Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition

Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition intervened in debates that had extended for more than two decades across the fields of religious ethics and the philosophy of religion. A central aim of the book was to mediate a long-standing impasse between theological traditionalists and liberal secularists. The former often described liberal democracy as inhospitable-if not positively antithetical-to the substance and particularity of theological claims. For the latter, democracy required the secularization of what they believed to be exclusionary and authoritarian dogmatism intrinsic to robust theological commitments. Was it possible for these opponents to find common cause in the face of social injustices, forms of imperial expansionism and a market-saturated society that they found equally intolerable? If so, how would they navigate the apparent irreconcilability of their commitments without compromising the substance of those commitments? What hope was there for the emergence of the kind of broad-based coalition building among fellow-citizens of drastically different commitments that had proven indispensable to social justice and reform movements of previous eras? Adapted from the source document.