April 19, 2007
Blogging will be light for the next few days, as I am off on a five day holiday to Kangaroo Island. So I've linked to this review of two books about the entry of religious reason into the political realm in liberal democracy in Borderlands, and the questioning of whether secularism is the only acceptable form of political belonging.
The books are William Connolly's Why I Am Not a Secularist and Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition. In the Introduction to his text Stout makes comments that resonate with Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Stout says:
Democracy, I shall argue, is a tradition. It inculcates certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward deference and authority in political discussion, and love for certain goods and virtues, as well as a disposition to respond to certain types of actions, events, or persons with admiration, pity, or horror. This tradition is anything but empty. Its ethical substance, however, is more a matter of enduring attitudes, concerns, dispositions, and patterns of conduct than it is a matter of agreement on a conception of justice in Rawls’s sense. The notion of state neutrality and the reason-tradition dichotomy should not be seen as its defining marks. Rawlsian liberalism should not be seen as its official mouthpiece.
What is interesting about Stout is that he adopts the point of view of a citizen, that is one who 'accepts some measure of responsibility for the condition of society and, in particular, for the political arrangements it makes for itself.' Adopting this point of view presupposes participating in the living moral tradition of one’s people (ethical life?) understood as a civic nation.
This tradition, Stout says, holds that it is the task of public philosophy, to articulate the ethical inheritance of the people for the people while subjecting it to critical scrutiny. Consequently, it is presupposed that citizens reflect philosophically on their common political life.
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