For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit (...) another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

Biesta distinguishes three functions of education: qualification, socialization and subjectification. We focus on subjectification. When first addressing this concept, Biesta referred to action as defined by Arendt, thereby stressing the importance of ‘the question of freedom’. More recently, the question of freedom is replaced by ‘the question of responsibility’. For Levinas responsibility is related to irreplaceability. While the concept of responsibility is valuable, we question the call upon irreplaceability in education. Actively taking responsibility where irreplaceability might not be either present (...) or felt should be central to education. Unlike the morally clear examples invoked by Biesta, complex societal issues like the climate and refugee crisis are not accessible as an immediate appeal to a specific subject. Therefore, we propose a return to Arendt and her concept of action. Action allows and requires students to create the world anew, to take a position without pretending that the outcome can be controlled. Biesta refers to this as the impossibility of education. However, rather than repeating the theme of impossibility, we focus on the possibilities of education: there are several ways to create the world anew. (shrink)

Moving education to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and the many alternatives during the COVID19-pandemic raised the question of pedagogical form. In a sense, pandemic education in its two-dimensionality was a frictionless, sanitized reduction of education to pure form; it offered a more efficient transfer of knowledge and was marked by a heightened means-to-an-end logic. This has made the informal, unforming and deformational activity that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call study even more difficult, if not impossible during pandemic education. In this (...) article, we consider the pitfalls of thinking in terms of pedagogical form and the formalization of education by engaging with Emile Bojesen’s work on education as (de)formation. Via Harney and Moten, we reflect on what the concept/practice of study by way of formless formation teaches us about (pre-)pandemic education and about pedagogical forms that might be in keeping with study in post-pandemic education. (shrink)

Utopianism is often rejected out of hand for one of two reasons: either it is thought to be politically dangerous, or it is thought to be a mere fantasy. It is nevertheless an important theme in contemporary political philosophy. This article reviews part of the political-philosophical career of ‘utopia’ as a concept by considering the different traditions that have been influential in shaping the way utopia and utopianism are perceived today. A brief reading of Thomas More’s Utopia is followed by (...) a consideration of the utopian socialist tradition and Karl Marx’s criticism of it. Their understanding of utopia continued into the twentieth century. Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet Union, but other factors include the Eastonian empirical turn in political theory and the onset of postmodern incredulity. It made a perhaps surprising comeback in the work of John Rawls, whose work was recently criticized by Amartya Sen for being overly ‘utopian’ – a criticism that is highly analogous to Marx’s onslaught against the utopian socialists. With the help of counterarguments devised by Pablo Gilabert, the article considers three ways in which utopianism can be useful to contemporary political thought. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.