Democracy and Tradition

by Jeffrey L. Stout

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theology, Religion

348 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2003

Reviews

[William Feng · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am grateful that it introduced me to pragmatism.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book with some major limitations. Basically, it's an attempt to confront people like MacIntyre and Hauerwas on their own turf, agreeing with them that abstract or procedural Rawls-ean liberalism is bogus but also rejecting their illiberal solution; he does this by arguing that, contra the neo-traditionalists, there is such a thing as a democratic tradition, as in Emerson/Whitman/Dewey, and there is a democratic form of piety. This is all well and good, but the whole thing reeks of Princeton somehow; this is obviously a guy who has never really lived anywhere else (as he admits in the preface). I mean, he says at one point that we don't get our democratic morality from Rawls (which is of course right) but then he says that we get it from sermons, stories, and plays. What planet is he living on? Show me one youngster who imbibes his moral sensibility from ye olde drama house and I'll eat my hat. It's the blindness to the reality of a democratic culture that now expands far beyond Walden/Lake Wobegon that makes this seems somewhat myopic.

[William Randolph · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great defense of American democratic ideals against traditionalist critics such as Hauerwas and MacIntyre. It claims continuity with Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey. While it certainly doesn't close the discussion, it's definitely worth reading, if only in sections.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can be dry in a few parts, but a great analysis of some of the more prominent criticisms of modernity and democracy-- and an encouraging way of looking at the possibilities of going forward.