Colleges Should Teach Statesmanship

Steven B. Smith argues that the crisis of liberal democracy is partly intellectual — modern civic education has ceded the formative task of teaching judgment, rhetorical capacity, and the limits of political idealism. He proposes recovering the classical idea of the statesman (a public educator who balances prudence and aspiration) and making that recovery an explicit mission of higher education and civic institutions. — If universities embraced statesmanship as an educational goal, it would reshape civic formation, presidential politics, and how publics judge leaders—shifting debate from exclusively technocratic metrics to cultivation of judgment and moral rhetoric.