Book excerpt: Focusing on the writings of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, Esquith shows how modern liberal theory represents politics as the play of spectacular images and the reasonable interchange of domesticated voices - a representation that narrowly restricts the boundaries of public life, excluding those who are unable to enter this political domain of clients, consumers, and professional policymakers. By revealing this weakness, Esquith hopes to move political education in a more democratic direction. He uses Bakhtin's notion of speech genres to develop a critical interpretation of liberal theory's relationship to practice, then draws on Emerson's ideas of power and the public intellectual to reconsider the relationship between democratic theory and political education.