'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
Introduction - politics: a revolutionary idea and a practical problem
Prologue: the educational system of eighteenth-century France
1 Education and an ambivalent Enlightenment
2 National education: promise and paralysis
3 Public instruction: a new pedagogy for a new politics
4 Constitutional principles and concrete proposals: reconsidering Talleyrand and Condorcet on public instruction
5 Revolutionary politics a la plume: the public on education and politics
6 New wine in old bottles? Ancien Regime schools imagine the future
7 Republican instruction: an elusive ideal
Conclusion - politics: real, pursued, and promised
Index