel—that is, the teaching of salvation through Jesus’ words on the coming of the kingdom of God—but not with the intention of making those teachings the subject of discussion in theology or the science of religion. Instead, the teaching of salvation was seen as the prerequisite to thinking and acting, as the fertile ground, so to speak, on which life and thought took place and out of which sprung literature such as Walt Whitman’s. The University of Chicago’s President Harper provided another, more specific statement of this purpose, when he told the student body that the fourth part of world history was beginning, it had its center in the United States, and in this era civilization was reaching its apex: According to Harper (1904), “the history of civilization has been synchronous with the development of a pure and true conception of God, and of his relation to man” (p. 175)— that is, the Baptist-Protestant interpretation of God and God’s relation to man. Harper saw this movement as a mandate for a mission that had been assigned to the United States by God and that had deep educational consequences: “If, now, our faith is sure that there has been committed to us this great mission, shall we not purify ourselves?” For Harper, this was a purification from both immorality and ignorance: The ideal purification is a purification from vice and immorality, from sin of every kind and from impurity; but it is more—it is a

106

Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education purification (I use the word advisedly) from ignorance and prejudice, from narrowness of every kind, and from intellectual dishonesty. What is needed? The gospel and education. (p. 180f.)

Only the two together would empower the United States to convert the world: “In this work of educating humanity to understand God and itself, America is the training-school for teachers” (p. 184).

The Kingdom of God on Earth American Protestantism, therefore, was a fundamental part of the American culture during this period. This religious understanding was not fundamentalist in orientation but liberal in the American sense: mostly un-dogmatic, not specific to any denomination or church, and thus best understood as an all-encompassing certainty rather than as a sect. James B. Angell, Dewey’s employer at the University of Michigan, characterized the proper relation of religion and higher education as follows: Michigan is a Christian State, and her University can be true to her only by cherishing a broad unsectarian but earnest Christian spirit. I think that her sister universities in the Northwest are pervaded by the same spirit, and that they are contributing their full share to the dissemination of a Christian culture. (Angell, as cited in Longfield, 1992, p. 46) Accordingly, true science could not oppose Christianity—in this circle, the choice was not one of either Darwinism or Christianity. To be liberal meant—quite different from an European sense—a lack of concern about dogmas, like original sin, and this opened up the possibility of thinking and acting in a scientific and modern way and, at the same time, in a Christian way. The newly founded social sciences, such as sociology, were salvational, for they inscribed the forecasting of a progressive future through defining and planning who people had to be in the present (Popkewitz, 2010). Of course, some theological tensions between these value systems were recognized, and numerous studies attempted to reconcile them (see, for instance, the writings of John Fiske, who served under Tufts on the faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Chicago).10 All of the participants in the Chicago School recognized that the conditions of living were changing, particularly in large cities such as Chicago. The goal of realizing the message of salvation required adjusting politics and education to these conditions in order to respond to them, where adjustment is an active process that requires targeted action. Out of this recognition grew the Social Gospel movement, to which Jane Addams also belonged. In Addams’s (1893) programmatic treatise, The

American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God’ 107 Necessity for Social Settlements, written prior to the founding of the University of Chicago and nearly two years before Dewey and Mead’s arrival in Chicago, she interpreted her settlement community, Hull House, as a response to the manifold social divisions characteristic of the urban experience, which had isolated people from one another and therefore weakened democracy, understood as “social intercourse” (p. 1). Addams saw democracy primarily as a process of social exchange, as a form of cooperation, to which she gave a religious interpretation: The Settlement movement is only one manifestation of that wider humanitarian movement which throughout Christendom, but preeminently in England, is endeavoring to embody itself, not in a sect, but in society itself … I believe that this turning, this renaissance of the early Christian humanitarianism, is going on in America, in Chicago, if you please, without leaders who write or philosophize, without much speaking, but with a bent to express in social service and in terms of action, the spirit of Christ. (p. 19ff.) Action in the sense of self-activity stood at the center of intelligent cooperation for the purpose of mastering and changing the environment into an industrial democracy, and “activity” here was at its core religious. This line of thinking was impressively developed by George Herbert Mead. As early as March 20, 1885, Mead wrote to his friend Henry Castle that Christianity was an infallible motive for an active life, “which raises every man to become a King and Priest, *me to God; makes every man a man of action and gives the most exceeding pleasure health and removes the dregs from the cup and despair from life” (Mead, 1885).11 Mead developed this view shortly before he was asked to join the faculty at the University of Chicago on Dewey’s recommendation. Evidence of this development is a forty-page manuscript, probably written in 1893 while Mead was still in Ann Arbor. In the lecture, Mead discussed the meaning of the New Testament, focusing on the relationship of Jesus Christ to John the Baptist and on Christ’s Gospel, specifically on his announcement of the coming Kingdom of God on earth in the Sermon on the Mount. According to Mead (c. 1893), it is from their spontaneous relationship with God in prayer that men recognize they have common—not contradictory—interests, which are endangered by the capitalist economy: “The centering of our interest upon riches that pass away involves the absence of all ‘treasure in the Kingdom of Heaven.’ For where your treasure is there will your heart be also [Matthew 6:21].” Mead (c. 1893) continued, We fi nd in a later chapter [of the Holy Bible] still more strongly expressed the destructive effect of the greed for wealth upon that identity of interest that should exist between all men in the Kingdom,

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Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education —‘If thou wilt to be perfect go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven’ [Matthew 19:21]. (p. 20f.)

Mead then quoted Matthew 19:24—the passage saying that it is easier for the camel to pass through a needle than it is for a rich man to enter Heaven—to which he offered the following as a complement: It is just as impossible to do both—serve God in this Kingdom and Mammon as well. One’s life is not made up of the abundance of things one possesses, but life is more than meat. In God’s Kingdom it is impossible that one’s interest should be centered upon the mere conditions of existence. (p. 21) Faith in Christ and thus the “community of interest” of men is not a matter of rational understanding, but it is also not a matter of: emotion in the sense in which we generally perhaps consider an emotion. It does not represent a feeling insofar as this is something static but a state mind prepared for the most absolute, the most perfect acting—it is the condition of perfect activity. (p. 26) To provide evidence for this interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, Mead referred to William James’s Principles in Psychology, fi rst published in 1890, in which James insisted that emotions are the consequence of activities and thus exist prior to all attempts at rationalization. In that work, James had wanted to demonstrate clearly that the traditional assumption of a causal relation of the following type was false: coming unexpectedly upon a bear in the woods, then experiencing fear, then running away. James wrote that it was more correct to assume that we experience fear because we run away—that running away is the physical activity and that the subsequent perception of the activity is what we call a feeling (James, 1890, p. 449ff.). Following this digression, Mead (c. 1893) returned to Jesus in order to show that the emotion of love can arise only in connection with action and activity: I come back to our theme if the principle which Jesus represents is to be expressed as an emotion. The emotion of love—it can only be as an active principle—the principle of the most complete and absolute activity our natures are capable of. It must have back of it the instinctive actions of the whole social—in other words: religious— nature and it must have the power of supporting these activities at once and without cessation. (p. 37ff.)12

American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God’ 109 Or, as Dewey (1893/1971b) expressed it in the same year of 1893: Christianity is revelation, and revelation means effective discovery, the actual ascertaining or guaranteeing to man of the truth of his life and the reality of the Universe. It is at this point that the significance of democracy appears. The kingdom of God, as Christ said, is within us, or among us. (p. 6)

Democracy as Redemption The idea of a true community of interests and thus the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth was not held exclusively by the Chicago Pragmatists; rather, it shaped a wider Protestant discourse that dominated the field of common schooling at the end of the nineteenth century (Tyack, 1996). This same idea can be seen in Graham Taylor, who, after Jane Addams, was perhaps the most important exponent of a settlement house. Like Addams and others in the Chicago School, Taylor oscillated between scholarship and social engagement: He was founder and director of the Chicago Commons Settlement House and, at the same time, a professor of biblical sociology in the sociology department at Chicago Theological Seminary.13 His lectures were based largely on Francis Herbert Stead’s The Kingdom of God: A Plan of Study in Three Parts, which was written in 1893 (Stead, 1893). However—and this may explain why the Dewey circle had close contacts with Addams but not with Taylor— Taylor championed a type of social reform that was much more closely oriented to formal institutions: For example, among other things, it targeted better conditions for, and an increase in, civic participation and voting among the work force. In 1882, about ten years before Mead set down his thoughts about the Sermon on the Mount as a guide for realizing the Kingdom of God on earth, Taylor delivered a Thanksgiving address titled, The Unity of Human Interests. Although the address has been passed down to us only in the form of phrases and abbreviated words (“That in Ch[rist] of G[od] at call of State, on day sacred to Home”), its content is illuminating. In contrast to Mead or Addams, Taylor asserted that the institutionalized interests of state, church, and family “are really one. Their common blessings imply substantial unity” (Taylor, 1882). This was precisely not what Mead, Dewey, and Addams thought. Whereas they shared with Taylor the vision of a Kingdom of God and the idea of a community of interests, they did not view these primarily in the context of formal institutions, and certainly not the church. It is not by chance that Jane Addams was convinced that Hull House was the expression of a renaissance of early Christianity. Mead, Dewey, and Addams were less concerned than Taylor with strengthening the institutional power of

110 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education the state and were not at all interested in a strong church; instead, they sought to perfect their vision of community as an expression of a common interest that was Christian, social, and democratic—and therefore critical for American development. They viewed as “good” that which emerged from unity and remained unified; “bad” was the particular or the particularizing. As Dewey (1894/1971c) said in 1894: The bad act is partial, the good organic … The good man, in a word, is his whole self in each of his acts; the bad man is a partial (and hence a different) self in his conduct. He is not one person, for he has no unifying principle. (p. 245) Within this framework, capitalism had to be criticized, not because it is based on private ownership of the means of production but instead because of its socially divisive, segregating consequences, which, because it made common intercourse, the community of interests, and organic unity impossible, stood in the way of realizing the kingdom of God on earth. Congregational minister and journalist George Davis Herron, one of the most popular activists of the Social Gospel movement, expressed this by calling America undemocratic: We Americans are not a democratic people. We do not select the representatives we elect; we do not make our own laws; we do not govern ourselves. Our political parties are controlled by private, close political corporations that exist as parasites upon the body politic, giving us the most corrupting and humiliating despotisms in political history, and tending to destroy all political faith in righteousness. (Herron, 1895, p. 76ff.)14 This critique, formulated in the language of republicanism, finds fertile ground in the Protestant ideal of liberal reform, according to which social, religious, and democratic life are fundamentally identical—a natural expression of the common interests of men. In this view, formal institutions become, if not superfluous, certainly secondary: The political realization [of Christianity] will be a pure democracy. Christianity can realize itself in a social order only through democracy, and democracy can realize itself only through the social forces of Christianity. A pure social democracy is the political fulfi llment of Christianity; … It is the historical and providential idea that God shall lead the people by his Spirit of right as his sons, governing them inspirationally rather than institutionally. (Herron, 1895, p. 74)

American Culture, Pragmatism, and the ‘Kingdom of God’ 111 This argument is not very far from the analysis that Dewey set forth in The Public and Its Problems, fi rst published in 1927, when he accused in a classical republican and reformed Protestant manner the captains of industry of destroying democracy in order to serve their private interests (Dewey, 1954, p. 204f.):15 This accusation is an especially demonstrative example of how the two languages of republicanism that went along each other since the time around 1776 clashed when the traditional culture of reformed Protestantism and its political language of classical republicanism realized—in the frame of their language—the devastating effects of the (capitalist) liberalism (in the European sense). Dewey was by no means alone in accusing wealthy men of destroying American culture. Henry Demarest Lloyd, the son of the Dutch Reformed Church minister Aaron Lloyd in New York, published a series of articles between 1881 and 1903 in which he investigated the abusive monopoly of capitalism, and he published these collected articles under the title Lords of Industry (Lloyd, 1910). Dewey’s answer to his perception of the decline is as revealing as it is simple: Dewey (1927/1954) said, “the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy,” so that a scattered and mobile and diverse public can come to “recognize itself [italics added] as to defi ne and express its interests.” Given this premise, it is not surprising that Dewey viewed democracy as the “idea of community life itself,” in which there is a single consciousness of a single interest that produces the public as a public and in this way makes democracy truly possible in the fi rst place: “The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy” (pp. 140, 146). As Dewey repeatedly stressed, the vitality of democratic social life does not depend on formal democratic institutions like voting or representative government, but vice versa. Thirty years after the period examined here, Dewey’s mode of thinking had not essentially changed: Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication. (Dewey, 1927/1954, p. 84) In Dewey’s view, the project of communion and immediacy must start with education, namely, education in the home within communal “faceto-face relationships” (p. 218).16 The educational reaction towards the perceived decline in public morals and democracy and the rise of corrupt lords of industry is expression of the educationalization of the modern world mentioned at the outset of this book. As early as in 1872, we fi nd the example of Charles Loring

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Brace, a Congregational minister who accused politicians of corruption and advocated that endangered city children should benefit from exposure to country life (Brace, 1872). In this same educational spirit Dewey explained to a Chicago audience in 1899 that prevailing socio-economic conditions required an educational response (Dewey, 1899/1976, p. 6ff.). Whereas many Lutheran educators in Germany avoided dealing with political questions and sought after Bildung in a remote context, Dewey’s reformed Calvinism was aimed at curing the endangered community by means of education. He could not ignore the conditions of metropolis and sought to deal with them: “It is silly and futile to ignore and deny economic facts. They do not cease to operate because we refuse to note them, or because we smear them over with sentimental idealizations” (Dewey, 1927/1954, p. 156). Education had to resolve the issues of the deviant republic, and this educational faith was as Protestant as his critique towards capitalism was classical republican. Upon this background, it is advisable when interpreting My Pedagogic Creed (1897)—Dewey’s fi rst work on education to enjoy broad reception—to understand the democratic element of his theory of the school in the context of Dewey’s own summary of his educational belief: “I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God” (Dewey, 1897/1972, p. 95).17

7

Langue as Homeland The Genevan Reception of Pragmatism

One way to understand Pragmatism as embedded in reformed Protestant language is to fi nd out where, in the world, its paroles have been ‘understood’ in a rather unproblematic way. Whereas Pragmatism was harshly rejected in Germany with its dominant Lutheran langue in philosophy and education, we can nowhere demonstrate more evidence of an early and long-lasting interest in Pragmatism than in Switzerland.1 To be accurate, the Swiss reception had three centers, one of them a kind of ‘headquarters’: in Neuchâtel, Lausanne, and above all Geneva—in other words, in the three Protestant capitals of cantons in the French part of Switzerland.2 The transnationality of this language obviously allowed a willing reception in the city of Calvin and Rousseau.

“C’est mon homme” As far as reconstruction is possible, the transcontinental exchange of ideas between Geneva and the United States that proves to be important in this context began with the publishing of contributions by William James in the dominant British journal Mind and in the French journal La Critique philosophique in the 1880s. Apparently, the Genevan scholar Théodore Flournoy, descendant of a French Huguenot family, who was twelve years younger than James, showed a deep interest in James’ research on physiological psychology, including James’ response to Huxley’s famous 1874 statement, “We are conscious automata” (James, 1879) and James’ reflections on emotions (James, 1884). On one of James’ long trips to Europe, he visited the International Congress of Physiological Psychology in Paris in 1889, where he was introduced to Théodore Flournoy (Le Clair, 1966, p. xiiiff.). A year later, James sent his new Genevan colleague his two-volume work, Principles in Psychology (James, 1890), and Flournoy expressed his deep appreciation in a letter dated October 15, 1890, thanking James for the books and confessing that, besides a few minor points of disagreement, James inspired him and put into words his own feelings: “… I am forced frequently to say, in speaking of you, ‘C’est mon homme!’” (Fluornoy, as

114 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 6). In the spring of 1891, Flournoy published a most favorable review of Principles in the Journal de Genève, and James assured him in a letter of March 31, 1891, that Flournoy “had better than anyone else caught the ‘point of view’ of my lengthy pages.” Reading Flournoy’s Métaphysique et psychologie (1890),3 James felt the transcontinental affi nity even more deeply. James expressed his hopes that, with each other’s help, “our ‘School’ will prevail!” (James, as cited in Le Clair, p. 7ff.).4 This “school” was not based only on personal characteristics or intellectual affi nities. James and Flournoy both felt “at home,”5 because they shared the same mode of thinking, the same intellectual horizon that was shaped by the Calvinist-Protestant and classical republican langue. It is not by accident that James calls Switzerland, foremost Geneva, “the terrestrial paradise” and praises Flournoy as “a citizen of that fortunate republic.” According to James (as cited in Le Clair, 1966), the worldwide “neurotic fin-de siècle element” had “comparatively little hold on” Geneva; this was a compliment to Geneva but also an inexplicit side attack on Germany, with its constant prejudices against the United States (p. 31). Nowhere (at least not in Europe), says James, have the beauty of nature and the political institutions joined together more harmoniously than in Switzerland (p. 115). Discussing the intervention of American troops in Spanish-occupied Cuba, Flournoy wrote to James on December 11, 1898, in the same ‘spirit’ but more explicitly: “… on the whole we [the Swiss] applaud the triumph of a republican and Protestant nation representing liberty and modern civilization over the old monarchical and Catholic despotism” (Fluornoy, as cited in Le Clair, p. 76). But neither political nor religious topics dominated the discussions between the two scholars. Their correspondence focused on personal subjects and, in second place, on the evolving world of academic psychology. Flournoy and James had their own laboratories in their universities, which very soon began to trouble them both (see chapter 8 below). In 1896 both James and Fluornoy agreed on the fact that laboratory psychology would not meet the expectations formed two decades ago. It was the year that John Dewey’s “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (Dewey, 1896)—based on the laboratory work at the University of Chicago under the direction of James Roland Angell—brought to public expression the unsatisfactory results of a mechanistic and dualistic psychology.

Psychology, Liberal Reformist Protestantism, and Evolution The skepticism against the laboratory work rooted in religious convictions—but not in theological questions. The distance that William James felt can be demonstrated as early as 1879 in his challenge of Huxley’s mechanistic Darwinism, which Flournoy applauded in Geneva

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long before he and James met in Paris for the fi rst time. Among many other arguments, James (1897) cites a strophe of a poem by Goethe (in German): Nur allein der Mensch Vermag das Unmögliche. Er unterscheidet, wählet und richtet, Er kann dem Augenblick Dauer verleihen. (p. 15)6 The poem, Das Göttliche (The Divine), was published in 1783 and was one of the most popular poems of the late eighteenth century. At fi rst glance, that James would cite a poem about the divinity of humankind is surprising in the context of a scholar considered to be an evolutionist. But it is a common error to interpret the intellectual discussions in the late nineteenth century as similar to the intransigent debates between creationists and evolutionists today. Finding phenomena like the struggle for existence, natural selection, probabilities, or adaptation convincing did not necessarily mean that you had no faith or were unchristian. ‘True’ science was not meant to be opposed to Christianity, as the history of the universities in the United States shows (Ross, 1991; Marsden & Longfield, 1992). Menand (2001) says about James: “He was Darwinian, but he was not a Darwinist. This made him truer to Darwin than most nineteenth-century evolutionists” (p. 141). James took a position that was shared by many American intellectuals in the last third of the nineteenth century. It was called liberal, and liberal meant not caring much about dogmas, such as the idea of original sin. Theological arguments could not, in the liberal view, add anything to the only important thing, namely, being religious, experiencing religion, in a Protestant sense. Of course, the theological tensions between Darwin(ism) and the belief in creation were recognized, but there were efforts to reconcile them, pragmatically. This pragmatic handling of questions of dogma was deeply rooted in the liberal Calvinism of the end of the nineteenth century: Religion is a (social) fact and theoretical discussions about it rather idle. ‘True’ life was religious as well as social and political—a deep reformed Calvinistic conviction—and was therefore not to be understood using mechanistic methods. That is why both James and Flournoy were interested in doing psychical research in spiritism, telepathy, and hypnosis, and in working with mediums. Flournoy’s most famous book, Des Indes à la planète Mars: étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie [From India to the planet Mars: A study of a case of somnambulism, with glossolalia], was published in 1899 and translated into English as early as 1900, published in Italian in 1905, and in German in 1914. There were countless new editions and reprints of the book

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throughout the twentieth century—the last printing in English was in 2003 and in French in 1994. Years before this publication, James was attending (anonymously) the séances of medium Mrs. Leonora E. Piper, and he wrote about her in The Will to Believe (James, 1897, p. 319). Apparently, James had an agreement with his Cambridge colleague and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers; they agreed that when the fi rst of them died, he would send news to the other from the kingdom of the unknown. And indeed, in 1901 James was waiting, pen and notebook in hand, outside the door of the hotel room in Rome where Myers lay dying. James’ notebook remained empty, as Alex Munthe tells us in his immensely popular Story of San Michele (1929, pp. 372–373). Spiritism remained an important topic in the correspondence between James and Flournoy up to James’ death in 1910. Visible life was understood to be as real as religious feelings, and reflection about psychological facts was called “philosophy.” By 1900, religion had become James’ central topic. James’ (1902) Varieties in Religious Experience was translated into French in Switzerland by a friend of Flournoy’s, Frank Abauzit, and edited in Paris with an introduction by French philosopher Emile Boutroux as L’expérience religieuse: essai de psychologie descriptive (James, 1906). It is no coincidence that the Faculty of Theology of the University of Geneva had planned to award James the honorary degree of “Docteur en Théologie honoris causa” in 1909 (Le Clair, 1966, p. 213) or that the 1910 lecture on James that Flournoy was to hold was organized by an union of young (Protestant) Christians in Neuchâtel. Religion was questioned as metaphysical humbug but not as a real phenomenon. Flournoy (1903) wanted to understand religion psychologically, e.g., through scientific methods, starting out from the fact of the diversities of religious experience in different social contexts (p. 43). Religious psychology, he says, has the advantage over religious philosophy, as it restrains us from giving any interpretation of what is true—and he remembers history “where everyone believed himself to be the only judge not only for himself, which would be perfectly legitimate, but for the others, too” (p. 38). This speaks quite strictly against Catholicism, against Lutheranism, but not against Protestantism as it is found in Baptist circles, for instance. What seems to be secular proves to be—on a quite invisible background—liberal reformist Protestantism. Flournoy’s article, Les principes de la psychologie religieuse [The principles of religious psychology], was published in 1903 in the journal Archives de psychologie, which he and his nineteen-years-younger cousin, Edouard Claparède, had co-edited since 1901. Claparède eventually became a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva (in 1908) and founded the “International Bureau of Education”7 in 1925 together with Pierre Bovet. Bovet was the author of Le sentiment religieux et la psychologie de l’enfant [The religious feeling and child psychology] (Bovet,

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1925). The third of the prominent Genevans in the reception of Pragmatism, Adolphe Ferrière, took the chair of the International Bureau of Education in 1929 and was later succeeded by his ‘disciple’ Jean Piaget, whose fi rst writings had also dealt with religious feelings. But by then, Pragmatism and Dewey had become an essential element of the intellectual discourse in Geneva. The questions to be examined here are how Pragmatism was understood and, vice versa, what reading of Pragmatism was able to express what the Genevans were thinking.

Pragmatism and Progressive Education The issue of the transcontinental discussions was “facts and religion,” as James pointed out in his public lectures in Boston and New York 1906 and 1907, published under the title Pragmatism A New Name For Some Old Ways Of Thinking; Popular Lectures On Philosophy (James, 1907b). He thus challenged both of the dominant doctrines of his time, rationalism and empiricism. “My reading is more philosophical than psychological in these days,” James writes on January 2, 1907, to Flournoy (James, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 181).8 It is as if the Genevans were just waiting for this philosophical justification of their interest in American psychology. Flournoy confi rmed that he saw James as the “genuine creator” of Pragmatism, “for the worthy Peirce does not appear to me to have been more than the starting push” and that without James, Dewey, and Schiller, neither Bergson nor Boutroux would have been able to develop their philosophical systems (Fluornoy, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, pp. 183–184). Dewey may have been received in Geneva earlier, but it is certain that he was introduced by James in a letter of January 1, 1904, when James highly recommended Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory (1903) and sent along a copy (Le Clair, 1966, p. 152).9 In a letter of 1907, Flournoy wrote to James: I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say: “je m’y sens tout gagné”. It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it, and I am certain that it is your philosophy. (Fluornoy, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 187) In the field of psychology, Pragmatism seemed to be the tool against causal empiricism, and in the field of philosophy it was the tool against (German) rationalism or idealism. Together with Bergson, James (as cited in Le Clair, 1966) believed, his pragmatism would “converge [history] toward an antirationalistic crystallization. Qui vivra verra!” (p. 205). In the context of this mission, James praised Flournoy’s cousin Edouard Claparède—and at the same time made an accusation against German philosophy: “When will the Germans learn that art?” (p. 217).

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With James’ (re)turn to Pragmatism in the early 1900s, the intellectual dispositions between Geneva and Harvard had been adjusted and clarified to the extent that now, James, Dewey, and his (former) Chicago colleagues could be received well beyond philosophical reflections on religious psychology. Pragmatism struck the right note for the mental dispositions of an old republic, which had demanded political ethics, virtue, and education ever since Rousseau’s (1758/1995) Lettre à d’Alembert. James’ (1899) Talks to Teachers appeared in French translation in Lausanne under the title Causeries pédagogiques in 1907,10 which launched a broad discussion within the field of education. After having announced the French translation already in February 1907, in March the department for public education in Neuchâtel lauded the advantages of James’ psychology for education, not forgetting to mention the difference between psychology and education (Blaser, 1907), in the Bulletin Mensuel, a newsletter that was distributed to all school board members, school administrators, and teachers. A month later, the Lausanne journal L’Educateur published a brief summary of the translation (Métral, 1907), and in August, the same journal contained a short introduction to the philosophy of James (Pidoux, 1907) written by James’ translator, Louis[-Samuel] Pidoux. In 1910, the educational society of Neuchâtel dedicated its fiftieth anniversary celebration to James. Bovet, who had been a professor of philosophy in Neuchâtel since 1903, dedicated his key note address to James’ psychology: William James psychologue: l’intérêt de son oeuvre pour des éducateurs (Bovet, 1910). Two years later Bovet was the fi rst director of the “Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau”11 in Geneva founded by Edouard Claparède, and in 1920, he became professor of education at the University of Geneva. Together with the Genevan sociologist Adolphe Ferrière, Bovet and Claparède dominated the educational scene in Geneva and made it a worldwide center of educational discussion. What Flournoy came to mean for James, Claparède would—about ten years later—prove to mean for Dewey. The increasing interest in Dewey can be reconstructed by examining one of Claparède’s best-selling books, Psychologie de l’Enfant et Pédagogie experimentale (1905). The book grew in content between 1905 and 1922 from 76 to 571 pages, and it was republished after the Second World War (Claparède died in 1940) in two volumes, from the eleventh edition on containing also a study by Jean Piaget called La psychologie d’Edouard Claparède. The book was translated into more than six languages and appeared in English, based on the fourth French edition, in 1911 (Experimental Pedagogy and the Psychology of the Child; reprinted 1975).12 The original 1905 edition of Claparède’s book contains one single reference to James and no references at all to Dewey, but both authors become more and more important with each new edition published. In 1909 the French journal L’Éducation13 published Dewey’s (1909) The

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School and the Social Progress. Two years later, in the introduction to the 1911 fourth edition of Claparède’s Experimental Pedagogy and the Psychology of the Child (the basis of the German and English translations), James is the authority for advocating the importance of psychology for education, and Dewey is the authority for having expressed one of the core problems of education, namely, the genetic-functional phenomenon. This replaced the simple, 1905 conception of an “attracting” education. According to the pragmatic idea that life means active adjustment to constraints, the term “functional education” was central in this new edition. In the eighth edition ten years later in 1920, Dewey is additionally the authority for child development—based on his texts collected in The School and Society. Meanwhile, L’Éducation had published in 1912 the translation of Dewey’s (1912) The School and the Life of the Child and, in 1914, Dewey’s (1914) Waste in Education. A 1913 volume containing four Dewey texts published under the title John Dewey. L’école et l’enfant,14 translated by Louis-Samuel Pidoux15 and edited by Claparède, demonstrates the increasing importance of Dewey in the Genevan discussion. Claparède’s (1913) introduction to the volume, titled La pédagogie de John Dewey, may well be the fi rst elaborated French study on Dewey, and it proves that almost every paper that Dewey had published after 1886 had been read in Geneva. The Dewey quote (cited in English) that heads Claparède’s introduction indicates the quite different interest Claparède had in Dewey than Flournoy had in James; it represents the core of what was called in Geneva education nouvelle (new education): “Learning?—Certainly, but living primarily, and learning through and in relation to this living” (Claparède, 1913, p. 5; freely translated here). Claparède’s argumentation is interesting. First, he refers to a certain similarity between G. Stanley Hall, who at this time was much more famous in Europe than Dewey, and Dewey, whose theory of education was considered to be “more genetic and dynamic” (Claparède, 1913, p. 6; freely translated here). Listing all the different areas of Dewey’s research, Claparède hastens to tell his readers that there has always been just one method: “it is pragmatism, of which Dewey is, together with William James and F.C.S. Schiller, one of the most brilliant heads.” Claparède cites Flournoy’s definition of the core of Pragmatism, namely, to renounce to the use of decontextualized terms and, instead, to look at real and situated consequences. Claparède demonstrates how Dewey uses this method in his moral philosophy, his logic, and his psychology and mentions that it contains itself an “educational method” (p. 13). Most interesting is that Claparède sees in Dewey’s “psychopedagogics” a representation of Pragmatism at its best, but he denies any common destiny with the fortune of Pragmatism as a “doctrine,” which had been the object of raving attacks in Europe ever since the International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg in 1908 (Elsenhans, 1909).

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Claparède’s intention is ‘pedagogic’ insofar as he tries to show his deep conviction in progressive education. Dewey’s education is, as Claparède says in short, “essentially dynamic” and deeply rooted in life. “Life! Life! Ah! If we want life, let us place ourselves into life; let us see how the child is, and where it is heading” (Claparède, 1913, p. 14ff.; freely translated here). Dewey’s education is, according to Claparède, threefold: genetic, functional, and social. The genetic aspect is believed to have overcome the mechanistic and/or analytic-empirical psychology of nineteenth-century Germany by stressing the dynamics of the child’s self- development. The focus on the child’s development turns out to be very useful for practitioners, because it solves the Gordian knot of education: the relation between the arbitrariness of the child and exterior constraints. To leave children on their own to ‘obey’ their desires is no education at all, because the skills and abilities of the child develop only through mastering obstacles. The functional aspect reinforces the contrast with empirical psychology, because it indicates active adaptation to a situation created by interaction of external circumstances and inner desires— and this active adjustment is usually neglected in the traditional schools. And the social aspect, according to Claparède, can in fact be reduced to the functional aspect (Claparède, 1913, p. 33). Claparède’s introduction shows that the three dimensions of education analyzed were estimated unequally. Claparède’s own book, Experimental Pedagogy (from the 4th edition in 1911 on), proves that the two fi rst elements, “genetic” and “functional,” were seen in combination. They are interpreted as one of the core problems of education, whereas the “social” aspect is hardly discussed at all. This ‘ignoring’ of the social dimension accords with the way in which Dewey’s educational theory was viewed in ‘isolation’ from Pragmatism. From this, one could easily conclude that the Genevans were not interested in the social and political part of Dewey’s philosophy of education but only in his progressive psycho-pedagogical construction. But why, then, were James and Dewey so much more highly estimated in Geneva than the well-known German progressive educators? The reason for this is to be found not so much in explicit concepts or arguments, but in the same reformist Protestant langue that they shared, which made the American foreigners seem indigenous in Geneva.

