It expressed that part of liberal thought, found in a range of thinkers including Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, that regarded raw economic interest as too thin a reed and too crude a principle on which to build either an individual life or a democracy; cultivation of mind and character through education was one crucial counter to this thinness and crudeness. Consider this justification, from the 1946 President’s Commission on Higher Education, for immense federal investment in public higher education: “It is an investment in social welfare, better living standards, better health and less crime. It is an investment in a bulwark against garbled information, half-truths and untruths, against ignorance and intolerance. It is an investment in human talent, better human relationships, democracy and peace.”

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 378