NONFICTION - Jan. 24, 1993

AN ARISTOCRACY FOR EVERYONE: The Politics of Education and the Future of America by Benjamin R. Barber (Ballantine Books: $20; 307 pp.). One of the great wisecracks of recent decades, usually attributed to Henry Kissinger, claims that academic arguments are so virulent because the stakes are so low. There’s a lot of truth to that observation, but Benjamin Barber, professor of political science at Rutgers University and author of numerous books on democracy, shows the academy’s better side: “An Aristocracy of Everyone” is a temperate book, temperate because Barber believes that his subject, education, carries such high stakes. Barber argues, in a nutshell, that political equality and intellectual excellence are not antithetical, that the oft-repeated dichotomy between democracy and excellence is not merely false but destructive, because a healthy democracy encourages excellence. Though Barber can be repetitive and over-reliant on rhetorical devices, he makes a compelling case, basing his views more on common sense than ideology. He tells conservatives that “the canon must always be understood as an argument” rather than an unchanging, value-free lodestone; academic theorists that deconstruction may seem “a clever way to think, but it is no way at all to live”; multiculturalists that their basic tenet has monocultural origins, tolerance for difference and a belief in pluralism being a cultural phenomenon almost unique to the United States. Barber shows himself at his crowd-pleasing best, however, in the course of critiquing the late Allan Bloom. Bloom has been upbraided many times previously for his crabbed, elitist view of higher education, but Barber delivers a piercing blow when he writes, “It is not really the last twenty years that disturb Allan Bloom, but the last two hundred years. The last two thousand, for that matter.”