ABSTRACT
Moral development can be viewed epistemologically. The processes of cognition by which citizens learn to distinguish what constitutes right from wrong, or good from evil is a learning situation. The fusion of moral development, political style, and democratic persuasion takes from Deweyan to Meadian premises; from pragmatism as a theory of education to symbolic interaction as a theory of politics. A democratic theory of politics must take the clear differentiation between moral development and the development of morals. Such a distinction takes on distinctive practical meaning, because it is primarily in the context of statist repression that either notion has ultimate significance. Moral development as a brute fact, derived from commonsensical attitudes toward order and civility, is handmaiden to panoply of authoritarian ideologies. The forms of such an ideology might be thoroughly benign, even genteel, but ultimately the notion of moral development rests on the imposition of behavior through methods of authority or divinity for their realization.
