Galston & tradition.

In his review of my book Democracy and Tradition ("Augustine or Emerson?" January 30), William Galston charges that "By representing the Emersonian tradition as the core of American culture, [Stout] needlessly stacks the deck against competing possibilities that give more value to respect for authority and for the inherited wisdom of the past." In fact, however, the first page of my first chapter says that Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey "represent only one strand of an American debate over religion, ethics, and political community that has been going on since Emerson's lectures and essays of the late 1830s. Another strand, equally important but much more aware of itself as a tradition, is that of orthodox Christianity."

The story I am telling portrays both of these strands as having contributed essentially to what our civic nation has become. I am bewildered that Galston thinks I propose that Christians and others embrace Emersonian individualism. My account of democratic discussion encourages all citizens to stand up in public and have their say on the issues of the day without feeling that they need to filter out the religious components of their reasoning. I explicitly reject the idea, popular among some secular political philosophers, that religion has no place in our politics. A major theme of the book is that the decline of the religiously orthodox Left has harmed our shared democratic culture. Do I expect "conscientious traditionalists" to accept even a heavily modified Emersonian individuality? No. My hope is rather that they will see me and others like me as worthy conversation partners and, on issues of social justice, as political allies, and I suggest how the differences that remain between our positions can be fruitfully debated in keeping with the ethics of public reasoning I offer.

When I discuss the Emersonian strand, I do not hide my sympathies for it, but I also work hard at correcting the standard textbook account of it echoed in Galston's reference to "Emerson's idolatry of the imperial self." Emerson and Whitman were more complicated than the one-sided individualists they have often been thought to be. Even so, much of what they said about tradition, authority, and the past was hyperbolic or false, and much of my book is devoted to correcting their excesses. It would be hard to tell this from Galston's review.

Galston alleges that according to my account of piety, "human moral understanding is adequate to judge the nature and deeds of God." My book says no such thing. What it does say is that the Emersonian ideal of "just or fitting acknowledgment of the sources of our existence and progress through life" puts a democratic twist on a tradition that "begins in Plato's dialogue, the Euthyphro, and extends through such thinkers as Cicero and Aquinas, before reaching the modern period." Notice the position of honor Aquinas holds in this Socratic lineage. The members of this otherwise diverse tradition are united in the conviction that human beings must employ their own, admittedly fallible, conception of justice when initially determining which being, if any, deserves the title of "God" and thus our obedience and worship.

Since the time of Aquinas, Catholic orthodoxy has affirmed this principle. So it is wrong for Galston to leave the impression that endorsement of it has anti-Catholic implications. According to Aquinas, we do need to rely on our own moral conceptions to get started in thinking about God, for the very reasons Socrates uncovered, but we eventually discover that God's grace has been equipping us to live and think virtuously all along. And at the height of our spiritual maturity, we can see that even our best thoughts about God fall radically short of adequately judging his goodness or comprehending his greatness.

Galston implies that I see Emersonian piety as the only form of religion compatible with democracy. What I actually say is that it would be "presumptuous to think that the debate" over piety "can be resolved in the foreseeable future." Hence, there is "no reason to declare" any conception of piety, be it naturalist or supernaturalist, "the religious basis of social order" (p. 33).

What troubles me most about Galston's review is its charge that I have stigmatized those with whom I disagree "as practitioners of 'docility' and 'slavish idolatry.'" I cannot recall characterizing my opponents in this way, and can only hope that readers of Commonweal do not infer that this is how I have written about Rawls, Rorty, Hauerwas, and MacIntyre. Where in my book did Galston find the words he places in quotation marks in his last paragraph? After searching high and low, I have found only two possibilities, neither of which supports his allegation.

JEFFREY STOUT 

Princeton, N.J.