Reformed Calvinist and Lutheran Protestantism It is a remarkable phenomenon that Germany was familiar with James and Dewey at least as early as the French Swiss were. James was known as an important psychologist, and Dewey was known—even earlier than in Geneva—as a reformer of schools: The School and Social Progress (1899) appeared in German translation as early as 1903 and The School

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and Society in 1905. But when it became obvious that James and Dewey were strongly interrelated with Pragmatism, sympathy soon waned (Gonon, 2004). James’ 1907 volume, Pragmatism A New Name For Some Old Ways Of Thinking; Popular Lectures On Philosophy, was published in German only a year later (James, 1908) by Wilhelm Jerusalem. As the discussions during the Third International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg in 1908 show, arguments in favor of Pragmatism were difficult to uphold, because it refuted eternal truths and metaphysics. Schiller, for instance, argued that truths were always related to real human life and that the idea of an “independent, supernatural, eternal, incommutable, unachievable, inapplicable, and useless truth” was a childish delusion (Schiller, 1909a, p. 711; freely translated here). Later in the discussion Schiller assessed that this way of looking to truth is useful and leads human kind to a “progressus in infinitum.” Truth does not have to be true in the beginning—the likeliness is the utmost certainty we get when assumptions “stand the test of experience” (Schiller, 1909b, p. 739; freely translated here). These positions were unique and exposed to attacks, and with this background it is almost an ironic aperçu that the Second International Congress for Philosophy had been organized by Flournoy and Claparède in Geneva in 1904. They did not attend the Heidelberg congress (neither did James), and Flournoy remarked in a letter to James of September 20, 1907: “I have had news of the Congress at Heidelberg only through [Lorenzo M.] Billia, the philosopher from Turin, who passed through Geneva … He found the Congress very tedious, much too German and not international” (Fluornoy, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 202).16 The scandal within European and, most of all, German philosophy was enormous, and it was in this context that Eduard Spranger, a professor of education and philosophy in Berlin, belittled Dewey’s work, which he reduced to education that was merely economic and technical. Spranger assessed it as vastly inferior to the “latitude of German education.” For Spranger, Dewey’s work represented—in stark contrast to the higher ends woven into the German mind—a despicable kitchen and handyman utilitarianism that had to be countered by the “theory of the ideal Bildung.” Compared to this militant refutation of Pragmatism in Germany, the ‘emancipation’ of Dewey’s education from the destiny of Pragmatism, as Claparède had written, was a very careful formulation. The harsh rejection of Pragmatism in Germany does not yet explain why James and Dewey found greater acceptance in Geneva than in Germany, but it indicates a deep difference that I see as religious/cultural or linguistic. German Lutheran Protestantism, which according to Dewey (1915), was the basis of the German philosophical idealism with its dualistic worldview, was largely incompatible with the social-action ideology of both reformed Protestantism and its associate political language of classical republicanism. Weber, as shown in chapter 3 above, detected

122 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education only the strong social engagement in Calvinism but not its democratic implication, democracy being almost a swear word for the German intellectuals of the time. They were idealists, skeptical about intellectual rationalism and deeply indebted to the dualistic two-kingdom conception of Luther and indebted politically to the German Reich, believing in the superiority of the German Volk. This mode of thinking necessarily led to deep distrust in conceptions that denied ideas of eternal truths as well as dualisms, that built on interaction and on cooperation, and therefore on democracy. Pragmatism had to appear as a danger, and it was therefore discredited, under the banner of slogans like “dollar philosophy” or similarly disrespectful terms. Swiss reformist Protestantism was based on Zwingli (Zurich) and Calvin (Geneva), and it—transformed by British Protestantism—was dominant in the United States. It is socially and politically very different from German Lutheran Protestantism, both in its original positions of the sixteenth century and in its liberal versions around 1900.

Langue as Homeland From this perspective, the Genevans’ appreciation of American psychology and their distancing from German psychology becomes more understandable. Claparède’s (1913) introduction to the volume containing the French translations of the four Dewey works admires Dewey’s psychology as against German psychology, which Claparède characterizes as “static” (p. 11) and criticizes for dividing up development into analytic elements that have no interrelation to each other (p. 17) and as “sterile doctrine” (p. 21). This critique is very similar to Dewey’s objections in his paper, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” that German psychology, building on the dualism of stimulus and response, was too mechanical, “a patchwork of disjointed parts” (Dewey, 1896, pp. 39–40). Dewey’s paper was fi rst published 1896 in Psychological Review, together with articles by colleagues from the philosophy department at the University of Chicago. The articles appeared again in the same year as offprints in the fi rst issue of Studies from the Psychological Laboratory: The University of Chicago Contributions to Philosophy, edited by James Rowland Angell (Angell, 1896), who was a former student of Dewey at Ann Arbor and son of Congregational minister and president of Ann Arbor, James B. Angell. The anonymous Introductory Note (Angell, 1896) to the issue sets out the purpose of the collection as presenting articles that were all based on experiments that were underlined by a certain hypothesis: This is the conception of consciousness as an organic unity, with the resulting ideas that the facts are facts of growth or continuous realization, and are to be interpreted as such. It is believed that this

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principle is as important in its bearing upon laboratory work as upon those phases of psychology defi nitely labeled genetic: that, in other words, mental phenomena are to be regarded as continuous changes in an interaction of organisms and environment. This point of view, of necessity, throws the emphasis upon activity. (Angell, 1896; Introductory Note) This fundamental way of looking at man’s soul was decisive for the positive reception in Geneva, and it explains why James and Dewey, although foreigners, were indigenous. “Organic unity,” “growth or continuous realization,” “interaction,” “activity” were all attractive in psychology, education, and politics framed by liberal reformed Calvinism. It is no coincidence that George Herbert Mead, son of a Congregational minister, in a lecture in Ann Arbor tried to prove the deep truth of the Sermon of the Mount with the theory of action that he found in James’ Psychology. Mead (1893) writes that to recognize Jesus and therefore the community of interests of all men would be neither a question of rationality, nor one of: emotion in the sense in which we generally perhaps consider love an emotion. It does not represent a feeling insofar as this is something static but a state [of] mind prepared for the most absolute, the most perfect activity—it is the condition of perfect activity. (p. 26) To prove this statement, Mead cites James’ Psychology, in which James had insisted that emotions were connected to physical activities and therefore prior to all attempts to rationalize (James, 1890, pp. 449– 450). Mead (1893) concludes that the emotion of love occurs only with activity; love is the emotion stemming from the most complete and most absolute activity of humankind: I come back to our theme if the principle which Jesus represents is to be expressed as an emotion. The emotion of love—it can only be as an action principle—the principle of the most complete and absolute activity our natures are capable of. It must have* back of it the instinctive* actions of the whole social—in other words: religious—nature and it must have the power of supporting these activities at once* and without cessation. (pp. 37–38; punctuation added; asterisk = uncertain reading of Mead’s handwriting) It is not a coincidence that the two persons in Geneva who were the fi rst to feel ‘at home’ in the pragmatist way of thinking, Flournoy and Claparède, were not only cousins but also both stemmed originally from French Huguenot families that left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1695 by Louis XIV. The Protestant view of

124 Reformed Protestantism, Classical Republicanism, and Education a fundamentally active person—as laborer as well as citizen—frames the background of the Genevan interest in Pragmatism. Thus we understand why Claparède (1913) points out Dewey’s “primacy of action” in his introduction in countless variations (p. 13). The aim of education was “self-realization,” which meant calling “all inner activities” (p. 15). According to Claparède, Dewey’s psychology built on “mental activity” (p. 20) and on the faculties as “instruments of action,” adapting to circumstances (p. 21). All development is considered to be “genetic” (p. 16), leading to a “unity” (p. 24), so that education could not be different than active, e.g., manual training. Bovet, in his William James lecture in 1910, used Herbert Spencer’s terms to adapt it to Pragmatism: “Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations” (Bovet, 1910, p. 3; freely translated here), and this adjustment, which can be understood as passive (as it still is in Germany today), was interpreted by the Genevans—according to James or Dewey—as activity (Hamline, 1986, p. 441). Whether or not the Genevans had read Dewey’s entry on Adaptation in Monroe’s Encyclopaedia of Education, they certainly would have agreed with Dewey’s attempt to warn against interpretation influenced by Herbert Spencer. According to Spencer, “adaptation” was reduced to “passive organic beings,” an assumption that would lead to a “perversion” in educational thinking, Dewey (1911) fears, because it would mean “the accommodation of individuals to the existing type of social polity and customs”; “To avoid this error it is necessary to realize that adaptation is a case of control involving the subordination of the environment to the life functions of individuals” (p. 35). Adaptation is always active (p. 35); it is the essence of life. How important “activity” was to the Genevans can be demonstrated not only in the way that they received James or Dewey or in the way that they were ‘affected’ by the American scholars. It also becomes visible in a public conflict between the two colleagues and friends, Ferrière and Claparède. The confl ict was about the interpretation of “activity” as the top slogan around 1920: L’école active, the Activity School. The term had shown up fi rst in 1917 and was in the core of educational semantics within less than eight years. In 1922, Ferrière published a two-volume book, L’école active, with many references to James and Dewey, and the combined edition of 1929 shows even a significant increase in these references. Almost countless articles in journals used the title L’école active to praise the very core of all progressive education. Albert Chessex, a teacher and comrade-in-arms of Ferrière, for instance, demanded in the Genevan journal L’Educateur that every student had to be “active in the broadest and highest sense of the term” (Chessex, 1923, p. 241; freely translated here). The same year, Claparède published an article in the same journal criticizing the advocates of L’école active, but not, of course, because he favored anything like a passive school. He argued fi rst that Ferrière had

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departed psychology for some metaphysic fields, arguing with unintelligible slogans such as Bergson’s “élan vital.” The practitioner will not know what to do with slogans like that, and when Chessex contents himself with demanding “a broadest and highest sense” of activity, the practitioner still is left on his own. Then what exactly does Chessex mean? The notion “active” is equivocal, Claparède (1923) teaches (p. 371). According to him, we have to differentiate between two different senses of “active.” There is active in the “sense of effectuation” and active in the “sense of function” (p. 377). Claparède advocates for the latter: “Activity is always evoked by needs” (p. 372; freely translated here), which is his core idea in a book he would publish in 1931, L’Education fonctionelle (Claparède, 1931). Activity as a function of adjustment was a Darwinian/Protestant idea that Claparède (1923) had seen in Dewey and Rousseau: “If you want to make your child active, put him in circumstances that call for a need to fulfi ll an action you expect from him” (p. 373; freely translated here). Ferrière (1928), too, when he defended the slogan L’école active, saw Rousseau and Dewey as his own forerunner: If all life is essentially adaptational work, a reaction to the environment, in other words: activity and labor, so we have to admit that Dewey across the ocean was the fi rst pioneer for labor in school, not just for manual labor, but mainly for labor as a whole. (p. 93; freely translated here)

Reception as Activity The slight relativization of Dewey’s pioneer work that one can read in Ferrière’s words above is no coincidence. It relates to the self-confident Genevans’ own ambitions in general and to Ferrière’s in particular. Behind all the recognition of James or Dewey, we find little modesty in the arguments. The Genevans believed that they were fulfi lling the program of a ‘science of education’ that had been announced by the eminent French educationalist Gabriel Compayré in 1879 and 1881, urging that history embodies all good ideas of education—French history in the main, of course—and that all that was needed now was the evaluation of those ideas by a pedagogical psychology. This program had been highly attractive to the Genevans (Charbonnel, 1999), but they switched the chronology around somewhat. They did not evaluate historical ideas using the means of modern psychology (which would have been hardly possible anyhow); instead, they constructed a history of their own pedagogical psychology. Thus, the argumentation architecture of most of the Genevan books was similar. The books usually began with a historical look at comparable enterprises in the past in order to reinforce their own concerns and ideas, and the more renowned the educational

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“predecessors” were, the better: Rousseau and Dewey were merely ideal witnesses of their own ambitions. Ferrière (1914) was just a bit more crass in expressing his pride than his colleagues when he asked Dewey, who had stayed in the French part of Switzerland in 1914, in a letter (in French) whether he was the author of The School of Society having been published in French under the title L’école et l’enfant [School and the Child]: If this were the case, Ferrière writes, he would be delighted to welcome Dewey to Geneva, his own birthplace. And while he assures Dewey that there were “few men with whom I share so completely a philosophical and pedagogical ideal,” he names some of his own articles that cited Dewey and invites Dewey to a talk that he himself would be holding in Geneva (freely translated here).17 A similar strategy is found in his book L’école active. After having described the ideas of Dewey, Decroly, and Lighthart (the Dutch “Deweyan”), Ferrière (1928) writes: “I, myself, have also—in absolutely autonomous way—taken about the same paths as John Dewey, Decroly, Jan Lighthart, and Lay. Here you fi nd along general lines what I have been doing in practice” (p. 226; freely translated here). How little Ferrière in particular really studied Dewey becomes apparent in his comment on Dewey’s Democracy and Education in L’Éducation: Ferrière (1927) holds that Democracy and Education had been published only in 1923 (p. 274). Limiting himself to “collecting” the best ideas that Dewey’s book contains, Ferrière does little more than point out those elements that support him, e.g., his own doctrine. The word “active” or “activity” appears at least fifteen times in his seven-page long comment. Of course, Ferrière sees in Dewey the “spiritual descendent” of Rousseau as well as the exponent of European progressive education “across the ocean.” On the other hand, he does not mention any of Dewey’s critique of Rousseau, nor do we find any hint of Dewey’s idea of active adaptation that changes the circumstances, itself causing new constraints. Ferrière ignores the fundamental problem that Dewey fights against, the dualisms in both philosophy and society. When Dewey describes that in democracy the aim “culture” emanates from education beyond the two false dualistic alternative aims of “social efficiency” and “something purely ‘inner’” (Dewey, 1916/1944, p. 122), Ferrière (1927) simplifies the problem in his psycho-pedagogical view. He re-divides aim and process: “In a democracy … we have to cultivate the child’s faculty of joining voluntarily and completing the collective activities within the division of labor. This is not possible without a strong culture” (p. 276; freely translated here). Indeed, the deep confidence in the psychological basis of education and the interpretation of psychology as psychologic eclipsed to a certain extent the social and political dimension of Protestantism, much more so than we find in Dewey. When Ferrière (1927) writes that Dewey was “a philosopher rather than a psychologist, but a knowledgeable adept of childhood” (p. 274; freely translated here), we see the differences quite

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well. Dewey’s writings about (new) education that were received were closely connected with his early phase in Chicago and his Laboratory School—with the exception of Schools of Tomorrow, which he jointly wrote with his daughter Evelyn in 1915. This selection of articles by the Genevans indicates the selection of perception within these articles. Dewey’s considerations of contingency in life and the danger that democracy faced in a capitalistic society are not really appreciated in Geneva— and a book like Dewey’s (1927/1954) The Public and its Problems would have hardly been likely in Geneva. This basically psychological fundament of educational thinking steered the reception of Pragmatism in Geneva—on the basis of political and psychological reformist Protestantism that they were little aware of. The difference can be seen, for example, in the way that Dewey and Claparède responded to the political situation at the end of the 1930s. Dewey was defending American democracy by referring back to political virtues as portrayed by Thomas Jefferson in Freedom and Culture (1939) and the Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson (1940). Claparède, in contrast, shortly before his death complained of the loss [vacation] of individual righteousness in a talk titled Morality and Politics that he held before the circle called “Friends of Protestant Thinking” in Geneva and La Chaux-de-Fonds (in the Canton of Neuchâtel). Here again, education becomes the means of reinstituting these virtues. But in a naive reading of Rousseau, Claparède (1940) says: “Education means to form ‘the human’, in other words the person, to lead him to the spiritual unity characterized by the fact that the ‘higher self’ is capable of perceiving and thwarting the traps stemming from the ‘lower self’” (p. 178; freely translated here). Politically, Claparède was quite at a loss, as can be expected of someone who had a lifelong dedication to interpreting everything according to the psychological point of view and progressive education. He thus shared the langue with Pragmatism, using it when formulating his paroles, but he did not engage in conscious reflective thinking about it. But this is not the end of the story. An astonishing number of books and articles by the Genevans were translated into other languages, such as Esperanto, Romanian, Polish, English, German, Portuguese, and, by far most of all, into Italian and Spanish. It is obvious that the Genevans were widely read and appreciated, particularly in Catholic countries with rather rudimentary democratic experience (including South America). For example, Claparède’s (1905) Psychologie de l’Enfant et Pédagogie experimentale [Experimental Pedagogy and the Psychology of the Child] was already translated into Spanish in 1910 and reprinted in 1911, 1927, and 1930, and it appeared in Italian in 1934, 1936, 1971, and 1973. His Comment diagnostiquer les aptitudes chez les écoliers (1924) [How to Diagnose the Aptitude of Students] was printed in Spanish in 1924, 1927, 1933, 1959, 1961, 1964, 1967, and 1972. Ferrière’s

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(1922) L’école active —printed in English as Activity School in 1928— was published in Spanish in 1927 and 1932 and in Italian in 1939, 1947, and 1958; his Spontaneous Activity of the Child [L’activité spontanée chez l’enfant, 1922] was translated into Italian only and published in Italy in 1947, 1951, and 1970. And some of Pierre Bovet’s writings were published in Spanish in 1922, 1925, 1927 (two works), 1928, and 1934. Whether or not the translations of the Genevan books and articles stimulated scholars in the Catholic countries to read primary literature and how this ‘steered’ their active reception of Dewey, James (or Mead or Addams) is a question that cannot be answered here. ‘Transfer’ is—and here Pragmatism proved to be right—unpredictable, because it depends on the interests and activity of the receptors. The principle of activity is not logic—neither psychologic nor teleologic—but contingency. But paradoxically, the international attractiveness of the Genevan publications was based in the psychologic foundation of education that promised to fabricate a ‘modern self’ enabled to master both the opportunities and challenges of modern industry and democracy. The reduction of the active citizen to the psychological activity of child was in its core still deeply Protestant, but exactly this was difficult to recognize. To most of the educators in the world, who feared the contingent modern developments and sought for an assured basis of education, these Protestant roots remained unrecognizable because of the attractive promise of the comforting vision of well-ordered child development and, by that, of a well ordered world. They were not aware that their own reception was active and contingent, too, and that their conception of the ‘modern self’ could well differ from the vision of the ideal (and idealized) Genevan citizen. The resulting Catholic and (at best) apolitical active reading of Dewey or James or Claparède or Ferrière in Italy or Spain is neither only a sin nor only degeneration but perhaps just a bit awkward. But it shows impressively the attractiveness of Protestantism beyond its ecclesiological and theological frame. The following chapter does some archeology, investigating the origins of modern psychology and demonstrating the Protestant denominational differences in psychology.

Part III

Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung

8

The Becoming of an Educational Science The Protestant Souls and Psychologies

As mentioned in chapter 6, the fi rst president of the newly founded University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, offered his former Yale student James Hayden Tufts a job as instructor under the condition that Tufts would go to Germany to acquire a PhD. Tufts was Dewey’s collaborator in Ann Arbor at the time, but he did not hesitate. He married Cynthia Hobart Whitaker and moved to Germany, where he did some research on Kant’s teleology in Berlin and Freiburg. His dissertation was published a year later by the University of Chicago (Tufts, 1892). According to Tufts’ account in his autobiography, when he enrolled at the University of Berlin he realized that there might be a problem, for the forms contained questions about the religious denomination. Tufts (1939a) seems to have known that the denomination he belonged to, the Congregational Church, would not be known in Germany: I didn’t think ‘Congregationalist’ would mean much in Deutschland. Fortunately a friendly German solved the difficulty by two questions and a syllogism. ‘Are you Jewish?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you Roman Catholic?’ ‘No’. ‘Then you must be evangelical, for these are the only possibilities.’ (p. 1) It is not reported what Tufts decided on, but for lack of alternatives it is likely that following the unerring logic of the German clerk he decided on “evangelical,” for this denomination was at least Protestant like his own. This denominational cousinship between Lutheranism and Calvinism solved the formal problem of enrolling. However, it suggests some conformity by content that can cause errors, as we will see looking at the example of Max Weber, when he ‘read’ Calvinism with Lutheran glasses (see chapter 3). Anyhow, the transnational affi nities seemed to exist despite the crude nationalism towards the end of the nineteenth century that had not only affected the educational discourse and institutions but was borne by them, too. On both sides of the Atlantic we detect some kind of transformation of the educational thinking, which was getting ready to become

132 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung more academic and institutionally coupled to the research universities. Especially the American research universities are—if we follow the usual reading—largely a copy of the German universities, so that the parallel development of education in both countries cannot surprise us. In both countries the educational research focused on modern psychology, which had it easier getting established as an academic discipline in the universities than the field of education did: Psychology acted as institutional stirrup for education and changed education by that. The impression of a transatlantic pas de deux is reinforced by the fact that on both sides of the Atlantic, note was taken of the research on the other side. Study tours, translations, and abstract of journals were common, and the mutual influences under the leadership of the German development were considerable. However, there is one annoying phenomenon in this picture of a parallel development, namely, the fact that in the United States a psychology-based educational theory started to prevail after the turn of the century, whereas the same kind of educational theory was almost forgotten with the First World War.1 This unequal development is not a coincidence but due to broad, religiously coined cultural self-images that influenced the developments of psychology and education in both countries. These self-images affected on the one side the perception of the soul, the child, and the future citizen and on the other side the perception of what psychology, education, and political philosophy are to be. Against this background, it becomes evident how the different Protestant denominations affected the particular perceptions of the academic objects, that is, of the child, the soul, the future citizen, but also of the science of these objects—psychology, education, political philosophy. Therefore, the idea of a parallel development of education in the United States and Germany is more an illusion, similar to the alleged similarity between evangelical and Congregational denominations when Tufts was enrolling at the University of Berlin.

The Protestant Soul Wilhelm Wundt is called—correctly or not—the founder of modern experimental psychology having a strong impact on experimental and empirical research in education. Wundt had studied medicine and then switched fi rst to physiology and again to psychology, which induced the University of Zurich to offer him a full professorship in philosophy in 1874. A year later, Wundt joined the University of Leipzig, again as a full professor in philosophy. Here he opened his famous laboratory for experimental psychology in 1879, which attracted many students and scholars from all over the world and was imitated in many universities around the globe.

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Today, a career starting with medicine, changing over to physiology, then philosophy, and ending in psychology seems odd, but in the emerging process of the research universities it was rather typical. More important than Wundt’s professional discontinuity for our understanding of the emergence of experimental psychology is the fact that Wundt’s father was a Protestant minister. In isolation this fact seems to be of no importance, but the issue gets more interesting when we consider the fact that the father of the founder of the second laboratory for experimental psychology, Georg Elias Müller who founded the laboratory at the University of Göttingen in 1887, was a Lutheran minister, too. If in addition we realize that the two authors of the Weber-Fechner Law in 1860, which was of utmost importance for Wundt (Wundt, 1885c, p. 162f.; Wundt, 1920, p. 301), both had Lutheran ministers as fathers as well, as did also the founder of experimental education, Ernst Meumann, who even studied Lutheran theology himself, then the interconnectedness between Protestantism and psychology becomes tangible. The picture gets even clearer by the fact that the most prominent critic of experimental psychology in Germany, Wilhelm Dilthey with his own psychology, had a German Calvinist minister as his father and had studied Protestant theology and passed the state examination in theology. Wundt’s fi rst American student was G. Stanley Hall, who had completed his doctoral degree under the supervision of William James at Harvard University and had fi rst studied reformed theology at the Theological Seminary in New York. The fi rst American to obtain a doctorate under Wundt (in 1885) was the Unitarian minister James Thompson Bixby (1843–1921), and Wundt’s fi rst American “disciple,” who both studied and completed a doctorate (1886) under Wundt’s supervision, was James McKeen Cattell, whose father was a Presbyterian minister. Some twenty-five years had passed between the formulation of the Weber-Fechner Law in 1860 (which describes the relationship between the physical magnitudes of stimuli and the perceived intensity of the stimuli) and the fi rst American to complete his doctorate under Wundt (Cattell, 1886). This was a quarter of a century in which a field of research was established in which strikingly many sons of Lutheran, Calvinist, Presbyterian, and Unitarian ministers were active but hardly any Congregationalists (Tufts studied philosophy, and George Herbert Mead, son of a Congregational minister, who studied in 1888 under the supervision of Wundt, did not fi nish his doctoral dissertation and focused more on philosophy), Baptists, Catholics, or Jews. The exception is Hugo Münsterberg, coming from a Jewish family, who wrote his doctorate under Wundt in 1886 (the same year that Cattell did) and was invited to Harvard by James, whose father, Henry James Sr., had studied theology and was a self-confessed Swedenborgian and member of the Unitarian Church.

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In Protestantism—and here for the moment I do not differentiate between the different denominations—the human soul is of utmost importance, because according to Protestantism, salvation takes place in the soul while a person contemplatively reads the Holy Bible or prays. In contrast, in Catholicism salvation takes place during collective rituals in the context of the Holy Mother Church, whereby these rituals are directed by a holy person whose dignity is granted by higher authorities. Against this institutional conception, salvation in Protestantism is a matter of the individual soul, that is, a matter of the individual relation of the person to God with no intermediation by an institution or third person.2 The Protestant focus on the individual soul rather than on an institution gained steam by the triumph of modern sciences in the nineteenth century. In an academically accurate way, the soul was called following to its Greek origin ψυχή (psyché), and the science of the psyché was understood as λόγος (lógos) of the psyché, that is: psychology. Wundt said in 1882 that modern psychology should “take over the weapons from the mechanical natural sciences” and “examine with their exact research methods the laws of the mental life” (Wundt, 1882/1885b, p. 153; freely translated here).3 The martial rhetoric is no coincidence, for Wundt’s commitment to establishing experimental psychology faced two enemies, both of which he traced back to his favorite enemy, René Descartes. On one hand, Wundt distanced himself from—as he called it—speculative metaphysics characterized by an unmethodical, that is, intuitive introspection with no scientific value at all (Wundt, 1882/1885b, p. 134ff.). On the other hand, he dissociated from materialism, trying to replace the research on the soul by research on the human brain (“brain physiology”). Together with the materialists and against the metaphysicians, Wundt claimed that there is no cognition without sensual experience, and he did not deny that many of these experiences are retraceable in the brain, but he resisted the opinion that every perception “is stuck in a nerve cell” (Wundt, 1880/1885a, p. 114; freely translated here). It is here that the dualistic Lutheran interpretation of the world comes into play, the attempt towards an amalgam between experience as a creed of modern science and inward dignity and superiority as a creed of Lutheranism. In this spirit Wundt declares that outer and inward experiences are not identical, for it is the outer, sensual experiences that trigger the inner experiences, that is, the procedures in the soul. However, Wundt emphasizes that despite their temporal previousness, the outer experiences are not of higher value. On the contrary, Wundt (1880/1885a) assigns higher value to the inward experiences: “The objects of the outer experience have to be imbibed and impropriated and the way, how we perceive them, is throughout defi ned by the nature of our effective mental procedures” (p. 126; freely translated here). The outer objects are given to us only indirectly, namely mediated by our senses, in contrast

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to the feeling and thinking that are given immediately. For Wundt, the consequence is the (classical Lutheran) dualism between the outside and the inside: Insofar as the own feeling and thinking are stimulated by outer objects and focused on them, these objects are only of an indirect reality like all outer experiences. Our thinking and feeling are themselves the only immediate objects of our cognition. Precisely because of this it is impossible to blend the mental activities with the objects of the indirect reality. (p. 126; freely translated here) Wundt (1880/1885a) does not doubt that “mental existence” as “sole object of immediate cognition” is “more certain” than any indirect cognition. But that is not all, for Wundt expands his model to social ethics by claiming it is also ethically “more valuable.” Indeed, cognition is always triggered by outer objects, but it is clear, Wundt claims, that “we are surrounded by similar mental beings with whom we have a common striving to common moral objects. It is alone these convictions that alone that make life livable” (p. 126; freely translated here). The model used in this social ethics is not Catholic, for it lacks the institution; it is not Calvinist, for it lacks the theocracy; it is not Congregational, because there is no congregation. It is Lutheran, according to which there is a harmony of the universe with the inner soul. The conviction, Wundt follows, that our mental life is the higher life, “makes us sense the moral obligation, that the reality of the objects behind the sensual shells of our perceptions is conforms with the spiritual being, that bear in ourselves” (p. 126; freely translated here).

The Laboratory and the Protestant Soul By means of the methods of the modern sciences, Wundt, son of a Lutheran minister, wanted to understand better his Lutheran interpretation of the human soul, which might well have been the true reason behind a somewhat obscure conflict that he had with his doctoral student James Cattell, son of a Presbyterian minister, who was conducting stimulus-response experiments without considering the idea of an isolated inward life. This confl ict was solved according to the culture of a self-confident German full professor, which led Cattell to complain in a letter home, in which he claimed that Wundt preferred docile students and was unreasonable towards his own academic weaknesses. His Presbyterian parents responded with a harsh letter: You write of having found errors in some of Prof. W’s published investigations. If he is really wrong & you have discovered it, to publish this with becoming modesty when you are no longer under

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Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung his instructions will of course do you honor. Now it is dangerous ground. (…) It would be far better for you, while a student, to be as ‘docile’ as the most exacting Professor could demand. (as cited in Sokal, 1981, p. 92)

Contemporary research identifies the real conflict behind this educational tension as a conflict between Wundt’s psychology and an Americanized version of Wundt’s psychology. In both cases reaction times were investigated, but whereas Wundt aimed at measuring mental processes under controlled conditions in order to come to a better cognition of the soul, American researchers such as Edward Wheller Scripture (at Yale University) aimed at measuring reaction times of different people in different conditions such as tiredness or stress (Sokal, 1980; Fuchs & Burgdorf, 2007).4 This difference becomes evident in Cattell’s experiments, too. Together with his friend Gustav Oscar Berger, Cattell explored reaction times to different stimuli in countless serial experiments. To his parents Cattell (as cited in Sokal, 1981) wrote home: We are trying to measure the time it takes us to perform the simplest mental acts—as for example to distinguish whether a color is blue or red. At this time seems to be not more than one hundredth of a second, you can imagine this is no easy task. (p. 89) However, the test arrangements became more and more complex by measuring the effects of different stimuli on all the five senses and by combining the results. In particular, Cattell and his colleague explored how tiredness or stimulants affected the results. They tested the impact of caffeine or alcohol on reaction time, whereupon the testing of alcohol had also private motives and not only scientific ones: “I drank that alcohol partly for experiment, partly for the emotional affects, not intending to carry either as far when I began. Yesterday I suffered slightly from nausea” (p. 91). They also experienced with hashish. On October 5, 1882, at 2:30 p.m., Cattell took twelve grams of hashish and “during the afternoon I felt in excellent spirits.” On 4 November at 6:30 p.m., he took eleven grams and became thirsty, so he decided to take seventeen grams on 8 December: “I wish I could describe all effects in full, as I may not take the drug again,” he wrote, somewhat dizzy, in his diary (p. 55). On 3 April 1883, he took seventy-five grams of hashish but felt like having had two glasses of beer (p. 71), so on 16 May he really wanted to know the full effects: At 7:30 a.m. he took seventy-five grams, at 10 a.m. an additional eighty-five grams, and at 13:20 an additional forty grams. According to his diary he fell asleep: but when I awoke at 5 I was quite intoxicated. I walked home having all that hasheesh delusion, but after eating some oranges, went to

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sleep, and slept apparently normally until two. Then I got dinner & went out to the park. I was rather dazed during the evening & not in especially good conditions for work Monda. (p. 77) Probably more despite than because of all these self-experiments, which Cattell was confiding to his diary but not to his letters, he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1886, published the same year as Wundt’s Philosophische Studien. It was much smaller in scope than originally intended and contained the results of serial experiments conducted with only his friend Gustav Oscar Berger5 and Cattell himself as the participants. In silent opposition to Wundt, Cattell did not use the word “soul” but instead “brain.” Cattell’s (1886) doctoral dissertation begins as follows: The time taken up by cerebral operations cannot be directly measured. It is necessary to determine the time passing between the production of an external stimulus, which excites cerebral operations, and the making of a motion after these operations have taken place. The apparatus needed to determine this time must consist of three parts:—(1) An instrument producing a sense-stimulus to excite cerebral operations and registering the instant of its production; (2) an instrument registering the instant a motion is made, after the cerebral operations have taken place; and (3) an instrument measuring the time passing between these two events. The fi rst two instruments must vary with the sense-stimulus to be produced and the motion to be registered; to measure the times, I have used the Electric Chronoscope made by Hipp in Neuchatel. (p. 220) Psychology in this sense is measurement of inner experiences that are not dualistically opposed to outer experiences and that are therefore of no higher value. Accordingly, the American interest in Wundt declined relatively quickly. From 1910 on, Wundt is hardly mentioned in the American journals; the former interest had focused mostly on one publication, namely, the Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie (Wundt, 1874)6 (Brozek, 1980). Criticism followed a short period of enthusiasm, because the American empiricists did not want to examine the soul but variable human behavior according to different stimuli, as John B. Watson (1913) paradigmatically formulated in a journal paper titled, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it”: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods” (p. 158). With this, the precondition for the successful American Behaviorism was given. Strikingly, the actors in Behaviorism were most of all American Calvinists (originating in Presbyterian,

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Methodist, and conservative Baptist environments), whereas scholars who grew up in milieus of the liberal Calvinism transformed in England, that is, liberal Congregationalists and Baptists, criticized experimental empiricism and favored Pragmatism.

