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Dialogues and Addresses
Madame de Maintenon
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Born Françoise d'Aubigné, a criminal's daughter reduced to street begging as a child, Madame de Maintenon (1653-1719) made an improbable rise from impoverished beginnings to the summit of power as the second, secret wife of Louis XIV. An educational reformer, Maintenon founded and directed the celebrated academy for aristocratic women at Saint-Cyr. This volume presents the dialogues and addresses in which Maintenon explains her controversial philosophy of education for women.

Denounced by her contemporaries as a political schemer and religious fanatic, Maintenon has long been criticized as an opponent of gender equality. The writings in this volume faithfully reflect Maintenon's respect for social hierarchy and her stoic call for women to accept the duties of their state in life. But the writings also echo Maintenon's more feminist concerns: the need to redefine the virtues in the light of women's experience, the importance of naming the constraints on women's freedom, and the urgent need to remedy the scandalous neglect of the education of women.

In her writings as well as in her own model school at Saint-Cyr, Maintenon embodies the demand for educational reform as the key to the empowerment of women at the dawn of modernity.
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Education for Democracy
Essays and Addresses
John Johnston
University of Minnesota Press, 1934
Education for Democracy was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.“The Greek ideal of the citizen realizing himself in the state” is the heart of Dean Johnston’s philosophy developed in this book. He is concerned not merely with education, but with our current economic, political, social, and ethical problems, which education directed toward service to the state may help to solve.This is a book in which an ideal rather than a theory of education is clearly stated at the beginning, and developed like a theme in music. The author, speaking from a long and varied experience as scientist, teacher, and college administrator, sees the only hope of a future democratic state in the selection and training of competent and unselfish leaders.This selection, he firmly believes, is the task of the schools and especially of the colleges. By “selection” he means – he is careful to point out – not the exclusion of any capable person from higher education, but a careful fitting of every individual for the occupation in which he will be most happy and will render the best service to society.The papers collected here all deal with some variation of this theme. They draw up a striking indictment of many current educational practices, while pointing the way, as this prominent educator sees it, toward the alleviation of that “social manic-depressive insanity” with which our civilization is now afflicted.
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The Essential Hayim Greenberg
Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism
Hayim Greenberg, Edited and introduced by Mark Raider, Foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Though well known to many scholars and critics in the field of Judaic studies, Hayim Greenberg remains relatively unknown. Since his death in 1953, Greenberg’s contributions to modern Jewish thought have largely fallen from view. In The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism, the first collection of Greenberg’s writings since 1968, Mark A. Raider reestablishes Greenberg as a prominent Jewish thinker and Zionist activist who challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of American Jewry and the Zionist movement.

This collection of thoroughly annotated essays, spanning the 1920s to the early 1950s, includes Greenberg’s meditations on socialism and ethics, profiles of polarizing twentieth-century figures (among them Trotsky, Lenin, and Gandhi), and several essays investigating the compatibility of socialism and communism. Greenberg always circles back, however, to the recurring question of how Jews might situate themselves in modernity, both before and after the Holocaust, and how Labor Zionist ideology might reshape the imbalances of Jewish economic life.

Alongside his role as an American Zionist leader, Greenberg maintained a lifelong commitment to the vitality of the Jewish diaspora. Rather than promoting Jewish autonomy and statehood, he argued for fidelity to the Jewish spirit. This volume not only seeks to restore Greenberg to his previous stature in the field of Judaic studies but also to return a vital and authentic voice, long quieted, to the continuing debate over what it means to be Jewish.

The Essential Hayim Greenberg provides an accessible text for scholars, historians, and students of Jewish studies, religion, and theology.
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Nature, Addresses, and Lectures
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press, 1971


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