Many philosophers of education are familiar with Frankenstein, at the heart of which the creature explains how he learned to speak and read, his description echoing Rousseau’s Emile.  Less well-known is Shelley’s 1826 novel, The Last Man.  Like Frankenstein, it picks up and advances thinking about education as a matter of both nature and artifice, considering these factors in the context of hubris and disaster.  In The Last Man, disaster is the effect of a plague with a mortality rate of 100% minus one, which correlates with (never directly explained) climate change. The plague is part and parcel of “nature”, but like all “natural disasters,” its disastrousness results from humanity’s actions – and hubris. While Frankenstein is about Victor Frankenstein’s flawed personal choices, The Last Man attends to the political circumstances, with lengthy passages dedicated to the evolution of England’s political system, ongoing international conflicts, and England’s imperial ambitions. If Frankenstein looks to Emile, The Last Man picks up on Rousseau’s Second Discourse and Social Contract, from the vantage point of several (American, French, Haitian) revolutions later.

The education of the titular Last Man, Lionel Verney, like that of Frankenstein’s creature, is framed in terms of the 18^th century “wild child” trope.  The educations of actual and fictional “wild children,” i.e. children who spent stretches of childhood quasi-independently on the margins of civilization, served as a device enabling Enlightenment-era thinkers to think through – and make claims about -- the effects of nature and artifice on human education.  The nature/artifice binary was utilized by Rousseau, Shelley and others as a means of addressing the era’s burning questions about the moral valence of nature on a planet increasingly understood in secular, scientific terms.  It was tied also to the distinction between civilization and savagery in the face of imperial global projects.  Shelley takes up, and contributes in original ways to that ongoing speculation.  Shelley’s recognition that education about the environment is as much a matter of politics and aesthetics as of science is a particularly valuable line of her thought.  The Last Man is set in the years 2070-2100, and like all of Shelley’s writing it imagines human beings as living in a “fallen world,” one in which revolutions have failed to bring about any kind of utopia.  Human beings prove “perfectible” in the Rousseauian sense: equally capable of becoming better and worse.  As 21^st century Europe faces the twin challenges of climate change and populist demagoguery, themes that appear in The Last Man, Shelley’s futuristic contemplation of how education might prepare us for ecological and political disaster feels strikingly prescient – and worth delving into within philosophy of education’s frameworks.

This paper addresses two interrelated questions.  First: What does The Last Man offer philosophers of education, particularly as political and aesthetic education cross with nature and a ‘natural’ world needing to be seen in new terms?

A secondary question, to be answered in part by the first, is: What grounds are there for treating Shelley as a philosopher of education? Her ideas were mainly expressed in novels and biographical sketches, rather than obviously “philosophical” prose.  Furthermore, for a century after her death her novels were ignored or treated as sensationalist thrillers, kept at the sidelines of philosophical thinking.  Both facts – genre, irrelevance – work against treating her work as philosophy.  Yet other novelists are read as philosophers, and Shelley was educated by her father, philosopher William Godwin, co-translated Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and read extensively in philosophy.  She wrote, that is, with a solid understanding of the philosophical discourses of her time. Does her work therefore merit treatment as philosophy?

This paper will analyse Shelley’s The Last Man in conversation with a) the philosophical sources she draws on and b) contemporary philosophy of education addressing the interconnected perils of climate change and populist authoritarianism. It presumes that climate change is a political problem rather than a “natural” one. Like other natural disasters, it is brought about by our collective inability/unwillingness to enact political measures necessary to forestall what we have the scientific wherewithal to expect. Thus, the populist and illiberal movements gaining hold across Europe, and the philosophy of education literature that addresses this shift, will be an important piece of this paper. As noted above, The Last Man can be read as a “companion piece” to Frankenstein, just as Rousseau’s Social Contract is a companion piece to Emile. Shelley wrote The Last Man immediately after the deaths of Percy Shelley and Byron, and the novel has usually been read as a roman a clef, with Mary Shelley herself represented by Verney. While this is not inappropriate, the novels sources stretch far beyond Shelley’s personal life. Verney’s account of his early education, which sensitized him to the beauties of nature, also rendered him “brutish and savage.” Only when he meets Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who introduces him to literature, philosophy, music and art, does he say “I became human.” The play of nature and artifice, wildness and civilization, in this account echoes Rousseau’s Second Discourse, which provided important philosophical groundwork (as it does in Shelley’s novel) for later ideas about children’s education and the familial and political orders productive of human happiness – and misery. This paper will demonstrate Shelley’s uptake of Rousseau’s ideas about the education of men, women, and citizens, and her philosophical revisions of those ideas. Later in the novel, the major characters engage in British politics. They first embark on globalist, imperial adventures, which unleash the plague that destroys Europe. When Britain then tries to isolate itself from the European continent, relief is illusory. The Last Man contains extensive sections that relate the devolution of Britain’s government, from parliamentary republic through demagoguery, strong-man authoritarianism, and theocracy. Through this, a second kind of education takes place: that of the reader. We are invited to educate ourselves about the likely results of our inability to learn from the mistakes of an imagined 21st century Europe.

As scholars of education, including but not limited to philosophers of education, seek education policies and practices that will help prevent humanitarian disasters in the face of climate change, we are well-served by a critical understanding of the historical discourses that still shape contemporary thinking. This requires an understanding of both the major channels of past thought and some of the paths-not-taken. Major channels include liberalism and neoliberalism, based on social contract theory (and the postulation of a “state of nature” preceding it) as formulated by Locke. They include also revolutionary and quasi-communitarian alternatives descended, via Marx and others, from Rousseau. Mary Shelley’s writing, which reconfigures Locke’s and Rousseau’s ideas about nature and artifice, “savagery” and civilization, offers a hint of what roads less traveled might offer. As in all of Shelley’s novels, the only antidote to human failure is love. Loving relationships with fellow humans, with animals, and with the natural world around us, she suggests, are our only hope. The Last Man’s prescient forecast of human failure offers a useful education to those of looking at the Earth from the perspective of 21st century Europe – if we choose to listen.

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