American Education and its Science: Pragmatism and Behaviorism After having completed his PhD with Wundt in Germany, Cattell—who on the advice of his ambitious mother started to call himself James McKeen Cattell in order to be distinguishable from other Cattells—went to the University of Cambridge for three years, where he was even more directed towards individual differences by Francis Galton and where he became involved with statistics. In 1889 Cattell accepted a job offer as professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a year later a job offer at Columbia College New York. Under his leadership the reputation of the psychology department at Columbia grew remarkably. Edward Lee Thorndike, son of a Methodist minister, completed a doctorate under Cattell in 1898 with a treatise on animal intelligence (Thorndike, 1898). With his later works, Educational Psychology and An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements (Thorndike, 1903, 1904), Thorndike helped to popularize empirical research methods in the educational field, whereby he tied education closely to empirical psychology and separated it completely from philosophy. This behaviorist psychology and thus empirical education fostered by Cattell at Columbia was foiled to some degree by a rather sensational deal Cattell made in 1904, when he hired John Dewey, who was unsatisfied with the president of the University of Chicago. Whereas Dewey was situated at the Columbia’s department of philosophy, Thorndike was at the teacher’s college affiliated with Columbia. The punch line is that since the middle of the 1890s Dewey7 had belonged to the prominent critics of stimulus-reaction psychology. What was Dewey’s argument against Wundt and his school? In his 1896 paper, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Dewey had discussed the fundamental assumption of experimental psychology—namely, the notion stemming from physiology that there is a reflex arc of sensory stimulus, nervous and muscular activity, and physical reaction. Dewey criticized the notion for being dualistic and because it neglected the conditions under which stimuli arose. It can be decisive, for example, whether a flash of light occurs at night in a dark cemetery or if we are exposed to a series of flashes of light in a laboratory or in a thunderstorm. Dewey’s point here is that the disposition of the reaction, which is given by the context, in a certain sense has an effect already prior to the stimulus. For this reason, says Dewey (1896), stimulus and reaction cannot be viewed as “separate and com-

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plete entities in themselves” but rather “as divisions of labor, functioning factors, within the single concrete whole” (p. 40). Here Dewey is not criticizing the methods of experimental psychology per se but instead their fundamental assumption of the physiological reflex arc, which was not suited for describing “the whole act, a sensori-motor coordination,” the “circle” that in fact occurs with psychological processes (pp. 43, 45). Against this background, Dewey developed a fundamentally different philosophy of education in the context of the democratic convictions of a liberal Congregational culture, essentially believing in the fundamental meaning of human interaction. It was this idea of community that— against the background of phenomena and crisis of modernity in the big cities around 1890—became educational (see chapter 6 in this volume and Tröhler, 2010a). Thorndike’s departure was completely different. Thorndike could not make anything of the liberal Congregational ideal of an interactive community as expression of democracy; he found Dewey’s ideas simply incomprehensible (Lagemann, 2000, p. 57), and in his books Principles of Teaching Based on Psychology (Thorndike, 1906) and Educational Psychology (Thorndike, 1914), the notion of democracy is simply inexistent. In the linguistic constructed world of Thorndike, stimuli existed, and differently gifted people dealt with these stimuli, so reactions are different. Accordingly, to Thorndike (1906) questions of education have more to do with (physiological) psychology than with philosophy: The sciences of biology, especially human physiology and hygiene, give the laws of changes in bodily nature. The science of psychology gives the laws of changes in intellect and character. The teacher studies and learns to apply psychology to teaching for the same reason that the progressive farmer studies and learns to apply botany; the architect, mechanics; or the physician, physiology and pathology. (p. 7) Individual nature, not democratic culture, is the scope of Thorndike’s thinking: “What anyone becomes by education, depends on what he is by nature. Teaching is the utilization of natural tendencies for ideal ends” (p. 34). Thorndike describes these ideal aims, however, rather monosyllabically: Education as a whole should make human beings wish each other well, should increase the sum of human energy and happiness and decrease the sum of discomfort for the human beings that are or will be, and should foster the higher, impersonal pleasures. (p. 3) Compared to the ambitions and aspirations of Dewey and his Congregational colleagues in Chicago, this sounds quite modest. In the following

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years, Thorndike conducted countless experiments, interpreting the results by means of statistics and trying thereby to give education a true scientific background. This undertaking was very popular at the time, especially in teacher education, and certainly more attractive than the seemingly unclear philosophies of education by Mead or Dewey. Mead and Dewey latter tried to formulate an educational concept in terms of democracy and hoped to strengthen their vision of democracy by education, whereas Thorndike hoped to identify learning effects statistically. Thorndike (1914) took it for granted that improvements of the learning effects would help societal development as a whole: The arts and sciences serve human welfare by helping man to change the world, including man himself, for the better. The word education refers especially to those elements of science and art which are concerned with changes in man himself. (p. 1) This understanding of education became dominant in the United States and most of all in school administration, whereas Pragmatism took the role of school critic, a role that has accompanied school development ever since. However, what was seen as good research that is useful for the development of the school were the large-scale assessments with their probabilistic statements and no lamentations about the drifting apart of social classes hindering the mutual exchange and interaction, isolating experiences and rendering them futile for democracy. Here we have the background of the drift apart in the educational field that David Tyack effectually labeled as tension between “administrative progressivism” and “pedagogical progressivism” (Tyack, 1974; see Labaree, 1995, 2010). To be clear, democracy was not questioned by Thorndike and his colleagues, but it was just not in the scope of educational research. “To change the world for the better” meant the strengthening of the human intellect, character, and skills through empirically tested educational measures, without claiming the almightiness of education. The difference between this experimental/empirical understanding and the Pragmatist understanding of educational research could turn out to be dramatic, as we can see in the example of Charles Hubbard Judd, Dewey’s successor as head of the Department of Education at the University of Chicago, son of Methodist missionaries, and Wundt’s doctoral student (from 1894 to 1896). Judd dropped from the department a philosophy of education course that had been taught by Mead, son of a Congregational minister (see Lagemann, 2000, p. 69).8 On the other side, the enthusiasm that Wundt’s physiological psychology had been able to engender in the 1870s even among the later Pragmatists was eclipsed by the perceived slow and uninteresting results in the early 1890s. The Genevan psychologist Flournoy (see chapter 7) complained in December, 1892, to his friend and colleague William James

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about “my laboratory, which bores me more and more” and said that the results “accomplish nothing worthwhile” (Flournoy, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 17); and James confi rmed that Wundt’s time was over and that he should be retired (James, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 20). Three years later, in 1895, Flournoy began to suffer because his laboratory was “becoming a fi xed, morbid idea, a real phobia with me” (Fluornoy, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 45). In 1896, James’s judgment was clear: “The results that come from all this laboratory work seem to me to grow more and more disappointing and trivial” (as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 61). Accordingly, James got excited when his laboratory got destroyed by a fi re. He expressed his relief in a letter to Flournoy, in December, 1896: “I have got rid of the laboratory forever, and should resign my place immediately if they reimposed its duties upon me” (James, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 61). In the same letter, James advised Flournoy “simply to drop it [the laboratory] and teach what you prefer” (James, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 61). Flournoy’s answer was accordingly: “I followed your advice and neglected the laboratory a great deal this winter—it is so easy and pleasant to follow advice which falls in line with one’s own natural indolence” (Flournoy, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 66). But the transatlantic reformed Calvinist skepticism towards empirical psychology (and education) was not the only opposition; in Germany there was another opposition, which was more in line with Lutheranism and its ideal of Bildung.

German Education and its Science: Geisteswissenschaftliche vs. Empirical Education The developments in Germany were completely different than in the United States. Indeed, there was criticism of Wundt as well, and the most prominent critic was Wilhelm Dilthey, son of a German Calvinist minister and one year younger than Wundt. In the paper, “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” [Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology], Dilthey (1894/1957) presented a concise summary of the objections to the new experimental psychology that he had made years before. Experimental psychology claimed to explain the appearance of all psychic phenomena by means of the hypothesis of causal explanation, for which reason the same methods were used that physics or chemistry employed to explain the physical world. The ideal in that method was actually derived from atomistic physics, wrote Dilthey, and accordingly, experimental psychology sought to subordinate psychic phenomena to a system of causality by means of a limited number of well-determined elements (p. 158). Dilthey (1894/1957) calls that kind of psychology ‘explanative psychology,’ because—as in the stimulus-reaction model—it causally attributes phenomena to other phenomena. Similar to Dewey two years later,

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Dilthey raises the question here of whether this natural scientific model can be applied to the human spirit—and says no. Any explanative psychology, says Dilthey, starts out from hypotheses that cannot exclude other possibilities, so that no less than in metaphysics, in explanative psychology there is an anarchy of hypotheses, one fighting the other (p. 142). Nothing makes it possible to support any one of the hypotheses fighting for predominance. Moreover, due to the fundamental irreconcilability of the metaphysical problem of the relation of body and soul, complete certainty of causal understanding can never be achieved. Owing to the impossibility of supporting the hypotheses through experimental testing of the facts of the mind, Dilthey comes to his overall unsatisfactory appraisal of experimental psychology: “Hypotheses! It is all only hypotheses” (p. 143; freely translated here). As opposed to explanative psychology’s use of hypotheses following the model of the natural sciences, Dilthey defended the claim of the human sciences, or Geisteswissenschaften, to use their own methods to access the object of study, the human spirit, or soul. According to Dilthey (1894/1957), whereas for the natural sciences the object of research was outer experience, facts that in consciousness come from the outside, as phenomena and individually given (“welche im Bewusstsein als von aussen, als Phänomene und einzeln gegeben auftreten”; p. 143), the object of the human sciences was inner experience, facts that come from the inside out, as a reality and the lived experience, a given psychic nexus lying at the root of all human sciences phenomena (“von innen, als Realität und als ein lebendiger Zusammenhang originaliter”; p. 143). As a result, the natural sciences were indeed to be found only through additional conclusions, the nexus in outer experience being ascribed to nature, the result of hypothetical construction (“nur durch ergänzende Schlüsse, vermittels einer Verbindung von Hypothesen, im Zusammenhang der Natur”; p. 143). But the nexus experienced in inner experience is always already given and thus does not need to be sought, constructed, and explained, but instead “just” understood. And here Dilthey comes to the most frequently cited sentence in his work: “We explain nature, we understand psychic life” (p. 144; freely translated here). The experienced nexus (as a coherent whole) comes fi rst; the distinguishing of the individual parts of it follows after. And the pertinent and distinguished method of understanding (the spiritual world) was hermeneutics, which Dilthey tried to develop in the tradition of the hermeneutics by Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, son of a reformed minister and a Protestant theologian himself. Against this background of an inward/outside dualism, geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik emerged, as described in chapter 9. The crucial focus was the inward soul of the individual and its determination was Bildung; the important aspect was not knowledge but ethos, not teaching and learning but the “educational relation.” The social dimension

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of education was almost without relevance; multiple mutual exchanges of experience and democracy were anathema. If there were any political aspects, often they were racial (völkisch) and always anti-democratic. On both sides of the Atlantic, empirical education was seen as thirdclass, but the American critique of empirical education, Pragmatism, was viewed as utilitarian and therefore as un-German. Without the idea of a spirit (Geist), which in Germany was always Lutheran, no educational theory could gain broader acceptance. In contrast to the United States, in Germany the critics of empirical education gained dominance by referring to the Lutheran interpretation of the soul and its telos, “Bildung” (on the origin of the idea of Bildung, see Horlacher, 2004). To be sure, the ambitions of the actors of the empirical education were all but irreligious. The most famous exponent of empirical education in Germany, Ernst Meumann (he, too, had studied Lutheran theology), saw education as a “sacred duty,” by which the young person would come to its “individual personality in its own idiosyncrasy” (Meumann, 1911, p. 184; 1914, p. 8; freely translated here). In his autobiography Meumann claimed to have lived “without religion” and wrote that he desired to die “without religion, too,” but he then narrated his life in a Lutheran language: “My life was a hard wrestle for cognition, purification of my personality, and inward freedom” (Meumann, as cited in Hopf, 2004, p. 142; freely translated here). Meumann’s great adversary, Wilhelm August Lay, who had no academic degree, used the same language. Lay (1910) claimed that he had committed himself to “the educational idea in the highest sense, for the ideal of pure humanity, for the kingdom of God on earth” (p. 640), and he conceptualized his “organic curriculum” around the terms “religion and Weltanschauung” (Lay, as cited in Hopf, 2004, p. 133; freely translated here). Beyond the epistemological quarrels, the German intellectuals shared the Lutheran language, as can be seen in the example of Ernst Weber, an educational progressivist. Weber realized the promise of salvation by the empirical educationalists and warned: “Not everyone is a savoir who pretends to be Messiah. The Gospel is being sermonized, whose core thesis, if we hear it the fi rst time, lights up our soul like a flash of lightning” (Weber, as cited in Hopf, 2004, p. 258; freely translated here). Hence, the criticism of empiricism was not its focus on the soul but that this kind of research on the soul “left the heart cold,” so that the “real life of the soul of the child” was untraceable (Weber, as cited in Hopf, 2004, p. 258; freely translated here). In other words, the normative assumptions of examining the soul, the child, or the citizen as well as the alleged antagonism between the individual and the society, were similar on both sides of the debate—the real difference was about the scientific method and its scope. This normative partisanship was the reason why Behaviorism never developed in Germany.

144 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung In this intellectual milieu the perception that empirically tested technologies could be used for progress was not assertive; even the notion of progress raised skepticism. The eminent German Protestant theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch said in 1917: I defend myself against the idea of constituting education from the point of view of psychology; instead I constitute education from the history of teaching, research on institutions, and cultural philosophy. Psychology can neither comprehend the given system of education, for it is a historical-political fact, nor can she comprehend the ideal of education and the ideal of culture. (Troeltsch, as cited in Drewek, 1996, p. 300f.; freely translated here) According to Troeltsch, psychology claims aims with regard to the school system that are directed towards progress and democracy and are therefore to be rejected: Here the educational system is being placed in the service of so-called sociological and social psychological progress aiming at equity in education for all and at utilitarian enhancement for the masses. This is the real leadership of the manifold demands of psychology, being in truth hidden metaphysics and a utilitarian doctrine of progress. (Troeltsch, as cited in Drewek, 1996, p. 300f.; freely translated here) Only two years before that, Eduard Spranger had labeled Dewey’s pragmatism as “kitchen and handyman utilitarianism” that had to be countered by the (German) “theory of the ideal Bildung” (Spranger, 1915/1966b, p. 37; see chapter 9).

Education and Lutheranism, Liberal Calvinism, and Presbyterianism Modern experimental psychology, which began with sons of Lutheran ministers in Germany, won supremacy in the U.S. context of Presbyterianism, and psychology in the Geisteswissenschaften, which gained supremacy in Germany, was first formulated by a son of a German Calvinist minister as a criticism of experimental psychology, and it was deeply embedded in a Lutheran culture or language. On the other hand, Pragmatism, which criticized experimental psychology in the United States, did not win supremacy, but it did not eclipse as did the inferior empirical psychology and education in Germany. And it shared with the latter hardly any fundaments, as I will show in this last section of the chapter. American Protestantism is basically egalitarian, communal, and in this sense democratic. If we take a look at James Hayden Tufts’ auto-

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biography, the difference from the German opposition to empirical psychology becomes evident. Tufts describes how in former times there had been discussions about the future of the American colleges and more precisely on the question whether or not the American system should adapt to the German system or go its own way. Tufts’ plea for an American system is symptomatic, for it is said to effect the favored “interfusion between professional and other classes,” or in other words democracy, quite contrary to the German university, which possibly might generate pure research but causes an unwanted “separation of professional from other groups” (Tufts, 1939b, p. 1). The Americans had never been unworldly scholars but socially engaged professors who were involved with their environment. Accordingly, their research subjects were the working conditions of the employees or the living situations of city residents, and professors sat in arbitration committees to help the underprivileged. Similar phenomena cannot be reported from Germany. In the eyes of German scholars, the ideal educational philosophy was exactly anti-utilitarian, headed towards totality of the individual and the nation (see chapter 9) and opposed to the differentiation of the sciences. They believed themselves to be founded by the philosophy of antiquity and German idealism, and accordingly, access to the university preparation high school (Gymnasium) was basically limited to higher social classes, and all through the nineteenth century, Greek, Latin, and religion made up 50 percent of the curriculum of this university prep school; by 1900 German as a school subject was taught proportionately more, at the cost of foreign languages (Tröhler, 2009b). A dominant cultural Lutheranism, as it emerged in the context of the growing nationalism after 1871 (Müller, 1992), turned the philosophical faculties of the universities—with their carefully pre-selected elitist, German-nationalist personnel committed to the idea of Bildung—into a fortress against experimental or empirical education (Schwenk, 1977; Drewek, 1996; Hopf, 2004). They could never get rid of the adjective “utilitarian” that against the ideological background of the German intelligentsia could only be pejorative. The fact that the German empiricists networked with their colleagues abroad did not help them, quite the contrary. The Western world was seen as materialistic, which was quite often equated with democracy, and democracy was to many intellectuals, in the words of Thomas Mann (1918/1993), a “traitor to the Cross” (p. 419) (see also chapter 9 of this volume). In contrast, Bismarck was celebrated as a second Luther, and Mann (1918/1993) postulated in 1918 the need for a leader (Führer), a great man of German provenance, who would put an end to the humbug democracy (pp. 231, 358). Accordingly, a few years later Spranger concluded that dictatorship was the logical consequence of democracy as seen in Russia and Italy. However, Spranger (1926/1928) supported the Italian dictatorship (Mussolini), for it had brought a “sort of redeemer”

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to the top of the country, for “Who ever has the great idea of the state, the real leader (Führer), should govern. It is the idea that is of utmost importance” (p. 30; freely translated here). The idea of mutual exchange, deliberation, and reconstruction of knowledge by new experience had to be more than alien in this linguistic and ideological framework. The difference becomes even more evident when we take a look at another passage in Tuft’s autobiography. Tufts (1939b) describes how Hugo Münsterberg, who after completing a doctorate under Wundt was invited to Harvard by William James, was interested in American politics. Münsterberg asked Tufts about the difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties. Tufts mentioned the question of the import tariffs, highly disputed during the election campaign in 1892 (Grover Cleveland won). Münsterberg mentioned in his answer that in Germany, experts were to decide about questions like that and not political parties. Tufts (1939b) reported: And then came this question which was so revealing as to the gulf between German and American thinking. ‘Do I understand then,’ said he [Münsterberg], “that both parties are in favor of the republic?’ I assured him that this was the case. I did not then expect the day to come in my lifetime when one party would charge the other with designs to abandon the republic in favor of dictatorship. (p. 12) Tufts wrote these lines at the end of his life, in the late 1930s, which allowed him to bring the differences to the point. Regardless of Tufts’ mental acuity, it becomes evident how dominant Protestantism was when the Western world crossed the threshold to modernity during the nineteenth century: It dominated visions of the child, the soul, and the future citizen. The different denominations of Protestantism were decisive for the different fates of empirical psychology and education in the United States and in Germany. Whereas the successful Behaviorism took democracy for granted and refrained from explicit educational promises of salvation—they were pragmatic in the common perception—the inferior Pragmatists defended a vision of democracy that was more closely tied to the ideal of the eighteenth-century communities than to modern mass societies. Accordingly, they rejected the idea of experts (Grube, 2010) and were skeptical towards modern democratic institutions (Tröhler, 2010a). As did Lay in Germany, the Pragmatists hoped for a Kingdom of God on earth, which, however, would have been different from the one that Lay had in mind. In the meantime Behavorism was successfully promising a society based on experts and on expertise. John B. Watson—who had completed his doctorate under John Rowland Angell and John Dewey in Chicago—wrote self-confidently in 1924: “It is the business of behavioristic psychology to be able to predict and to control human activity. To

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do this it must gather scientific data by experimental methods (Watson, 1924/1925, p. 11). Like Dewey, Watson did not grow up as the son of a Protestant minister, but like Dewey (and Piaget, by the way) he did have a most devout Protestant mother (“a fiercely devout Baptist”) and was socialized in the context of the Southern Baptist Convention (South Carolina), in which the liberal Protestant theology that had affected the Northern Protestants had no effects whatsoever. His mother’s dearest wish was that her son John Broadus, who was named after John Albert Broadus, a prominent South Carolina Baptist theologian and minister who became president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky , would one day receive the call to preach the Gospel (Buckley, 1989, p. 4). Unlike Dewey, Watson aimed at controlling and predicting developments. In his essay, “Practical and Theoretical Problems in Instinct and Habits,” Watson (1917) stated that “most of our biological and psychological problems now center in the processes of growth and development in particular organisms, and especially around the methods of predicting, controlling, and regulating such development” (p. 53) and defi ned psychology as basically the “study of behavior.” The problem of both the schoolroom and the laboratory is to detect the instinctive capacities of an individual and what he “can be trained to do,” and the methods that will “lead him most easily and quickly to do both those things which society demands of him and the things which he also as an individual can do” (p. 54). As soon as psychologists have found the laws of the human soul, educators, or educational experts, are able to form the human being they want to: “It is what happens to individuals after birth that makes one a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, another a diplomat, a thief, a successful business man or a far-famed scientist” (Watson, 1925, p. 217). Even if Behaviorist promises were exaggerated, Behaviorism was highly attractive to the leaders of the modern mass democracies of the twentieth century. It opposed the intangible Lutheran idea of Bildung, it set a limit to the alleged dubiety of Pragmatism, and it suggested feasibility. However, it took the experiences of the Second World War and the role of technological experts for the idea of expertise to become dominant in the United States, and in the form of cognition psychology, Behaviorist psychology lived on. Together with the cult of expertise, it fit optimally into the ideology fi rst of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEED) and then of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (starting in 1960) (see Tröhler, 2010b).

9

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik and the Ideology of Bildung

As seen in chapter 8, in Germany after 1900 an educational doctrine started to prevail that was called geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik. It was opposed to experimental and empirical approaches in educational research. This educational language affects—at least to some degree— the educational thinking in Germany up until today, as can be seen in the concluding chapter of this book. The network of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik triumphed around 1925 in the second half of the Weimar Republic on the basis of various successful strategies (in organizational, institutional, and literature/journalistic areas): • the establishment of education as one of the humanities in the philosophical faculties of the universities and, with this, the rejection of education as an empirical science;1 • the dominance of geisteswissenschaftlich discourse in educational journals, foremost in the journal Erziehung, which was put out by the Mandarins of geisteswissenschaftlicher Pädagogik: Aloys Fischer, Theodor Litt, Herman Nohl, Eduard Spranger, and Wilhelm Flitner (the editors of the journal); • the codification of the knowledge of the field in manuals, such as the Handbuch für Pädagogik; • the bundling of scientific studies in the series edited by Herman Nohl, the Göttinger Studien (1923–1939; 32 vols.); • the series of textbooks edited by Elisabeth Blochman, Herman Nohl, and Erich Weniger, the Kleine pädagogische Texte (1930– 1973; 43 vols.).2 As to content, the strategies were based on historical constructions like the following: • the Deutsche Bewegung, or German Romantic Movement, around 1800, with its ideal of Bildung. The geisteswissenschaftliche educationalists held in unison that Johann Gottfried Herder represented the starting point and Johann Gottlieb Fichte the acme of

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik 149 the Movement. Eduard Spranger (and many others) constructed Wilhelm von Humboldt as the theoretician of this Movement (Spranger, 1910); • an interpretation of the diverse and varying streams of thought in progressive education that homogenizes them into something that is taken to be the precursor of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik. From the normative perspective, the geisteswissenschaftlich language of education bases upon: • a philosophical orientation towards Lutheran metaphysics, the metaphysical view of Geist; • a political orientation towards German Romanticism and, therefore, skepticism regarding democracy; • skepticism about modernity as a whole and modern science(s) in particular; • the assertion of the autonomy of education from social, economic, and political contexts.

Dualisms In the early 1920s, Alfred Vierkandt, one of the founding fathers of the German Sociological Association, published Der Dualismus im modernen Weltbild (Vierkandt, 1923). Vierkandt (1923) wrote that, based on predecessors Hegel and Schopenhauer, modern thought from 1900 had undergone a shift from the old, theistic Weltanschauung to a “dualistic” worldview (p. 5ff.). The new way of thinking broke away from rationalism and turned to life (Leben), which is characterized by central dualisms between “an animalistic-biological world and a world of the spirit or soul (Geist)” (p. 6). Despite the fact that the soul world had its own laws, it was also casually determined by the conditions of the empirical world, because Weltanschauungen are always “personal forms of a general view that is collective in nature”—or in other words, discourse as I use it here. Vierkandt went on to say that the dualism of the time was expressed in philosophy, art, culture, and spiritual life. He then distinguished between a higher and lower stage of human being, between culture and civilization, the rationalism of pure reason and the rationalism of understanding, individualism as autonomy within society and individualism as a “state of atomistic disintegration and decomposition” (p. 87ff.; freely translated here). Vierkandt’s analysis of contemporary, and foremost German, thought was very accurate, as is shown by the development of geisteswissenschaftliche education, which is indeed based on dualistic thinking. The dualisms show up in concentrated form in an essay by Herman Nohl in 1926, “Die Einheit der Pädagogischen Bewegung” [The unity of

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the educational movement] (Nohl, 1926), which is probably the shortest, most succinct summary of the geisteswissenschaftlich doctrine as expression of a Lutheran language of education. The dualisms are: • Empiricism and Geist; • Plurality and Unity; • Outward and Inward. The juxtaposition is between plural, external reality versus the inward unity of Geist, or mental-internal unity. This distinction is descriptive as well as normative, because it favors the inward unity of Geist, and it is not original. It was already discussed in the context of eighteenthcentury Enlightenment thinking in Germany, in the German Romantic Movement. In the essay, Nohl examines the debates on education law that were unleashed at the School Conference (Reichsschulkonferenz) of the Weimar Republic in 1920. He writes that the chaos, tumult, disunity, and inconsistency of the debates reflect broader political and social debates and appear to suggest that, in a Platonic sense, there is no internal coherency to them. Even if we go beyond all politically motivated discourse, says Nohl, there still remains a multitude of educational movements that appear to be just as incompatible. If we look at these reform movements merely from the outside, all that we perceive is an “educational revolution” that falls apart into seemingly independent concepts. Nohl calls this a false, “external” conclusion that he counters with the following apodictic hypothesis: If these diverse educational movements represent something that is true and alive, then there must be an ultimate unity among them. The notion of truth that Nohl mentions refers to the idea of truth in German philosophy at the time; it is non-empirical and stands in explicit contrast to the pragmatic idea of knowledge as dependent upon experience. The contemporary conception of life (Leben), which was common by 1900, was also not empirical as it is in modern science but instead expressed the notion of the mysticholistic experience of life, which Wilhelm Dilthey, Nohl’s teacher, had contrasted against the natural sciences. The unity that Nohl (1926) proposes to discern in the diverse reform movements from 1900 onwards is the “unity of a new ideal of the German man” (p. 58; freely translated here). This not only homogenizes the multifarious forms of progressive education, but also narrows them down nationally. Nohl thus trims and cuts progressive education to allow it to be utilized for the development of a national doctrine of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik. The dualistic thought schema was virulent not only among German educationalists and philosophers. Probably no one at the time put more concisely the nationalistic loading of dualism than the highly regarded novelist and essayist Thomas Mann, who identified the German character with a spiritual-apolitical attitude. Mann wrote that the difference

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik 151 between Geist and politics encompasses the difference between culture and civilization, soul and society, freedom and the right to vote, art and literature. For Mann, Germanness is culture, soul, freedom, art and not civilization, society, the right to vote, literature (Mann, 1918/1993, p. 23; see also pp. 160ff., 240, 248). Mann and others criticized Western democracy and capitalism—fi rst and foremost, however, American democracy and capitalism, which were seen to epitomize both of these “un-German” movements (Kamphausen, 2002). Mann (1918/1993) even viewed democracy as identical with materialism or capitalism (pp. 233, 346),3 and he attacked all three, noting that politics in general was “un-German” or even “hostile to Germany” (pp. 21ff., 29, 256, 268), because the Germans, in their philosophy of life, were a “Folk of life” (pp. 76, 181ff.). To Mann this notion of life was the most German, most Goethe-like, and in a religious sense, the very highest conservative notion, whereas democracy stood in contradiction to Christianity and was a traitor to the Cross (p. 419). With this, Mann is representative of the mainstream of the German academic community, which was, according to Fritz K. Ringer, in a state of decline from 1890 to 1933 (Ringer, 1969). Another mainstream voice is Werner Sombart, sociologist and national economist, who described the First World War as a war between the commercial and the heroic ethos (Sombart, 1915, p. 5) and the West as having the soul of the petty shopkeeper, whereas Germans had the soul of the warrior. This dualistic comparison was commonplace at the time and was used practically word-for-word by the German philosopher Max Scheler (Scheler, 1915, p. 94ff.). What is remarkable is that Germany was the leading economic power in Europe at the time of the First World War. Nevertheless, only the states to the West were reproached with materialism. This discrepancy between German economic prosperity and German ideology, or between matter and Geist, was not due to a lack of knowledge about Germany’s national economic potency, however. Instead, the contradiction was consciously nullified by a further dualism, inward purity and outward corruption. This shows up clearly in the work of Rudolf Eucken, New Idealist philosopher of life (Lebensphilosophie) and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eucken acknowledges that Germany—like France, England, or America—had experienced tremendous economic growth in the nineteenth century. The crucial difference according to Eucken (1914), however, is that this development did not corrupt the Germans’ true character: Have we then fallen away from our own selves when we turned to the visible world, when we developed our forces on land and water, when we took the lead in industry and technology? Have we thus denied our true, inner nature? (p. 8; freely translated here)

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Eucken asks this, only to respond, “No and once again no!” (p. 8). That true nature, which according to Eucken differentiates the Germans from the rest of the nations, is an inner spiritual life, which was originally religious and through the course of history came to characterize the whole of German life and thought. German philosophy, Eucken says, is essentially different from all other philosophies; it is not merely selforientation in the given world, but rather a bold attempt to understand the world from inside ourselves; it creates great masses of thought, monumental systems, and with these systems it attempts to penetrate the visible world, and even to turn it into an invisible one (p. 12ff.). Eucken believed, with Thomas Mann, that this spiritual inner life could be seen in German art and particularly in music (Eucken, 1914, p. 13). Mann (1918/1993) sees art, dualistically, as the opposite of politics (p. 301) and Germanness, or the Germanic character, as equivalent to art (pp. 106, 129). Music and the German character became welded together with the music of Martin Luther; music became a form of morals (p. 311). For Mann, art is the expression of Bildung, which is a term coined by Goethe and particular only to the Germans (p. 497) that refers to the cultivation, the forming of the inner spiritual life of man (p. 249). It is thus no surprise that Mann sent his children to Landerziehungsheime, the country schools founded by German educators based on the concepts of progressive education,4 or Reformpädagogik, which in Germany emerged from pietistic motives (Osterwalder, 1988) on a religious basis (Baader, 2002). It was in this context that Eduard Spranger, professor of education and philosophy in Berlin and a prominent member of the geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, belittled John Dewey’s work, which he reduced to education that was merely economic and technical. Spranger (1815/1966a) assessed this as vastly inferior to the “latitude (breadth) of German education” (p. 30). For Spranger, Dewey’s work represented—in stark contrast to the higher ends woven into the German mind—a despicable kitchen and handyman utilitarianism that had to be countered by the “theory of the ideal Bildung” (p. 37).

