NOT FOR PROFIT The Public Square Book Series PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS MARTHA C . NUSSBAUM With a new afterword by the author NOT FOR WHY DEMOCRACY Needs THE HUMANITIES PROFIT Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Fourteenth printing, and first paperback printing, with a new afterword, 2012 Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15448-0 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1947– Not for profit : why democracy needs the humanities / Martha C. Nussbaum. p. cm. — (The public square book series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-14064-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Education, Humanistic—Philosophy. 2. Democracy and education. I. Title. LC1011.N88 2010 370.11'5—dc22 2009053897 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Pro with Bodoni and Futura display Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 [H]istory has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete man, is more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for the . . . commercial man, the man of limited purpose. This process, aided by the wonderful progress in science, is assuming gigantic proportion and power, causing the upset of man’s moral balance, obscuring his human side under the shadow of soul-less organization. —Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 1917 Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside. —John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1915 To Lois Goutman, Marthe Melchior, Marion Stearns, and all my teachers at the Baldwin School CONTENTS Foreword by Ruth O’Brien Acknowledgments I The Silent Crisis II Education for Profit, Education for Democracy III Educating Citizens: The Moral (and Anti-Moral) Emotions IV Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument V Citizens of the World VI Cultivating Imagination: Literature and the Arts VII Democratic Education on the Ropes Afterword to the Paperback Edition: Reflections on the Future of the Humanities— at Home and Abroad Notes Index