Extraordinarily, and perhaps ironically, erudite, this unfailingly engaging book offers a bracing admixture of cynicism and scepticism, comedy and tragedy, pathos and parody. A raw, unflinching, and uncompromising exploration of the conceits of ‘educated people’ and the ways we seek—as a species, as societies and as individuals—to deny, disavow, and distance ourselves from our finite, material, animal, and embodied existence.

~ Matthew Clarke, author of Education and the Fantasies of Neoliberalism: Policy, Politics and Psychoanalysis and Lacan and Education Policy: The Other Side of Education

In spite of itself, perhaps, there is a romance to the work—the romance of walking and intellectual conversation, the preserved aesthetico-intellectual space, the turning of life to art. Perhaps the closest corollary is, in fact, Wordsworth’s (…and Coleridge’s…) The Prelude. It is the playing out of the intellectual relationship/friendship of two ‘educated people.’ Their very education (like many of the authors they discuss) providing them with the tools for its self-critique. The educated person is at once presented as obscene, self-obstructive, and unavoidable.

~ Emile Bojesen, author of Forms of Education: Rethinking Educational Experience Against and Outside the Humanist Legacy

Educated People

Imprint:

by Roy Goddard, Ansgar Allen

FORTHCOMING Summer 2026

Educated People identifies a specter haunting the discourse of critical thought and it isn’t communism. It is the unseemly figure of the bourgeois individual, the obscene subject and agent of capitalist culture. This subject is the educated person, the protagonist of a historical culture rooted in human exploitation and a hypocritical social myopia, whose trajectory tends without shame toward the extinction of social and moral difference and the suppression of humanity’s spontaneous vitality and imagination.

Educated People recalls from the margins of intellectual history an assortment of radical thinkers who have been deemed useless to the existing imperium of thought, consigned to irrelevance by a system whose grotesque evaluations work relentlessly to reduce human experience to a passive commodity fetishism. Roy Goddard and Ansgar Allen write against a dominant academic convention that conforms to an idea of knowledge as refinable and progressing toward closure: a final and definitive identification of what counts as true. What is presented here is a series of fragments, the product of reading across traditions of philosophy and critique in the arts, history, and anthropology, a series of short pieces that often center on thinkers who have been deemed no longer apropos to a project of closure. These fragments are not so much aphorisms as experiments, tentatively ventured and assembled in such a way as to foster creative doubt and to provoke a more productive sharing and interaction of thought.

About the Authors

Roy Goddard is the author of a novel Morant (Erratum, 2022) and, with Ansgar Allen, Education and Philosophy: An Introduction (Sage, 2017).

 

 

Ansgar Allen is the author of Cynicism (MIT, 2020) and several other books, including the novels Black Vellum (Schism, 2023), The Sick List (Boiler House, 2021), and The Wake and the Manuscript (Anti-Oedipus, 2022).