On the corruption of learning and the formation of independent citizens and citizen journalists.
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” (Milton, Areopagitica)
Fellow citizens, even though we are not joined in person, yet we are joined by the golden thread of thought and commitment under the open sky to swear the common good and to ward off harm. We are brought together to consider a matter that touches the very independence of judgment by which free men and women govern themselves. The republican tradition has never rested upon the production of extreme specialists. It has rested upon the formation of citizens capable of independent judgment, public deliberation, and resistance to arbitrary power. In the present moment, that formative task is undermined by a model of education and knowledge that prizes narrow expertise, costly credentials, and institutional closure. Against this model, citizen inquiry and a renewed cosmopolitan recovery offer a coherent path for a new generation of republican thinkers. Let us examine the danger and the remedy with the same gravity with which we take our oaths.
- INTRODUCTION ON CITIZEN JOURNALISM, COSMOPOLITAN RECOVERY, AND THE RESISTANCE TO EPISTEMIC DOMINATION
- I. THE CHARACTER OF MODERN EXPERTISE AS CONTRARY TO REPUBLICAN LIBERTY
- II. CITIZEN INQUIRY AS THE PRACTICE OF PUBLIC JUDGEMENT
- III. COSMOPOLITAN RECOVERY AS THE CONDITION OF INHERITANCE
- IV. PRESENT DUTIES
I. THE CHARACTER OF MODERN EXPERTISE AS CONTRARY TO REPUBLICAN LIBERTY
Contemporary society organizes knowledge through highly specialized, credentialed hierarchies. Entry into serious intellectual work is made conditional upon expensive degrees, prolonged training within closed institutional settings, and the accumulation of debt. This arrangement concentrates the capacity for public judgment in a narrow class. When the ability to interpret history, law, political ideas, or cultural traditions is treated as the exclusive property of those who have passed through particular institutional gates, the broader citizenry is reduced to the status of consumers or spectators. This is a form of epistemic oligarchy, an arrangement in which knowledge itself becomes a means of domination rather than a shared resource for self-government.
The financial burden is itself anti-republican. A generation forced into significant debt in order to acquire the credentials required for public voice is not free in the classical sense. Debt creates dependency, and dependency compromises the independence of judgment that republican citizenship requires (Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism). The tradition that once regarded education as preparation for free citizenship now confronts a system that frequently functions as a mechanism of subordination.
Extreme specialization narrows the horizon of inquiry. The republican tradition has always drawn strength from wide historical memory and from the recovery of classical, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern sources across linguistic and cultural boundaries. An educational model organized primarily around professional specialization and institutional prestige is poorly suited to sustain that breadth. We see here the same corruption of manners that Sallust diagnosed when private interest and luxury displaced the common good, leaving citizens unable either to hold their own or to suffer others to hold theirs (Sallust, Bellum Catilinae). What becomes of self-government when the capacity to interpret the past is treated as the private property of a credentialed few?
It becomes the meritocratic mask of liberal politics. Over forty years the Democratic coalition sorted toward college-educated professionals, and that class fact learned to wear the clothes of equity, so that the non-college voter can be called privileged in the official story and treated as comic relief in the actual one. The mockery of opponents as people who didn’t make it into the meritocracy is a judgement. Civic worth is quietly fused with the credential, and the working-class citizen is no longer a peer with a different lot but evidence that the sorting worked. Our standing, before any judgement, comes from not living at another’s arbitrary will, not from polish. Even a party that wants us as voters has to stop mistaking a class for a citizenry and stop treating the interpretation of the common past as a license the uncredentialed have failed to earn.
The structural dependence created by prolonged, debt-financed credentialing is visible in the pattern whereby advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences routinely require six-figure indebtedness before any independent livelihood is possible. Because repayment and professional advancement remain contingent upon continued access to the same institutional networks that confer the credentials, the capacity for public judgment that diverges from prevailing disciplinary orthodoxy is placed under continuous material pressure. Independence of mind becomes subordinate to the conditions of entry and retention within the closed order that alone can convert specialized learning into economic security.
Historical parallels confirm the danger. Roman patronage systems once bound public speech to the favor of the powerful. Medieval guilds monopolized crafts and learning alike. Early modern critics of courtly and clerical enclosure warned that closed orders of knowledge produce servitude of mind. The same pattern reappears today under the guise of expertise.
II. CITIZEN INQUIRY AS THE PRACTICE OF PUBLIC JUDGEMENT
Seeing the Roman people, once politically powerful, now caring only for panem et circenses (“bread and circuses”), Juvenal recounts in his Satires about the corruption of civic capacity when public judgment atrophies.
“…the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddle no more and long eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses.” (Juvenal, Satires, Book X – Satire 10, lines 77-81, trans. G. G. Ramsay, 1918)
Liberty of inquiry and utterance are both a prerequisite of citizenship and a defense against the corruption that follows when knowledge itself becomes a form of private dominion.