The Construction of Two Totalities: Inner Personhood and National Volksstaat In Germany, the resistance to empiricism in combination with a tendency that Dewey rejected as the Quest for Certainty (Dewey, 1929) led to two analogous notions of totality or wholeness. Mann (1918/1993), writing on belief, once again offers a concise formulation of the way in which the empirical social dimension was marginalized in favor of the moral perfecting of both the individual and the nation as a religious vision: The “personal ethos” is primary, preceding the social ethos (p. 518). Man is not a mere social being, for he is also—in a dualistic manner—a metaphysical one. For that reason man is not merely indi-

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik 153 vidual, but more importantly “personhood” (Persönlichkeit) (p. 240), which meant an inward spiritual life that arose through effort and selfcultivation, or Bildung (we will fi nd the exactly same argument in the German opposition to the PISA survey in chapter 12). Here Mann uses a concept that was also central in liberal Lutheran theology regarding salvation from the deep fi n de siècle crisis. The concept of Persönlichkeit was highly attractive to the educationalists, and it became popular through a widely received book, Die Persönlichkeits-Pädagogik, written in 1897 by Ernst Linde, one of the opponents of Herbartianism (Linde, 1897). Mann (1918/1993) writes that man is not only a social being but also a metaphysical being, the German being a metaphysical fi rst of all (p. 274). In addition to inward personhood, however, the nation, or the “emergence of nationality from religious elements, the national idea as a religion,” also takes precedence over the political and social dimensions of man (p. 518; freely translated here). Because the Absolute cannot be politicized, writes Mann, it is important to follow Kant and separate and distinguish spiritual, national life from the political sphere (p. 262) and to speak not of democracy but of Volksstaat, (pp. 237, 263) or the ethnic nation, the community that shares an ethos. The solidarity of all such spirits is itself, however, not a product of the mind, but rather solidarity that emerges “organically” from the homogeneity of the form of being (p. 314). In agreement with Mann, Sombart writes that each individual person can perfect himself only in the framework of the typical characteristics of his folk (Sombart, 1915, p. 113). Marianne Weber, wife of the famous sociologist Max Weber, writes in 1916 about the outbreak of the war that everyone felt lifted out of themselves as they became one with the greater whole (Weber, 1919, p. 158). The grudge was directed against democratic plurality and the “leveling, atomizing spirit of the Enlightenment, against the sciences that were becoming differentiated and specialized and their international dimension” (Langbehn, 1891, pp. 1ff.; freely translated here). True individuality is not the individuality shown by persons who seek their own advantages, writes Sombart (1915, p. 113), but rather by the German who serves Germanness (Langbehn, 1891, p. 5), who has been raised to “heroic idealism” (Sombart, 1915, p. 113). Western democracy is seen as an atomistic “aggregate of individuals” and juxtaposed against the German concept of Nation, which is “a folk community composing a unity,” the “deliberate organization of something transcending individuals,” to which single individuals (Sombart, 1915, p. 76; freely translated here) who are Persönlichkeiten (who have cultivated personhood), belong as parts. Sombart (1915) concludes that in addition to this orientation towards the concept of the whole, the fact that there should be a continuing, fi rm commitment to raise strong, unique, self-contained personalities, who are after all the most wonderful credit to the Volk, is self-understood (p. 126). For

154 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung Eucken, the principle of the inner spiritual life as the “whole of personality” is what gives the Germans their “world historical importance” (Eucken, 1914, p. 22), for it forms the “last dam holding back the mud slide of commercialism” (Sombart, 1915, p. 145; freely translated here). Exploring the soul of the Germans, the philosopher Paul Natorp (1918) distinguishes “true” or “full,” e.g., “German individuality” from the merely contingent individuality that he associates with particularity (p. 52). Natorp thus stigmatizes the West as “civilization” and “society,” while the Germans alone are considered to be a Volk of “culture” and “Gemeinschaft” (community) (p. 55). According to Natorp, democracy in Germany means something different than in all other nations. To the Germans democracy is not connoted with multiplicity or plurality, but with the “allness of the Volk comrades.” Only such an understanding deserves to be called “true democracy,” demanding social economy and social education, whereas he names Pestalozzi, the “essentially German Swiss” (p. 131) as an antetype. Whatever seemed to fit into the German national ideology was adapted and interpreted as German; whatever seemed to be foreign was strictly rejected: Internationalization? The devil with it (…) We understand all foreign peoples, yet none understand us, and none can understand us (…) They do not understand us, but they sense our vast spiritual/mental superiority. (…) So let us Germans in our times go through the world proudly, with heads held high, in the secure understanding that we are the folk of God. (Sombart, 1915, p. 132; freely translated here)

Völkisch (National) Totality as the Fertile Ground for the Forming of the Personality A decidedly nationalist education theory in Germany goes back to the year 1806, the end of the “Holy Empire” through Napoleon. Nationalist in the German-language realm in the 1800s meant education directed to a community, an ethnic folk, bound by a shared language and customs. For the Germans, the Nation was not the real state, the German Reich, but rather the linguistic cultural community. It was no coincidence that after 1890, the works of Fichte, Arndt, and Jahn, the most prominent representatives of that educational tradition, were now once again being widely read and cited, but this time in a more pronounced nationalistic context, where völkisch came to connote the specific German folk and was often linked with Anti-Semitism. This development can be illustrated quite graphically in the changes in the way that national holidays were staged and presented to educate the Volk. National celebrations at the Hermann monument in 1841, 1875, and 1909 serve as an example. Hermann is the falsely Germanized name for Armin, the Cheruscan prince who defeated Roman legions at the Battle

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik 155 of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 a.d. This legendary defeat effectively cast the Romans out of Germania. The historian Tacitus honored Armin in the Annals as the liberator of Germania; ever since, “Hermann” has been the most famous figure of early German history. In 1909, the 1900year anniversary of the battle was celebrated. In contrast to the national celebrations of 1841 and 1875, this particular occasion served, as historian Charlotte Tacke (1993) discovered, the “propagation of national and völkisch ideologies” (p. 209) by portraying a harmonious and distorted picture of early German history and deliberately refraining from including contemporary political statements (p. 212). Earlier national celebrations of Hermann had emphasized visions of societal coexistence; in 1909, however, the point was to plant in the people’s imagination the idea of a historically legitimate national society that should no longer be seen as bound by geo-spatial borders (p. 214). And, in contrast to the two earlier national celebrations, this time there was involvement of the rural, agrarian folk in order to propagate the idea of the völkisch unity of the national society, unity that could not be changed through history and unity despite the social classes defi ned by occupation (farmers, artisans, bourgeoisie, nobility) (p. 215). This 1909 celebration of the völkisch unity of the Germans even overcame the traditional division of roles between the genders, according to which woman’s role is in the home and man’s role is in the outside world. The national mobilization (p. 217) required women as brides and mothers: Reproduction within marriage, the rearing of children, in particular the rearing of sons to be warriors and members of the Volk community, care of the wounded and the sick, as well as upholding the masculine war morale … were given historical legitimacy and established as the duties of women within national society. (p. 217; freely translated here) Just a few years later, at the start of the First World War, this attitude led Sombart (1915) to define the double, gender-specific, nationalistic goal of education: “Wide-hipped women to bear hardy warriors; strongboned, wiry, courageous men with stamina to be fit for war” (p. 121; freely translated here). The bourgeois women’s movement sought after Volk unity explicitly (Prokop, 1979). Although the martial rhetoric of wartime receded during the Weimar Republic, the völkisch orientation, which assigned a central role to women, remained strong. Nohl, lecturing in October of 1932, refers to the common perception that Germany was in a state of crisis. His premise is that “our German destiny” was being decided in the areas east of the Elbe, for the glamorous big industry could only build upon the “foundation of the strength of the Volk”. Nohl (1933a) therefore demands the re-agrarianization of Germany (p. 43), which together with the “will towards settlement” is no

156 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung longer merely an economic issue but instead the “elementary release of our national powers that have been dammed” (p. 44; freely translated here). The power of the Volk is not a question of “industrial captains and party leaders” but bases upon the people, the “settler and his wife” and is ultimately an educational, that is, a “social educational” or “national educational” question (Nohl, 1933b, p. 84; freely translated here) in which women play a central role. For Nohl, the “lifting up of the Volk” and the “establishing of the Nation” will essentially depend upon the extent to which “female energies” could be increased. To this end, Nohl envisions two supporting roles: “female village helpers” who will support “women, those plagued creatures of the world” (p. 87) and kindergarten teachers, for it is in kindergarten that children learn the German language “in the early years, when language and mythos grow in the soul, which will guide the subsequent development of the child and the adult” (Nohl, 1933a, p. 49; freely translated here). The “spiritual/mental health” of Germany (Nohl, 1933b, p. 84) will ultimately depend upon the “possibility of a healthy family and neighborhood life in the country,” which fosters in the village community the inner life, strength, and energy that makes each person proud and fi rm (Nohl, 1933a, p. 47). For Nohl, mother/housewife is the supporting pillar of the family, and the family is the actual life cell of the Volk. Only when these cells are effective and joyful actors is the Nation unsurpassable (Nohl, 1993b, p. 93). Wolfgang Klafki, who with Johanna-Luise Brockmann published a study on the relationship between geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik and National Socialism, finds it important to emphasize that Nohl should not be branded simply as a forerunner of National Socialistic education (Klafki & Brockmann, 2002, p. 31ff.). I fi nd it more significant that Nohl, in the context of the fundamental dualisms, saw the economic, political, and social world in a pejorative sense. Nohl was able to fi nd meaning only through extolling Volk life and apolitical education. Through their brisk rejection of Western democracy, industry, and science, the geisteswissenschaftliche educationalists also robbed themselves of other, meaningful alternatives and the opportunity to develop another language of education. The inevitable consequence of this could only be adaptation to the new power relations after 1933. In a letter to Erika Hoffmann, who had written to Nohl expressing her uncertainty regarding a National Socialist group of pupils within the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus, Nohl admonished in May 1933: “If only you could stand as a teacher before these young girls, who indeed have the understandable right to make swastikas. I am pleased with every pupil who can participate in this wholeheartedly” (Nohl, as cited in Klafki & Brockmann, 2002, p. 81; freely translated here). We fi nd the same uncertainty and helplessness in Spranger, who wrote an article on the Die Individualität des Gewissens und der Staat [The Individuality of Conscience and the State] in the fi rst three months

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik 157 of 1933—at the time Hitler became Reichskanzler (January 30) and the National Socialist Party gained 44 percent of the election votes (March 5). Spranger (1933) seems to feel uncomfortable with what he calls a sort of demonical possession of the Volk (Volksdämonie), but he does not have any but a very unhappy historical German alternative: “We must not drown within a demonical possession of the Volk, but we have to hang on to Fichte’s belief in the Volk.” According to Fichte, the national movement after 1806 had shown the divine element in the German Volk, the origins that deemed it worthy of taking form and going out into the world. Spranger (1933) cites Fichte: That is why the divine will break forth from this Volk one day again. It is from this belief that the consuming flame of higher love of the Fatherland blazes up—that patriotism that envelops the nation as a mantle of the eternal. (p. 202; freely translated here)

Personhood and Volk Education The education of the Nation or Volk was not understood to be totalitarian education by the state but rather as the fertile ground for Bildung, the spiritual formation of integrated, cultivated personalities who would orient themselves to the Volk community. The supremacy of the German people and the Germanic personality according to this view lies in the qualities they were claimed to possess: naturalness, simplicity, unspoiledness, and innocence. This—and here is the crucial point— makes a relationship between the two totalities, the person and the Volk, part and parcel of education. No Volk, says Eucken the philosopher, has ever been as concerned with the self-contained person, and no Volk has ever understood childhood as insightfully as the Germans. Eucken believes that this competency comes from the ability to “understand empathically the soul of the child,” an ability that he attributes to the Germans alone. This means, says Eucken, that in the inner soul of the German person something childlike, simple, natural has been maintained (Eucken, 1914, p. 13; freely translated here). The double, analogous totality pattern, which at one and the same time frames and leaves out the empirical world, can already be seen in Nohl’s 1926 essay on the unified education movement. He tries to show that the purpose of all the different strings of the progressive education movement is to strive to overcome the one-sided schooling of the intellect, “mere” intellectual training, in favor of total education, meaning, as Nohl adds, education that is conscious of the community, or more precisely, the “ideal of a Volk community.” The task, says Nohl, is to provide an educational organization that develops unified humanness, that makes the person whole, and at the same time fosters the unity of a higher form of life in the Volk as a whole, which is at risk of being

158 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung lost through the process of modern specialization. For Nohl, the salvation of the German Volk from the dangers of the modern world, with its plurality and division of labor, lies in educating youth to the higher spiritual life of the idea, in teaching them that they must always consider the whole, from which the meaning of life comes, so that the Volk can blossom as a unified higher spiritual life in a higher form of community. Nohl believes with no uncertainty that it is this educational work on the totality that will rescue the German people from the pitfalls of the pluralizing world. He writes that the future of the German people depends on this endeavor, that future that it is the fortune and responsibility of every German educator to contribute towards (Nohl, 1926, p. 60ff.). This corresponds exactly to thoughts that Nohl had expressed immediately after the First World War, while he was still stationed in Belgium, in the foreword to a collection of essays. His words expressed the mood of the mainstream of all educators of the time: There is no other cure for the misfortune of our Volk than the new education of its youth, raising them to joyful, courageous, and creative achievement (Nohl, 1919, p. 4). Almost 20 years earlier (and therefore long before the First World War), Spranger lamented the “inner corrosion” of Germany to an industrial state or social democracy or even anarchy—and promoted Fichte’s ideal of a “closed national Bildung” (Spranger, 1902/1973a, p. 201; freely translated here). In 1920, Spranger repeated that there was only one way out of the political corrosion of the German Volk: the establishment of an educational parliament mandated to discuss educational matters autonomously and free from any direct linkage with politics or economy. Spranger knows that there will never again be a uniform Weltanschauung. However, he does not turn, as a consequence, to pluralism and democracy, but rather to a “higher spiritual power” that is superior to any Weltanschauung and to which education has to lead young men (Spranger, 1920/1973b, p. 267ff.; freely translated here). The way in which this formative discourse impacted the administration of the schools is revealed in the new organization of teacher training in 1925. The constitution of the Weimar Reich had introduced four years of general primary school for all children in 1920. In a 1925 memorandum, the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art and Education states that the goal of the reorganization of primary school teacher training in Prussia is to train teachers to be teachers (Bildner) of the Volk and child-rearers (Erzieher) of the Volk with a high consciousness of real life. Teacher training should base upon strong roots in native Volk tradition (Denkschrift, 1925, p. 7) and strive towards a many-sided education, rather than the mere accumulation of knowledge. Teacher training should become the guardian of heimatlich (or native) nature and culture and heimatlich (native) Volk traditions (Heimat meaning the native homeland). This would produce teachers capable of contributing towards the promotion of healthy German Volk character and culture

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik 159 that is down-to-earth and embedded in tradition (Denkschrift, 1925, p. 8). In other words, the aim should be to rear teacher personalities that are suited and willing to serve the community and to rear the “Führer and Erzieher personality” (Denkschrift, 1925, p. 10). Along with the German language, Heimat had become the fundamental element of the curriculum of true education. Spranger, one of the most influential theoreticians of Heimat, saw in Heimatkunde (or the study of Heimat as a school subject) the chance to overcome the increasing specialization of school subjects. In contrast to specialized subjects, Spranger (1923/1943) saw the contents of Heimat as reflecting the organic in the world, the totality of life (p. 22f.). As it cannot be dealt with using one science alone, says Spranger, it is the purest example of a totalizing science (p. 33), a schooling in the concept of totality that we need in order to liberate ourselves from the mental-spiritual fragmentation of the present (p. 43). Here again, this totality is seen in a double manner: in the unity of the Volk and in the spiritual-mental unity within ourselves (p. 3).

Bildung in a Social Vacuum: The Alleged Autonomy of Education The constructions of deepest roots in the tradition of the Volk/highest inner spirituality in the personality resulted in an education that had to oscillate between lowest and highest and, through this, had to lose sight of empirical, that is, social and political dimensions. It is in this form that the history of education was constructed and its high point seen as the German Romantic Movement around 1800. In this context, a theory of Bildung was developed. Here again Thomas Mann is representative of the thinking at the start of the twentieth century. In the frequently cited Refl ections of an Unpolitical Man, Mann (1918/1993) is proud to stress in 1918 that the German concept of education lacked the political element (p. 103), as he rearticulates the long-established idea that the Germanic essence and the notion of Bildung is apolitical and antidemocratic. Referring to Goethe, Mann writes that the “democratization of the means of education” is the only and bitterly necessary corrective to the emerging democracy. The true understanding of education puts social and political issues in their only proper place: inside the inner personality (p. 251). Education, says Mann, is the forming of human beings, and never will the German spirit view “human beings” exclusively or even foremost as “social human beings” (p. 236). Politicization of the German person has to take place in the context of Volksstaat, not democracy, for only so can the German people fulfi ll the tasks of “tasks of supremacy” (p. 264ff.). In this same period Sombart formulated the German understanding of freedom, writing in 1915 that freedom in the German sense means mainly

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to be liberated from the intolerable slavery of public opinion, or in other words, from the true democratic institution. To be free means the embedding of the individual into the harmonious beauty of the whole (Sombart, 1915, p. 124). In this social and political vacuum between the lowest denominator or totality of the Germanic people and the highest whole or totality of the Germanic personality, education had to be given the attribution—one that is variously described and affi rmed in the research in the German-language realm up to the present day—that education is autonomous. This was based on the term Bildung that had been cultivated in the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of a de-politicized and inner reception of Shaftesbury (Horlacher, 2004). Already at that time, Bildung was aimed against Western Zivilisation, targeting France in particular. Bildung became the epitome of the German Romantic Movement around 1800. On the basis of the concept of Bildung, then, geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik crystallized out of the context of the clutter and uncertainties surrounding the education law of the Reich. The idea of the autonomy of education gained its ideological power out of the often heated parliamentary and school policy debates on the education law. The debates were interpreted as a reflection of a Volk community torn apart by democracy, and it was to be the job of education to rebuild that community. Wilhelm Flitner (1928/1989) wrote as editor of the journal Erziehung in 1928 that it was not the task of educators to take sides, or in other words, it was not the job of educators to make people capable of engaging with democracy. Education must instead be oriented towards the higher world of the whole, the true Volk. As to the controversy between democracy and the authoritarian state, educators should look exclusively to a higher instance for orientation: the true community (p. 244). In Flitner’s understanding, this is the true Volk, the invisible Church, the true Community, whose contents are legitimate if they have a place in the inward spiritual world of the Person. It is in this that the autonomy of education lies when we examine the societal dependencies (p. 244). Flitner does not negate the necessity of tension in political life, but it means merely that education has some intrinsic laws that must not be denied, for that would mean abandoning educational responsibility (p. 248). Politics is external—meaning that it is controversy and plurality—and its limits lie where the inner freedom of the duty of education begins (p. 252). One year later in 1929, Erich Weniger, who studied under Nohl, placed a double emphasis on the autonomy of education. That autonomy was, fi rst, a part of the modern atomization process into different cultural areas, and, second, it must be strictly upheld because it came under attack from these other autonomous cultural areas. Weniger (1929/1952) described this as tragic, because education was the greater means of upholding man’s freedom and dignity (p. 72). The autonomy

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik 161 of education came to the fore in three areas: in the educating behavior of the educator, in educational institutions, and in science (p. 75). Weniger found the fi rst area to be the most significant, because autonomous educational practice was not dependent upon education’s status as a science but was merely fostered or hindered by same (p. 76). Weniger bases this idea on one of Nohl’s statements in his essay in Erziehung: The teacher is not merely a contractor providing services to the family, the state, or the church. He serves his own higher idea, namely, the mental and physical development of children, which is supposed to cultivate the organs of a higher life (p. 77). This was in no way a new idea; it had its origins in progressive education. In the foreword to a collection of texts called Vom Kinde aus [From the Standpoint of the Child], the editor, Johannes Gläser (1920) writes in the name of the Educational Commission of the Friends of the Fatherland School and Education Department in Hamburg (Arbeiten des pädagogischen Ausschusses der Gesellschaft der Freunde des vaterländischen Schul- und Erziehungswesens zu Hamburg) that he rejects anything that is demanded of education for the purposes and aims of the state, church, party, or the trades. Education is about “undisturbed growth” (Gläser, 1920, p. 9; freely translated here), so that the whole of the child’s soul can be sustained (Gläser, 1920, p. 14). Just as the progressive education movement had deemed children and youth “holy,” geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik based on the premise that it was “immediate to God.” This was in analogy to the historian Ranke’s by then famous dictum that, whereas every epoch has it particular tendency and its own ideal, every epoch is a manifestation of the will of God, is “immediate to God.” This meant that the individuality of history was the expression of divine providence. Similarly, then, education always meant acting as the “child’s advocate” against the diabolical demands of society. Weniger (1929/1952) writes that the powers in life seek in youth successors, servants, and holders of office; they seek total possession. But autonomy means insisting on the freedom of man, on his inner agreement and his will. In the midst of the confusing simultaneous societal demands on youth, educational autonomy is a means of assuring human unity and wholeness; it is a protective dam to contain the danger of being ripped apart or pulled hither and yon. It is here that the Persönlichkeit of the teacher, or child-rearer, makes his crucial contribution (p. 82ff.). The weak theoretical foundation of the argument forced geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik to fall back on historical constructions. The catchword of child advocacy led naturally to the elevating of Rousseau as the fi rst hero of educational autonomy. In 1929 and 1930 Georg Geissler, who was part of the circle around the editors of the journal Erziehung, published a monograph and a collection of texts on the autonomy of education. Both works begin with Rousseau and then move

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on, via Pestalozzi, to a treatment of only German authors up to the present. Rousseau was named the “founder of educational autonomy,” who had caused a complete shift in education by considering the “whole man” and “man himself in his totality” (Geissler, 1929, p. 9ff.; freely translated here). Here the focus is on three factors in the true essence of education: pupil, educator, and objective value. The educator is responsible for transmitting to the pupil—taking into account the “whole person”—not primarily scientific knowledge of the empirical world, but rather a world of ideas and values so that the “subjective totality of the pupil” can evolve (Geissler, 1929, p. 78ff.; freely translated here). By the close of the Weimar Republic, the concept of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik had matured to the extent that it could be codified effectively by Nohl and Pallat’s Handbuch der Pädagogik and could take on paradigmatic character. Whereas many, diverse authors contributed to the Handbuch, the most important contributions closely followed the line taken by the editors of the journal Erziehung. The fi rst essay in the fi rst volume was dedicated to the “Theory of Bildung”; the second addressed the “History of Bildung and Its Theory.” This “History,” which was the cooperative effort of several authors, did not begin with the Greeks but instead introduced the topic with a long digression on “The Germanic Character” by Friedrich Naumann, one of Nohl’s colleagues in Göttingen. Nohl himself wrote the conclusion to the history, “The Educational Movement in Germany,” which once again homogenized all variations in the educational reform movement in Germany and thus created the premise that allowed the theory of Bildung to appear to follow logically. In other words, this construction of history served as the basis of argumentation for the Bildung theory. With all this, it may be surprising to learn that these two essays subsequently appeared in book form in 1935 and, by 2002, had been published in a total of eleven editions. Still today, this book is regarded as one of the most important educational works of the twentieth century (Horn & Ritzi, 2001). Nohl’s programmatic essay on the Theory of Bildung contains all the elements of this geisteswissenschaftliche theory. First, following Dilthey, the author examines the “Possibility of A General Theory” and, after analyzing the various founding theories, declares the field to be an expanse of rubble and ruins. For Nohl, the correct approach is to start out from the education reality, which for him is in no way empirical, but instead idealistic. Each cultural area, says Nohl in a Platonic fashion, is led by “its own idea,” and this idea is the phaenomenon bene fundatum that must constitute the starting point for the scientific theory (Nohl, 1933c, p. 12ff.) Nohl does not elaborate on why this is so. Logically, Nohl (1933c) now moves on to treat the “autonomy of education” and asserts that the state, politics, economy, and the parties seek to instrumentalize education as an executive organ that carries out their aims. In the face of the horrible struggle of these powers and

The German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik 163 worldviews, says Nohl, we must reinforce the autonomy of education that the theory of Bildung demonstrates. The act of educating, or the pedagogical relationship, stands at the center of this autonomy, which has been possible in Germany only since Rousseau’s discovery of childhood and its transmission by Pestalozzi. Its goal is the education of the whole man (p. 15ff.) From this, writes Nohl, the pedagogical community (Bildungsgemeinschaft) becomes the core of education. It is the most intensive form of human relationships. The educational community has as its goal the “awakening of a unified spiritual life,” a “personal spirit [Geist].” In these polarizing times, we need the model of the educator personality, Nohl continues, for the more scattered or incomplete that education is in a particular time, the more important it is for the pupil to see in the unified humanness of his educator a representation of the higher life (p. 21ff.). Thus, the goal of the autonomy of education is Bildung, which starts out from the dualisms and seeks personal totality. As Nohl puts it, Bildung is the subjective way of existing in a culture—the inner form and spiritual posture of the soul, which takes on, through its own powers, everything that comes to it from the outside towards forming a unified inward life. It is this inward spiritual life that shapes every utterance and every action (p. 27). Therefore, as Nohl sums up, this approach is possible only in a state that has a comprehensive Volksbildung. Nohl concludes from his discussion of Volksbildung that only in an educated life of the Volk does the individual also achieve this unified shaping and forming (p. 32). Nohl and his geisteswissenschaftliche colleagues turned out to be good disciples of Fichte, former student of Lutheran theology in Jena and later admirer of Imanuel Kant’s pietist philosophy, defending the inner soul against the modern sciences by emphasizing the line between the a priori and the a posteriori, or the realm of pure reason from empiricism. In the disturbances after being defeated by the French troops in 1806 Fichte managed to blend the idea of Bildung and the idea of German superiority (Fichte, 2008) in a most sustainable way, reinforcing the vision of the German Sonderweg, the (idea of a) peculiar way of development since the eighteenth century. The German geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik in an expression of this idea of peculiarity and helped tremendously to transport it way beyond the end of the Second World War in 1945. A comparison with the Swiss and American tradition will make the peculiarity even more obvious.

10 Languages of Education Compared Germany, Switzerland, and the United States

Against the background of the preceding chapters, a comparative view among the dominant educational languages in three Protestant countries, that is, in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, has become advisable. As an concrete example, I have chosen to look at the language of the academic discipline of education in Germany in the twentieth century, more specifically the mainstream of its dominant doctrine, geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, as presented in chapter 9, to oppose it to educational ideas in classical republican cultures.

Language, History, and Education in Germany Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik constructed itself to be “historical/ systematic.” The idea behind this construction was that the systematization of an educational problem—the theory—can only be understood by its historization, and vice versa, that the history of education is the emergence of the discussed phenomenon to be theorized. This construction was at the same time an expression of the Lutheran background of the exponents of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, the ideology of which became entrenched in the educational discourse. Against this background, it was not empirical psychology that lay at the foundation of education but the ideological construction of history, starting with the Lutheran theologian Schwarz, as was seen in chapter 4. Starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “history of education” as a part of the educational literature became established by the middle of the nineteenth century in Germany, from where it quickly diffused to the rest of the Western world.1 If we look at German history of education from its earliest times, we fi nd a remarkable stability on up to the present. This stability can be explained by the stability of the language that is common to most of the German educational authors. The analysis of these “histories of education” reveals four common, characteristic features. First, the histories are pedagogical and not scientific, because they were written for the purpose of moral catharsis in teacher education. The incomparable boom of textbooks in the history

Languages of Education Compared 165 of education after the founding of the German Empire in 18712 points to the second, the nationalistic characteristic of the histories. The German historiographies renounced all non-German authors after Rousseau except for Pestalozzi. However, by 1809, when Johann Gottlieb Fichte published Addresses to the German Nation, Pestalozzi was viewed as a German educator in the Lutheran tradition (Fichte, 1808/2008). Fichte brings us to the third characteristic, the almost exclusive orientation of the histories towards German idealism or German philosophy of the time around 1800. This brings us to the fourth characteristic, for German idealism was indebted to German Lutheran Protestantism. German histories of education favor Protestant authors and emphasize the evangelical interpretation of man’s inner soul. Catholic authors are generally marginalized, and Calvinist educators are given a Lutheran Protestant reinterpretation. This German pattern of history of education was widely received and accepted in the Western countries up to 1900. Then, three interrelated developments allowed national emancipation: the differentiation of the national school systems, professionalization of teacher education, and the establishment of chairs for education at the universities. 3 The dominant doctrine in the German discussion in the twentieth century was geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, developed during the Weimar Republic (from 1918 to 1933) (see chapter 9). Compared to the discussion during the nineteenth century, the educational discourse of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik appears to be more nationalistic, oriented to what is called the “ideas of 1914,” a popular dictum of German intellectuals at the outset of World War I (see Lübbe, 1963; freely translated here). The notion of “idea” is not an accidental reference to Plato. German scholars believed that the “idea” was only manifested in Germany and gave the Germans a world-historic mission. Only the Germans were believed to be the “soul of humanity” (Eucken, 1914, p. 23; freely translated here) and thus destined to have a mission with the “secure understanding that we are the folk of God” (Sombart, 1915, p. 143; freely translated here). The absolute certainty of the necessity to fight the First World War to the very end as a “crusade in service of the world spirit” (Weltgeist) was deduced religiously, or as the economist Johann Plenge put it in 1915: “God wants it. To the salvation of ourselves and the world!” (pp. 190, 108, 200; freely translated here). The semantics of the Weimar Republic were not, of course, as martial/ warlike as the semantics during the periods of the First World War. But the authors and texts that were considered authoritative remained the same, as did the modes of thinking. In fact, we fi nd a stable connection between the discipline of education at the universities and qualifications for the academic chairs, because usually people tend to teach what they have learned. There is homogeneity of the language in textbooks for students and in the doctoral dissertations and habilitation theses of

166 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung professors who go on to teach and choose the texts for their students, thus perpetuating the very same language of discourse in the discipline. During the Weimar Republic, histories of education focused on Johann Gottfried Herder for the period up to 1800, on Fichte after 1800, and for the contemporary period on Rudolf Eucken, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the interpretation of the intellectuals of the Weimar Republic, all three authors had pointed to the two crucial elements of the German preeminence: to the German language as the only natural language and to the Lutheran principle of inwardness. Both elements determined the construction of historiography as well as the theories or philosophies of education, whereby both—history and philosophy— seemed to bolster the arguments of the other.4

Construction of History and Philosophy within geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik We fi nd an especially colorful and significant example of this interlacing of “history” and “philosophy of education” in Herman Nohl’s lemma, “The Educational Movement and its Theory,” published in 1935.5 Recently, a survey of the members of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungwissenschaft [German Society of Education] found this book named as one of the most important educational works of the twentieth century (Horn & Ritzi, 2001). However, a closer look shows that the book is not a monograph but a compilation of two different articles that had already been published in 1933 in the important manual of education, Handbuch für Pädagogik. The fi rst essay in the fi rst volume was dedicated to the “Theory of Bildung,” which set the programmatic character for the manual as a whole. The second essay, titled the “History of Bildung and Its Theory,” was the cooperative effort of several authors, and rather than begin with the Greeks, it instead introduced the history of education with a long digression on “The Germanic Character” by Friedrich Naumann (1933). Nohl himself wrote the conclusion to this historical article, “The Educational Movement in Germany,” which homogenized all variations in the educational reform movement in Germany and thus created the premise that allowed the “Theory of Bildung” to appear as an articulation of the idea behind all reform movements. The historical essay on the history of education in the manual thus starts with broad elucidations of the “The Germanic Character” and ends with the educational movement in Germany. In the middle of the history, Lutheran education dominates, and for the period after the Enlightenment—with the exception of Rousseau and Pestalozzi—no foreigners are mentioned at all. This narrowing of the history to the nation of Germany is supplemented and reinforced by the assumption that through history, there are not different theories, but the one theory—namely, the one that Nohl had elucidated in his fi rst

Languages of Education Compared 167 essay. In other words, the construction of history served as the basis of argumentation for the Bildung theory and vice versa. The bundling of different educational movements as the development of the one thought of education did not stem from lack of knowledge of the diverging ideas of the anarchists, socialists, or psychoanalysts in Germany, or the French discussions, or American Pragmatism. On the contrary, it was a rejection of those ideas, because they contradicted the German ideal of education (Bildung). And vice versa, Nohl supported his own philosophical essay on the “Theory of Education” with historical arguments that corresponded precisely to the doctrinaire bundled and cleaned body of the history of the education. The reduction of the history served the philosophy of education and vice versa, a procedure that was then proudly proclaimed to be “historical/systematic.” The language lying behind this doubled construction was built in essence on three dualisms: • • • •

Unity and Plurality; Inward and Outward; Geist and Empiricism; These dualisms had specific contents and stood in a certain hierarchy: • Unity = German Nation > Plurality = Democracy of the Western world • Inward = evangelical (Lutheran) > Outward = Catholic, reformed (Calvin, Zwingli) Protestantism, or atheistic/materialistic • Geist = idealistic > Empiricism = materialistic

This dualistic thought pattern is virulent not only among German educationalists and philosophers. Probably no one at the time put more concisely the nationalistic loading of dualism than the highly regarded novelist and essayist Thomas Mann, who identified the German character with a spiritual-apolitical attitude. Mann wrote that the difference between Geist and politics encompasses the difference between culture and civilization, soul and society, freedom and the right to vote, art and literature. For Mann, “Germanness” is culture, soul, freedom, art and not civilization, society, the right to vote, literature (Mann, 1918/1993, p. 23; see also pp. 160, 240, 248). Mann viewed democracy as identical with materialism or capitalism (pp. 233, 346), and he attacked all three, noting that politics in general was “un-German” or even “hostile to Germany” (pp. 21, 29, 256, 268). As previously mentioned, democracy, according to Mann, stood in contradiction to Christianity and was a traitor to the Cross (p. 419). Democracy was regarded as a battleground of the big trusts and the political parties, whose sole striving is towards power, as Eduard Spranger, along with Herman Nohl another mandarin of education, described it. To these power strivings Spranger opposed

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visions of salvation. Although he condemned any proletarian dictatorship, Spranger supported explicitly the Italian dictatorship of Mussolini, because he saw Mussolini as a “kind of savior.” Spranger wrote: “Whoever has the great idea of the state, the true leader, ought to rule. It all depends upon the idea” (Spranger, 1926/1928, p. 30; freely translated here). The scholars’ skepticism towards democracy, which was almost without exception and in part even celebrated, was a consequence of two analogous notions of totality or wholeness, the inner “personhood” and the nation as Volksgemeinschaft (Volk community, culture of the folk). These two totalities at one and the same time framed and left out the empirical world, e.g., the world of communication, cooperation, and shared experiences—the world where real education occurs. Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik was not about learning through experience or communication; it did not reflect on the permanent reconstruction of knowledge through new knowledge; it did not rely on empirical facts at all. The main focus was what in the German tradition from the late eighteenth century up to today is called Bildung—or ‘inner formation.’ Inner formation does not represent plural or contingent knowledge but rather “uniform life.” According to Nohl, Bildung meant “the inner form and spiritual attitude of the soul,” the “total higher life within the individual opposed to all the separations within the outer culture” (Nohl, 1933d, pp. 21, 27; freely translated here).6 What Nohl called “separations within the outer culture” was nothing other than the democratic principle of plurality. On the background of the dream of a uniform and total Volksgemeinschaft, democracy necessarily had to appear as deviant. Just as Mann called democracy “traitor to the Cross,” democratic institutions seemed diabolical. Erich Weniger, who studied under Nohl, wrote in 1929: “The powers in life want the youth to be their succession, their servants, their office bearers; they want to possess man from scalp to toe” (Weniger, 1929/1952, p. 82; freely translated here). To oppose such a world, education had to assign itself a role. This role was given a religious formulation and aimed at nothing less than salvation. However, to redeem the world through education, education needed an autonomous societal/cultural area, or sphere. This “educational autonomy” was not justified empirically. Each individual cultural area, says Nohl (1933c) in a Platonic fashion, is led by “its own idea” (p. 12ff.). According to the Lutheran dualisms of bad or good, or outside or inside, the state, politics, economy, and the political parties appeared as mere “outer” powers, meaning bad powers, competing against each other and trying to instrumentalize and indoctrinate young people for their own purposes. Against this “barbaric fight of the powers and their Weltanschauung,” the autonomy of education was endowed to foster “Bildung”—inner formation—in order to “awaken a uniform spiritual

Languages of Education Compared 169 life” (p. 15; freely translated here). For education, the only significant reference outside of the educational sphere was the community of the Volk. In this context Nohl’s collaborator Wilhelm Flitner (the third of the mandarins), wrote in 1928 about the “higher world of totality” represented by the “true Volk.” As to the controversy between democracy and the authoritarian state, educators should take their orientation exclusively from one single higher instance: the true community (Flitner, 1928/1989, p. 244). In Flitner’s understanding this is the true Volk, the invisible Church, the true Community, whose contents are legitimate if they have a place in the inward spiritual world of the Person. The main concern of the intellectuals was thus not the public sphere or society but the nation as the community of Volk, which was understood to be a manifestation of God. “Nowadays the national individuality belongs to the clothes of Godhood,” wrote Spranger (1926/1928, p. 68; freely translated here). This narrowed the semantic possibilities, and plurality, negotiation, or experience had no significance at all. Instead, “Geist,” “true” life, inwardness, the depth of sentiment, and the height of the “personhood” were the standard normative terms. The middle ground between the depth and the height, the real place of social interaction and communication, was excluded. It was neither “fi niteness” nor “reality” that should dominate the Germans, Paul Natorp (1918) stated in 1918: “Rather, we demand the last unity of Spirit, transcending fi niteness, reality and rationality—and this is called to be ideal” (p. 46; freely translated here).

