Populist perfectionism: The other American liberalism

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 141-163

  Spragens Jr , Thomas A ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34247476452     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052507070069     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955);
2. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
3. See Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969),
4. and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
5. An excellent treatment of these issues is provided by Steven Dworetz in The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1990).
6. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
7. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
8. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);
9. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
10. and Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
11. See, for example, Philip Selznick, "Foundations of Communitarian Liberalism," in The Essential Communitarian Reader, ed. Amitai Etzioni (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 1998);
12. Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
13. Benjamin Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
14. Alexis de Tocqueville, introduction to Democracy in America (1835), trans. Henry Reeve and Frances Bowen (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), 29.
15. Jürgen Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," a lecture given in December 1988, trans. William Rehg, in James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1997), 39, 41.
16. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 70.
17. Ibid., 71.
18. Ibid., 82, 73.
19. Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas" (1871), in Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1996), 972.
20. Ibid., 1009.
21. Ibid., 983, 980.
22. Ibid., 1001-2.
23. Ibid., 967, 953.
24. See John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861; Chicago: Regnery, 1962), 35-36.
25. Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty," 39.
26. Whitman, "Democratic Vistas," 971.
27. Ibid., 972.
28. Ibid., 970-71.
29. John Dewey, "Creative Democracy-The Task Before Us" (1939), in Dewey, The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 244.
30. John Dewey, "Intelligence and Morals," in Dewey, Political Writings, 72.
31. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, reprinted in Michael Levy, ed., Political Thought in America (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1988), 412.
32. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998).
33. Ibid., 41.
34. Ibid., 7, 3, 11.
35. Ibid., 11, 97, 101.
36. Rorty argues that Whitman and Dewey were not implicated in the Hegelian/Jacksonian belief that an entelechy of reason in history provided cosmic impetus for democratizing: "they [i.e., Whitman and Dewey] rejected any idea of Divine Providence and any idea of immanent teleology." I am not as certain as Rorty is about this, especially about the immanent teleology part. Either way, however, this widespread belief of nineteenth-century democrats can be set aside.
37. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955), 163.
38. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 101.
39. Ibid., 20, 23-24.
40. Dewey, "Intelligence and Morals," 67, 74.
41. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 18.
42. Whitman, "Democratic Vistas," 971.
43. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 59.
44. Whitman, "Democratic Vistas," 982.
45. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 18, 101.
46. William Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 162.
47. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (see note 4 above).
48. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
49. This is the standard found in Rawls's second principle of justice, his "difference principle," whose imperatives are "basic throughout... [his] general conception of justice." That general conception is that "all social values-liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect-are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution ... is to everyone's advantage"; and "to everyone's advantage" is to mean "to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged." Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 83, 62.
50. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 161. These beliefs and practices include the conception of human freedom and dignity widely associated with the idea of human and civil rights and the conception of accountability for one's deeds incorporated in the doctrine of mens rea.
51. Ibid., 177.
52. Mill, On Liberty, 75-84.
53. Whitman, "Democratic Vistas," 982-83.
54. Mill, On Liberty, 76.