This chapter reviews contemporary discussions in political philosophy and educational theory about the character of children’s rights and their importance to debates about the character of democratic education. It focuses on five areas in which there is contestation about the interpretation and implications of children’s rights: (i) issues about the appropriate content of democratic education; (ii) issues about children’s rights of access to education and the degree to which educational inequalities are acceptable; (ii) issues about the kind of control parents should exercise over the kind of education children receive; (iv) issues about the degree to which schools are themselves sites of democratic activity; and (v) issues about how educational institutions should be designed or reformed in order respect the educational rights of children.

In order for democratic deliberative interactions in educational settings to fruitfully occur, certain favorable conditions must obtain. In this chapter, I chiefly concern myself with one of these putative conditions, namely that of school integration, believed by many liberal scholars to be necessary for consensus-building and legitimate decision-making. I provide a critical assessment of the belief that integration is a necessary facilitative condition for democratic deliberation in the classroom. I demonstrate that liberal versions of democratic deliberation predicated on this condition are puzzlingly inattentive both to the inevitability of segregation, as well as the inequities occasioned by “school integration.” I then move to probe the possibilities for democratic education in the absence of integration. I argue that neither the possibilities for deliberation nor the cultivation of civic virtue turn on an environment being “integrated.” Indeed, some kinds of segregation may be more conducive to fostering both deliberation and civic virtue.

The Philosophy of Freedom from Rousseau to Heidegger was not content with modern liberal individualism and materialism, but longed for a noble politics, and this longing for wholeness, while giving rise to brilliant cultural achievements, also fueled the catastrophes of violent revolution, tyranny and genocide on the far Left and Right from the French Revolution down to the present.

This chapter sets out the idea of the moral economy of elections in more theoretical detail, locating it in the context of a particular theoretical approach to the state that draws inspiration from the work of Timothy Mitchell and others, as well as elaborating the description of the patrimonial and civic registers. The chapter also sets out the relationship of this moral economy approach to analytical models that foregound the idea of the norm, arguing that the affective power of the behaviours and language on political subjectivity is better captured by the language of virtue and morality. The chapter concludes with a brief description of three moments that help reveal the tensions between registers of virtue that shape the moral economy of elections.

Chapter 7 turns to daimonification in the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus (205–270 CE). Porphyry presented Plotinus as already a daimon while on earth. This presentation partially depends on Plotinus’s own teachings: the one who becomes a daimon in heaven already was one on earth. This presentist focus was shaped by a reading of Empedocles and Plato – the daimon is one’s higher consciousness into which one lives. In his theory of daimonification, Plotinus emphasized ethical and contemplative practices. Purifying virtues disengaged the higher consciousness from the “conglomerate” of the body and the lower mind. When one’s higher mind is free from bodily images, one can live at the level of the daimon.

Chapter 3 engages in a close analysis of several interrelated categories of the normative order that, together, provide the ethical foundations of the res publica. They include the concepts of virtue, the common good, citizenship, education and customs, which are discussed as representing a coherent normative political theory influenced by the classical republican tradition, but also by the empirical context of the Commonwealth. For the republican writers, it was evident that in a well-ordered political community liberty could be preserved only by the law and virtue. They paid scrupulous attention to character formation and the duties of citizenship. It is argued that, in doing so, they were followers of Aristotle and civic humanists for whom the virtuous character of citizens rather than a well-designed institutional order was the most important safeguard of liberty. This chapter stresses the influence of Platonic and Aristotelian insights in the republican discourse. Numerous texts published in the sixteenth century shared the same conclusion, that a free political community needed constant attention and improvement, because of the weakness of imperfect human nature