Democracy and identity: educating the student voice

Considering the role of student voice in music education in connection with the role of music in identity formation. A report on a small-scale study.

Democracy, equality and toleration

In this paper I comment on a recent "letter" by Burleigh Wilkins addressed to nascent egalitarian democracies which offers advice on the achievement of religious toleration. I argue that while Wilkins’ advice is sound as far as it goes, it is nevertheless underdeveloped insofar as his letter fails to distinguish two competing conceptions of toleration – liberal-pluralist and republican-secularist – both of which are consistent with the advice he offers, but each of which yields very different policy recommendations (as can be seen by consideration of The United States v. Lee in America and, I’affaire du foulard in France). I argue that a democratic society of equals must be committed to liberal-pluralist rather than republican-secularist toleration

‘Due libertie and proportiond equalitie’: Milton, democracy, and the republican tradition

John Milton’s political thought has been interpreted in strikingly divergent ways. This article argues that he should be seen as a classical republican, and locates key aspects of his political thought within an ancient Greek discourse critical of democracy or extreme democracy. Milton was clearly familiar with the ancient texts expounding this critique, and he himself deployed both the arguments and the characteristic discourse of the anti-democratic thinkers across the span of his writing. This vision of politics emphasized the rightly-ordered soul of the masculine republican citizen, in contrast to the unruly passions seen both in tyrants and in the democratic rabble.