Liberal Education as Rescue

The idea: reading canonical political thinkers together (Machiavelli through Nietzsche) lets students diagnose the defining feature of modernity — the drive for 'rational control' — and so recover a sense of who we are. Presented as a curricular prescription, this frames liberal education not as antiquarian study but as an active civic therapy against modern/postmodern disorientation. — If taken up, this frame could shift debates over university curricula from skills and identity politics toward a civic narrative that defends classical texts as essential to national self‑understanding.