The Problem of Educational Travels Abroad in the Eighteenth Century Dominant doctrines like the one molding the German discussion represent a certain canon, and they are relatively easily to identify by means of international comparative research. However, linguistic analyses are needed in order to recognize the causes of these idiosyncrasies —methodological procedures, which have also come to be called archeological. The archeology metaphor is insofar appropriate as non-dominant “languages” are buried under the dominant languages. The problems or concerns of the fi rst are not inexistent, but they cannot be raised using the dominant “language,” so that they appear inexistent, because they are either not made the subject of discussion at all or—even if they do surface—are translated into the semantic repertoire of the dominant “language.”7 Pocock (1987b) put it this way: “This historian is in considerable measure an archaeologist; he is engaged in uncovering the presence of various language contexts in which discourse has from time to time been conducted” (p. 23). I begin my archeological excavation with an example from the historical epoch that the German field of education considers to be the birth

170 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung of modern education—namely, the time after 1750. My example may not seem to be a very exciting motif, and in fact, there has hardly been any research on it. I speak here of the eighteenth-century phenomenon of travel abroad for educational purposes. Traveling abroad was a common practice in the biographies of upper-class young men, as we can read as early as in the fi nal passages of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in 1693. However, through the course of the eighteenth century, this practice came to be viewed in some places with increasing skepticism of a moral and political nature. This discussion rises from a conflict that could not be “put into words” in the dominant historiography, because it rises from a different “language.” It serves here, as it were, as a disturbing but visible phenomenon, the “language background” of which I want to uncover. The discussion was not conducted by unimportant actors. I start with the already mentioned author of the Declaration of Independence and later president of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson. As previously stated, on October 15, 1785, Jefferson (1785/1984b) wrote a letter from Paris to his friend John Bannister, describing what happens to a young American on an educational trip to Europe, which was common practice for Americans as well: He acquires a fondness for European luxury and dissipation, and a contempt for the simplicity of his own country; he is fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats, and sees, with abhorrence, the lovely equality which the poor enjoy with the rich, in his own country (…) It appears to me then, that an American coming to Europe for education, loses in his knowledge, in his morals, in his health, in his habits, and in his happiness. (p. 838ff.) However, Jefferson began to question the value of educational trips to Europe in principle, for he feared the effects of the encounters of the young Americans with European aristocracy, luxury, pomp: He acquires a fondness for European luxury and dissipation, and a contempt for the simplicity of his own country; he is fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats, and sees, with abhorrence, the lovely quality which the poor enjoy with the rich, in his own country. (p. 838) Apart from that—and in analogy to Rousseau’s concern of Emile in puberty, the young person would become dominated by the strongest passion, the appetite for women and prostitutes, which would ruin his health and happiness. Back home, he would be a foreigner, unable to adjust to the living conditions of the republic: “It appears to me then, that an American coming to Europe for education, loses in his knowl-

Languages of Education Compared 171 edge, in his morals, in his health, in his habits, and in his happiness” (p. 838). Therefore, Jefferson concludes, the people who are most appreciated in America, who appear to be well educated and eloquent, who are loved by the citizens and enjoy their confidence, are those who are acquainted with the life conditions of the republic: “They are those who have been educated among them, and whose manners, morals and habits, are perfectly homogeneous with those of the country” (p. 838). Jefferson’s warning represents the dominant form of educational discourse in the United States at the time. It is also found, for instance, in the writings of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, who in 1786 insisted, “that an education in our own is to be preferred to an education in a foreign country,” and for the reason that patriotism necessarily required the “reinforcement of prejudice” (Rush, 1786/1965, p. 9). We also fi nd this warning in a text by the politician and influential textbook writer Noah Webster,8 who advocated traveling for education within the United States: “It is time for the Americans to change their usual route and travel through a country which they never think of or think beneath their notice: I mean the United States” (Webster, 1965, p. 76ff.). It would be easy (and wrong) to disqualify Jefferson’s, Rush’s, and Webster’s critique as early American chauvinism. But surprisingly, we also fi nd the same critique of travel abroad at the very same time— 1787—coming from a monastery in the Swiss Alps. Like Webster, the abbot Konrad Tanner (1787) pleads in Patriotic Thoughts about a Proper Education for Young People in the Swiss Democracy for a patriotic education (p. 15). According to Tanner, education always has to be adapted to the local circumstances. Young Swiss have to become Swiss citizens, because they go to school in Switzerland and Switzerland is democratic. Tanner (1787) goes on: It may be good for him [the young man] to visit foreign countries, but only after having been adopted to the way of living in his fatherland, after having absorbed the good principles with his mother’s milk, after being enabled by the domestic education to know himself and the world. (p. 20) Similar to Jefferson and Webster in the United States, Tanner represents the mainstream of the Swiss reform discussion—even though Catholic reformers in the eighteenth century were rather an exception. Twenty years previously, the only association in Switzerland that transcended the level of the canton, the Helvetic Society, adopted a “Recommendation to restrict the travels of young Swiss to the benefit of their Fatherland” (Moral Society, 1769). The Helvetic Society did so, because traveling abroad was found to be disadvantageous with respect to the customs, the “way of political thinking,” and the economy of Switzerland.9

172 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung But even in 1767 this idea was not new at all. Another twenty years earlier, Franz Urs von Balthasar, a Lucerner patrician, had warned that young people learn abroad only “luxury, haughtiness, debauchery, and exuberance” and that many a young person returned home from abroad “as an idiot, a spoiler of language, full of foreign vices, as a tippler, as an amorous adventurer, a boaster, and a swaggerer” (Balthasar, 1744/1758, p. 12; freely translated here). Innumerable comparable examples could be added. Almost all of them were written either by American or by Swiss authors. In other words, they come from educated men who lived in the only two countries of the Western world that saw themselves mainly as classical republics of virtues.10 Both were strongly influenced by a reformed, that is, democratized Calvinism (on this, see chapter 3).

Classical Republicanism as Educational Language Given the fact that most of the scholars issuing warnings about the dangers of travels abroad for education in the eighteenth century had been abroad themselves for long periods, one could easily be tempted to seek biographical or even psychoanalytic explanations. However, pathological categories are not really fruitful to explain these historical fears, which, from our point of view today, are hardly understandable. More seminal is the approach to contextualize the skepticism within a decisively anti-monarchial language, the language of civic humanism or republicanism. The fact that American as well as Swiss authors, (a few) Catholics as well as Protestants—but not Lutherans—used the same language points to the existence of a trans-confessional and transnational approach—even in the paradox example of the fear of traveling abroad. The notion of “nation” in the republican language does not signify the pre-empirical idea of a Volk community, but rather the idea of citizens’ permanent duty to rule their country by themselves, which therefore required certain political or public virtues. In this language, politics does not stand in opposition to education, but in close connection with it. The historical characteristic of this connection reveals the reason why educational travels in the eighteenth century must have appeared problematic in the republican language horizon. No one at the time raised this issue more precisely than the French philosopher Montesquieu, in Spirit of the Laws in 1748. In it, Montesquieu identified the different laws of education with different political systems: “The laws of education will be therefore different in each species of government: in monarchies they will have honor for their object; in republics, virtue; in despotic governments, fear” (Montesquieu, 1748, Book IV/1). Here education is not focused on a soul in no context but intimately connected to the real social and political context. With the

Languages of Education Compared 173 notion of “virtue” Montesquieu names the normative central idea of the republican language ever since antiquity. Virtue education does not happen in an isolated, autonomous space but instead depends on the real political and social environment. Spoken in the language of republicanism, it depends on the laws, the customs, and the highest possible degree of equality of the citizens. A republic of virtue will be destroyed whenever a capitalistic economy, trade, and commerce are dominant, because a capitalist economy causes wealth, luxury, and social inequalities. According to republicanism, money can corrupt individuals’ commitments to common welfare and lead them to follow private interests. Montesquieu (1748) wrote: In proportion as luxury gains ground in a republic, the minds of the people are turned towards their particular interests. Those who are allowed only what is necessary have nothing but their own reputation and the glory of their country in view. But a soul depraved by luxury has many other desires, and soon becomes an enemy to the laws that confi ne it. (Book VII/2) Arguments like these were very attractive and convincing, as the example of one of the most famous scholars of Zurich in the eighteenth century, Johann Jacob Bodmer, shows. Bodmer was a professor of history at the academy, and he influenced the education of the later famous painter Johann Heinrich Fusely, the later famous theologian Johann Caspar Lavater, and the later famous educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Bodmer interpreted political and economic events in the words of the French philosopher. After Zurich had liberalized its politics of international bonds and the fi rst luxury buildings in the French style were erected around 1750, the city parliament was discussing new sumptuary laws. In a letter of 1755 (mentioned in chapter 2), Bodmer comments: It is believed that luxury is a consequence of the industry, of the abundance, of the commerce, and that those would suffer if the laws restricted the enjoyment of their fruits. But on the other hand, it is believed that luxury creates a strong break in the spirit of equality and mitigation that is so important in a popular or half-popular state. But a soul depraved by luxury has many other desires, and soon becomes an enemy to the laws that confine it. (February 16th 1755, f.o 88; freely translated here) Bodmer ‘speaks’ the republican language using Montesquieu’s words or paroles, and it is of no consequence that Montesquieu was French and Catholic.11 This language enabled recognition and articulation of a problem—namely, how the capitalization of society, interpreted as a cultural crisis—could be averted. Bodmer’s letter continues as follows:

174

Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung Only a small part of them seriously seek new sumptuary laws. Vanity is shared by both, the noble and the common. You would not believe how absurd the pomp of clothing, furniture, food, and beverages has become. Who will control those who are assigned to control the people? There is no way to correct corrupted customs all at once. How can fathers lacking of sentiments implant sentiments in their children? What kind of education can a father give them if he needs it himself? (February 16th 1755, f.o 88; freely translated here)

The question that Bodmer raises in this letter indicates the basic problem. Education in a republic presupposes a political-ethical context and does not fall into the hubris of creating such a context. Republican education is not salvation through inner formation of an isolated soul. It may be called “sensual socialization,” a concept that we can trace as far back as Machiavelli’s Discorsi or can fi nd as the basis of Bodmer’s poetics (Bodmer, 1749/1989). Not surprisingly it can be found in Lavater’s Swisssongs (1767) and Pestalozzi’s Leonard and Gertrude (1781). Precisely this affiliation of education and sensual experience caused the wide skepticism towards educational traveling abroad, because it was taken for granted that young people would experience in monarchies the very opposite of republican ideals.

Timelessness and Historicity Languages change through history, and this is one of the major arguments against using Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm in order to detect the normative frame of arguments in history (see chapter 1). The adaptability of language depends on how strongly its ideological content is connected to images of timelessness or historicity. The language used in Germany is characterized by original, unempirical, and dualistic connotations, so that also the majority of the newer histories of education and newer theoretical approaches ultimately differ little from their predecessors in the nineteenth century, although offensive nationalistic arguments have long disappeared. But language can work as an intellectual prison, if it builds on ontological, that is, timeless, dualisms. However, overcoming “inwardness” does not mean simply shifting towards the outward appearance. It means overcoming the dualism itself—whether these dualisms concern inwardness and outwardness or individual and society. An advancement within this dualistic thought pattern has little promise. On this background, it will be understandable why it has been difficult for German education in general to connect internationally and to fi nd international acknowledgment right up to the present day. The fierce reactions towards the PISA survey in Germany provide evidence of the ongoing dualistic worldview or langue (see chapter 12).

Languages of Education Compared 175 In contrast, languages that base on empirical circumstances such as customs and laws are essentially more changeable. This is shown by the example of republicanism, which had to overcome at least three central topoi of the eighteenth century, namely, male dominance, restriction of political participation to the city citizen, and hostility to commerce, or the exclusive focus on agriculture. The adaptation was necessary during the nineteenth century with the inexorable advancement of the sciences, the attraction of the modern natural law, Darwin’s biology, and the unignorable evidence of big-city industry and its advantages. American Pragmatism was a reaction towards these developments (see chapter 6), torn between the ideal of (vision of) the republican local communities of the eighteenth century and the mastering of the threats of the “Great Society” by envisaging a local and global order of a “Great community” (Dewey, 1927/1954). This was conservative and progressive at the same time: conservative, because it carried on the Puritan vision of the congregation, progressive, because it tried to enhance more democracy.12 However, and here the conservative heritage lingers on, for John Dewey and his colleagues do not understand democracy as a state-procedural order but as a social idea of interaction and communication, i.e., of the most various and free exchange of learning experiences in and between different communities. In a democratic philosophy like this, dualistic thought patterns are inconceivable, and this was an advantage compared to the ontological Lutheran dualism: An early student of Dewey, the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1902), for example, issues a warning about dualistic wrong conclusions at the beginning of Human Nature and the Social Order: “A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals” (p. 1). The crucial notion here is “experience.” In the Pragmatic conviction, people stand in everyday connections of experiences; they interact, communicate, and cooperate. Jane Addams, for example, already said in 1892/93 that her famous social-educational institution, Hull House, “was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as ‘social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation’” (Addams, 1892/93, p. 1). The reciprocity of social relations is understood as democratic: “Hull House endeavors to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society. It is an effort to add the social function to democracy” (Addams, 1892/1893, p. 1). This was the starting assumption for Dewey in 1894, when Addams introduced him to the realities of the big-city life of Chicago. The social dimension of democracy, building on communication and interaction, was seen as the solution of the problem of how the language of the traditionally agrarian and anti-commercial republicanism was to be transferred to the industrialized modern age.

176 Lutheran Protestantism, Education, and Bildung It is no coincidence that the linguistic tradition in which Dewey stood politically manifested itself particularly clearly in a text that he had written in 1939 in view of the dangers of totalitarian governments in Europe, namely, Freedom and Culture. In this work, Dewey legitimizes the ideal of American democracy using one of the crucial republican authors of the eighteenth century that I mentioned earlier in connection with the educational travels abroad, namely, Thomas Jefferson. Dewey preferred Jefferson to other democracy theorists like Locke, Bentham, or Mill, because only Jefferson connected virtue and politics, as Dewey emphasizes: “Jefferson’s formulation [of democracy] is morality through and through: in its foundation, its methods, its ends” (Dewey, 1939/1988, p. 173). Jefferson’s distinctly anti-commercial, that is, pro-agrarian, attitude (see chapter 5) was evidently no obstacle for Dewey’s reception within a commercialized society. As stated by Dewey, Jefferson had assumed that people change, and laws and institutions have to adapt themselves to this human progress. Therefore, the problem of the large city is not seen—as it was in the intellectual mainstream in Germany—to lie with industry. On the contrary, industry is viewed as an economic system that has freed the people from agrarian dependencies and has made possible broad democracy. Incidentally, this argument was represented in Germany by the outsider Georg Simmel in 1900 in Die Philosophie des Geldes [The Philosophy of Money], a book which in the same year was positively reviewed in Chicago by George Herbert Mead (Mead, 1900). Harry Pratt Judson, the later president of the University of Chicago, had stressed already in 1895 that it was the task of the industrial present “to adapt our civilization to new forms of social organization,” and with “civilization” he understood a “democratic republic,” a model that he located in the spirit of 1776, too (Judson, 1895, pp. 39, 28). As Dewey states in opposition to the German, Russian, or Italian propaganda, the problem of the modern age is not industry or democracy but the lack of communication and interaction through which the excesses of modern life can be discussed and steered democratically (Dewey, 1938/1988). The overcoming of the weakness of democracy in view of the capitalization of life did not lead Dewey into agrarian nostalgia. Instead, he fostered two strategies for the stabilization and development of democracy. For one, opposing the one-sided virtue orientation of the old republicanism, Dewey certifies the crucial role of academic knowledge. It is the task of the modern empirical and social sciences to act as a seismograph and register the changes within society and to disseminate this knowledge appropriately among the citizens. Disseminated by the media (and the media technologies), Dewey emphasizes, this knowledge enables citizens to discuss their social and political affairs without being in danger of manipulation by the “captains of industry,” as long as communication between the citizens is ensured. This leads to the second strategy. Dewey

Languages of Education Compared 177 saw himself as part of the new social sciences, providing knowledge and technologies (sociology, psychology, education) to ensure social change (Popkewitz, 2010). According to Dewey (1927/1954), the basis for this was to strengthen the local neighborhoods and communities in which communication takes place and in which communicating is learned; the educational reflex (see chapter 2) to social problems had become a social science with regard to the communitarian ideal of democracy: “Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community” (p. 213)—the community for Dewey being essentially “face to face relationships” (p. 218). According to Dewey then, these—the ability to communicate and scientific knowledge—are the two pillars on which the ideals of the republic can be maintained and developed in a modern democracy. The changed societal framework conditions made disapproval of traveling abroad just as unnecessary for the maintenance of the republican virtue ideal as restricting political power to men.13 However, Dewey’s solution was neither unchallenged nor concluded. The idea of an unhindered exchange of informed citizens in the local communities, and between them and throughout the globe, was in the end still Congregational, as can be seen in the 1934 publication A Common Faith (Dewey, 1934/1986), in which Dewey tries to harmonize modern empirical knowledge, mutual interaction, and social progress against the background of the assumption that uninterrupted exchange and interaction are to be understood as religious (Tröhler, 2000; see also chapter 6). Whereas this form of political and educational reasoning was attractive to educational progressivism, it was challenged by a much more functionalist approach that was based on the planning ideology of Behaviorism and later cognitive psychology, the technocratic age of expertise, itself absolutely a heir of religious, and even Calvinist ideologies, too, but not of Congregationalism but rather Presbyterianism (see chapter 8). This expertocratic langue is the homeland of global educational aspirations of the World Bank or the OECD, and with the latter of PISA. It is a language that not coincidentally clashed with the Lutheran langue in Germany as harsh opposition to PISA (see chapter 12).

Part IV

Linguistic Archeology in Contemporary Debates

11 Globalizing Globalization The Neo-Institutional Concept of a World Culture

The history of education in relation to globalization is quite paradoxical. The fi rst global phenomenon of education emerged out of reactions against the Reformation in the late sixteenth century, when the counterreformatory Jesuits, or Society of Jesus, started to establish institutions of higher education fi rst in Europe and later in other parts of the world. Provided in architecturally standardized buildings, the Jesuit education was based on a standardized curriculum developed by international experts1 and used standardized quality rating systems to assess students’ achievement (see, for instance, Dainville, 1978). The historiography of education in relation to globalization can be called a paradox because it does not focus on this successful counter-reformatory concept, but, quite to the contrary, on the alleged spread of mostly secularized Protestant concepts. It is these Protestant concepts that—according to the historiographic accounts—have diffused around the world since at least the end of the Second World War, constituting through a “cultural globalization” process a new “world culture” in which specific patterns of thoughts are brought about by transnational organizations and international experts. One defi nition of this process reads as follows: “Cultural globalization involves the worldwide spread of models or blueprints of progress and the networks of organizations and experts that transmit these logics of appropriateness to nation-states and other collectivities” (Suarez & Ramirez, 2004, p. 1). Educational expectations and organizations play a crucial role in this process: According to these interpretations, educational systems were the crucial means in “the developing Western Europe model of a national society” (Ramirez & Boli, 1987, p. 3) that were transcended in the twentieth century but without diminishing the importance of education, quite on the contrary. Against the background of this book, two important questions remain: namely, the (denominational) origin of these successful Protestant concepts and the (denominational) origin of the historiography of the success story. “Globalization” is a concept that refers to an encompassing process with radical effects, similar to concepts such as Christianization, confessionalization, secularization, or modernization. All of these notions

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serve to indicate fundamental theories describing these encompassing processes. However, when describing processes of this amplitude, the description is always a construction, too, for it necessarily makes selections, composes things, put emphasis on this and that but not on others. This construing description has its pitfalls. The main danger is linearizing and harmonizing the process, starting out from its alleged result: Christianity, schism, secularity, modernity, or the globalized world. 2 Following the normative preferences of the authors, these descriptions tell either a story of decline or a story of success: Famous stories of success were written, for example, by the British Whigs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, depicting the past as an unavoidable and thus teleological progression towards always greater individual liberty and enlightenment, resulting in modern forms of liberal democracy, constitutional monarchy, and scientific progress—in other words, to the dominant ideology of Whiggism in England. In order to criticize this goal-directed, often hero-based historiography, the British historian Herbert Butterfield published the celebrated book, The Whig Interpretation of History, in 1931, and ever since, the notions of Whig history or Whiggishness have been used to criticize teleological accounts of the past to the present. In the following I will focus on how globalization and education are addressed in research. More precisely, I will concentrate on only one dominant approach to analyzing globalization and its effects on education and also the educational role within globalization. Although my focus is quite narrow and apparently analytical, I still do not imagine that I am refraining from talking about globalization and education itself, for the international discussion about globalization is itself a part of the process.3 Nevertheless, I wish to analyze a model that seems to provide a basically analytical account of globalization with respect to education, the model called sociological neo-institutionalism, and its concept of world polity or world culture. This is an area of research that emerged mostly at the Department of Sociology and the School of Education at Stanford University. These analyses have garnered a lot of attention, and they are broadly discussed and refi ned all around the world in a number of different academic disciplines. As the notion of sociological neo-institutionalism suggests, the German sociologist Max Weber and his theory on institutions plays a particular role. Basically, using the example of the sociological neo-institutional contribution to globalization and education, I will demonstrate how difficult it is to analyze or describe the process of “globalization” without premises that fi rst construe the topic itself that is going to be described. In other words, the analysis of encompassing historical processes such as “globalization” is already predetermined by general epistemological assumptions in the research design. These epistemological premises in

Globalizing Globalization 183 sociological neo-institutionalism—as I will argue—are rooted in Max Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis (on that, see chapter 3 of this volume). This origin is particularly juicy for neo-institutionalism, for its sociological paradigm is the result of a critical examination of Weber’s theory on institutions. My thesis is that on background of Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis, sociological neo-institutionalism interprets the process of globalization as a more or less linear process, and the analysis becomes thus a part of the grand narrative of Lutheran Protestantism itself, describing rather Calvinist phenomena.4

Education and the World Culture Thesis of Neo-Institutional Sociology About thirty years ago the educational discourse was confronted with a conceptual distinction developed at the Department of Sociology at Stanford University on the basis of studies of educational establishments. The distinction reformulates Weber’s concept of the institution by differentiating the “institution” from “organization.” The inspiration for this distinction was borrowed from a model developed in organizational psychology, the notion of “loose coupling,” which describes the relation between the formal structures of and the inner activities within an organization (Glassmann, 1973; Weick, 1976). When this model developed within organizational psychology was looked at from a sociological point of view, the idea arose that these formal structures of an organization (such as the school) are a result of adjustment processes. These adjustment processes are interpreted to be triggered by institutionalized social and cultural expectations in order to provide the organization with legitimacy—in other words, to allocate the required resources to the organization. The loose coupling model in sociology thus describes the fact that these formal structures of the organizations are not tightly linked (or coupled) to the practices of production of the organization. These inner activities are believed to have—regardless of public legitimacy—their own logic in terms of effectiveness and efficiency (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, pp. 341–343, 361; see also Meyer & Rowan, 1978, pp. 79–81). Historical case studies in education endorse the idea that the phenomenon of loose coupling is not only not a disturbing factor but quite on the contrary also a constitutive factor of an educational organization; indeed, attempts to connect formal structures and inner activities tightly can lead to an annulment of the organization (Bosche, 2008; Tröhler, 2009a). In other words, cultural expectations are mirrored in the formal structures and procedures of organizations such as schools, whereas the inner activities such as teaching are hardly affected by these organizational strategies—much to the chagrin of educational reformers.

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Shortly after having presented this fruitful and, to a certain degree, non-historical sociological interpretation of the loose coupling model, the authors started to expand it. At fi rst glance, the expansion was primarily geographical, for now global (rather than local or national) tangible structures of education were analyzed. But the expansion of the model was not only geographical, for it aimed at explaining long-term processes: The expansion became historical. The analysis of these processes in the period of the last 150 years led the scholars to conclude that there has been growth and enactment of a world culture, in which the world has become an “international society” or a “world polity” (Meyer, 1980; Boli & Thomas, 1997). They argued that since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, a rationalized world institutional and cultural order has emerged, which consists of universally applicable models that shape states, organizations, and individual identities (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997, p. 173). In order to write this kind of history of the emergence of a world culture, the authors relativize the traditional assumption according to which the school systems of the nation-states of nineteenth-century Europe, on the one side, and the global structured schools of today, on the other side, are incompatible to a large degree. In a paper on historical and comparative education, “The world institutionalization of education,” Meyer and Ramirez (2000) claim that as a rule the functionality and singularity of the national education systems of the nineteenth century are being overestimated to a large degree. They point to a lot of transnational similarities despite the fact that the national education systems became institutionalized in the national societies based on even nationalistic agendas (see also Ramirez & Boli, 1987). This historical and comparative interpretation led to the conclusion that the nation-states, these “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983) with their educational systems as core means of these constructions, did not emerge mainly from ‘internal’ (national) ideas but rather were framed by “cultural principles exogenous to any specific nationstate and its historical legacy” (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000, p. 115) that exert pressure on the national educational systems. Due to this pressure, Meyer and Ramirez (2000) continue, the national educational systems are not as much tied to new and very different idiosyncrasies of social realities as they are homogenized by common aims and projects of development and by shared technological visions to achieve the aims (p. 116). The process of homogenizing and standardizing became faster through technological means and organized international networks of communication: “The professionalization and scientifi zation of education greatly speeds up worldwide communication and standardization, just as the latter clearly facilitates the former. These processes reciprocally influence and strengthen each other” (p. 118). They are described

Globalizing Globalization 185 to be isomorphic in the results (p. 127), fostering the worldwide formal adjustment of the national educational systems. The leading ideology of this transnational process was accompanied by universalization of the notion of development. Whereas for a long time the concept of “development” was applied primarily to the socalled Third World states in order to outline their duties toward the First World, in the 1970s development became the core concept of modernity par excellence. In other words, all countries had to develop in order to guarantee global survival (Hüfner, Meyer, & Naumann, 1987, pp. 194–197).5 Therefore, the cultural self-understanding of modernity is the permanent task of continuous self-development, a task that depends heavily on education, or the educational system. Although doubts have been raised about the connection between the establishment and development of the educational system and the economic, social, and political development, belief in this connection has become accepted all over the world (Chabbot & Ramirez, 2000). In other words, the world society requires both the nation-state and its overcoming in the age of globalization (Meyer, Drori, & Hwang, 2006), whereas belief in the agency of the educational system has been handed over from the ideal of the national to the global society without being altered in its importance. Globalization is defi ned here as the “diffusion of cultural practices and commodities – from consumption of media such as TV programs and Hollywood movies to norms like human rights and environmentalism” (Drori, Meyer, & Hwang, 2006, p. 11), which in turn exposes a need for adjustment in the single national societies. Meyer et al. (1997) state: World-society models shape nation-state identities, structures, and behavior via worldwide cultural and associational processes. (…) As creatures of exogenous world culture, states are ritualized actors marked by extensive internal decoupling and a good deal more structuration than would occur if they were responsive only to local, cultural, functional, or power processes. (p. 173) According to sociological neo-institutionalism, the world society is primarily a cultural phenomenon that arose historically, and international organizations such as the United Nations, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), or the World Bank founded in the wake of the Second World War have played a crucial role in establishing this globalized culture: The colossal disaster of the Second World War may have been a key factor in the rise of global models of nationally organized progress and justice, and the Cold War may well have intensified the forces pushing human development to the global level (Meyer et al., 1997, p. 174).

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The crucial epistemic question remains as to whether processes like globalization can be described analytically at all, or how far sociology or history themselves contribute to the construction of their own object that is allegedly simply being described.

