Educating for Democracy: Empathy, Reading, and Making Better Citizens in Martha Nussbaum’s Public Education Project

In discussions about the usefulness of the humanities, it is generally accepted that reading literature will enhance empathy, e.g., make for better doctors and, more generally, better people, and that more empathy will also improve politics. In this article, we discuss these claims about empathy, focusing on some central ideas of Martha Nussbaum. She turns reading literature into a public education project in which good and bad emotions are demarcated from each other and government is given the task of strengthening good emotions, among other ways by stimulating the reading of "good" literature. This project of making better citizens through reading brings literature and politics into an unholy alliance in which essential elements of both politics and literature are discarded.