Danielle Allen

A connected society

P olitical conditions in many countries presently demand that we undertake serious thinking all the way to the roots about how to build a progressive politics of egalitarian empowerment. In this essay I focus on the contribution that connectedness can make to such a politics. After discussing the relationship between egalitarian empowerment and social connectedness, I describe the economic, political and personal benefits that connectedness can bring, and reflect on how policy-makers could tackle the project of building a connected society.

Further Reflections on Little Rock

The famous photo of Hazel Bryan jeering at Elizabeth Eckford as a mob helped drive Elizabeth from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 4, 1957 compels meditation on the nature of democratic politics. As I have studied this image for the last seven years, that has been its impact on me. In a quick moment—with a mob encircling two protagonists who contest the meaning of a major political decision (Brown v. Board of Education)—the photographer laid bare a failing version of a democratic public sphere (I explore the structure captured by the photo in detail in my book, Talking to Strangers). In the strikingly complementary but also contrastive postures of the two protagonists—one upright and aggressive, the other hunched, acquiescent, bent on escape from a dangerous situation— one sees, painfully, the effects on each of the two young women of long training in the two different etiquettes of citizenship taught respectively to white and black citizens of the American South throughout (at least) the first half of the 20th century. As a classicist, I also see in the picture something that may at first sound far-fetched but, I hope, will come to seem quite pressing: at long last, an actual illustration of Aristotle’s ethical doctrine that achieving the virtues is a matter of hitting a mean or a midway point between two extremes. The usual image of his theory is a bull’s-eye target. One is taught that, according to Aristotle, one needs to miss the vices on either side of a relevant virtue and aim to hit the very center of the target. But I think this 1957 photograph is a far more effective illustration of what Aristotle meant, for it also shows the stakes of getting it wrong. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that every virtue—for instance, courage, liberality, or prudence—is a mean or midpoint between two negative extremes. Courage, for instance, is not the opposite of cowardice; it rather lies between cowardice

Beyond Pointing and Hoping: On Pedagogy

Jan Zwicky’s fertile essays expose by contrast the aridity of much contemporary writing about the point of humanistic endeavor and intellectual life. Thinking, in her account, is importantly the work of imagination. The more common focus on critical thinking, in arguments on behalf of liberal arts pedagogy, does put a salutary emphasis on some aspects of thoughtfulness, for instance, use of evidence and argumentation, but Zwicky is right that this approach fails to articulate a standard for synthetic, imaginative discernment that meaningfully grasps the world. Zwicky usefully provides an account of just such a standard. Yet her argument that “other than pointing and hoping, there are no rules, no algorithms, by which human perception of a gestalt may be facilitated” sells the work of teachers short. An alternative case is made by Plato in his representation of Socrates-as-teacher, and most of this article is a case study of passages from the Republic .