Sociology and the Temptations of History Complementary historical and sociological explications of developments of organizations such as schools are not only academically desirable but also a desideratum of educational policy and of all efforts that are subsumed in the notion of school development. However, from its beginnings the complementary harmony between history and sociology has been more wishful thinking than artifact, if we only think of Émile Durkheim’s (1898) Preface to his journal Anné Sociologique, in which he evaluated the academic character of history with the standards of sociology: “History can be an academic discipline only to the extent that it explains, and it can explain only by comparing (…) But then, from the moment it compares, history becomes indistinguishable from sociology” (p. III; freely translated here). The great interest of sociology in history is no coincidence, for history provides an inexhaustible potential of empirical facts. However, Durkheim’s hierarchy in terms of academic standards is problematic, because sociology is tempted to argue historically but not using standards developed in academic history but rather using its own standards. Sociological neo-institutionalism relies largely on such an historiography, namely, on the historical reconstruction in Weber’s study, published fi rst as essays in 1904 and 1905, Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism] (Weber, 1930)—a prime example of a history construed by a rather ahistorical sociology of religion. As shown in chapter 3, in this eminent study Weber transposes the German Lutheran concept of Beruf (occupation) into English Calvinism and by that creates a peculiar Lutheran interpretation of Anglo-Saxon Calvinism. It is this Lutheran/Calvinist amalgam that led to Weber’s dilemma in religion policy, for despite his deep sympathy with Luther, Weber showed more respect for the Calvinist culture. The main theoretical problem with this blending is that Luther and German evangelical Protestantism insist on a dualistic, twokingdom doctrine. According to the doctrine, in the one kingdom Christ rules through word and sacrament, mercy and forgiveness are practiced, and there are no differences among people. In the other kingdom, in contrast, the Emperor reigns with the sword, and there is no mercy and no equality. But to Luther the worldly kingdom still has a purpose in that, namely, the prince curbs the evil in men—even if through violence; peace is established, and thus conditions are created for proclaiming the Gospel (Luther, 1523/1983, pp. 41–44). Logically, ideas like political

Globalizing Globalization 187 participation, which is a core characteristic of English Protestantism and thus of the Baptist church and of Congregationalism, are foreign to Lutheranism. This political indifference of Lutheranism makes it understandable that whereas Weber focused on the Anglo-Saxon Calvinist theory of work, he neglected its political theory of participation. Indeed, this culture is not inherent in original Calvinism but was developed by refugees that had to escape the reign of “Bloody Mary,” who was trying to reinstall Catholicism, and went to the Continental centers of the Swiss Reformation, where they accommodated to theories of political participation that were developed by the Baptist and Congregationalist sects in the in the seventeenth century in the light of the dominant Anglican Episcopal Church in which the suppressed Protestant sects had to fortify the role of the community and the concept of participation.6 To date, sociological research has hardly recognized that Weber’s Lutheran interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon Calvinism has eclipsed one core element of the latter, namely, the fundamental local democratic culture, and by doing so it has at the same time stressed the alleged lonesome Calvinist citizen. This Weberian pattern seems to stand in the background of the (re-)construction of the idea of a world culture, too. For if neo-institutional analysis presumes that the nation-states of the nineteenth century were less unique and much more exposed to transnational pressures than one would think, the question arises as to where the transnational or universal ideas originated. Neo-institutionalists address this task by going back to the time that is usually labeled the Renaissance, a cultural epoch superseding what are called the Middle Ages and breaking the path to modernity.7 Again, it is Weber who provides the starting ground, namely, Weber’s thesis of the rationalization of the world.8 In an article on “Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account,” Meyer, Boli, and Thomas (1987), with their concept of “world culture” in mind, understand the structuring of daily life as following standardized and impersonal rules; these rules constitute the social order as a means to achieve collective aims such as progress and justice. In this respect, Meyer et al. (1987) interpret the establishment of a world culture as a matter of a millennium project of the Western world (p. 20), in which actors and actions are examined through universal lenses that are hardly recognizable general rules and that are very effective because they are precisely hard to recognize (p. 19). In the same way that Weber argued, Meyer et al. (1987) state that the beginning of this development is situated in fi rst universal structure to exist, namely, in the Western church: The institutions of the West devolve from Western religion and the church at least as much as they are built up by the strategies of subunits (…). The frame derives directly from the Christian church and

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Linguistic Archeology in Contemporary Debates the invisible conceptual ‘Kingdom of God’ that the earthly church organization was supposed to represent in an imperfect way. (p. 23)

Of course, it is interesting to detect what Meyer et al. (1987) mean by the “Western religion and the church” that allegedly were at the origin of the millennium project. Obviously, the authors are in a dilemma. On one hand, they foster the idea of an early global idea, and on the other hand, they of all things identify the Reformation in the fi rst quarter of the sixteenth century as the initial point of this peculiar development towards World Culture. This, in turn, means seeing (church) schism as beginning of a process of global standardization. Against that background, the historical source is blurred rather than identified. For one, a date is named that lies some years ahead of the Reformation, namely, “perhaps 1500” (Meyer et al., 1987, p. 23), when according to the authors the church had been ‘transnational’ and able to comprise a multitude of cultures symbolically. The church had been universalistic in its duty to bring “the way, the truth, and the life” to the whole of humanity. For another, the authors emphasize that the “power of the Word” had been extremely important in the church’s evangelic attempt, which as a matter of fact would unmistakably be a Protestant interpretation: The holistic Catholic universalism of the late medieval times (or very early modern period) is being interpreted through Protestant lenses. What remains to be analyzed is through the lenses of which Protestantism. According to sociological neo-institutionalism, it was the expansion of Christianity that had prepared the way for dissemination of universalistic ideologies with highly legitimated, boundary-less polities: It is precisely within this process that the modern cultural culture with its crucial means of the education system arose (Meyer et al., 1987, p. 23). In an article co-authored with Ronald Jepperson, Meyer argues how within the expansion, the development, and the secularization of Christianity the concept of agency altered: In the beginning, agency was ascribed to transcendent powers, and little by little it was transferred to society and the individual person as the “authorized agency” (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000, p. 101ff.). Here it is interesting that the authors, in only two pages, jump from the alleged universal world of “perhaps 1500” with its feudal system, to the ideology of technical progress and the sacred meaning of the nation-state in the nineteenth century with its educational system, and to Bretton Woods and the founding of the World Bank, one of the crucial transnational organizations in the process of globalization. Here they leave little space for alternative concepts and counter-movements and do not trace the questions as to how in an universal culture the idea of a nation-state became possible, how the school became the church of the (sacred) nation in the nineteenth century, and how the different denominations influenced the cultural understandings of the school systems (Meyer et al., 1987, p. 23). According to Ramirez and Boli (1987),

Globalizing Globalization 189 “despite much variation in level of industrialization, class structure, and political regime, the ideological and organizational responses [mass education] of the various countries to challenges to state power were strikingly similar” (p. 9). This, of course, is a matter of the level of interpretation. At a very abstract global macro level, this interpretation might be convincing, and it fits in nicely with the idea of a global vision of universalism spreading around the world. It is significant that an examination on a more meso level challenges the persuasiveness of this global interpretation. A comparison between the upper secondary education curricula in Prussia and Switzerland in the nineteenth century reveals a different picture. First, there appear to be striking transnational similarities with regard to both the formal differentiation of the upper-secondary education into types and the development of the curriculum (focusing mainly on the introduction of modern foreign languages). However, another picture appears if methods of historical contextualization are used: First, the contextualization of the curriculum within the overall organization of the school system raises doubts as to whether the similarity between the two countries is more than only quantitative on a very abstract level. The second contextualization of the overall organization of education within cultural convictions not only makes this even more doubtful but also reveals fundamental differences rooted in different political convictions, such as monarchism and republicanism (and German Lutheranism and Swiss Calvinism). The result of the comparison shows that despite some formal similarities, the establishment of foreign language education in Switzerland and Prussia could not have been more different (Tröhler, 2009a). The point is that by abstracting from all cultural idiosyncrasies, it cannot be really surprising that a school is a school and that, therefore, they all appear to be similar.

The Linear Construction of a Global History and the Institutions of Education The religious history serving the construction of the neo-institutional account of globalization is little differentiated and does not discuss explicitly the church schism of the sixteenth century, even though it is focused on the Reformation, and it does not pay sufficiently attention to the different denominations within Protestantism and their respective development. The neo-institutional interpretation of Calvinism with the sacred individual as agent (besides the organization and the nation-state) is clearly owed to Weber’s Lutheran interpretation of English Calvinism. When the authors of this interpretation start their historical account at “perhaps 1500,” they do not claim that the globalized world culture in fact arose out of the Western church. It becomes evident that they are talking about Protestantism, more precisely about Calvinism that had

190 Linguistic Archeology in Contemporary Debates become transformed in seventeenth century England—in other words, the line of Calvinism that was already Weber’s focus and to which he attributed the Lutheran concept of profession. Meyer and Jepperson (2000) refer explicitly to “Anglo-American” Protestantism without precisely distinguishing it from a “German and Scandinavian” tradition; they simply state that this latter tradition is “more corporate,” whereas the Anglo-American tradition is supposed to be more individual (p. 108). The fact that Anglo-American, that is, reformed Calvinism and Lutheranism differ greatly in the idea of the political order and the concept of the citizen is not considered at all, but still today Bürger in German means something completely different from ‘citizen’ in U.S. English, as perplexed scholars in the field of international comparative citizenship education have to admit. And whereas in some countries small efforts in citizenship education are very effective, in other countries, such as Germany, few of the desired effects are achieved, despite high investments. The low results are hard to explain: “Whether they are rooted in culture, history, or some aspect of schooling is not evident” (Hahn, 1999, p. 247). Neglecting these fundamental religious/cultural distinctions, Meyer and Jepperson (2000) believe in American individualism, losing sight of the fact that local democracy is the ideological counterpart of this individualism, setting boundaries to excessive individual liberalism—an ideological source, that, for instance, stood at the beginning of the educational philosophy of Pragmatism (see chapter 6). The social culture emerging from this ideology sociability was not least appreciated by Weber when he visited the United States in 1904, as demonstrated in chapter 3. Weber’s wife, Marianne Weber (1926/1950), wrote when describing the American culture: The whole magic of memories of youth lies alone just in this time of life. Lots of sports, pleasant forms of social activities, endless intellectual stimulation, and long-lasting friendships are the yields, and especially, far more so than our students, they are trained in the habit of work. (p. 345; freely translated here) And at the end of their American travels, she reported: “This faithful companion sometimes has the feeling that she is bringing home a man who has recovered, who has become conscious of a slowly gathered stock of strength” (p. 345; freely translated here). However, despite his personal experiences, Weber continued to interpret Calvinism as essentially individualistic without paying attention to its democratic local basis, and neo-institutional sociology seems to follow this crooked interpretation by defi ning this model as the basis of the American liberalism that eventually became successfully disseminated around the world after Second World War and that dominates contemporary world culture. In it the agent as that “abstract, rather contentless,

Globalizing Globalization 191 entity in social space” is being legitimated (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000, p. 109). In accordance with Weber, the neo-institutional interpretation identifies an isolated individual as the result of Calvinist Protestantism having become the rationalized agent of the globalized process. However, by following a Lutheran interpretation of Anglos-Saxon Protestantism and its triumphant history, the historical account becomes itself part of this Whig history. It is true, of course, that the democratic dimension in Anglo-Saxon Calvinism is universal in terms of its religious foundation, but the point is that this universal claim is foreseen to be materialized locally. Within this tradition, democracy is embodied locally, and the local traditions are distinguishable and precisely not standardized. But like any other fundamental theory about historical processes, the neo-institutional reconstruction of globalization pays little attention to challenging concepts, cultural idiosyncrasies, and the contingency of the process, for the glory of making complexity look logical. Weber’s Lutheran philosophy of history is rewritten and expanded in order to explain the emergence of a (Calvinist!) world culture, ignoring the taken-for-granted assumptions, the culturally anchored convictions, in other words, the institutions of the localism that nota bene had been the topic of the early neo-institutional studies with which this area of research was able to become established. This may be the reason why little attention is paid to the tensions between a global culture and a local culture, each of them sharing expectations about schooling. The fierce reactions to PISA in Germany, for instance, that are discussed in chapter 12, are due to a cultural clash between the national taken-for-granted assumptions about education and the transnational agenda of an international organization such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Weigel, 2004; Overesch, 2007). And in Switzerland, where schools are governed by the individual cantons and the school laws have to be put to the ballot, educational reform proposals following an international agenda are turned down by the local or regional sovereigns. Recently, even a not very far-reaching attempt to harmonize (for the very fi rst time) the duration of the educational levels and some basic aims of the elementary schools in Switzerland (HarmoS) was rejected by some of the Swiss cantons. The organizational expression of this locally defi ned democracy within education are the already local and regional school boards in the United States, in some districts of Canada, and in Switzerland—thus, in those regions of the world dominated by a reformed Calvinist religion.9 It is these that make out of a state school a public school, a distinction that is usually not broadly recognized. It is this localism that reinforces the stability of the inner activities of organizations such as the school, or the grammar of schooling, as David Tyack and others put it (Tyack, 2003). If the school is primarily subject to the local public instead of the cen-

192 Linguistic Archeology in Contemporary Debates tralized administration, the caution shown towards reforms is greater, because communal responsibility does not gamble lightly with proven quality. It is no coincidence that the transnational culture of experts conflicts with the local logic of school governance. The constant accusation that the local school boards are the major cause of failing reforms signifies the dramatic clash between the idea of an elite democracy and the local democracy, or between expertise and common sense,10 whereas the confidence in expert and expertise goes back to the Presbyterian and conservative Baptist circles after 1900, developing a new form of empirical psychology allowing them, so they believed, “prediction and control of behavior” (Watson, 1913, p. 158) (see chapter 8 this volume). Local cultural expressions such as the school boards are not the focus of sociological neo-institutionalism. They seem to disappear altogether or to take the role of agents, losing their character of agency in the course of the globalization-process. However, within the Weberian inspired historical theory of rationalization and Weber’s Lutheran interpretation of Calvinism, phenomena will be perceived to fit into the encompassing historical process leading to the world culture. The alleged empirical evidence of the processes that seems to be the source of the theory of globalization is itself a consequence of a universalized interpretation of Protestantism that has been taken for granted. The historical particularity has thus become a universality, a frame that would allow no empirical evidence to be different other than to support the general thesis of globalization. The (alleged) description of the object turns out to be, in the end, the construction of the object. In as far as this (re-) construction serves the interpretation of the universalized self (perception), we can recognize a new example of Whiggism.

Research in Globalization and Education It is not difficult to fi nd evidence of pro and con arguments regarding the globalization thesis of sociological neo-institutionalism. Leaving cultural idiosyncrasies of the school systems aside, there is a history of globalization leading to a more or less homogenous world of education, and focusing in contrast on historical particularities raises doubts about this history: The French do center on political symbols in citizenship education, and the British do not (Hahn, 1999). However, this kind of argument might not pay attention to the main problem discussed here. The problem is—and this is the overall concern of this book—how to deal with phenomena without being part of it. Classical scientific epistemology used the word “objectivity” to surmount the problem, but we know today that paradigms not only suggest certain solutions of the problem but instead actually construe the problem, and any successful paradigm will reduce history to its own success, widely ignoring other paradigms (Kuhn, 1962). As there seems to be no

Globalizing Globalization 193 Archimedean point from which we can perceive the subject of inquiry objectively, the inquiry needs to address the researcher as well—not in order to eliminate the researcher’s own world view and epistemological frame but in order to become aware of it: that is, what can be offered. I see no other way than to historize not only a topic but the construer of the topic as well. It was for good reason that Quentin Skinner said that one of the big advantages of history is not only the acquisition of knowledge but also the acquisition of self-awareness: “To learn from the past—and we cannot otherwise learn at all—… is to learn the key to self-awareness” (Skinner, 1988a, p. 67). Doing history is essentially the self-discovering of one’s own standpoint. From a historiography point of view, the critical question discussed in this chapter is not how we explain our global hegemony historically, but why and how we ourselves help to construe a history framed as a triumphant history (or a history of decline). Discussing the quest that historians should be able “to discount or set aside the fact that he or she holds certain beliefs to be true and others false,” Skinner (1988b) answers: “I am sure no historian can ever hope to perform such an act of forgetting, and that in any case it would be most unwise to try” (p. 236). The act of forgetting would be unwise, because it would homogenize the researchers with their topic, in other words melting the construction of the object with the research on it; again, the result is then a form of Whiggish history that serves the ideological interest of the observer and not its instruction: The German historiography in education is one prime example of this problem (see chapter 9). The historical analysis of a process of globalization that will minimize the construing of the topic must analyze the adaptability of the single languages, their connection to religious and/or political languages, and their hybrid forms that they can receive in specific historical constellations. Isomorphic structures cannot then be the center of research but rather patterns of thoughts and the adventure of their cultural diffusion. And we should not forget that Christianity is not the dominant religion in the world, that Protestants make up not even 10 percent of the world population, and that Christianization is the story not only of the missionaries but also of those being evangelized, as Jacques Gernet (1985) showed in his wonderful book, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures. There is ample empirical evidence that the dominant culture in the world today is a dominant one among others and that historical accounts of the triumphant story will cement the position only at the price of neglecting others. And as this book has shown, Protestantism itself is in itself still divided, as the fierce reactions in the German discussion on PISA show.

12 Concepts, Cultures, and Comparisons PISA and the Double German Discontentment

In the October/November issue of 2002, the University of Heidelberg newsletter Unispiegel announced a series of public lectures dedicated to the question: “Are we still a people of poets and thinkers?” The subtitle provided the information that the university’s Studium Generale lecture series in winter semester 2002/2003 would focus on educational questions (Bildungsfragen) (Unispiegel, 2002). Ten different scholars were invited to speak, including even one scholar from abroad, as the announcement proudly emphasized. The speakers were philosophers, historians, politicians, and writers—and none of them were from the educational sciences. The Unispiegel announcement of this series of lectures names the poor German PISA results presented to the public a year previously in 2001 (Deutsches PISA-Konsortium, 2001) as the reason for this initiative. Also, the announcement stated that results alarmed Germany, and that all over the country causes and culprits were being sought after and identified, and that many of reform ideas were being formulated: “Although the bad ranking of the PISA survey concerns the realm of education and schooling, the self-doubts go far beyond. A whole nation wonders: Are we still the people of poets and thinkers?” (Unispiegel, 2002, ¶ 1). PISA, in other words, had shattered the national prospect of idiosyncratic singularity, the residual identity of a country with a troubled history. The estimation that PISA signified a cultural crisis was no illusion. No other country has reacted to PISA as fiercely as Germany. It is illuminating to go to the different country websites of Amazon.com—www. amazon.de, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.co.uk. If you enter “PISA” at www.amazon.co.uk, you fi nd games, sandals, novels, and guidebooks but nothing on the OECD survey. If you search www.amazon. fr, the same holds for French publications; however, there are at least two English publications and one German publication on the survey, and in Spain, where there is no Amazon.com but www.fnac.es, there is one single book to buy, the official OECD report of the 2006 survey in Spanish. In Portugal, there is no publication about the survey at all.

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The picture changes dramatically when you search for PISA in Germany (www.amazon.de): You fi nd over a dozen publications connected to the survey, including the official publications, in-depth analyses, PISA for small children, PISA for adults, and PISA training programs to enhance knowledge; even a crash course on PISA has been produced. In other words, in Germany, PISA has obviously created a market, for it has created customers with specific demands and specific supply. The general thesis of this concluding chapter is that this manifold phenomenon arises out of a situation that was caused by the clash of the two dominant cultural self-understandings that go back to the different Protestant denominations, Calvinism and Lutheranism.

Concepts in a Domestic Debate: Competence—Bildung—Knowledge At the center of the PISA survey, there is a distinction that caused some confusion in Germany. This distinction is the one between different characteristics of knowledge, namely, the distinction between useful and useless knowledge. There is knowledge that is “merely learned,” and there is learned knowledge than can be used in the (future) lives of students (OECD, 2001a, p. 14). Because PISA wants to look at “young people’s ability to use their knowledge and skills in order to meet reallife challenges,” the focus is not on what students learn at school on the basis of their curriculum and textbooks (p. 16): “Assessments that test only mastery of the school curriculum can offer a measure of the internal efficiency of school systems. They do not reveal how effectively schools prepare students for life after they have completed their formal education” (p. 27). The German translation of the OECD report, of course, follows this fundamental distinction. It says—and here I retranslate from the German-language version of the OECD report—that PISA does not merely focus on knowledge learned at school but on how students can apply this knowledge (OECD, 2001b, p. 14). In the German text this ability is called Grundbildung, and it is specified by the addition in parentheses of the English notion “literacy,” but it is also called Kompetenz (competence) in the German text (p. 16ff.). Kompetenz is the German conceptual frame within which PISA operates in Germany, and it opposes—at least to a certain degree—the concept of knowledge (Wissen). In this respect the German translation is quite consistent with the English version. However, this consistency with the English version is superficial. In Germany, there is indeed a long tradition that marginalizes school knowledge as mere knowledge, but this alienation occurs for a totally converse reason than that of the OECD survey. The overall German cultural marginalization of knowledge can be easily seen in the absence of the headword Wissen (knowledge) in relevant German-language

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educational encyclopedias and reference works. These works do not even refer to related headwords such as Kenntnisse (knowledge, skills); and in those instances where Wissen is discussed, it only appears in compound words that can be found in numerous encyclopedias, such as Wissensbegierde (desire for knowledge). This shift to the inner attitude of the learner is no coincidence and reflects the educational concept that draws the most attention in the German discussion, namely, the notion of Bildung. Knowledge is by nature in deficit; Bildung, in contrast, is the aim. In other words, both the OECD and the German tradition marginalize knowledge in contrast to something else, and this “something else” is called competence within the linguistic world of PISA in Germany and Bildung in the much older German tradition. This shared enmity against mere knowledge suggests, of course, the merging of competence and Bildung. And indeed, the assertion that competence is in fact basically Bildung—and that their common enemy “mere knowledge”—is made explicitly. In their outline on developing national education standards, the German PISA experts assure us that “‘Competencies’ describe nothing other than those individual skills that had been indicated by the concept of Bildung” (Klieme et al., 2003, p. 65, see also p. 66). Unfortunately, and in contrast with the concepts of competencies and standards, the “concept of Bildung” is not elucidated at all, but in another publication by the same PISA experts we fi nd the names of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Wilhelm Flitner,1 and with them some very general references to the German concept of Bildung (Deutsches PISA-Konsortium, 2001, p. 21). It is important to note, too, that the merging of competencies and Bildung is not solely an act by historically blind empiricists (some of the so-called empiricists were initially trained in history, too), and HeinzElmar Tenorth, a genuine historian of education, did the very same thing: “Bildung and literacy, basic skills and modes of handling higher culture do not depict disjunctive classes of knowledge and behavioral patterns but specific developments of a single and identical dimension of human practice” (Tenorth, 2008, p. 29). So much for what may develop from of a common enmity, but whether or not this marriage of competences and Bildung was sustainable must be analyzed. The critics of this alliance between competencies and Bildung were, at any rate, not a long time coming. One journal in education (see Rekus, 2007) organized a special issue by inviting scholars to discuss the question of whether or not competence is indeed simply a new notion for the concept of Bildung (“Kompetenz—ein neuer Bildungsbegriff?”), and the result of this discussion is devastating for the PISA consortium—admittedly, the consortium did not participate in the discussion. The general critique discloses not only a fundamental difference between Bildung and competence but also a fundamental hierarchy between the two, for the latter is identified as a decline of true culture. It

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is interesting to note that the very same Wilhelm von Humboldt who had been used by the PISA consortium to legitimize their concept of competence is now being used for exactly the opposite purpose. Manfred Sieburg, for instance, says that one of the enormous merits of Wilhelm von Humboldt was that he had “succeeded at breaking the unfortunate chain” between education on the one hand and adjustment on the other by proclaiming Bildung as immeasurable occurrence in the inner person, and that with the PISA ideology the schools would basically become training institutions again, with the aim to adjust students to the existing environment (Sieburg, 2007, p. 189). This sharp dualism between inward Bildung, on the one hand, and simple adjustment to the existing world, on the other hand, was in fact the basic inspiration for the lecture series at the University of Heidelberg in 2002/2003, defending Wilhelm von Humboldt against the aspirations of the PISA ideology. The philosopher Brigitte-Sophie von Wolff-Metternich reminded the public that “Bildung … is not codifiable and fi xable knowledge—neither theoretically nor practically” (Wolff-Metternich, 2004, p. 68), not utilitarian nor pragmatic (p. 69), and therefore principally purposeless (p. 71). And compared to the Humboldtian theory of Bildung, Wolfgang Frühwald, professor of literary studies, identified the basic assumptions of PISA by even using a medical metaphor, as being the “cancer” of a “value-for-money ideology”—and he wrote this in English (2004, p. 42). Bildung, as another prominent critic stated, is exactly the opposite of this “value-for-money ideology,” for it indicates the inward formation of a human being that in the end is called a Persönlichkeit (Herrmann, 2007, p. 172). The Persönlichkeit as result of Bildung is the self-sufficient mature and harmonious person, whereas PISA and its program intend to incapacitate humans in order to train them to be obedient homo oeconomicus (Krautz, 2007). In other words, the suggestion to mate competence and Bildung caused irritation and raised skepticism.

The Clash of Religious Languages It would probably have been helpful to the protagonists of this domestic debate to recognize that a very similar discussion occurred a century ago, when American Pragmatism, as the fi rst non-European philosophy, began to be discussed on the old continent. Whereas American Pragmatism was received with some interest or even sympathy in different European countries such as Britain, the Netherlands, or, most of all, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, it was with very few exceptions harshly rejected in Germany (see chapter 7). One of the major reasons for this rejection was William James’ theory of truth, in which James had identified the idea of truth as a contingent function in the process of thinking—and not as an eternal idea, as German idealism

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did: “‘The true’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving” (James, 1907b, p. 86). Truth, in other words, is not the aim of thinking and research but its means; it is a tool of the human practice and not its transcendent aspiration. In the normative horizon of a dualistic German philosophy, this very identification of truth and utility was a slap in the face, and because James did not use his metaphors with caution, he added even more fuel to the German fire, by talking about the “truth’s cash value” (p. 77). The German intellectuals pronounced sentence quickly: Pragmatism was an abject philosophy; it was labeled a “dollar philosophy” and a “despicable kitchen and handyman utilitarianism” that did not hesitate to sell truth for cash (Spranger, 1915/1966b, p. 37). Within the context of the discussion on James in Germany, a German philosopher named Jacoby (1912) replied to James’ characterization of the educational goals of European and, most of all, British universities in Talks to Teachers (1899), which was published in German translation 1900. Jacoby (1912) took up the notion of the Persönlichkeit that is praised today against the PISA ideology (see above) and wrote: The German university does not make it its task to teach a German Herr how to behave like a German Herr. In our tradition, that is exclusively a matter for the nursery. In contrast, the German university, to an outstanding extent, makes it its task to educate the German student to become a Persönlichkeit—a fact that William James, of course, does not take into account but that is nonetheless important and true. England is the land of gentlemen; Germany is the land of Persönlichkeiten. Gentleman and Persönlichkeit, however, stand essentially in hostile opposition to one another. This does not at all mean that a gentleman cannot have something Persönliches about him or that a Persönlichkeit cannot be a gentleman. But the ideal of the gentleman clashes with the ideal of the Persönlichkeit, and the ideal of the Persönlichkeit clashes with the ideal of the gentleman. (p. 217; freely translated here) The perception of a national orientation within these arguments—if they are arguments at all—is not misleading. Eduard Spranger, one of the mandarins of German education in the twentieth century and a critic of Pragmatism, had as early as in 1902 lamented the “inner corrosion” of Germany to an industrial state or—horribile dictu—a social democracy or even anarchy (which in Spranger’s eyes was about identical with democracy) and promoted Fichte’s national ideal of a “closed national Bildung” (Spranger, 1902/1973) (see chapter 9 this volume). And it was the same Spranger who—in his fundamental opposition to the Western world and democracy—in 1928 propagated Bildung as the essential German alternative to the modern world. He identified the birthplace of

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this alternative in German classicism, at the time around 1800; it is the time of the German poets and thinkers, as Spranger emphasized: “We call our thinkers and poets German classics. They had ‘Bildung’ in the full plastic sense of the word, for they were not merely literary intellectuals. That is why they were masters of life and not its wageworkers” (1926/1928, p. 11; freely translated here). The opposition of Bildung and knowledge is crucial: First of all, it is evident that the meaning of Bildung is not an arbitrary sum of know-how and language knowledge, of social attitudes and political dispositions … The meaning of Bildung is always personality [Personalität], that is, Bildung belongs to the human being insofar he is able to represent a unitary meaningful form as opposed to the manifold intellectual contents. It is this meaning that the classics [poets and thinkers] have discovered: The human being as a meaningful form in contrast to the materials of life, the human being as a unity against the multiplicity of the manifold sensual fields of life. (Spranger, 1926/1928, p. 12; freely translated here) The role of Bildung creating meaning is one of the crucial arguments in Spranger’s criticism of Pragmatism, and it is one of the crucial arguments of today’s critics of PISA. Whereas Pragmatism—and here most of all George Herbert Mead—emphasized that meaning is created by social interaction and therefore changes in different contexts, the German idealist tradition insists on an internal instance of true meaningmaking, and this inward instance is what Bildung is all about and how it makes the person the Persönlichkeit. Today, the critics argue against the concept of competence by claiming that the PISA ideology refers solely to utility while neglecting the dimension of the Sinnhaftigkeit, which means something like the “reasonability” in life (Rekus, 2007, p. 156). Against this background, the critics have to reject the merging of Bildung and competence by the German PISA protagonists. Sieburg (2007) gets to the point by starting out with a quotation from what is referred to as ‘the Klieme report’: The educational standards are oriented at the general aims of education, and in principle they are convertible (operationalizable) by tasks and test charts’ [Klieme et al., 2003]. This is the inner contraction: Bildung, regardless of which historical or present attempt of containment of this almost impossible to comprehend concept one wants to subscribe to, resists being operationalized; Bildung is the character of the Persönlichkeit, a never ending process; Bildung is the meta-useful. In other words, Bildung is unmeasurable. (p. 186; freely translated here)

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The Educational “System,” its Engineers, and Cognitive Psychology From the critic’s linguistic and thus ideological background, the merging of Bildung and competences and thus the whole setting of PISA, cannot be interpreted as anything other than upsetting, for it represents the surrender of an entire tradition, of the German Sonderweg, the peculiarity of German History and its ideological and cultural background. Even worse, it is the almost unconditioned capitulation of a cultural ideal to a capitalist ideology, without any ethical value save the making of money. And it is true that against the background of this normative horizon in which Bildung plays a crucial role, PISA’s advance is being identified as an unfriendly take-over that has to be fi rmly rejected. And indeed, when we look at the emergence of PISA, there are good reasons to reject this attempt to merge competency and Bildung. As I argued elsewhere (Tröhler, 2010b), PISA roots in the late 1950s, when the launch of the Sputnik triggered the educationalization of the Cold War, as it was expressed, for example, by former U.S. President Hoover’s reaction to Sputnik: The trouble is that we are turning out annually from our institutions of higher education perhaps fewer than half as many scientists and engineers as we did seven years ago. The greatest enemy of all mankind, the Communists, are turning out twice or possibly three times as many as we do (…) The harsh fact is that the high schools are not preparing youngsters for the entrance requirements which must be maintained by our institutions training scientists and engineers. (“Education,” 1957) In the frame of this ideology, little by little the Cold War had become an encompassing educational reform project with single facets that ironically merged into one single new agenda only after the end of the Cold War in 1989. One of the facets was the National Educational Defense Act in 1958, with its emphasis on three school subjects that today may not be unfamiliar: mathematics, sciences, and foreign languages—in other words, almost the trilogy that PISA is focusing on today. A second facet was the development of the human capital theory at that very same time, and still another facet was the foundation of the OECD in 1960. The fi rst official OECD conference, held in Washington, D.C., in 1960, was devoted to the topic, “Policy Conference on Economic Growth and Investment in Education” (OECD, 1961). However, the enemy was not only the Russians but also the educational ideology that was dominant in the United States at the time and supported by the philosophers of education and the powerful teachers’ unions; it was called the Life

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Adjustment doctrine. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover attacked this doctrine in the name of many: If the local school continued to teach such pleasant subjects as ‘Life Adjustment’ and ‘How to know when you are really in love,’ instead of French and physics, its diploma would be, for all the world to see, inferior. Taxpayers will begin to wonder whether they are getting their money’s worth. (“Education,” 1957) Against this background, the educationalization of the Cold War in the United States marked a transformation of the dominant reference discipline for education, for it switched from philosophy to psychology, more precisely from a popular interpretation of Pragmatism to cognitive psychology, which was at its outset in the late 1950s—cognition theory being the most important academic reference of PISA today, as the stakeholders admit themselves (Klieme et al., 2003, pp. 23–26; Deutsches PISA-Konsortium, 2001, p. 22). The rise of cognitive psychology came along with the rise of new governance ideologies of the Cold War. These governance ideologies arose on the background of a specific historic model—the effective model of problem solving by collaborating military, scientific, and political experts during the Second World War at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in the context of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. In the superb book, Scientists in the Classroom (2002), John Rudolph describes in detail how in the eyes of this ideology the idea arose that nearly any problem could be solved by cooperation of fi rst-class experts, for it had been groups of scientists, for example, who had successfully solved complex problems with radar during the war in order to detect German submarines and who developed the atomic bomb used in Japan (p. 90). This idea of contract research became the model of efficient research for the sake of the nation defending freedom, welfare and peace, for the sake of all people, in other words—an idea that is being applied again within the OECD, PISA, and other large-scale assessments. However, the shift from self-defi ned research to contract research implied a shift of terminology, and the main actor, the researcher, became an expert who understood predefi ned problems as a complex setting of different elements constituting what was called a “system.” The scientific background of this system perspective largely disengaged the experts from cultural constraints; they focused less on understanding in what way a system is a cultural construction or how the system works as a system and instead defi ned it departing from the idea of the best possible mutual arrangement of its identified elements. In other words, the systems perspective was the engineering perspective, and this perspective focused “not just on the optimum performance of a given human/technological

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system” but on “the entire array of possible alternatives that might be created by using existing or newly developed technologies … from scratch” (Rudolph, 2002, p. 94). It is exactly this idea of interpreting problems as systems and finding solutions “from scratch”—in other words, disregarding the contexts in which systems are constructed and are operating—that gave cognitive psychology entry into educational governance, for cognition theory interpreted cognitive data processing in the language of mathematics, defi ning intellectual solution procedures using the mathematical template of algorithms. In this way, the human mind had become a computing machine that had to be maintained and supported like a complex computer. This understanding of the processes within the human mind ideally fitted the technological systems perspective, and optimism about the feasibility of the one safe free and prosperous world grew again. The new model entered into educational governance quickly. Already at the Woods Hole Conference in 1959, where the problems of U.S. education were discussed against the background of Sputnik, Jerome Bruner reconciled his cognitive psychology with the systems engineering perspective. Bruner noted that in order to discuss the problem of the U.S. educational system: We introduced this subject … by suggesting the analogy to a weapon system—proposing that the teacher, the book, the laboratory, the teaching machine, the fi lm and the organization of the craft might serve together to form a balanced teaching system. (Bruner, as cited in Rudolph, 2002, p. 99) The experts at the conference had agreed that “the goals of education … expressed in terms of the human functions and tasks to be performed … can be as exactly and objectively specified as can the human functions and tasks in the Atlas Weapon System” (as cited in Rudolph, 2002, p. 99). This ideology took forty years to become globally dominant—ironically, however, only after the big enemy, communism, had eclipsed.

