In Pursuit of Politics

Adrian O’Connor is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg

• Introduction – politics: a revolutionary idea and a practical problemPrologue: the educational "system" of eighteenth-century France1 Education and an ambivalent Enlightenment 2 National education: promise and paralysis3 Public instruction: a new pedagogy for a new politics4 Constitutional principles and concrete proposals: reconsidering Talleyrand and Condorcet on public instruction5 Revolutionary politics à la plume: the public on education and politics6 New wine in old bottles? Ancien Régime schools imagine the future7 Republican instruction: an elusive idealConclusion – politics: real, pursued, and promisedIndex

‘In Pursuit of politics is thus a welcome addition to the history of education as well as the history of French Revolutionary politics and offers new and important ways of approaching both topics.’Karen E. Carter, Brigham Young University, French History, Vol. 33, Issue 1, March 2019'We get insightful reconsiderations of Enlightenment luminaries like Rousseau and Condorcet, their work freshly illuminated by the context of eighteenth-century public instruction; even more impressively, we learn they were in a national conversation with ordinary citizens from across France... If it may be that eighteenth-century public instruction is “the history of a failure”, O’Connor nevertheless shows that an account of that history can be a wonderful success.'Journal of Modern History