It is because of the seriousness of this question that the meaning of the liberal arts and liberal education has been and will continue to be so fervently disputed. This disagreement ascends to the greatest height of controversy: to disagreement about the most urgent question-the question of the highest good, the question of the end or purpose of human existence. There has always been-as there continues to be-lively disagreement about how the various disciplines are related to one another and, indeed, which are essential and why. In the late twentieth century they patiently endured deconstruction in the service of the dogmas of a postmodernism that is now passé. They were transformed by the centuries-long cultural and political spread of Christianity and again transformed by the rise to ascendancy of modern natural science. They were systematized as Rome reached and passed the apogee of its ancient pagan greatness. The liberal arts came into formal and self-conscious being in the last glow of the political greatness of Athens and Greece. The tradition of the liberal arts is, in a decisive respect, the Western Tradition, and the fate of the liberal arts will be inseparable from the fate of the West. The successful cultivation of the arts of necessity seems to be a necessary condition for the flourishing of the arts of freedom. Economics (from the Greek oikonomike, household management) is the name given to the general art of acquiring such necessary material goods. Arts are developed to secure the necessary material conditions for existence.
Other necessities also encroach upon our freedom and our very survival-the needs for food, shelter, and clothing, for example. To prevent such conquest, to preserve that freedom which is a condition for the exercise of the liberal arts, requires other arts, arts of necessity, most notably the art of war.
People are subjected to slavery by conquest. A slave is one who is subjected to the will of another, who is a mere tool or instrument of alien purposes and cannot choose purposes for himself.
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Traditionally this meant, among other things, the arts of free men as opposed to slaves. In this tradition, the liberal arts, the artes liberales, are literally arts of freedom. More generally, if less dramatically: human beings throughout history have proven as apt to use their acquired skills to inflict suffering on one another as to confer benefits: Consider the innocent skill of flying small airplanes in the light of Septemor the equally innocent skill of manipulating chemical or biological agents, in the light of the war on terrorism that has come to define our era. As communism continues to take its uncertain and much awaited departure from the world, let us not forget the horrors of the Gulag Archipelago, the Bolshevik extermination of the Kulaks, the millions sacrificed to China’s political experiments, and of course the “killing fields” in Cambodia-all in the name of scientific socialism and progress, but in fact amounting to a new phenomenon in the world: scientific savagery. The twentieth century, the most technologically advanced century in history (until the twenty-first), with more technically skilled people per square mile than could once have been imagined, stands out as a century in which genocide was a term with which every grade school child must become familiar.
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