The political significance of the provision of a liberal arts education to the many might be compressed this way: if, historically, a liberal arts education pertained to a leisured class that was also a ruling class, the extension of such an education to the general citizenry configures an ideal of this leisure and power as widely shared. Extending such an education to the masses draws a utopian vision in which freedom from toil is generalized and political rule is widely shared. Crucially, citizens educated in the liberal arts are being prepared for what Aristotle called “the good life,” which he understood as cultivating the higher human faculties for thoughtful civic engagement and eudamonia, that special Greek term for happiness comprising rich fulfillment through the elaboration of human possibility. The notion of the “good life” may sound arcane, effete, or even decadent. Thus, it is important to remember that for Aristotle, it signifies the capacity for human pursuits beyond toiling for survival. “Mere life” (mere existence) is the good life’s opposite, and the difference between them is marked by the difference between freedom and necessity and even between freedom and enslavement.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 381