'Any Democracy Worth Its Name: Bernstein's Democratic Ethos and a Role for Representation'
"Any Democracy Worth Its Name: Bernstein's Democratic Ethos and a Role for Representation" with Lawrence Marcelle, in Thinking the Plural: Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy, Eds. Megan Craig and Marcia Morgan, with a Foreword by George Yancy, Prologue by Ed Casey.
28 Pages Posted: 23 May 2019
Date Written: 2016
Abstract
In this paper we take up Richard J. Bernstein’s emphasis on a ‘democratic ēthos’ requisite for ideals to become more than mere abstractions in public life: “We can recognize that there is a perfectly valid sense in which democracy is dependent on the virtues of its citizens, that democracy is - in Dewey's words - "a moral way of life" without thinking this enmeshes us in some sort of self-defeating contextualism.”1 We live in a world where the majority of nationstates are nominally democratic, or often at least pay lip service to democratic ideals. But nominal declarations do not suffice to make democracies. The task is to articulate and make explicit the democratic ēthos if it is to gain self-reflexivity and become intelligent in a pragmatic sense. This entails expressing and deciding what ‘we’ are committed to, what it is central to address ‘our’ energies towards, and what is only of peripheral concern, and all of this in a pluralistic context. This context is fraught with disagreements, conflicts, and confusion over the practical entailments of basic concepts of public life and even deeper problems concerning the identities and allegiances of the ‘we’ who are the addressees of our expressions. Difference, conflict, and pluralism have been embraced by Bernstein as constitutive elements of contemporary life. A democratic ēthos, however, requires certain practical virtues.
Keywords: Richard J. Bernstein, democracy, representation, justification, pragmatism, Dewey, Gadamer, fallibilism, redistribution, recognition
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