Democracy and Tradition (New Forum Books)
Jeffrey Stout
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0691102937
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Do religious arguments have a public role in the post-9/11 world? Can we hold democracy together despite fractures over moral issues? Are there moral limits on the struggle against terror? Asking how the citizens of modern democracy can reason with one another, this book carves out a controversial position between those who view religious voices as an anathema to democracy and those who believe democratic society is a moral wasteland because such voices are not heard.
Drawing inspiration from Whitman, Dewey, and Ellison, Jeffrey Stout sketches the proper role of religious discourse in a democracy. He discusses the fate of virtue, the legacy of racism, the moral issues implicated in the war on terrorism, and the objectivity of ethical norms. Against those who see no place for religious reasoning in the democratic arena, Stout champions a space for religious voices. But against increasingly vocal antiliberal thinkers, he argues that modern democracy can provide a moral vision and has made possible such moral achievements as civil rights precisely because it allows a multitude of claims to be heard.
Stout's distinctive pragmatism reconfigures the disputed area where religious thought, political theory, and philosophy meet. Charting a path beyond the current impasse between secular liberalism and the new traditionalism, Democracy and Tradition asks whether we have the moral strength to continue as a democratic people as it invigorates us to retrieve our democratic virtues from very real threats to their practice.
The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion
The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution And Why We Need It More Than Ever
Aristophanic Comedy and the Challenge of Democratic Citizenship
Shall offer none. I am content to let pragmatic considerations settle the question of individuation on a case-by-case basis. On another day, with a different purpose in view, one might have reason to refer to the likes of Coleridge and the likes of Emerson as embraced by a single, larger, looser tradition. Macintyre sometimes uses the term in roughly the way I use it, but he also uses it in a narrower, normatively charged way. Susan Moller Okin, in her incisive feminist critique of Macintyre,.
Quite different from that which we hitherto thought we saw." The main effect that Macintyre's traditionalism has had on Hauerwas's thinking is to hinder the possibility of taking Yoder's "politics of Jesus" where he had once wanted to take it. For he seems no longer to be moving in the direction of a world-engaging conversation about the biblical injunction to build communities-ecclesial, familial, and national-in which justice and peace visibly embrace. One reason for this is that justice has.
Life of its own, which philosophers would do well to articu late. Pragmatism is best viewed as an attempt to bring the notions of demo cratic deliberation and tradition together in a single philosophical vision. To put the point aphoristically and paradoxically, prag;matism is democratic traditionalism. Less paradoxically, one could say that pragmatism is the phil osophical space in which democratic rebellion against hierarchy combines with traditionalist love of virtue to form a new.
Logically, there is no substitute for 'saints'-palpable, personal examples of the Christian faith-because . . . we cannot know the Kingdom unless our eyes are opened to see it."3 I agree with Hauerwas's claim that an ethical aristocracy is essential to the maintenance of a virtuous community, assuming that "aristocracy" is here being used metaphorically. But in that case, the claim is hardly anti democratic-not, at any rate, if Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau qualify as paradigmatic democratic.
Oppose restrictions on the public expression of religious dissent against majority views. One can hope that they will do so successfully for the foreseeable future. My version of pragmatism endorses major themes from Hegel's critique of Kant. It then combines Hegel's dialectical normative expressivism with the Emersonian conviction that the most substantial spiritual benefits of expressive freedom are to be found in a form of social life that celebrates democratic individuality as a positive.