Citizen inquiry, properly understood, is not amateurism for its own sake. It is the practice of public investigation conducted outside the exclusive control of credentialed institutions. It recovers the older republican conviction that the capacity to investigate, interpret, and publish belongs to citizens as such, not only to those who hold particular degrees or occupy particular offices.
This practice keeps the formation of judgment public. When serious writing on history, political ideas, and civic questions remains open to those who have not passed through the most expensive institutional filters, the tradition itself remains available for wider appropriation and contestation. The result is not the rejection of learning but the refusal to allow learning to become a closed guild.
It models independence. The republican tradition has long regarded independence of means and independence of mind as mutually reinforcing (Pettit, Republicanism). Citizen inquiry, when sustained by readers rather than by institutional patronage alone, offers a practical illustration of that independence. It demonstrates that serious intellectual work can be carried on without complete reliance on the very structures whose costs and exclusions the tradition has reason to question.
It trains the habits of public speech. Republican citizenship is not only a matter of private study. It is a matter of contributing to common deliberation. Writing for a public audience, under the discipline of clarity and evidence, forms the capacity for that contribution in ways that purely academic specialization often does not.
Historical recovery strengthens the case. The pamphlet culture of the English Commonwealth, the coffee-house and newspaper practices that formed public judgment in the early modern period, and the citizen writing of the American founding era all show that serious inquiry flourished outside closed corporations. Milton defended the free circulation of printed argument precisely because truth emerges from open encounter rather than from licensed monopoly (Milton, Areopagitica). Harrington understood education itself as the plastic art of government, a public trust rather than a private craft (Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana).
Some will object that such inquiry risks amateurism and the loss of rigor. We answer that the alternative is not the rejection of learning but the refusal to allow learning to become a closed corporation whose entry is purchased by debt and prolonged institutional subordination. Genuine formation of judgment arises from wide reading, public contestation, and evidence under the discipline of clarity. It does not arise from the mere possession of a credential that itself creates dependency.
III. COSMOPOLITAN RECOVERY AS THE CONDITION OF INHERITANCE
The republican tradition has never been purely localist. From the classical recovery of Roman sources, through the Carolingian and Renaissance rediscoveries, to the early modern circulation of republican ideas across borders, the tradition has depended upon a cosmopolitan reach, an openness to texts, languages, and historical experiences beyond any single national or institutional setting.
For a new generation this cosmopolitanism remains essential. Extreme expertise often produces deep knowledge within narrow bounds while leaving larger historical and comparative horizons underdeveloped. A republican education worthy of the name requires the ability to move across the classical, humanist, Carolingian, Renaissance, and modern layers of the tradition and to set them in conversation with one another. That work is better served by a cosmopolitan orientation of wide reading, linguistic range, and attention to the transmission of ideas across time and space than by the further intensification of specialized credentialing.
Cosmopolitanism in this sense is not rootless internationalism. It is the recognition that the republican inheritance is itself a complex historical achievement that cannot be reduced to any single institutional or national frame. The successive recoveries of Roman texts in the Carolingian age, the Renaissance humanist reclamation of Cicero, Livy, and Sallust, and the early modern English and Atlantic transmission of those sources form a continuous chain. A new generation that wishes to inherit that tradition intelligently must recover its full breadth.
The hybrid arrangement of citizen inquiry and cosmopolitan recovery is presented here as one practical expression among several possible forms of resistance to epistemic enclosure. Other configurations, through voluntary associations of readers, independent presses, informal networks of mutual instruction, or renewed classical curricula outside the credentialing apparatus, may prove equally or more durable. What matters is not any single institutional design but the recovery of conditions under which independent judgment can be formed and exercised without prior subordination to a monopolizing guild.
IV. PRESENT DUTIES
The model of open access to core ideas, sustained by those who choose to support deeper work, supplies one practical expression of the principles outlined above. It refuses both the complete enclosure of knowledge behind paywalls and the fiction that serious long-form work can be maintained indefinitely without material support. It treats readers as potential citizens of the tradition rather than as mere consumers of expertise.
A new generation of republican thinkers will not be formed primarily by further intensifying the present system of costly, debt-financed specialization. It will be formed by practices that keep inquiry public, that recover the historical breadth of the tradition, and that treat the capacity for judgment as a civic rather than a purely professional attainment. Citizen inquiry and a renewed cosmopolitan recovery are not peripheral to that task. They are central to it.
Fellow citizens, recall the history of the principles and oaths that bind us to the common good and to the defense of liberty against arbitrary power, and let us resolve to practice public inquiry, to recover the sources of our inheritance, and to form independent citizens capable of deliberation and resistance. The capacity for judgment belongs to the citizen body. Let no closed association claim it as private property. So may we keep faith with the tradition that has sustained free commonwealths, and so may we transmit it unbroken to those who follow.
Let us break through, not subjecting ourselves to toxicity because we live in a time of desperation — desperation for work, that is so limited. Let us chart our own paths, with or without the approval of institutions, whether small or elite. The task of civilization will be ultimately left up to us, not those currently in their seats of office and power who look down on us and manage access.
