ABSTRACT
In the winter of 1987 educationalists around the world were shocked to learn that Lawrence Kohlberg, the most influential researcher into moral education of his generation, had committed suicide. This act was a poignant and ambiguous footnote to the life of an academic who had striven to establish the universal principles of moral development. In his later years, the epistemological vision which had underpinned his research had come under increasingly vocal criticism. His was a modernist project, founded upon a faith in grand theory and a belief in the existence of rational, universal laws to explain human development and human behaviour. In retrospect it is tempting to see his suicide as tragically symbolic, to view it if not as an admission of failure, then at least as a testimony to doubts in what he had achieved.
