According to an extreme view which is the predominant view in the profession, the ideal of democracy was a sheer delusion and the only thing which matters is the behavior of democracies and the behavior of men in democracies. Democracy is then not indeed mass rule but mass culture. A mass culture is a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual and moral effort whatsoever and at a very low monetary price. Thus we understand most easily what liberal education means here and now. Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.
Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.
Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness. Someone might say that this notion of liberal education is merely political, that it dogmatically assumes the goodness of modem democracy. Only letters which have come down from the founders can make it possible for the founders to speak directly to the latest heirs. It is then self-contradictory to wish to return to illiteracy. We are compelled to live with books.