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The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Rob Reich’s essay, on multicultural accommodations in education, proposes that the liberal state needs to rethink its commitment to cultural groups whose educational agendas advance the integrity of the group over and against the freedom and equality of its members, and that thus educate in ways that place strict limits on the autonomy and critical thinking skills of their members. He aims to examine two prominent defenses of multiculturalism, showing how each pays insufficient attention to the tension between cultural groups: Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal argue that, because individuals have a ‘right to culture’, the state must grant groups a status that may flout the rights of some individuals, conditioned on the ability of those individuals to exit; Will Kymlicka, in a far more sophisticated version of multiculturalism, defends cultural rights, and accommodations, but only for those cultural groups that are themselves internally liberal (except in rare circumstances) and that take seriously the value of personal autonomy. Reich contends that, while the freedom to exit from a group is important, the group rights supported by Margalit and Halbertal may serve to disable or severely impoverish the ability of children to exit from groups; further, he contends that, while personal autonomy is important, Kymlicka’s conception of autonomy is unsatisfactory and, moreover, his defense of rights to separate schooling for national minorities and to educational exemptions for some polyethnic groups leaves him open to the same critique about exit that Reich levies against Margalit and Halbertal. Along the way, Reich comments on the odd fixation of multiculturalists on rights of exit.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Susan Okin, in her essay on group rights, gender, and realistic rights of exit, is mostly concerned, not with the oppression of traditional groups by the liberal state, but with the oppression of individuals, and especially of girls and women, by the traditional community. She is critical of those liberal theorists who argue that a right of exit is sufficient to qualify a cultural or religious group for special recognition in liberal societies, and to counter these views, she notes that the unequal treatment of girls and women can mean that even though they may have a formal right to exit a group, their actual opportunities for doing so are far less adequate than those of their male counterparts. She holds, then, that the right of exit is not sufficient and that the liberal state should have a higher requirement, namely, that girls and women should be treated fairly within the group and thus should be able to take advantage of any formal right of exit. The chapter is arranged in three sections: Section 12.1, Gender and Other Forms of Inequality in Group Rights Theories, shows, by looking at three examples of liberal defenders (as exemplified by Joseph Raz, William Galston, and Chandran Kukathas) of group rights, that they tend not to take gender inequality seriously when considering group rights and limitations; Section 12.2, Cultural Factors Affecting Women’s Realistic Rights of Exit, specifies and discusses a number of reasons that contribute to women being significantly less able than men, in many cultural contexts, to chart their own courses of life outside their community of origin; and Section 12.3. Rights of Exit and Realistic Rights of Exit for Women, concludes that the theories examined contain several problematic elements concerning rights of exit for women.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Kevin McDonough’s essay, on multinational civic education, develops a conception of this that allows for both federal and minority national groups to reinforce conditional civic attachments. This ‘conditionalist’ view of civic education is necessary in multinational federal societies, he argues, because appeals to one set of national attachments may exacerbate rather than alleviate particular injustices in particular circumstances. For example, McDonough argues that when aboriginal women and children are the victims of injustice at the hands of tribal institutions and leaders, they must be able to appeal to their fellow non-aboriginal citizens and federal institutions for assistance, although this is not possible unless citizens – aboriginal and otherwise – have come to regard attachments to the minority nation as conditional rather than absolute. Similarly, citizens whose primary identification is to the federal society must be able to recognize that some of their fellow citizens legitimately have a minority nation as the object of their primary loyalty – otherwise, efforts to support federal intervention in minority national affairs will be vulnerable to forces of cultural insensitivity and arrogance, rather than of liberal justice.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. In the last chapter, on liberalism and group rights, according to Stephen Macedo, while the commitment of liberalism to individual freedom and equality is far more easily reconciled with group-based remedies for group-based inequalities than the critics of liberalism allow, the liberal commitment to freedom of association imposes limits on group recognition by insisting on intragroup openness and diversity. The chapter has two main parts. Section 15.1, Liberalism, Education, and Group Identities, rebuts the charge that a liberal public philosophy embraces a narrow individualism that is incompatible with tackling group-based forms of inequality, and surveys some of the myriad liberal reforms of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that promoted more equal respect for differing group identities, especially in schools. Section 15.2, Special Exemptions and the Rights of Traditional Communities, focuses on the difficulties raised by “traditionalistic” groups that seek special accommodations in part because they reject liberal values of equal freedom for all, and makes the point that a liberal regime should not seek to be equally hospitable or accommodating to groups that accept and those that reject educational policies designed to promote the equal freedom of all persons; various examples are presented and discussed.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Walter Feinberg’s essay, on religious education in liberal–democratic societies in relation to the question of accountability and autonomy, takes up the issue of educational constraints with respect to religious schools in such societies. While he allows that religious education need not be inconsistent with liberal goals, and can find reasons why some liberal societies feel it appropriate to provide public support for religious schools, he argues that certain conditions can render such support tyrannical and unwise. He concludes that if the conditions are appropriate for public support of religious schools, then there should also be significant public control. After an introduction in Section 14.1, the chapter has six further sections: Section 14.2 discusses some of the potential lines of conflict between religious liberal education and public (common) education; Section 14.3 examines a number of arguments that have been advanced in support of public funding for religious schools; Section 14.4 looks at a potentially fundamental reason for denying public funding for religious schools – that it would be tyrannical to take tax funds from one believer in order to advance the beliefs of another – and the implications as regards the First Amendment to the United States Constitution; both Sections 14.4 and 14.5 suggest some of the conditions that need to be satisfied in order to supply this funding – primarily that it must be predicated on the school advancing individual and social autonomy; Section 14.6 briefly suggests what such an arrangement might entail for the traditional way in which the public/private divide is conceived; Section 14.7 concludes.

