What can be done when monsters arrive? Knowledge and education after hegemony

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct contemporary authoritarian politics and to develop an alternative to educational projects rooted in liberal and critical traditions, which are often proposed as antidotes to authoritarianism.

Contemporary authoritarianism is described as a manifestation of the disintegration of the neoliberal hegemonic regime. The processes of de-hegemonization have led to liberalism losing its role as a commonsensical point of reference for other ideological discourses, as well as to institutional decay and the loss of access to hegemonic sources of political legitimacy.

One of the consequences of this condition is the emergence of the phenomenon of “post-truth,” typically defined as the prioritization of personal emotions over facts and rational argument. From an educational perspective, post-truth represents the most significant symptom of the post-hegemonic condition. Strategies rooted in liberal concepts of civic education—such as enhancing the cognitive competencies of future citizens—are intended to counteract this phenomenon. Critical strategies, drawing on the thought of Laclau and Mouffe, aim instead to establish, through education, the foundations for non-antagonistic political relations.

Both of these approaches are considered problematic by the authors due to their grounding in the attitudes and institutions of the decaying liberal hegemonic regime. As an alternative, the authors propose a concept of programmatic educational neutrality—drawing from, yet also diverging from, the thought of Paulo Freire. This neutrality stems from both an epistemic distance toward the fragmented and polarized public sphere, and from the conviction that education should support students’ ability to critically “read the world” based on their own lived experiences, rather than facilitate the translation of those experiences into the conflicting languages of political ideologies.