At Bookforum, Jim Sleeper eviscerates In Defense of a Liberal Education, the new book by uber-pundit Fareed Zakaria. While liberal education certainly needs defending these days—assailed as it is by demands that it be more “practical” and “market-oriented”—Zakaria is not the man for the job, according to Sleeper. Zakaria wants to save liberal education by killing it:
Zakaria’s response is to harness liberal education to the priorities of new “icons of the age”—“entrepreneurs, technologists, and businesspeople” such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, whom he presents as liberal education’s champions. Its actual practitioners, however, from Socrates to Allan Bloom, resisted learning primarily for power and profit in order to follow reason even when it led them to challenge power instead of serving it.
Zakaria barely acknowledges more substantive defenses of liberal education by Bloom, David Denby, Martha Nussbaum, Geoffrey Harpham, Harry R. Lewis, Anthony T. Kronman, Andrew Delbanco, Derek Bok, and others. Instead, he winds up celebrating liberal education’s contributions to the tech-pragmatist rampages he began by disparaging. Rushing to glorify and counsel emulators of the late Steve Jobs and the late founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, both the framers of a postdemocratic, postpolitical age that Zakaria says is upon us, he shows only a pro forma regard for the humanities’ great conversation across the ages about the civic and political ends of life.
Image of Fareed Zakaria via Huffington Post