This chapter offers an overview of the rise of the commercial media in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and their complex inter-relationship with existing cultural traditions in Germany. After briefly surveying the social and economic pre-conditions underlying the growth of the new media, it analyses how they intermingled with existing cultural forms and practices, and how media producers sought to identify with perceived audiences. Though this process entailed a number of innovations, the need to build on older, ‘safe’ traditions drawn from the theatre or music hall profoundly shaped how the media and commercial entertainments were perceived by both producers and consumers alike. Arguing that the new media did not so much displace these traditions as reconfigure them, this section then briefly considers the threat this reconfiguration posed to cultural authority, and the various arguments of articulate critics that were advanced against it.

Within their communities, women could act as authoritative public figures in ways that were strikingly at odds with the highly feminized modes of action with which they were associated in the wider ‘public sphere’ of national campaigns. Gender was always central to individual identity and social interaction, yet in these contexts it was a less obvious predictor of public engagement. Studying the multifarious constructions of women's local personas enables us to focus upon the varying salience of gender in the experiences and representations of publicly active women. This chapter explores the various sites of the ‘parochial realm’, a term used to denote situations characterized by daily, local interaction and personal communication. It focuses on three themes in particular: female economic agency, women's cultural activities, and female philanthropy. Finally, it discusses women's economic activities and local profiles, female philanthropy in relation to politics and community, cultural authority and civic identity, and the significance of female householders as political agents.

This chapter examines the professionalization of the poetic vocation in the wake of the expansion of the American system of higher education during the post-1945 era. The teaching of poetry writing in colleges and universities redefined poetry as something that could, at least in some sense, be taught, and it rendered the traditional image of the poet as an “untutored genius” highly problematic. First-book prizes for poetry proliferated in this new literary environment largely because they served to reinforce its central values. For the institutions to which they were in many cases linked, such prizes functioned as an assertion of cultural authority. They strengthened poetry's status as a profession by presenting its hierarchy as a meritocracy, open, like other professions, to anyone with talent and drive, and also affirmed the authority of contest judges.

Chapter 12 begins an analysis of the market conditions that supported Cody's course, chief of which was the anxiety about grammatical correctness that grew in the Anglo‐American tradition of language and letters.

Focusing on the early to mid-nineteenth century, this chapter argues that the desire to create utopias—the aspiration for a moral mission of social transformation—was an underlying motivation that united administrators and missionaries while locking them into conflicts over methods and authority. Just before and after France’s abolition of slavery in 1848, specific projects aimed at improving the lives of the enslaved demonstrated both the experiential piety that guided Catholic missionary utopian visions and the corresponding secular utopian visions that foresaw productive colonial populations contributing to the glory of the French nation. The conflicts that resulted between missionaries and officials allowed colonized peoples the space to use religious experience to create communities that could challenge European political and cultural authorities.

The chapter examines the X-men’s roles as spokespersons for science. The chief publicists devoted enormous energy to lectures, speeches, and articles addressed to general audiences. They saw themselves as scientific missionaries, converting ignorant “heathen” English to scientific ways of thinking; they represented all scientific men as especially reliable in their reasoning and virtuous in their concern for the public good. The quieter members, it is shown, shared the naturalism of the leading publicists. Naturalism is here reinterpreted as a project to provide a naturalistic account of the universe, from the original fiery nebula to the development of life, mind, and emotion– rather than as based on particular “scientific” theories. They emphasized continuity through deep time, from plant to animal, ape to human, savagery to civilization. By contrast, their statements of agnosticism reveal little common ground. They also differed over the degree of combativeness appropriate in their circumstances. Their interactions with other cultural elites demonstrate both shared goals and conflicts, their own growing cultural authority and the multi-dimensional nature of Victorian cultural authority. Most notably, in anti-Sabbatarian Sunday societies, they cooperated with reforming lawyers, positivists, and Unitarians to oppose devout culture by offering improving lectures as an alternative to Sunday sermons.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this volume, which is about class formation in America during the early industrial period. This book tries to show that the cultural arena provided opportunities for antebellum Americans to make sense of and give order to the profound social changes that were underway. It considers class formation more in terms of how power is wielded than in terms of how power is resisted and attempts to account for the relative success of the middle class in consolidating its social and cultural authority by considering how classes formed discursively at the same time that they formed socially. It argues that antebellum Americans constructed a class society in a broad popular discourse on mechanization that flourished in the newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets of the day.

The nine men of the X Club and the approach and themes of the book are introduced. The members, in birth-order, were George Busk, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley, William Spottiswoode, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst and John Lubbock. They dined together as a formal club from 1864 to 1892. Such dining clubs were common in gentlemanly London. The approach taken is non-heroic. Like group biographies of families and women, it is as much interested in the ways in which the protagonists were representative as those in which they were powerful. Although the members were among Darwin’s leading defenders, their Darwinism must be loosely interpreted to include non-Darwinian developmental schemas. Similarly, scientific naturalism, with which the X Club has been closely associated, is reinterpreted to include its pre-Darwinian and metaphysical sources alongside the scientific aspects usually emphasized. The historiography of professionalization, and the continuing importance of gentlemanly status and manners within science are discussed. Approaches to cultural authority from outside history of science suggest that the range of claimants to cultural authority be broadened beyond “science” and “the Church.” Finally, the variety and importance of religion in Victorian life is emphasized, and “secularization” interpreted.