Chapter 3 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley The purpose of this study is to recover politics as a creative and rational arena of discourse capable of uniting disparate individuals within a reasonable commonality. The citizen ideal as it was originally conceived and practised in classical Greece formed a complete contrast with modern notions of citizenship. The overarching ethic uniting citizens with each other within the polis was the organic and ecological conception of politics as integral to personal development. This is what the Greeks defined as paideia. As with so many of the classical terms defining politics, there is no adequate English translation with which to translate the meaning of this term in all of its richness. Paideia is normally translated as education, but the term connotes much more than this. By paideia the Greeks understood a formative and life-long process through which the individual became an asset to the polis, to his friends and family, capable of and willing to live up to the highest ideals of the community. The term is expansive and adumbrates a range of potentialities from the personal to the public. There is no English equivalent. The closest is the German concept of Bildung, which played a crucial role in Hegel’s political philosophy. This concept encompasses character development, growth, and a well-rounded enculturation so that the body politic is equipped with the knowledge and skills it needs to flourish. Bildung affirms the creative integration of the individual into the environment through the ability to shape, appreciate and transform that environment as his or her own world, an extension of one’s flourishing humanity. Educated thus, the individual acquires a comprehensive sense of duty as well as becoming capable of assuming ethical and political responsibility for the world around. The modern instrumental notion of means and ends is totally inappropriate in this context. The individual and the polis are simultaneously means and ends – the end of the polis is human self-realisation, the self-realisation of the citizen is the means by which the polis flourishes. Excellence in personal and public life are mutually conditional. The polis is the realised community of realised individuals. Education is therefore a unified process of self- and civic-development. Here is the answer to Marx’s question as to who shall educate the educator. If the polis is the ‘school’ in which the highest virtues of the individual as citizen were formed and given expression, it is also informed by the public commitment of the citizens. Politics was concerned not simply with administering the collective affairs of the polis but also with nurturing its members as public beings who were capable of assuming a citizen identity through developing the competence to appreciate and to act in the public interest. Paideia was both a civic schooling and personal training which cultivated both independence of mind and individual responsibility within an overarching civic culture and commitment. In comparison, modern notions of politics as the effective administration of public order and of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills are remarkably thin. To the Athenians, politics and education go together as social practices. The conception is inherently organic and holistic, ruling out any instrumental means-ends rationality and the strict demarcation of distinctive spheres which pervades the modern world. Hellenic politics is concerned not merely with the efficient transaction of public business and the making of laws but with the human growth of its participants. The process by which the Athenians gathered as an ekklesia to decide upon policies was simultaneously a mutual education in which each learned the judgement to act justly according to an appreciation of civic ideals of right and wrong. The political realm was not strictly institutional and administrative but was indeed a process in being a continuous, everyday framework for intellectual, ethical, and personal growth. Paideia nurtured the capacity of individuals to participate in public affairs in a creatively meaningful sense, engaging their best abilities to promote the development of the polis and ensuring their own self-development, succeeding in determining their private affairs in accordance with the collective affairs of the public community.