Capacity For Self-development Research Articles

Equal Opportunity in the Educational System and The Ethics of Responsibility

To be just, a society should treat every child fairly, i.e. with concern with regard to his potential education achievements. A person's educational achievements is indeed essential for enhancing her capacity for self-development: ideally, they all should have the same opportunities for achieving a level of formal education that would allow them to further study and compete for the jobs that they are fit for. This requires that the allocation of public educational resources among children should satisfy some principles of justice. Alongside objectives in terms of equality of extended resources, recent theories of justice have emphasised the importance of taking into account personal responsibility in the design of policies. Allocation rules of educational expenditures should compensate for difference in non-controllable (by the child) determinants of achievements, but also let freely determined effort levels to be adequately rewarded. Some allocation rules inspired by those requirements are discussed and the underlying reasoning for considering them are questioned along four different dimensions : 1. the child's effort and its determinants 2. the child's school achievement production function: i.e. substitutability or complementarity between the determinants of achievements, 3. the importance of externalities within the class room (peer effects), 4. the structure of the secondary curricula. It is argued that all those dimensions are justifying the importance given to considerations but are also essential in identifying what should be the basic features of an strategy. In particular, they suggest that the focus on responsibility as one essential dimension in the design of such a strategy might be misplaced. But it also points out that an strategy consisting of compensating for inequality in endowments among children should also carefully incorporate various incentives mechanisms that will both enhance the effectiveness of the equality of strategy while contributing at the same time to the maximisation of the total human capital acquired by the children. Section 1 discusses what is the equal opportunity approach to schooling, its raison d'etre. Section 2 reviews and critically discuss the basic equal opportunity model and its implications. Sections 3 and 4 present modifications and extensions of this framework and section 5 concludes with some policy recommendations.

Religion and the Case Against Ancient Liberty: Benjamin Constant’s Other Lectures

Benjamin Constant’s famous lecture comparing ancient and modern liberty can be better understood if it is read alongside a set of unpublished lectures on ancient religion that he delivered one year earlier. Those lectures suggest that Constant’s commitment to modern liberty was based in part on his deep anxieties about religious freedom, and that he valued religious freedom because he thought the “religious sentiment” was an important manifestation of a natural human capacity for self-development. In putting religion and self-development at the heart of his vision, he tried to show that modern liberty could have a positive moral or spiritual purpose beyond merely assuring people freedom from interference in the pursuit of their interests.

After '68: Narratives of the New Capitalism

WHOSE REVOLUTION? Most commemorative commentary on the legacy of '1968' revolves around a now familiar set of issues. (1) It asks how far the putatively revolutionary aspirations of the radical students and (to a lesser extent) workers--who demonstrated, occupied and fought with police across the globe during that year--were realised. It speculates as to how far those revolutionary aspirations were ever authentic, and how far they were 'really' just a cloak for an as-yet inarticulable set of desires for new freedoms: freedoms which post-Fordist consumer capitalism would go on to fulfil more satisfactorily than any form of socialism ever could. This essay will begin by revisiting this set of problematics, but in an attempt to go beyond them, by considering some of the issues in terms of the much wider question of how the evolution and emergence of contemporary capitalism is understood. It will argue that an understanding of the significance of '1968' remains fundamental to any historical narration of the mutations in capitalism of the late twentieth century. It will also argue that one of the reasons that '1968' has proved to be such a confusing event for subsequent commentators to narrate, and such a provocation to oversimplification, is that it was a moment whose specificity and consequences could not be understood in terms of the rather simplistic understanding of the social dynamics of advanced capitalist societies which was prevalent across the political spectrum during the middle decades of that century. Ultimately, it will suggest that any account of social change which escapes these simplicities must, by the same token, draw our attention to the continued indispensability of an anti-capitalist critique to any meaningful democratic politics. The striking fact from which this discussion starts is this: the world of today is not the one that the radicals of 1968 hoped to build by any means, because it is one in which the requirements of capital accumulation continue to organise most areas of social life across the globe, generating massive inequalities and condemning many of the formerly colonised peoples to extreme poverty, ruining the planetary ecosystem and subjecting millions in the 'developed' world to stress, overwork or poverty; and yet the culture of today's capitalism is different from that of the mid twentieth century in ways which seem to answer with strange precision to some of the demands of those protesting voices. The rigid hierarchies and narrow career paths of classic corporate culture have given way to the networked world of 'flat' management, rapid promotion, flexible working and short-term contracts, offering far more freedom of movement, far more capacity for self-development and self-expression than was available to the 'company man' of the mid twentieth century. To the successful, a 'portfolio career' today offers the kinds of opportunities for travel, autonomy and variety which once only typified the working lives of creative artists or certain kinds of politician. (2) Professional women have opportunities barely imaginable thirty years ago, and the entire education system has been transformed beyond recognition by the presence and success of girls and women at every level, as have a number of key cultural institutions such as the publishing industry. The social liberalism of contemporary culture, with its toleration of diverse lifestyles and modes of sexual expression, its valorisation of cultural and religious plurality, would have amazed and delighted the most imaginative libertines of almost any previous generation. The official embrace of multiculturalism was a long way off in the days when Enoch Powell could give his 'rivers of blood' speech (3) and not assume it to be a political suicide-note, but now few public institutions or corporations can avoid paying lip service to it, at least. The deference which once characterised relations between members of different classes or between juniors and seniors within all kinds of institution, is today long gone, even out of the memory of younger generations. …