Something about the Real World and its Challenges Comparing the ideological roots of both the PISA experts and PISA critics makes the harsh rejection in Germany of the merging of competency and Bildung appropriate and the series of lectures at the University of Heidelberg a matter of course. But why, we might ask, have the PISA experts been so foolish in trying to merge these two so obviously contradictory concepts? Were they attempting to use a Trojan Horse strategy, pretending that PISA was in fact what Humboldt and the German theory of Bildung actually wanted? Or are they just not gebildet, and thus confused about core concepts? There is some evidence of this, after all, for

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PISA uses variable and sometimes contradictory concepts: Does PISA in fact assess the performance of students (Deutsches PISA-Konstortium, 2001, p. 11), or the basic competencies of the next generation, or the student’s literacy and skills (Deutsches PISA-Konstortium, 2001, p. 15), or the educational system (Klieme et al., 2007, p. 11)? All this is asserted— and it makes PISA a real sitting duck for the rigorous school of both German idealism and critical theory, two ideological threads that are usually not very much in accord with each other. Indeed, it is pretty simple to attack PISA’s use of concepts as influenced by a rather meager educational theory that was developed in the context of the human capital theory. The argument that PISA is more an empirical than a theoretical approach does not hold, fi rst of all because I do not understand how you can count without knowing what and why you are counting. What is even worse is that PISA is in fact not as empirical as it pretends to be, which brings it closer to the non-empirical German ideology of Bildung and which thus supports the merging of competence and Bildung. When PISA looks at “young people’s ability to use their knowledge and skills in order to meet real-life challenges,” the focus is obviously not directed at what students learn at school on the basis of their curricula and textbooks (OECD, 2001, p. 16). In an irritating way these PISA “real-life challenges” are anything but the students’ school life, and beyond that they are not only outside of school, but they are also situated in “life after” compulsory education. In other words, PISA does not ask how students master their own lives but speculates about the mastery of a future life: “Assessments that test only mastery of the school curriculum can offer a measure of the internal efficiency of school systems. They do not reveal how effectively schools prepare students for life after they have completed their formal education” (OECD, 2001a, p. 27 [English version]). The German translation says even more explicitly that PISA wants to test the ability of the different school systems to prepare students for life (OECD, 2001b, p. 30 [German version]), for life as adults (Deutsches PISA-Konsoritum, 2001, p. 17)—as if students were not living at all as empirical entities in the here and now. Even more irritating is the fact that PISA takes a rapidly changing world as cause of the assessment itself, at the same time pretending to know what skills will be necessary in a changed world in ten, twenty, or thirty years. How can they know what kind of skills will be required, if they are so sure about how quickly the world changes? I have no trouble believing that competencies that you acquire in your life can be useful later, although there is, of course, no guarantee. But the basis of a successful later life is success in your present life, for you develop, differentiate, and adapt your skills or competencies through the learning effects of your interactions. Allow me to go back to my own youth, knowing full well that biographical introspection is certainly not the primary concern of cognitive psychology, but it gives you an idea of

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what real real-life challenges may be for a youngster at the age of fi fteen. In short, the challenge of adolescence is to gain esteem and recognition within the peer group and to avoid disturbing troubles at home. This latent tension may demand the highest skills. One example: At the time when I was young, it was cool for young men to have long hair, and I was growing my hair. The challenge was to convince my parents, most of all my father, week after week why I did not have to go to the barber, and I had to fi nd reasons and withstand fi nancial baits and bear arguments, again and again. The longer my hair grew, the more respected I felt in the peer group, and the more troubles I had at home. Another thing was to get a moped and additionally to have a fast moped—bicycles were outmoded. However, the technical control mechanisms of mopeds were stipulated by the law, so that the moped could not exceed 30 km/ hour—an offensive speed limit in our eyes. So a real-life challenge was to develop skills to tune up the motors and to have—if ever possible—the fastest moped in town. Further skills were to convince parents, without lying too much, that spending the night with friends took place in a controlled family situation, and other skills were to get money from them to pay for music that they did not like. All these negotiations on and violations of family rules were—at least in the eyes of most parents that I knew—alright, as long as we did well at school, and doing well at school meant nothing other than succeeding at what PISA is not interested in: mastering the curriculum. In other words, the handling of private life challenges had to be paid in some sort of way by bringing home good grades, and this meant—despite what PISA says—learning the very concrete lessons in very concrete textbooks, corresponding to very concrete curricula. All these skills—the basic ones that we needed—are largely neglected by PISA, because it is obviously not interested in the present lives of students but in speculating on future lives.

The Inner and Outer Harmony and the Double Discontent PISA’s peculiar non-empiristic empiricism is rooted in the original ideology of PISA, the Cold War ideology of the late 1950s, a world of expertise. In this cultural milieu we fi nd the vision of creating a united harmonious world of free people. The slogan of this vision was “One World.” It had been used as early as 1943 by U.S. presidential candidate Wendell Lewis Willkie, and it conveyed the idea of a safe and united world based on the security and well-being of common people throughout the world, provided by U.S. world leadership (Fousek, 2000, p. 79). Annoyingly, one of the former Allies, the Soviet Union, had expressed similar ambitions on its own agenda and had thus become more and more a distracting factor for the global vision of “One World” under the leadership of the United States. The Russians—by the way, with a very similar technocratic and expertocratic ideology as the United States—were denounced as being

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ideological, whereas the United States was praised as being free of ideology, for it was seen to be in the hands of academic experts. The concept replacing the concept of ideology was development, development being the global expression of an ideology-free, expert-driven world. The emphasis on development towards peace and freedom was by its very foundations religious, even missionary, as can be seen as early as in 1947, when former Vice-President of the United States Henry A. Wallace, said: “By reason of history, geography and sheer economic strength America has it in her grasp to furnish that great and last peace which the prophets and sages have preached for thousands of years” (Wallace, as cited in Fousek, 2000, p. 11). The religious language of salvation is not misleading but instead characteristic, as Denis Brogan, a British commentator upon the United States, noticed in 1957: “The notion of ‘mission’ is far wider than it was; the whole world is the parish of the United States as a government and a culture” (Brogan, as cited in Gilman, 2003, p. 69). Or to quote President Harry S. Truman in 1949: The United States is preeminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we can afford to use for the assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible. (…) Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technological knowledge. (Truman, as cited in Gilman, 2003, p. 71) The human capital theory and the OECD fit this ideology perfectly, and it is certainly no coincidence that at its fi rst conference in Washington, D.C., in 1960, where the discussion topic was Economic Growth and Investment in Education, none of the keynote speakers was an educationalist (for more details, see Tröhler, 2010b). Against this background, the exclusion of the real-life situations of students and thus exclusion of the curriculum from PISA becomes understandable. What students learn at school across the world is culturally contingent and disparate; however, the world according to PISA is the globally harmonized world of interaction: “PISA offers a new approach to considering school outcomes, using as its evidence base the experiences of students across the world rather than in the specific cultural context of a single country” (OECD, 2001a, p. 27). But there exists nothing like the experiences of students across the world in contrast to experiences within the “specific cultural context of a single country,” for experiences are always situated within a specific cultural context. The neglecting of both the real-life situations of students and the culturally situated learning experiences makes it clear why PISA exponents in Germany aim at harmonizing competence and Bildung.

206 Linguistic Archeology in Contemporary Debates Both the PISA ideology and the German traditional Bildung ideology are nonempirical by their foundations, and both are driven by the idea of a harmonious world as the goal of education. The German tradition aims at the harmonious inward Persönlichkeit, which is able to give sense to the multiple outer world, and the PISA tradition aims at the harmonious “One World” of free, globally interacting, and economically secure citizens. The ideological backgrounds of these two visions are not as alien as the heated debate in Germany might lead us to believe: They are both rooted in different denominations of Protestantism. The ideal of inward Bildung is based on Lutheranism and the ideal of the One World on Calvinism. It is no coincidence that around 1900, the president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, originally a Baptist theologian, told his students that the fourth part of world history was then beginning and that it had its center in the United States. Harper (1904) said that in this era civilization was reaching its apex: According to him, “the history of civilization has been synchronous with the development of a pure and true conception of God, and of his relation to man”—that is, the Baptist Protestant interpretation of God and God’s relation to man. Harper saw this movement as a mandate for a mission that had been assigned to the United States by God and that had deep educational consequences, built on the “Gospel and education.” The Gospel and education would empower the United States to convert the world into one: “In this work of educating humanity to understand God and itself, America is the training-school for teachers” (Harper, 1904, p. 175ff.). Milton’s Paradise, which had been lost when the Puritans had to leave England in the seventeenth century, was fi nally to be regained under the leadership of purified models of freedom, democracy, and prosperity based on technological and economical progress. Against this background, the double discontent in Germany and the general upset becomes clearer. For some, PISA is the cultural catastrophe as such, for it is unmistakably situated in the outer world rather than focused on the inner world, which in turn means a betrayal of the idiosyncratic German tradition of Bildung and Persönlichkeit, a tradition of a country that through its peculiar history has a hard time defi ning and fi nding national identity. The educational idea of Bildung had in some way replaced what William Wallace alias Braveheart is for Scotland, William Tell for Switzerland, George Washington for the United States, Giuseppe Mazzini for Italy, Mahatma Gandhi for India, or the revolutionaries of 1789 for France—and against that background, calling Bildung into question means basically questioning the idea of the German nation. However, there was an analogue irritation on the side of the PISA experts, who realized how little the educational project of the “One World” has been achieved, of all things, in Germany, for in no other country were the differences in the PISA scores between the immigrants and the native students so striking as in Germany, indicating

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poor national unity and coherence. It is no coincidence that in contrast to the politicians, the German PISA experts placed less emphasis on the international ranking than on the catastrophic diversity of the German students based on their social and racial backgrounds. The educational system had failed in its task to integrate the immigrants and thus failed to contribute to the creation of harmony, here not of the inward person—which is an odd perception in the world of cognitive psychology, anyway—but of the outer world. It is this clash of religious cultures or languages—so close and so alien at the same time—that made PISA an incomparable event in Germany. This clash is not without advantages, for at least it shows that on both sides an educational theory that might be called secular and thus academic has still a long way to go.

Notes

Foreword 1. See, e.g., Tröhler, Schlag, and Osterwalder, 2010. 2. In the current ISI Web of Science, there are 439 citations of this work from 1995 until the time of this writing. These references to the grammar of schooling function as a topoi of an unproblematized concept in the historical narrations. This index of recognition through citations can be compared to the citations of Atlantic Crossings by Rodgers that I discussed earlier. The latter book appeared three years later and has three citations in the education journals; of which only one was related to the history of education (Paedagogica Historica, a European journal). The American History of Education Quarterly is not listed in this citation index. 3. I am using religion in a broad sense about a cultural disposition about modes of life and how one is to achieve happiness and fulfi llment. But the term does not adequately apply to traditions in Asia that relate to, for example, Confucianism and Taoism. Labeling them as religions was a 19th-century invention of the West to rationalize difference from within its own classification system. The inscriptions of cultural dispositions from the Reformation and Counter-Reformations in different forms of republicanism and schools are examined in the case studies of Tröhler, Popkewitz, and Labaree, 2011.

Preface 1. Some paragraphs in this introduction follow Tröhler (2009c).

Chapter 1 1. Because this book aims at the identification of educational langues from the uses of the paroles, it differs from two other books that use the notion of “languages of education.” First, the two books (Reboul, 1984; Scheffler, 1960) are restricted to their own natural languages, French, respectively English, and thus forego the advantage of transnational and translingual comparisons. Moreover, Oliver Reboul’s title, Le Langage de l’éducation, is misleading to a certain degree, for the book’s content is closer to the subtitle, Analyse du discours pédagogique: The book aims at analyzing

Notes 209 discourses “intermediate between the langue and the parole” (p. 10; freely translated here). And Israel Scheffler’s The Language of Education aims at the analysis of a set of slogans and metaphors that obviously characterize public communication. In the vocabulary used here, Scheffler remains within the realm of paroles by analyzing them in the tradition of analytic philosophy. 2. The educational impact of republicanism on the development of modern schooling is examined comparatively in Tröhler, Popkewitz, and Labaree (2011).

Chapter 2 1. Capitalism as a specific economic mode is an older phenomenon, as we know from landmark studies such as the study by Jacques Le Goff (1956; 1986). But it is no coincidence that the advent of the notion of “capitalism” is in the second half of the eighteenth century (in French and English) or even the nineteenth century (in German), as it indicates that this mode of economy had become in some way distinguishable and even conspicuous and for cultural traditions a specific ideological problem. Max Weber (1904–05/1930) dates the crucial progression of the older capitalism to a dominant social phenomenon with the activities of the English Dissenters in the second half of the seventeenth century, which corresponds with the analysis here. For a broader interpretation of Weber, see the following chapter (chapter 3). 2. The fi rst famous economic or speculative bubble in which investors lost fortunes was the tulip mania in the Netherlands in 1637; other famous bubbles were the Mississippi Bubble and the South Sea Bubble in 1720 (for an overview, see Garber, 1990). 3. These letters were addressed to Madelaine Catherine Delessert (*1747), respectively to her daughter Marguerite-Madelaine (*1767). They were published in 1781 in Collections Complètes des Œuvres de J.J. Rousseau, which was the basis of the German and English translations (George, 2006). 4. Montesquieu’s father, however, had been French Protestant but was forced into Catholicism. His wife, Jeanne de Lartigue, was Protestant, too. 5. The Zurich Academy did not provide any courses in civic studies or political philosophy, despite the fact that only citizens who were themselves sons of citizens had admission to the Academy (which in turn expresses the character of a “mixed government” in Zurich). However, political knowledge was transmitted at the Academy in the subject “Swiss history” taught by Johann Jacob Bodmer. 6. A digital version of the English translation of Lavater’s Essays in Physiognomy is available at http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/fi ne-art/publications/lavater/ (Retrieved August 11, 2006). 7. There are fundamental differences between original Calvinism, Zwinglianism, and Lutheranism that are discussed in chapter 3 of this book. Here I talk about the theology of the Consensus Helveticus of 1675, which merged Calvinism and Zwinglianism and refrained from the idea of predestination and theocracy that characterized Calvinism. Zwinglianism

210 Notes was much more indebted to the classical Republicanism than Calvinism and thus politically more directed towards participation and ultimately democracy. 8. Hirzel became renown throughout Europe in 1761 with his work, Die Wirthschaft eines philosophischen Bauers (Hirzel, 1761). In this work he lauded hard work, thriftiness, common sense, and obedience as the fundamental virtues of the “wise” farmer. The work appeared as early as 1762 in French translation, under the title Le Socrate rustique, ou description de la conduite économique et morale d’un paysan philosophe, translated by Jean Rodolphe Frey, who was from Basel and an officer in the French Services. The Frey translation was translated into English by Arthur Young and published in London in 1770 in an anthology under the title Rural Oeconomy. All of these appeared in several editions; an American edition was published in 1800. Thomas Jefferson recommended this book in 1820 as a title that should belong in an agricultural library (I thank Ellen Russon for fi nding this information in “Agricultural titles recommended by Thomas Jefferson,” at the University of Maryland Universities Libraries website, under Special Collections, Maryland Room, Marylandia and Rare Books: http://www.lib.umd.edu/RARE/MarylandCollection/Riversdale/biblios/jefferson.html); http://www.lib.umd.edu/RARE/MarylandCollection/Riversdale/biblios/jefferson.html. An undated, probably earlier edition was published in Italian translation in Florence under the title L’ economia d’un contadino filosofo. 9. The idea of self-examination in order to modify the soul is a neo-Augustinian idea that was set against the teaching of St. Thomas, proclaiming the incommutable soul. It became educational in the political tensions of Florence around 1500, a time when classical republicanism was newly discussed in the context of civic humanism as opposed to the aristocratic authority of the Medici (for details, see Osterwalder, 2010), but it did not try to solve fundamental tensions between economic progress and classical republican ideas.

Chapter 3 1. I thank Michael Geiss for his help in fi nding pertinent sources. 2. Adherents of American Protestant revivalist “evangelical” groups, whose mission is to “evangelize” (convert) the lost, led by the Holy Spirit, took inspiration from the passage in the Old Testament in which Moses received the call from God, appearing in the burning bush, to lead the people of Israel home out of Egypt: “Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro … and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fi re out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fi re, and the bush was not consumed (…) God called unto him out of the midst of the bush (…) I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows (…) Come now therefore, and

Notes 211

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.” (Exodus 3:1–10). For possible inspiration that Steinbeck could have taken from the Bible, see Lisca (1997, p. 579ff.) and Crockett (1962). For a discussion on Talcott Parsons’ translation of Weber’s term Entzauberung as “elimination of magic” or “rationalization” and a proposal to translate the term more accurately as “disenchantment,” see Kaelber (2002), available also at http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/research/KaelberPE.pdf. Research on the use and impact of edification literature is still a desideratum on the research agenda (see here Lehmann, 1996a, p. 19ff.). In the fi rst footnote to the second part of the essay, Weber states: “Zwinglianism we do not discuss separately, since after a short lease of power it rapidly lost in importance” (Weber, 1904–05/1930, p. 217, Footnote 1). Ahlstrom (1972) makes it clear in his standard work, Religious History of the American People, that Zwingli and Bullinger in fact received recognition around 1550, at fi rst because of Luther’s conservatism and his specific theological orientation “especially on law and gospel,” but he stresses that they had become decisive by the turn of the century (by 1600) “to the needs of public and personal religion by means of the idea of covenant.” This local covenant of promise became one of the supporting pillars of the Puritans both in England and later in America. “Federal theology, as it is called (foedus, covenant), has, of course, a long pre-Puritan history. Some of its roots are to be found in certain writings of Calvin, and they achieve special clarity and emphasis in the extremely influential writings of Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich” (Ahlstrom, 1972, pp. 87, 130). It is therefore not by chance that Paradise Lost was fi rst translated into German (1732) by the arch republican of Zurich, Johann Jacob Bodmer. I thank Silke-Petra Bergjan for discussions on this section. The literature stresses that Luther himself never spoke of a two-kingdom doctrine and also never drafted a systematic theory of religion or church and state theory; moreover, the term “two kingdoms” was coined by Harald Diem (1938). However, the incontestable radical separation of the religious from the worldly dimension led, in the face of the primacy of religiosity, to political indifference, which later found expression in the concept of Bildung and the notion of the autonomy of education in German pedagogy. On this background, Luther’s rancor against Zwingli becomes understandable. Zwingli’s intention to work towards worldly, that is, political and social, reform led Luther to make the accusation that Zwingli’s republicanism presumed to “scorn everyone, including the princes and potentates.” Luther defended the system of state sovereigns and gave republicanism no chances: “It is also said that the Swiss have in the past killed their lords and in this way won their freedom … up to now the Swiss have paid in blood for this dearly and are still paying dearly; how this will end is easy to imagine … I do not see any type of government to be as enduring as the one in which authorities are esteemed and venerated” (Luther, as cited in Farner, 1931, pp. 18–21; freely translated here).

212 Notes

Chapter 4 1. Just how well known Rousseau’s works were known is difficult to assess. Schwarz gives Emile only four books instead of the actual five, and he asserts that Johann Gottfried Heinrich Feder had translated the work into German. However, Feder’s work was entirely his own: Der neue Emil oder von der Erziehung nach bewährten Grundsätzen (Feder, 1768–1775) (see Schwarz, 1829, pp. 453, 455, footnote 2). 2. In Grosses Conversations-Lexicon für die gebildeten Stände [Big conversational encyclopedia for the educated classes] of 1848, there is a 63-page-long entry under the subject heading “education,” which in part reproduces Schwarz’s treatment of the history of education word-forword. The entry emphasizes that the impact of Rousseau was incalculable during his own and succeeding periods but draws the reader’s attention to the fact that his religious education was “nonsense” (Meyer, 1848, pp. 164f.). As in Schwarz, the encyclopedia entry then turns in succession to the German philanthropists, to Pestalozzi, and, fi nally, to the development of German education from 1800 (p. 167ff.). H. I. Smith, writing one of the fi rst American histories of education, declared, that the “history has been taken substantially from the work of Schwarz” (Smith, 1842, p. v). 3. On how this mode of constructing the history of education became popular worldwide, see Tröhler (2004). 4. Of course, scholars have read more than only Emile, even in education. The First and Second Discourses and the Social Contract belong to Rousseau’s canonized texts, and people have sometimes read Rousseau’s confessional autobiography and the novel Julie or the New Heloise (Rousseau, 1761), whereas scholars engaged in gender studies focused on Rousseau’s Lettres elementaires sur la botanique, published fi rst in German in 1781 and then in English in 1785 with the title Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed To A Lady (Rousseau, 1787); see chapter 2 of this book. But when it comes down to Rousseau’s educational theory, we fi nd an interesting reduction of these texts to some of the core ideas of the fi rst three books of Rousseau’s Emile, notwithstanding some contradictions to other texts. Rousseau’s Social Contract, published the same year as Emile, in 1762, is then seen as Rousseau’s political solution to meet the challenges of a deeper cultural crisis—described in the two Discourses in 1750 and 1755, whereas Emile is defi ned as an educational solution to the very same problems. 5. The main work of sensationism in France was published in 1754 by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (Traité des sensations); it was translated into English only in 1930 (Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations). However, already in Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines in 1746 Condillac had developed John Locke’s empiricism to sensationism (translated into English ten years later: An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, London, 1756). 6. Rousseau praises the social circles for woman and girls, too, strongly separated from those for men and boys, where they could play, drink coffee, and engage in inexhaustible small talk (p. 97ff.; p. 91).

Notes 213 7. Aristotle, Politics, book 5, part 9: “But of all the things which I have mentioned that which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government, and yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected” (Aristotle, 1996, p. 138ff.). 8. Compare Aristotle’s Politics: “For, inasmuch as every family is a part of a state, and these relationships are the parts of a family, and the virtue of the part must have regard to the virtue of the whole, women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the constitution, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtues of the state” (Aristotle, 1996, book 1, part 13). 9. Leonhard Usteri was born the same year as Lavater and Füssli (1741), was a student of Bodmer’s at the Academy of Theology in Zurich, and part of the republican movement in Zurich. See also chapter 2.

Chapter 5 1. This remark was triggered by the fact that Bentley had mentioned the name of Thomas Day, an English abolitionist, progressive educator, and Rousseau admirer. Day had dedicated the third edition of his poem The Dying Negro (1775) to Rousseau. In the dedication he spoke abusively of the American colonists: “It was some excuse for the disciples of Lycurgus, that if one man had been created by Heaven to obey another, the citizens he had formed best deserved the empire of the world. But what has America to boast? What are the graces or the virtues which distinguish its inhabitants? What are their triumphs in war, or their inventions in peace? Inglorious soldiers, yet seditious citizens; sordid merchants, and indolent usurpers; behold the men, whose avarice has been more fatal to the interests of humanity, and has more desolated the world than the ambition of its antient Conquerors! For them the Negro is dragged from his cottage, and his plantane shade *;—by them the fury of African tyrants is stimulated by pernicious gold; the rights of nature are invaded; and European faith becomes infamous throughout the globe. Yet, such is the inconsistency of mankind! these are the men whose clamours for liberty and independence are heard across the Atlantic Ocean!” (Day, 1775, p. viiiff.). 2. One of these dissenters was the Baptist John Bunyan, who was sent to prison in 1658 because of preaching without permission. During his years in prison, Bunyan wrote the ‘manifest’ of reformed Calvinism, The Pilgrim’s Progress. On the importance of this book, see chapter 3. 3. Mercy Otis Warren is the female hero of the American Independence. She published several anti-British satires, such as Adulateur, a Tragedy, as it is now acted in Upper Servia in 1773 (Warren, 1790). It uses famous figures of the Roman republic to attack the British governor of the colony and to plea for liberty in the classic republican sense. Her Poems, in which the Roman republic plays an important role, too, are dedicated to George Washington, who is praised as having “united all hearts in the field of conquest” (Warren, 1790, p. iv). 4. Like the Puritans, the Quakers belonged to the English Dissenters of the seventeenth century. In contrast to the Puritans, the Quakers defended the

214 Notes

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

religious principle of the “Inner Light” of each individual and shared a different social theory than the former. Jefferson’s Notes … was submitted as a draft version in 1781 to François Barbé de Marbois, the secretary to the French legation in Philadelphia at the time. Circulating copies met with a tremendous response, so Jefferson wrote an extended version. In 1785 and then again in 1786/87 Notes … was published in Paris. A poorly edited bootleg print motivated Jefferson to publish an authorized version. It was published in London in 1787. For more details, see Nicolaisen (1995). In the very last and decisive confl ict in Geneva, Rousseau’s The Social Contract was published in 1762, adding fuel to the flames. For a comparative aspect of Jefferson’s educational republicanism, see chapter 10. All of the states ratified the Constitution, although some rather narrowly. Delaware ratified it as early as December 7, 1787, whereas Rhode Island waited until May 29, 1790. Important were the big states such as Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, which ratified the Constitution in 1788. The Federalists used Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans as a source for their arguments (Zehnpfennig, 1993, Anm. 17); it was one of Rousseau’s favorite books (see chapter 4). One of the most important differences between the modern republic and the classical republic is the idea that personal sovereignty can be delegated. The abdication of virtue is an additional difference between modern republicanism and classical republicanism, without interpreting factions as a prerequisite of a discursive public. Another supporter of the Constitution, Noah Webster, brought the problem to the point and recommended a solution that despite its abdication of virtue is based in the agrarian republicanism: “Virtue, patriotism, or love of country, never was and never will be, till men’s natures are changed, a fi xed, permanent principle and support of government. But in an agricultural country, a general possession of land in fee simple, may be rendered perpetual, and the inequalities introduced by commerce, are too fluctuating to endanger government. An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operation to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic” (Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, Philadelphia 1787, as cited in Stourzh, 1970, p. 230, footnote 104). This partial accordance with classical republicanism goes back to James Harrington, who expected virtue and equity under the condition that the material situation of the people is warranted. Harrington believed that this ideal is easier to achieve in an agrarian economy than in a commercial one (see Pocock, 1975, p. 534). However, Webster builds on the important educational prerequisite of a made (educated) citizen, as the following sub-chapter demonstrates. It is no coincidence that Rush’s home state was Pennsylvania, which had the most democratic constitution. An important cause was Alexander Hamilton, who aimed at a strong nation on the basis of commerce and trade. Hamilton caused general public distrust (see Stourzh, 1970).

Notes 215

Chapter 6 1. The fi rst railroad in Chicago made its maiden journey in 1848. Using the example of Rochester, New York, historian Paul E. Johnson impressively reconstructed how life in a city could change through the access to a modern transport network such as the Erie Canal, and how these ‘capitalist’ developments led to a religious revival called the Second Grand Awakening (Johnson, 2004). 2. Porkopolis was the nickname given for excelling in the slaughterhouse business. Cincinnati was the fi rst city to have this nickname (as early as 1843), being replaced by Chicago after 1860 (Wade, 2004). 3. An impressive view of the rise of Chicago and insights into city conditions is provided by the fi lm, Chicago, City of the Century, co-produced by WGBH Boston and WTTW Chicago, in association with the Chicago Historical Society. The fi lm is based in the book City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America by Don Miller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996; Touchstone, 1997) (see also Wade, 2004). 4. See, for instance, the essays of Montgomery Schuyler (1961) and the essays by Henry Van Brunt (1969). 5. To name a few examples: Henry George (George, 1879); Jacob A. Riis (Riis, 1890); Benjamin O. Flower (Flower, 1893); Lincoln Steffens, (Steffens, 1904); James Bryce (Bryce, 1913). 6. Theodore T. Munger, as cited in Hutchinson, 1992, p. 76. Munger, in his volume on Horace Bushnell, the prominent Congregationalist minister who rejected distinctions between the sciences and Christianity, constructed a prehistory of “New Theology” (Munger, 1899). 7. Unlike many other academics, Dewey had not studied in Germany. He was one of the fi rst to obtain a doctorate in philosophy in the United States (from Johns Hopkins University). 8. As explained in greater detail in chapter 3, Martin Luther and German evangelical Protestantism hold to the doctrine of the two kingdoms. In Christ’s kingdom, governed by the spiritual authority of the Word and the Sacraments, there is grace and forgiveness of sins, and there are no differences among men. The other realm, the secular kingdom, is ruled by the temporal authority of the ruler, the sword, and the law; there is neither grace nor equality. Lutherans view the two kingdoms as instituted by God as mutually beneficial. The realm of Christ benefits from the temporal realm, because secular authority enforces peace in the world, and the temporal realm is served by the realm of Christ in its proclaiming of the Gospel through the Word. This evangelical Protestantism holds further that it is of prime importance not to confuse the two kingdoms: God rules the spiritual kingdom through the Gospel. The Gospel is not meant to rule the secular kingdom, which is ruled by its own power and laws. Any attempt to use the Gospel to rule the secular world is an error. Politically, this doctrine—particularly since it was accompanied by a state church—was tantamount to total deprivation of people’s right of decision making. This makes clear once more the fundamental difference between the Baptist faith and Congregationalism, and it explains why American Lutherans and Presbyterians did not follow the liberal turn of theology—

216 Notes

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

that is, in the words of William R. Hutchinson, they were “most resistant to change.” See Hutchinson (1992, p. 114). These problems were primarily found in urban areas, such as Chicago. The above mentioned William Stead, son of a British Congregationalist minister, wrote an impressive account of the conditions in Chicago around 1893–1894; see Stead (1894). Fiske’s work in this area was controversial—at Harvard, he was condemned as an atheist and denied permission to teach. Tufts stood by him, however. In a letter in 1916, Tufts explicitly and positively identified Fiske as one of the few contemporary authors mentioned in Dewey’s Democracy and Education (Tufts to Edith Foster Flint, March 9, 1916). Asterisk indicates uncertain reading of Mead’s handwriting. Punctuation as in the original. Taylor’s private papers contain the following description of his settlement house: “Chicago Commons is a ‘Social Settlement’ located at the corner of Grand Avenue and Morgan Street. It was founded in May, 1894, and is the home of a group of people who want to share the life of the neighborhood its comforts and discomforts; its privileges and responsibilities; its political, civic and personal duties and pleasures. They offer their home as a social center for the neighborhood, in which they desire to be friends, fellow-citizens, neighbors” (Taylor, 1900–1906). Herron was a Congregational minister and professor of applied Christianity at Grinnell College from 1893 to 1899. In many ways, his views were closer to those of Graham Taylor. In fact, Taylor invited Herron to teach “social religion” at the Chicago Commons School of Social Economics in 1895 (see Taylor, n.d.). After his scandalous divorce in 1899, Herron resigned from Grinnell College and joined the Socialist Party. The passage cited here, which is as representative of Pragmatism as it is of Christian Socialism, shows how closely connected the various social reform movements were; specifically, it indicates that the mentality of liberal reformed Protestantism linked these movements together. This book was an answer to Walter Lippman’s (1825/1929) The Phantom Public. Lippmann, the son of second-generation German-Jewish parents, declared himself a socialist during his years at Harvard, but, starting at the turn of the twentieth century, he turned to radical liberalism in the European sense. In The Phantom Public, Lippmann criticized the Protestant/ republican ideology of the homo politicus: “The environment is complex. Man’s political capacity is simple” (p. 78). He wrote that the ideal of the old American communities, whereby “the voter’s opinions were formed and corrected by talk with their neighbors,” was no longer effective within the complexity of the “Great Society” (p. 181). For this reason, Lippman called for a plural public, arising from the exchange of interests: “I have conceived public opinion to be, not the voice of God, nor the voice of society, but the voice of the interested spectators of action” (p. 197). Dewey responded fi rst with a critical review (Dewey, 1925) and then with a series of lectures at Kenyon College, Ohio, in 1926. These lectures were later edited and published as The Public and Its Problems (Dewey, 1927/1954). On the whole debate between Lippman and Dewey, see Grube (2010).

