Tech elites are, for better or worse, princes of the contemporary age, wielding, perhaps more than politicians, the power to shape the present and future. Apparently obsessed with innovation, tech elites are also, in recent years, increasingly concerned with political institutions, self-conscious of their participation in a distinct intellectual culture, and interested in the services of people who might, with charity, be compared to the professional humanists and court philosophers of the past, as if aware that, given the role they have stepped into, they need to acquire a new kind of education.
For much of the history of philosophy, philosophers (in competition with other figures, such as rhetoricians, confessors, etc.) have sought to educate and influence elites through a wide variety of strategies. From sages wishing to be powers behind the throne, to cynics who seemed to ostentatiously spurn power and publicity (while making themselves famous in the process), the great thinkers have fashioned personae for themselves through their changing relationships to power. Our own moment—when both our political regime and its associated figure of the ‘public intellectual’ seem increasingly benighted—demands a reconsideration of this history, aiming at answering, or at least clarifying the terms of, the question of how today’s elites can be educated.