Speaking of Godwin's Caleb Williams : The Talking Cure and the Psychopathology of Enlightenment

Speaking of Godwin's Caleb Williams: The Talking Cure and the Psychopathology of Enlightenment Joel Faflak University of Western Ontario I will write a tale that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before. William Godwin, Preface to Fleetwood, 1832 I. This paper addresses a psychoanalysis that emerges in William Godwin's first novel, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), from the political unconscious of post-Enlightenment, Romantic thought. This Romantic talking cure generates a complex mode of representation that subverts its own diagnosis but, in turn, manages this sabotage for socio-political and cultural effect. Revisiting Things As They Are in his 1832 Preface to Fleetwood, Godwin argues that his first novel was an "analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing [his] metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses" that informed his characters' behaviour (339).1 This statement asks that we read the novel either politically, as a fictional extension of Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), or psychologically, as a confessional scrutiny of that text's unconscious.2 Tilottama Rajan [End Page 99] argues that Godwin's novel collapses these readings within a "system of representation and exchange, in which nothing is simply what it is" (189).3 This hermeneutics of suspicion ventriloquizes 1790s' fear and loathing as a site of trauma, the aftershocks of which drive readers to pursue relentlessly what David Collings calls the text's empty place of reason.4 I want to read this repetitive economy as one of the places where Romanticism invents psychoanalysis as a failed project of enlightenment. We can read this economy in terms of the Romantic public sphere and its networks of communication, the emergent modernity of which stages the 1790s as the shadows futurity casts on Romanticism's present. That by 1832 Godwin had shifted from the novel's original 1794 title, Things As They Are, to just Caleb Williams is symptomatic of the emergence of what Clifford Siskin calls "character," or a "periodic" subject, who possesses an always potentially knowable selfhood, what Siskin calls Romanticism's "self-made mind, full of newly constructed depths" (Historicity 13). Romanticism "invents" this mind in order to wager the ideology of its own inventiveness, a capacity for self-development that plays into post-Enlightenment myths of progress. Yet this mind's phantasmatic qualities also make it [End Page 100] susceptible to institutional and ideological self-deception and self-interest within the free and open exchange between subjects that governs the realization of Godwin's ideal of political justice. The "enquiry, communication, discussion" of popular exchange as the "legitimate instrument of effecting political reformation" (Political Justice 565) instead produce a civil society of serialized juridical subjects. As Andrew McCann argues, "the very idea that public interaction could be a mechanism of social amelioration and rational autonomy … itself be[comes for Godwin] a function of a discursive praxis inseparable from the consolidation of market capitalism" (209). As the "public" becomes the "multitude" and "rational communicative exchange" a "form of administered consciousness" (201), the cancerous effects of the social produce a web of being(s) from which the individual can never extricate herself. Justice and community become aesthetic phenomena (Edwards 592), and "the division between public and private spheres" becomes "an ideological phantasm" (Zomchick 189). Godwin can imagine but cannot particularize the subject independent of the "tangible communicative infrastructures" (McCann 200) upon which this subject depends to articulate her selfhood. The source of trouble is conversation, Godwin's "ideal form of communication" (Leaver 591).5 "Conversation is a species of co-operation, one or the other party always yielding to have his ideas guided by the other; yet conversation, and the intercourse of mind with mind, seem[s...