The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of (...) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions. (shrink)

Political liberalism purports to be independent from any controversial philosophical presuppositions, and its basic principles and features are often presented as the most accommodating of difference and heterogeneity, so long as the latter is not illiberal, oppressive and fanatic. Educational theory welcomes this assumption and attempts to utilise it in citizenship curriculum debates, often in a receptive and arguably uncritical way. I shall critique the above by unveiling the contestable epistemological and anthropological theses underlying Rawls' difference principle and by discussing (...) the conception of education that they ground. I shall draw especially on sociology of education and its questioning of the ‘racism of intelligence’ in order to show that political liberalism mistakes its self- and world-understanding as a reflection of general and undisputed facts. Further, I shall explain how a more critical perspective would give educational theory a more active role by challenging the so-called ‘reproductive’ conception of education. I shall conclude by assessing the significance of such a critique for teaching citizenship, putting forward some suggestions for a reorientation of political education. (shrink)

Political liberalism purports to be independent from any controversial philosophical presuppositions, and its basic principles and features are often presented as the most accommodating of difference and heterogeneity, so long as the latter is not illiberal, oppressive and fanatic. Educational theory welcomes this assumption and attempts to utilise it in citizenship curriculum debates, often in a receptive and arguably uncritical way. I shall critique the above by unveiling the contestable epistemological and anthropological theses underlying Rawls’ difference principle and by discussing (...) the conception of education that they ground. I shall draw especially on sociology of education and its questioning of the ‘racism of intelligence’ in order to show that political liberalism mistakes its self- and world-understanding as a reflection of general and undisputed facts. Further, I shall explain how a more critical perspective would give educational theory a more active role by challenging the so-called ‘reproductive’ conception of education. I shall conclude by assessing the significance of such a critique for teaching citizenship, putting forward some suggestions for a reorientation of political education. (shrink)