Notes 217 16. Evidently, The Public and Its Problems was not the defi nitive answer, because Dewey was unable to solve the problem of how local communities, which he wished to revitalize, could be brought to engage in the type of global communication necessary to advance scientific knowledge. That is, he failed to resolve the issue of why local communities should want to harmonize with other communities. Dewey developed a strategy for harmonizing the particular with the universal in his 1934 book, A Common Faith. What is crucial in the present context is not so much the fact that in this work Dewey, as Rockefeller stresses, once again uses the term “God” in a positive sense after not having done so many years (see Rockefeller, 1991, p. 234) but rather the fact that human and religious experience are made synonymous—that is, plurality is attributed to an assumed unity. See also Tröhler (2000). 17. See also Dewey’s fi nal address before the Students’ Christian Association of the University of Michigan on May 27, 1894: “The responsibility now upon us is to form our faith in the light of the most searching methods and known facts; it is to form that faith so that it shall be an efficient and present help to us in action, in the co-operative union with all men who are sincerely striving to help on the Kingdom of God on earth” (Dewey, 1884/1971a, p. 105).

Chapter 7 1. I would like to thank Ruth Villiger, Sylvia Bürkler, and Markus Christen, who helped me fi nd the sources. 2. In German Switzerland the reception was much more reserved, for the chairs in philosophy and education were held mostly by Germans or German-oriented scholars with a Lutheran language of philosophy and education (Tröhler, 2006a). 3. Flournoy’s booklet resulted out of studies on the relation between the soul and the body. His aim was to develop a psychology that had “the character of a science” (Flournoy, 1890, p. V). The bases of this psychology were fi rst of all the “laws” behind what was called the “psychophysiological parallel” and, second, the effort to emancipate psychology from the field of metaphysical philosophy. Flournoy legitimated this effort by the ‘empiric fact’ that “psychophysiological parallelism” was dualistic. According to tests in his laboratory, there was no mutual relation between psychological facts and physiological events—they are just “simultaneous” (p. 17). From the point of view of an experimental science, the psychophysical parallel was a given thing, inexplicable, an enigma, that seduces people into metaphysics (p. 20). Flournoy insisted that all metaphysical explanations and systems are fruitless attempts (p. 51). 4. A photograph of Flournoy and James in Geneva on May 18, 1905, is available on the Internet at http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/jamesn. html 5. “My dear Flournoy, there is hardly a human being with whom I feel as much sympathy of aims and character, or feel as much ‘at home’ as I do with you” (August 30, 1896) (James, as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 54).

218 Notes 6. Only a human being / is able to do the impossible. / He distinguishes, chooses, and judges, / and he can give permanence / to the moment (Goethe, as cited in James, 1897, p. 15; freely translated here). 7. This institute is now a part of UNESCO. See: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/ AboutIBE/hise.htm 8. “I am all aflame with it [Pragmatism]”, and “I want to make you all enthusiastic converts to ‘pragmatism’” (James to Flournoy, January 2, 1907; as cited in Le Clair, 1966, p. 181). 9. Dewey’s book, by the way, was dedicated to William James, who was not insusceptible to vanity and reacted quickly by publishing a short article, The Chicago School, in Psychological Bulletin in 1904 (James, 1904). James praised Dewey as the head of that innovative school, just as Dewey was about to leave Chicago for Columbia. 10. A German translation had been published in Germany already in 1900, and it was published in Italian as early as 1903. 11. Today the institute is a part of the University of Geneva. See http://www. unige.ch/rousseau/welcome.html 12. The very same fourth French edition was the basis of the German translation in 1911. 13. The editor of this journal, Georges Bertier, was the director of the experimental school L’École des Roches, and in the same year he translated James’ Principles. Bertier advocated a secular state and was active in the Protestant-dominated French Boy Scouts movement that today calls itself l’Unite scoute protestante Jean Calvin [Protestant Scouts Unity Jean Calvin]. 14. The texts by Dewey were: L’intérêt et l’effort (Interest and Effort in Education; published in 1913; L’enfant et les programmes d’études [The Child and the Curriculum; published in 1902]; Le but de l’histoire dans l’instruction primaire [The Aim of History in Elementary Education; published in 1902]; Morale et éducation [Moral Principles in Education; published in 1909]. 15. Pidoux had already translated James’ Will to Believe under the title La volonté de croire, which was edited in Saint-Blaise near Neuchâtel 1908, and Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some Life Ideals, which was edited in 1907 in Lausanne and published under the title Causeries pédagogiques (see above). 16. One of the most striking examples of foreignness between the Germans and Pragmatism can found in a rather unknown text, namely, in the introduction to the German translation of the book La philosphie de William James, which was published by Flournoy a year after James’ death in 1910 in French (it appeared in English translation in New York in 1917). In this introduction, the German editor Arthur Baumgarten, who had studied under Flournoy in Geneva, praises James as the greatest philosopher after Schopenhauer – but as having the severe blemish of a “pragmatistic theory of truth”: “Verifying through experience and practical probation are most worthy indications for the truth of an assumption, but it is not acceptable to identify it with truth” (Baumgarten, 1930, p. x; freely translated here). 17. The letter is not only embarrassing because Ferrière is obviously trying to display to Dewey his own ingenuity, but also because the articles collected

Notes 219 in Claparède’s L’école et l’enfant were not identical with the articles in The School and Society (see above).

Chapter 8 1. “The German scholars were forced to note that the public interest in empirical child and youth studies was greater abroad than in Germany, which was so much the worse, for the Germans believed themselves to be the creator of this discipline and thought they were being copied by foreign countries” (Hopf, 2004, p. 85, freely translated here). Indeed, German research was highly appreciated abroad, what can be seen, for instance, in the example of Edward Wheeler Scripture, a psychology teacher at Yale, who taught his private seminaries in German and discussed German books exclusively, and at the end of the seminars they sang German students’ songs (see Sokal, 1980, p. 258). The downfall of empirical education in Germany was parallel to the decline of historiography in psychology; Pongratz (1980), historian of psychology, speaks of “fi fty meager years” between 1912 and 1962. 2. As shown in the introduction to this book, the soul lies at the center of the Protestant interests, which in the context of the attraction of modern sciences in the eighteenth century led to the emergence of a specific branch of research called Erfahrungsseelenkunde (an early form of experimental psychology). Its actors were almost exclusively pious German Protestants. The general thesis was that the observations of made experiences would shed light on the inner life of the person. 3. The focus is self-observation, in which “our attention” is directed to “expected appearances, even before they occur”; we “pursue according to plan the single elements of it and … use artificial instruments helping our sensual organs” (Wundt, 1882/1885b, p. 135, freely translated here). The aim is the measurement of psychical procedures, that is, the relation between physically measurable stimuli (sounds, light, touch) and the exactly detectable psychic reactions that are being reflected upon. The claim is not limited to founding a new science besides all the others but to giving a sound foundation to all the others, for it is the scientifically unexplored “consciousness” that will give us a sorted picture of the outer world (p. 154ff.). 4. During the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, American psychologists had a booth where thousands of visitors and specially invited Native Americans measured their reaction times. The experiments aimed at individual varieties, not at the idea of a soul (Sokal, 1980, p. 264). 5. Gustav Oscar Berger completed his doctoral degree a year ahead of Cattell, in 1885, under the supervision of Wundt. Because of his economically rather unprivileged family situation, he had to help Cattell with his experiments in order to earn some money (see Cattell’s letter of December 23, 1884, as cited in Sokal, 1981, p. 147). 6. Grundzüge was translated by the British psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener and published in 1902 as Principles of Physiological Psychology (London: Palgrave). Titchener had completed his doctorate under Wundt in 1892. He then went to Cornell University to teach psychology.

220

Notes

7. Dewey was one of the few exponents of this broader movement who did not have a minister as his father. However, he grew up in a devout Congregational atmosphere in Burlington, Vermont, and his mother was deeply affected by the Second Great Awakening. 8. Mead’s lectures have since been published (Mead, 2008). They build almost exclusively on contemporary psychological literature, whereby neither Catholic nor Jewish authors are considered and, with the exception of Wundt, no Lutheran author either (Biesta & Tröhler, 2008, p. 14ff.). This selection was by no means a conscious discrimination but is an expression of a hardly conscious cultural (and thus linguistic) affi nity. The ‘enemies’ were the (dualistic) philosophies.

Chapter 9 1. See chapter 8. At a conference in May 1917 in Berlin, it was determined that teachers’ education would take place outside the universities, for education was not considered to be purely “scientific,” meaning not philosophical enough. The very few chairs established in the universities in the 1920s were held by exponents of geisteswissenschatliche Pädagogik, who were believed to be close to the major German philosophical tradition. See Schwenk (1977), Drewek (1995), and Tenorth (2002). 2. Many of the textbooks published in the fi rst years were republished in the 1960s, some of them several times. 3. Diverging from the majority, Mann modified his hostile attitude towards democracy after 1921. In 1933 he escaped to Switzerland. 4. The model was Cecil Reddie’s school, Abbotsholme. The German Lutheran theologian Hermann Lietz was a teacher at Abbotsholme in 1896 and wrote the educational novel Emlohstobba (anagram of Abbotsholme). In 1898 Lietz founded the fi rst German Landerziehungsheim. However, the Landerziehungsheim that Mann sent his children to (Odenwaldschule) was not anti-Semitic. The Odenwaldschule made headlines in 2010 for the massive sexual abuse of the children in the last decades.

Chapter 10 1. On the following considerations, see chapter 4 in this book and Tröhler (2004). 2. Within only two years of the founding of the Deutsche Reich in 1871, as many as four different “histories of education” were published for use in teacher education; they went on to appear in a total of fi fty editions, and they all stood in the service of the (moralized) building of the nation. Sixty percent of the authors designated in these works as important educational thinkers were German; a further 25 percent were figures from the ancient world. A few years later, the French took over this genre for their nationally oriented teacher education, replacing the German “personnel” with French exponents, however, and putting the ideology of rationalist progress in the place of the Lutheran doctrine of “inwardness” of the German works. On the connection between “history of education,” teacher education, and nation building in the nineteenth century, see Tröhler (2006b).

Notes 221 3. The obvious nationalization of the educational discussion and the development of the school system blocked sight of the fact that there were indeed international reception and affi nities. The reception activity was determined by commonality or foreignness of the dominant langue. See chapter 6 of this volume, with the prime example of the reception of pragmatism in Europe. Whereas Lutheran Germany brusquely rejected Pragmatism, Pragmatism found a home in Geneva. 4. Publishing on education was not out of the ordinary here but rather was in the mainstream of the German intelligentsia, as Fritz Ringer (1969) described in The Decline of the German Mandarins. The educational theorists differ only in that for them, we cannot speak of a “decline.” On the contrary, after the Second World War, the old mandarins of the Weimar Republic again held the important chairs at the universities and dominated the relevant journals. They safeguarded the dominance of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik in the discourse of German education, which at the same time isolated them from the international discussion—with consequences up to today (see also Kersting, 2009). 5. Herman Nohl completed qualifications as a university lecturer in 1908 under Rudolf Eucken, who stood at the center of the Lutheran national movement after 1900 (see above). With Eduard Spranger and Wilhelm Flitner, Nohl is regarded as one of the three mandarins of German education. 6. On the closer connection between dualism, the dual idealist idea of totality, and the concept of Bildung, see chapter 9. 7. It is interesting that both of these possibilities (reinterpretation and ignoring) happened with Rousseau. The “classic” example of reinterpretation is the translation and commentary of Rousseau’s Emile organized by a German group of educators (Philanthropists) in the twelfth to fi fteenth volumes of the Allgemeine Revision des gesamten Schul- und Erziehungswesens [General Revision of the Collected School and Educational Systems of a Community of Practical Educators] (1789–1791), edited by Joachim Heinrich Campe (1785–1792). The example of ignoring is Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert (1758), which was the only work of Rousseau’s books in the second half of the 1750s that was not translated and published in Germany at all. But a group of exponents of republicanism in Zurich organized an abridged translation and published it in Zurich in 1761 (the Lettre appeared in English in London as early as 1759). The educational concept developed by Rousseau of socialization in the social “circles” (cercles) of the republic was thus never discussed in the German educational theorists’ Rousseau interpretation up to today, despite the fact that it represents Rousseau’s educational ideal. 8. Webster’s famous spellers (The American Spelling Book, later becoming The Elementary Spelling Book) had sold over 20 million copies by 1829 (see Tyack, 2003, p. 17) and were used for the next hundred years. The spelling and reading exercises criticized the absolute powers, monarchies, and aristocracies of Europe; see, for example, Webster (1798/1880), p. 50 (in praise of Washington) and p. 52 (against Napoleon). 9. The recommendation was proposed by members of the Moralische Gesellschaft [Moral Society] in Zurich, who did not yet belong to the Helvetic Society. In the meantime, the president of the year of the Helvetic Society,

222

10.

11. 12.

13.

Notes Hans Rudolf Schinz, had been one of the founding members of the Moral Society in 1764, and the secretary of the Helvetic Society, Salomon Hirzel, had even been the initiator the Moral Society (see Erne, 1988, p. 130ff.). Acceptance of the proposal was therefore well assured within the Helvetic Society. As was seen in chapter 5, the language of classical republicanism was dominant in the Colonies in terms of the new nation as a (millennial) project and educational issues but less in the formulation of the Constitution, where a language of modern republicanism, based on the idea of the natural law, dominated. Montesquieu’s father, however, had been French Protestant but was forced into Catholicism. His wife, Jeanne de Lartigue, was Protestant, too. This does not mean to say that republicanism is the true dominant underlayer of Pragmatism; that underlayer is reformed and liberalized Calvinism as represented, for example, by the liberal Baptists or Congregationalists. But as soon as it came to political upset, as in the time of 1776, the language of republicanism that is clearly compatible with reformed Calvinism is used (see chapter 5). It is often assumed that the introduction of women’s suffrage has natural law and thus liberal origins and that therefore in this case we are dealing with a language other than the republican language. Whereas this is certainly true in many cases, it is not true of Pragmatism. Jane Addams— president of the second congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Zurich 1919—rejected natural law theories and gave reasons for the necessity of women’s suffrage based on the development of large cities; see Tröhler (2005).

Chapter 11 1. The procedure was dogmatic and pragmatic at the same time. First, in 1586 a committee of six experts from Spain, Portugal, Scotland, Flanders, Holland, and Sicily developed a draft of a course of study, which was then sent for comments to the teachers all over Europe. A reformulation of the course of study based on the feedback received was sent out again for annotations. The result of this consultation was the probably most successful global curriculum, the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu, published fi rst in 1599 and remaining unchanged until the nineteenth century. For further details, see Donelly (2006). 2. Thomas S. Kuhn detected this tendency in the history of science: After a paradigm shift has occurred, Kuhn (1962) says, the protagonists of the new paradigm write histories of the paradigm as if science could have not taken any pathway other than to the new state of the art. In doing so, they neglect, suppress, and marginalize competing paradigms. 3. “Globalization” is not only discussed as a distinct topic in the Western sphere by Western intellectuals, but it has also become a global phenomenon in the academic discursive performances themselves. See, for instance, Khondker (2000). 4. On one of the famous (postmodern) critiques of the grand narratives, see Lyotard (1979/1984).

Notes 223 5. As a matter of fact, the idea goes back to the Cold War in the 1950s, and it influenced educational notions, especially those of the World Bank and the OECD (see Tröhler, 2010b). 6. Calvinism in Scotland, in contrast, was broadly enforced, so that Scottish and Irish Calvinism—Presbyterianism —was not forced to develop a fundamental theory of political participation. 7. When exactly the epoch of the Renaissance starts, and when it ends, is a matter of dispute. In contrast to art historian Jacob Burckhardt, the “father” of the notion of the “Renaissance,” Burke takes the example of the supposed “end” of the Renaissance to show that it would be more accurate to think in terms of a dissolution of the various Renaissance arts—painting, philosophy, music, or architecture—that was successive but that varied in the speed with which it took place in the different European countries (Burke, 1987, p. 81). It is also impossible, Burke concludes, to speak of a clearly identifi able “start” of the Renaissance, which— according to Burckhardt’s thesis—marked the end of the Middle Ages and recognized, for the fi rst time, the person as an individual identity. 8. “By ‘rationalization’ we refer (conventionally) to the cultural accounting of society and its environments in terms of articulated, unified, integrated, universalized, and causally and logically structured schemes (Weber, 1927)” (Meyer & Jepperson, 1997, p. 105, footnote 5). 9. In the mentioned provinces of Canada, it was American settlers who brought the tradition of the school boards with them, for instance to Alberta. In Switzerland it was Zwinglianism, reforming Calvinism towards more democracy. 10. It does not occur without reason that educational policy makers, experts in think tanks, and professors attracted by the alleged opportunity to reform schools are irritated by the existence of local democratic control of the school and that they accuse the school boards of hindering reform and sustaining the persistence of the status quo. In the view of the expertdriven democracy emerging in the beginning of the Cold War, democracy works essentially not locally but as a form of competition among elites for votes, and therefore democracy is reduced to its procedural function of election. Not even high voter participation in elections was sought after, far from it: “That democracy is best, in which people participate least,” was the general assumption of the expertise-driven democracy in the 1950s (as cited in Gilman, 2003, p. 48).

Chapter 12 1. Along with Fichte, Humboldt belongs to the undisputed heroes of the German geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, as can be seen, for instance, in the hagiographic biography by one of the mandarins, Eduard Spranger (Spranger, 1910). Wilhelm Flitner is the second mandarin; Herman Nohl the third; see chapter 9. They all influenced sustainably the development of the German education in the universities after the Second World War; see, for instance, Kersting (2009).

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Index

A Addams, Jane, 51, 103, 106–107, 109, 128, 175, 222 Adams, John, 13, 82–83, 86, 97 Agrarian, agrarianism, 23, 34, 49, 50, 155, 175–176, 214 Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’, 70 Antiquity, 22, 68, 71–72, 145, 173 B Baptism, Baptist, 39, 53, 54, 57, 102, 105, 107, 116, 133, 138, 147, 187, 192, 206, 213, 215, 222 Bildung, xiii, xvi, 15, 112, 121, 129, 143–148, 152–153, 157–160, 162–163, 166–168, 195–200, 202–203, 205–206, 211, 221 Bodmer, Johann Henrich, 27–29, 31, 35, 173–174, 209, 211, 213 Bourgeois, 7, 9, 33, 69, 70, 72, 74, 90, 155 Bunyan, John, 39, 44, 47, 49, 213 C Calvin, Jean, 48, 53, 61, 80, 88, 113, 122, 167, 211, 218, 222, 223, Calvinist, Calvinism, xii, xiv, xvi, 2–3, 7, 15, 36, 40–45, 48, 49, 53–55, 77, 94, 98, 104, 112, 114, 115, 120, 122, 123, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138, 141, 144, 165, 172, 177, 183, 186, 187, 189– 192, 195, 206, 209, 210, 213 Cambridge school, 6, 10, 12 Capitalism, 21, 22, 24, 36, 39, 40, 43, 45–47, 49, 50, 52–55, 97, 110, 111, 112, 151, 167, 186, 209

Castle, Henry Northrup, 103, 104, 107 Catholic, Catholicism, 3, 27, 28, 33, 42, 43, 48, 52, 114, 116, 127, 131, 133–135, 165, 171–173, 187, 188, 209, 220, 222 Cattell, James McKeen, 133, 135– 138, 219 Chalotais, René-Louis de Caradeuc de, 67 Chicago, xv, 3, 37, 40, 99–107, 109, 112, 114, 118, 122, 127, 131, 138, 139, 140,146, 172, 176, 206, 215, 216, 218, 219 Child, Children, 1, 2, 4, 13, 15, 17, 28, 39, 42, 44, 51, 56, 57, 63–65, 67, 68, 73–78, 95, 101, 103, 112, 116–121, 125–128, 132, 143, 146, 152, 155–158, 161, 163, 195, 211, 213, 218, 219, 220 Christian, 2, 3, 10, 30, 39, 44, 45, 53, 62, 65, 77, 74, 94, 105, 106, 107, 110, 116, 216, 217 Christianity, 40, 50, 52, 77, 94, 109, 110, 115, 151, 167, 182, 187, 188, 193, 215, 216 Citizen, citoyen, 1, 4, 8, 9, 12, 15, 21–23, 28, 29, 31–33, 35, 36, 48, 50, 51, 64, 65, 69–77, 79, 82, 83, 87–94, 96, 114, 124, 128, 132, 143, 146, 171–173, 175–177, 187, 190, 192, 206, 209, 213, 214, 216, Claparède, Édouard, 116–125, 127–129 Commerce, commercial, 16, 21–29, 33–35, 49–52, 61, 69, 79, 86–89, 94, 95, 97, 151, 154, 173, 175, 176, 214

Index Congregation, Congregational, 3, 4, 15, 17, 49, 53, 54, 57, 102–104, 110, 112, 122, 123, 131–133, 135, 138–140, 145, 147, 187, 215, 216, 220, 222 Constitution, 33, 82, 85, 87–98, 158, 213, 214, 222 Corruption, corrupted, 22, 23, 28, 29, 31–34, 38, 42, 51, 54, 64, 68, 71, 72, 81, 84, 85, 87, 91, 97, 101, 102, 110, 112, 151, 173, 174 D Declaration of Independence, 81–83, 89, 93, 170, 171 Democracy, 15, 17, 50–51, 89, 92, 94, 98, 103, 105, 107, 109–111, 122, 126–128, 139–140, 143, 145–146, 149, 151, 153–156, 158–160, 167–169, 171, 175– 177, 182, 190–192,198, 206, 210, 216, 220, 223 Dewey, John, xii–xiii, xv, 3, 4, 17, 41, 50–51, 99, 103–107, 109–112, 114, 117–128, 131, 138–141, 144, 146–147, 152, 175–177, 215–218, 220 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 133, 141–142, 150, 162 Dualism, dualistic, 41, 54, 64, 75, 79, 104, 114, 121–122, 126, 134– 135, 137–138, 142, 149–152, 156, 163, 167–168, 174–175, 186, 197–198, 217, 220–221 E Education educational policy, 186, 223 education system, 184, 188, educational issues, phenomena, problem, 1, 28, 88, 164, 222 educational sciences, 2, 194 educational thinking, 3, 17, 124, 127, 131, 148 history of education, 17, 61, 62, 159, 164–166, 181, 208, 212, 220 Educationalization, 1, 15, 21, 33, 111, 200, 201 England, English, 6, 7, 8, 13, 15, 16, 22, 25–27, 39, 42, 45, 47–49, 51–53, 66, 69, 70, 80, 81,

249

83–85, 88–90, 93, 98, 105, 107, 115, 116, 118, 119, 127, 128, 138, 151, 182, 187, 189, 190, 194, 195, 197, 198, 203, 206, 208–213, 218, 221 Eucken, Rudolf, 54, 151–152, 154, 157, 165–166, 221 Europe, European, x–xiii, xi–xii, 22, 32, 40, 51, 65, 80–82, 85–86, 93, 96, 98, 103, 106, 111, 113–114, 119, 121, 126, 151, 170, 176, 181, 184, 197–198, 210, 213, 216, 221–223 F Fatherland, 9, 23, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 65, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 79, 82, 90, 94, 157, 161 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 61, 148, 154, 157–158, 163, 165–166, 198, 223 Flitner, Wilhelm, 148, 160, 169, 196, 221, 223, Flournoy, Théodore, 113–119, 121, 123, 140–141, 217–218 Foucault, Michel, 9–11 France, French, 7–9, 14, 15, 25, 26, 27, 28, 54, 62, 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 81, 85, 87, 99, 101,113, 116, 118–120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 151, 160, 167, 172, 173, 192, 194, 197, 201, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 218, 220, 222, G Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 142, 147, 149, 150, 152, 156, 160–166, 168, 221, 223 Geneva, Genevan, 4, 32, 36, 69–73, 79, 113, 114, 116–128, 140, 214, 217, 218, 221 Germany, German, 2, 7, 11, 14, 25, 30, 34, 38, 39, 42, 45, 46, 52–54, 61–64, 79, 103, 104, 112–115, 117, 119–122, 124, 127, 131–133, 135, 138, 141, 143–146, 148–160, 162–170, 174, 176, 177, 182, 186, 189– 191, 193–203, 205–207, 209, 211, 212, 215–221, 223 Globalization, 105–107, 109, 110, 112, 143, 146, 181–193, 222

250 Index H Hall, G. Stanley, 119, 133 Hamilton, Alexander, 91, 93, 214 Harper, William Rainey, 102–103, 105, 131, 206 I Iselin, Isaak, 35 J James, William, 50, 102, 103, 108, 113–128, 133, 140–141, 146, 197–198, 217–218 Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 50–51, 82–83, 86–89, 93, 96–97, 127, 170–171, 176, 210, 214 K Kingdom of God, 2, 39, 48, 52, 55, 98 Kuhn, Thomas, 5, 6, 7, 174, 192, 222 L langue(s), language(s) xi–xiii, xv, 1–6, 8, 10, 12, 17, 22, 24, 29, 66, 69, 81, 84, 86–87, 93, 113– 114, 120, 122, 127, 149–150, 164, 174, 177, 208–109, 221, Lavater, Johann Caspar, 32, 173, 174, 209, 213 Lay, Wilhelm August, 126, 143, 146 Locke, John, 25, 51, 62, 63, 81–86, 90, 170, 176, 212, 221 Luther, Martin, 14–15, 42, 52–54, 60, 80, 122, 152, 211, 215 Lutheran, Lutheranism, 2, 3, 7, 14, 15, 17, 36, 42–45, 52–54, 62, 64, 104, 112, 113, 116, 120– 122, 128, 131, 133–135, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150, 153, 163–168, 172, 175, 177, 183, 186–192, 195, 206, 209, 215, 217, 220, 221 M Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 34–35, 90 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 6, 8, 12, 174 Mann, Thomas, 145, 150–153, 159, 167–168, 220 Mead, George Herbert, xv, 51, 103–104, 107–109, 123, 128, 133, 140, 176, 199, 216, 220 Meyer, John W., 183–185, 187–188, 190–191, 212, 223

Meumann, Ernst, 133, 143 Milton, John, 14, 42–43, 47, 49, 94, 97, 206, 214 Monarchy, 30, 48, 70, 71, 74, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 91, 182, Monroe, Paul, 61, 65, 124 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 28–30, 73, 85, 90, 95, 172–173, 209, 222 N Natural law, 29, 30, 51, 81, 82, 86, 87, 90, 175, 222 Netherland, Dutch, xvi, 48, 85, 111, 126, 197, 209, New York, 37, 46, 102, 111, 117, 133, 138, 214, 215, 218 Nohl, Herman, 148–150, 155–158, 160–163, 166–169, 221, 223 O OECD, xvi, 147, 177, 191, 194, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203, 205, 223 P Paine, Thomas, 85, 89 Paris, 36, 49, 68, 71, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 113, 115, 116, 170, 214 parole, 4–6, 12, 27, 28, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 112, 127, 173, 208, 209 Passion, 9, 13, 21, 23–26, 33, 35, 36, 68, 69, 73, 75–79, 86, 91, 170 Patriotism, patriot, 9, 13, 22, 23, 24, 32, 33, 35, 49, 77, 81, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 157, 171, 214, PISA, xvi, 153, 174, 177, 191, 193, 194–207 Pocock, John G.A., 6, 8, 22–24, 97, 169, 214 Pragmatism, 50, 51, 52, 97–99, 102, 113, 117–122, 124, 127, 128, 138, 140, 143, 144, 147, 167, 175, 190, 197–199, 201, 216, 218, 221, 222 Presbyterian, 15, 41, 54, 93, 102, 133, 135, 137, 144, 177, 192, 216, 223 Protestant, Protestantism, xii–xiii, xv, 2–4, 7, 11, 13–15, 17, 21, 22, 26, 28, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43–49, 52, 54, 55, 57, 61, 64, 77–79, 84, 85, 89, 93, 97, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109, 110,

Index 112–116, 120–123, 125–128, 131–134, 142, 144, 146, 147, 163, 165, 167, 172, 181, 183, 186–193, 195, 206, 209, 210, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222 Protestant soul, 61, 131, 132, 135 Reformed Protestantism, 26, 57, 84–85, 94, 96, 98, 102, 111, 121, 216 Psychology, xiii, xv, 3, 34, 46, 47, 103, 104, 108, 113, 114, 116–120, 122–128, 132–134, 136–142, 144–147, 164, 177, 183, 192, 200–203, 207, 217–219 R Redemption, xvi, 3, 4, 102, 109 Religion, religious, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 27, 31, 34, 39–50, 52–55, 62, 63, 71, 77, 81, 82, 85, 92–94, 98, 99, 105–108, 110, 114–118, 121, 123, 131, 132, 143, 145, 151–153, 165, 168, 177, 186, 188–191, 193, 197, 205, 207, 208, 211, 212, 214–217 Republican, republicanism, 6, 8, 9, 13, 15, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33–36, 48–50, 52, 55, 61, 68, 69, 71–83, 85–91, 93–97, 110–112, 114, 146, 172–175, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 221, 222 classical, 9, 13–15 , 16, 21, 22, 26–29, 31–35, 48, 49, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 70, 75, 77, 81–86, 88, 90–96, 98, 111, 114, 121, 164, 172, 210, 214, 216, 222, modern, 81–84, 90, 96, 98, 214, 222 Rockefeller, John D., 102 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15, 17, 25, 36, 61–81, 84–85, 87, 88, 93–94, 112, 118, 125–127, 161–163, 165–166, 170, 209, 212–214, 218, 221 Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758), 70–72, 118, 221, Emile (1762), 36, 41, 61–79, 170, 212, 221 Social Contract (1762), 15, 70, 77, 81, 84, 89, 212, 214 Rush, Benjamin, 13, 93–96, 171, 214

251

S Salvation, x, xiv, xvi, 33, 43, 44, 65, 98, 105, 106, 134, 143, 146, 153, 158, 165, 168, 174, 205 Saussure, Ferdinand de, xi, 4, 6, 7 Schiller, F.C.S., 15, 117, 119, 121 School, school reform, schooling, 1, 2, 6–7, 10, 12, 14, 17, 21, 29, 53, 94–96, 102–103, 106, 109, 112, 114, 118–120, 124–128, 138, 140, 144–145, 150, 152, 157– 161, 165, 171, 182–184, 186, 188–189, 190–192, 194–195, 197, 201, 204–206, 208–209, 216, 218–221, 223 School boards, 2, 191, 192, 223 Skinner, Quentin, 7, 9, 12, 193 Social Gospel movement, xii, 54, 99, 106, 110 Sombart, Werner, 151, 153–155, 159–160, 165 Spranger, Eduard, 121, 144–145, 148–149, 152, 156–159, 167– 169, 198–199, 221, 223 Steinbeck, John, 37–41, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 55–57, 211 Switzerland, Swiss, xvi, 2, 8, 14, 15, 22, 26–29, 30, 35, 48, 61, 85, 86, 113, 114, 116, 120, 122, 126, 154, 163, 164, 171, 172, 187, 189, 191, 197, 206, 209, 211, 217, 220, 221, 223 T Teacher, teacher education, 21, 61–62, 68, 95–96, 106, 112, 118, 124, 138–139, 140, 150, 156, 158–159, 161, 184–185, 198, 200, 202, 206, 218–220, 222 Thorndike, Edward, xiii, 138–140 Tufts, James Hayden, 102–104, 106, 131–133, 144–146, 216 U United States, American, ix–xi, 2, 6, 8–9, 13, 16, 38, 40–42, 45–46, 49–52, 54, 61, 78, 80–84, 87–90, 92–94, 96, 97–98, 100–101, 104–106, 110–111, 113–115, 117, 120, 122,124 127, 132–133, 136–138, 140–141, 143–146, 151, 163–164, 167, 170–172, 175–176, 190–191,

252 Index United States, American (continued) 197, 200–201, 204–206, 208, 210–213, 215–216, 219, 221, 223 V Virtue, virtuous, 6, 8, 9, 12–15, 22, 23, 28, 31, 33, 34–36, 42, 49–51, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 81–85, 87–91, 93–97, 118, 127, 172, 173, 176, 177, 210, 213, 214 W Warren, Joseph, 51, 84 Warren, Mercy, 13, 83, 86, 213 Watson, John B., 137, 146, 147, 192 Weber, Max, 7, 36, 37, 42–49, 52–54, 61, 121, 131, 153, 182–183, 186–187, 189–192, 209, 211, 223

Webster, Noah, 13, 95–96, 171, 214, 221 Weniger, Erich, 148, 160–161, 168 Whorf, Benjamin, xi, 8 Wundt, Wilhelm, 103, 132–138, 140–141, 146, 219–220 X Xenophon, 8 Z Zurich, 8, 15, 26–27, 29, 32–35, 38, 61, 77, 87, 122, 132, 173, 209, 211, 213, 221–222 Zwingli, Huldrych, 8, 15, 32, 42, 48, 62, 64, 77, 79, 122, 167, 210–211, 223 Zwinglian, Zwinglianism, 15, 32, 61, 64, 77, 209, 211, 223