ABSTRACT
In responding to periodic government demands that it provide a rational justification for its activities as a public utility, the humanities academy typically appeals to the absolute ethical and intellectual values of liberal education. This paper investigates the nature of this response and its relation to the governmental field. The historical, ethical and political claims involved in the appeal to liberal education are discussed and rejected. It is argued that the cultivation of personhood has neither a single (‘complete’) form nor a privileged home in the university arts faculty. Weber’s sociology of ethical orders is used to frame a discussion of intellectual cultivation as a specific vocation or discipline of life. From Foucault’s conception of ‘governmentality’ the paper draws an account of a sphere of political rationality dependent on the historical deployment of particular intellectual and political technologies. The problem of the political rationality of the humanities is then discussed in terms of the unplanned historical convergence of the disciplines of cultivation and the technologies of government. 1
Almost any educated person could deliver a lecture entitled ‘the goal of the university’. Almost no one will listen to the lecture voluntarily. For the most part, such lectures and their companion essays are well intentioned exercises in social rhetoric, with little operational content. Efforts to generate normative statements of the goals of the university tend to produce goals that are meaningless or dubious. (Cohen and March, in OECD, 1987a:30)
