In his Australia Day Address in 2006, John Howard said that Australia’s "dominant cultural pattern comprises Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment and the institutions and values of British political culture".
The speech was controversial. Howard set out his vision for how history should be taught in schools, increasing attention to "the great and enduring heritage of Western civilisation", and argued against the introduction of a bill of rights.
But the words quoted remind us of something which is easy to forget: the Liberal Party and conservative parties generally derive their central values – indirectly but unmistakably – from what was primarily a philosophical movement: the European Enlightenment.
It is not merely ironic, then, that the federal government is moving to increase the HECS contributions that university students must make to study philosophy and to reduce its own contributions. It is perplexing. Why would a political party withdraw support from the discipline to which it owes its ideological heritage?
What many political philosophers of the Enlightenment emphasised – most notably John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government – was that it is not the natural state of humans to be governed. Individuals are inherently equal, so the "divine right" to rule which monarchs claimed cannot be a legitimate source of authority. The whole institution of government can only be legitimated by the consent of the governed. Even then, a government must not trespass upon whichever freedoms the people do not cede to it.
What the Liberal Party believes in is individual initiative; freedoms of thought and speech and worship; and limited government, which promotes individual initiative and leaves fundamental freedoms untouched. Enlightenment thinking has had enormous influence across the political spectrum, but its echoes in Liberal Party ethos are especially loud.
So why is the Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, proposing reforms that will make it harder to study philosophy? Officially, the rationale is economic: the government wants to encourage students to pursue areas of study which will make them ‘job-ready’ and they do not place philosophy in this category.
Employers disagree: data presented by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (originally sourced from the US Census Bureau) show an unemployment rate of only 4.3% for philosophy majors in the US six months after graduation – not as good as finance but better than industrial engineering.
Some critics see in the government’s proposed reforms the continuation of a sustained project to dismantle the humanities in Australia. This would be extremely regrettable in itself but it is especially hard to see why it would lead to philosophy being targeted. As a group, philosophers do lean left, but there have been very influential conservatives among their number in Australia.
David Armstrong, the Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University for many years, and one of the world’s leading philosophers throughout his career, was actively involved in the anti-Communist Australian Association for Cultural Freedom and sat on the editorial board of Quadrant. His colleague, David Stove, wrote a paper setting out his political views transparently titled, ‘Why You Should be a Conservative’. John Finnis, an Australian legal philosopher who spent much of his career at Oxford, has argued publicly for deeply conservative positions on social issues for decades.
Whatever influence Australian philosophers have had on politics, it has not been uniformly progressive.
The truth, I suspect, is that the government has no coherent rationale for increasing the cost of studying philosophy. It is what happens when you put together an assumption that studying philosophy does not develop job-relevant skills; a vague sense that the humanities are hostile to conservative politics; and a funding crisis in the higher education sector precipitated by a global pandemic.
But has the government not noticed that it is attacking the field of study in which its purported values were developed? Or does it not care?
Probably both. Dan Tehan is an intelligent man but I doubt he thinks much about his party’s intellectual heritage. And even the most knowledgeable and thoughtful parliamentarians usually maintain only a loose relationship with the philosophical foundations of their political views. In politics, not much is sacred.
Philosophy is a discipline, not a set of beliefs. All philosophical theories – including the political theories stemming from the Enlightenment – are vigorously debated. There are also certainly political theories in philosophy which are anathema to conservative politics.
So Dan Tehan is not repudiating any particular set of beliefs, but he is repudiating a way of rigorously thinking and contesting ideas from which his own political beliefs derive (even if, like many politicians, he has never thought much about the basis of those beliefs).
Immanuel Kant offered this as the ‘motto’ of the Enlightenment: "Have the courage to use your own understanding." It was an expression of optimism for individual rationality and potential. I hope Dan Tehan might find this courage and reconsider his proposal.
Daniel Gregory completed a PhD in philosophy at the Australian National University and now holds a position as Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany.