Augustine or Emerson?

Democracy and Tradition

Jeffrey Stout 

Princeton University Press, $35, 348 pp.

Democracy and Tradition is a long and complicated book that offers a diagnosis of what philosopher Jeffrey Stout (Ethics after Babel) regards as unsatisfactory ways of thinking about democracy, and a prescription for understanding it better. According to Stout, the late John Rawls and his followers dominate the study of democracy in philosophy and political science departments, while the "new traditionalists" led by Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) and Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas are equally dominant in theological seminaries. Each of these pervasive stances distorts and diminishes American democracy, Stout argues. In their place, Stout proposes what he regards as a more adequate description and justification of American democracy--a brand of pragmatism that combines Hegel's moral expressivism with Emerson's account of democratic individuality.

With the publication of A Theory of Justice more than thirty years ago, Rawls revived the social-contract tradition by drawing on Immanuel Kant's account of individual autonomy. In Stout's view, Rawls's contractualism begins well, as an effort to locate reasonable agreement that respects the fact of, and responds to, the contemporary diversity of conceptions of what composes the good life. Critics argued that the narrowness of Rawls's philosophical lexicon undercut the capaciousness of his moral aims, thus failing to take diversity, especially religious pluralism, seriously enough. Rawls responded by shifting the basis of his theory from Kantian universalism to the view, influenced by Hegel, that political theory draws from, and expresses, a particular "public culture." Stout argues that Rawls's revised theory fails in its own terms, as a theorized expression of the public culture of our democratic society. Democratic culture is far richer and more diverse, Stout argues, than the terms of Rawls's etiolated rationalism can capture. In particular, American religion is as intrinsic to American culture, and as compatible with democracy, as is secular liberalism, and there is less difference between the way we hold religious and secular beliefs than most secularists suppose. Rawls's effort to expel religious discourse from the process of public justification is both mistaken in theory and counterproductive in practice.

Much as political scientists argue that the secular liberal legal and social gains of the 1960s triggered a religious conservative backlash, Stout claims that liberal secularist gains contributed to a theological counterrevolution. The new traditionalists accept Rawlsian philosophy as an accurate description of modern democratic society and respond by rejecting democracy as hostile to genuine faith. If the faithful are required to check their convictions in the vestibule as a condition of entering the house of democracy, then the price of admission is too high, the new traditionalists say. Worse, while we can only lead morally meaningful lives--that is, lives of virtue and character--within communities constituted by shared traditions, modern democracy is at war with tradition. Rationalism, individualism, and unfettered liberty corrode bonds, restraints, and tacit beliefs. The inevitable result is social fragmentation and moral nihilism. As a consequence, whenever possible the faithful must retreat into communities of shared conviction. When that is not the result, they must fight against secularist coercion as best they can.

Stout's critique of the new traditionalists is astute. They begin to go astray, he argues, when they accept the claims of secular liberal philosophy at face value, as an adequate characterization of modern democratic culture. A greater openness to the actual texture of lived democratic life would enable them to see that democracy can make a place for moral excellence and faith. That is to say--and this is Stout's main point--democracy, far from being the enemy of all tradition, is itself a tradition, with its own canon of conduct, discourse, and virtues.

This is fair enough, as far as it goes, but it does not go quite far enough. Lurking beneath the surface of the new traditionalists' charge that democracy is at war with tradition is a different, more challenging claim that Stout fails to discern (or ducks): democracy is a tradition, but its moral substance is flawed, even contemptible, say many new traditionalists. Virtue requires deference, hierarchy, even awe, which democracy's shallow egalitarianism undercuts. True virtue exalts, not the self, but rather what transcends the self, which is at odds with Emerson's idolatry of the imperial self. The virtuous human being accepts, with docility and even gratitude, the constraints of human nature and the cosmos, limits that the restless democratic will cannot abide and against which it constantly chafes, or wars. And so forth. Stout is right to say that for the new traditionalists, the basic question to ask of any society is what kinds of people it characteristically produces. What Stout does not see, or say, is that the new traditionalists reject modern democracy au fond because they do not like its human products or way of life.

It is easy to take umbrage at the antidemocratic sentiments of the new traditionalists, but harder to respond to them. Stout's account of democratic theory as the theoretical expression of democratic culture turns out to be a two-edged sword: while it offers rich internal resources of moral narratives (Stout writes interestingly about his local soccer team as a community of shared values, for example), it is of little force against external critiques. A thick description of democracy may have persuasive force against critics whose understanding of democracy is phenomenologically thin; it has no force against critics who see democracy for what it is and nonetheless (or as they would say, accordingly) reject it in favor of an undemocratic ideal of human existence.

Stout's passionate Emersonianism makes it even harder to respond to the new traditionalists. He celebrates self-reliance, taking it to theological heights. His account of what he calls "self-reliant piety" insists that human moral understanding is adequate to judge the nature and deeds of God. Stout gives us an account of piety, and of the human moral life, that might be called "half of Abraham"--the Abraham who questions God's intention to destroy Sodom, but not the Abraham who accepts the command to sacrifice Isaac. He seems to suggest that the compatibility of religion and democracy presupposes the self-sufficient adequacy of human morality. I do not see why. Many forms of religious orthodoxy, Catholicism for one, that affirm a gap between human and divine morality have made their peace with democracy. Nor do I think Stout has made the case that Emersonian per fectionism is essential to the vindication of democracy. (As he himself observes, contemporary Augustinians have been good and conscientious democrats.) The democratic individuality of Emerson and Whitman, which Stout embraces, is nothing like a comprehensive account of American democratic culture. It is, at most, one strand in the strong rope of democracy in America.

Against his intention, Stout replicates Rawls's misstep. By representing the Emersonian tradition as the core of American culture, he needlessly stacks the deck against competing possibilities that give more value to respect for authority and for the inherited wisdom of the past. I do not see why a religious believer who embraces some form of orthodoxy would be any happier with Emersonian individuality than with Rawlsian rationalism. If either were essential to democracy, all orthodoxy would be at war, in principle, with democracy. Fortunately for democracy, neither is. Stout's loving evocation of the Emersonian tradition is a personal profession of faith. It is not, and cannot be, an account of democratic culture, or of democratic excellence, that all self-aware democratic citizens are bound to accept.

Democracy contains--must contain--many competing accounts of excellence. The most essential democratic virtue is the ability to coexist, on terms of mutual respect, with proponents of these diverse accounts. Stigmatizing those with whom one disagrees, as Stout does, as practitioners of "docility" and "slavish idolatry" is a continuation of the problem, not the path to a solution. If Stout hoped to offer in this book an account of American democracy that conscientious traditionalists can accept, I must reluctantly conclude that he has failed.

William A. Galston is professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. From 1993 to 1995, he served as deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton for domestic policy.