Abstract

In this groundbreaking work, William V. Spanos offers a powerful contribution to the impassioned debates about the crisis of the humanities. Drawing from various discourses of contemporary theory (primarily from Heidegger and Foucault), The End of Education constitutes a deconstruction of the discourse and practice of the modern humanist university. Spanos uses and transforms Heidegger's critique of the centered circle of Being in metaphysical, scientific, and humanist discourses and Foucault's critique of the panoptic gaze of disciplinary society to disclose the interplay between ontology and sociopolitics and between the so-called disinterested pursuit of Truth and the development of an ideological state. Spanos argues that both the left ("liberal") and the right ("conservative") are in complicity in appropriating emergent and different texts and social groups in such a way as to reaffirm the validity of the humanist tradition and thereby the validity of the universalist logic of the project of the Enlightenment that continues to govern our idea of politics and social transformation.