The liberal arts originated as an education exclusive to free men, not the many.

Evidence

The term “liberal arts” came into regular use in the fourteenth century and, as Raymond Williams argues, was “predominantly a class term,” identifying “the skills and pursuits appropriate … to men of independent means and assured social position, as distinct from other skills and pursuits … appropriate to a lower class.” Even in classical antiquity, the liberal arts (rooted in liberus, the Latin word for individual freedom) denoted the education appropriate to free men, in contrast to that of slaves. A liberal arts education, in other words, was necessary for free men to know and engage the world sufficiently to exercise that freedom. It was the knowledge that enabled the use of freedom, but that in an important sense also made men free insofar as it lifted them from the immediate present to a longer temporal and larger spatial domain, one accessible only through knowledge. Thus did Martianus Capella define the seven liberal arts in the fifth century A.D.: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Later, history, theology, and art would be added, along with the natural sciences. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 374

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the class-freighted origin of ‘liberal arts’ from liberus, marking the stark contrast with its later democratic generalization.
• XREF: connects to: Liberal arts mass education generalizes the leisured ruler’s freedom to all citizens — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 381

Broader Connections

• Liberal arts mass education generalizes the leisured ruler’s freedom to all citizens #expands (0.90) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 381