Recension av: Hren, Joshua, 2018. Middle-Earth and the Return of the Common Good. J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy. Eugene: Cascade Books.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate salient approaches to citizenship and civic-normative educationin liberal democratic life. The chapter argues that core technocratic assumptions about clarity,linearity, and predictability feeding into civic-educational deployment and change warrant critical attention.The chapter aims to shed new light on states’ instinct to regard themselves and their value setsas seamless conceptual wholes. A range of ramifications of this typical approach are interrogated, inprinciple as well as in relation to Swedish civic-educational matrices. The chapter refines a heuristicmodel for unpacking citizenship and civic-normative education thinking in liberal democracy originallypresented in an earlier work by the author. It is concluded that even as the enormous policy efforts thatgo into organizing and revamping public civic-normative education in response to new societal challengeshave little chance of meeting governments’ intentions; they may still be important since they areexerted in highly visible public spaces and domains.

Begrepp är centrala i allt politiskt tänkande och handlande: begrepp formar politiska program och dagordningar, men också maktförhållanden och världsbilder. Det går inte att förstå en politisk idéströmning om man inte tar hänsyn till de uttolkningar av begrepp som individ, gemenskap, autonomi eller kultur som strömningen omfattar – men uttolkningarna skiftar från en ideologisk tradition till en annan.

I denna bok utvecklas en modell för att förstå politisk-normativ begrepps­­bildning och här analyseras nio av de mest framträdande politiska begreppen. I anslutning till analysen diskuteras också villkoren för god kunskapsbildning i en tid som präglas av post-sanning, val­manipulation, sociala mediebubblor, elitförakt och politisk kunskaps­resistens. I ett utförligt appendix presenteras slutligen ett antal centrala västerländska ideologiska traditioner på ett överskådligt vis.

Drawing on recent interdisciplinary, multidimensional research on civic and religious education in northern Europe, this article explores disciplinary epistemological economies in an era of mounting discontent with the narrowness of mono-disciplinary analyses of complex social and educational issues. It is argued in the article that under conditions of sufficient world complexity, interdisciplinarity provides for a more cogent scholarly approach to educational structures and phenomena than either of the logics of mono-, multi- and transdisciplinarity—the main extant alternatives. It is shown in both conceptual and empirical terms that these alternatives cannot accommodate social and educational diversity, complexity and sprawl other than thinly, hence should mainly be endorsed by universities and research funders for other than epistemological reasons or when there is agreement that the object subjected to analysis is correspondingly thin and isolated. As education in and of itself is a remarkably complex social phenomenon and field of study, it is concluded that interdisciplinary environments may typically be expected to provide a stronger potential for assessing and understanding it.

This article investigates civic-political and cognitive participation as they play out in democratic theory. Its core purpose is to develop a conceptual-normative critique of the presupposition in liberal democratic theory that these logics are mutually reinforcing and complementary. This misunderstanding of a theoretical ambivalence contributes to inhibiting constructive assessment of epistocratic*technocratic frameworks of democratic interpretation and theory. I demonstrate that these logics circulate contrasting views of democratic power and legitimacy and should be disentangled to make sense of liberal democratic theoretical and political spaces. This critique is then fed into a political-epistemological interrogation of post-truth and alt-facts rhetorical registers in contemporary liberal democratic life, concluding that neither logic of participation can harbor this unanticipated and fundamentally nonaligned way of doing liberal democratic democracy.

This article hinges on the notion that the location of the term ‘culture’ in political discourse and debate remains under-theorised, particularly regarding its covariation with political recognition. It is shown that arguments for culturally motivated justice, recognition, or redress of past wrongs may be expected only by marginalised groups, not by states or other powerful political agents –since these are not framed as cultural in the first place. This suggests that to become more powerful in modern politics one normally must become less cultural. The article ultimately aims to unpack this implicit logic of modern liberal democratic reasoning on culture.

This book explores the inherent tension in civic education. There is a surging belief in contemporary European society that liberal democracy should work harder to reproduce the civic and normative setups of national populations through public education. The cardinal notion is that education remains the best means to accomplish this end, and educational regimes appropriate tools to make the young more tolerant, civic, democratic, communal, cosmopolitan, and prone to engaged activism. This book is concerned with the ambiguities that strain standard visions of civic education and educational statehood. On the one hand, civic-normative education is expected to drive tolerance in the face of conflicting good-life affirmations and accelerating worldview pluralisation; on the other hand, nation-states are primarily interested in reproducing the normative prerogatives that prevail in restricted cultural environments. This means that civic education unfolds on two irreconcilable planes at once: one cosmopolitan/tolerant, another parochial/intolerant. The book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of education, sociology, normative statehood, democracy, and liberal political culture, particularly those working in the areas of civic education; as well as education policy-makers.