When the state doesn’t commit: a review essay of Julian Culp’s Democratic Education in a Globalized World

ABSTRACT

The world has evolved from being international to being global. Increasingly, global issues like climate change, migration, pandemics, trade, big data, and terrorism spill over borders drawn centuries ago as if they were no longer there. In this globalized world, however, people are still born and educated as citizens of particular nation states. Indeed, education is still used as one of the state's main tools for shaping citizen virtues and commitments. Political philosophers have acknowledged both the increasingly global nature of contemporary political problems and the power of education to shape citizens but have failed to recognize how the two are interconnected. In his book, Democratic Education in a Globalized World: A Normative Theory, Julian Culp seeks to rectify this double-sided failure by building a theory of and framework for educating people for democratic citizenship in a world of border-crossing issues. I outline how he seeks to overcome this problem, set out an analytical framework with which to engage with his account, and note some significant worries that arise from this analysis. In particular, I focus on a specific blindness from which Culp's account suffers, which makes it unable to detect wrongs that arise when the state fails to commit to fundamental normative principles.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic education
• global justice
• personal autonomy
• expressive power
• formative power
• preference shaping
• Julian Culp
• ideal theory

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Hwa Young Kim, Tom Parr, Lasse Nielsen, Tim Meijers, and Clare Burgum for helping me systematize my thoughts on Democratic Education in a Globalized World.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See also Culp (2020), where Culp expands on his strict conception of anti-perfectionism.

² See also Anderson and Pildes (2000).

³ Anderson and Pildes (2000), 1527.

⁴ Dworkin (2002) invokes a similar distinction regarding the coercive realm of state power, between laws that are ‘enacted’ and ‘sustained’ by the state (1).

⁵ Culp specifically engages with the example of homosexuality and religion in his response to Brighouse (32).

⁶ This, broadly speaking, is the view espoused in Brighouse (2003); and Clayton (2006). See also Zwarthoed (2020) for a globalized version of this view.

⁷ Culp discusses what I call the formative element of state action in several places. In particular, when dismissing the functionalist view that educational policies merely sustain the present social order (27) and when discussing the worry that education merely reproduces a certain ideology (149–154).

⁸ Putting this in the words of prominent capabilitarian scholars, Martha Nussbaum and Serene Khader, we can say that people’s preferences are adaptive. See Khader (2011); Nussbaum (2001).

⁹ As seen elsewhere, Culp is aware of this issue – i.e. when noting that ‘citizenship education must fight the potentially very problematic socializing effects of unjust institutions that sustain injustice’ (118).

¹⁰ Clayton (2006), chapter 4, also focuses on this issue.

¹¹ Martin Beckstein similarly worries that Culp’s proposed policies will not succeed in motivating citizens for transnational solidarity. See Beckstein (2020). However, he proposes that their low chance of success stems from a failure to engage with tradition, while I argue that it stems from a failure of the state to commit fully to moral cosmopolitanism.

¹² See also Blake (2001).

¹³ The present argument, in general, is heavily inspired by Kim’s work.