ABSTRACT
Introduction Elite education has long been associated with a leisurely lifestyle, from ancient Greece, through Confucian China to post-war France (Bourdieu et al., 1994). In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (2000) reminds us that Plato valued skhole¯ , an activity (and later a place, a school) where philosophers could congregate away from the demands of everyday necessity and work, and engage in pleasurable speculation. Such speculation, about the nature of Being and its relationships with ideas and language, combined leisure and philosophizing. The ability to delegate dealing with the necessities of life to others (slaves, plebeians, women) enabled philosophers to develop arguments for their own sake, but there was a clear elitism in the practice. Scholastic philosophy was also notoriously unconcerned with scientic or social-scientic accounts of the world. Plato’s account of the after-dinner discussions of philosophy involving Socrates and his companions displays the playful and sometimes competitive qualities of the debates in ancient Greece beforehand (Lee, 1964). Socrates’ fate – execution after he had annoyed too many members of the Athens elite – also showed the wisdom of a degree of withdrawal from the public gaze, into the groves of Academe.
