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American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith (Hardcover)
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American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith (Hardcover)
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In June 1962, a group calling themselves the Students for a
Democratic Society gathered at a retreat in rural Michigan to
discuss and revise their founding manifesto. The result of that
meeting was the famous Port Huron Statement, a document that not
only reflected their disenchantment with America's elite-controlled
social and political institutions but also called for the creation
of a "participatory democracy" in which all citizens engage in
public life and share the responsibility of political decision
making. This demand for participatory democracy characterized the
New Left ethos and captured the imagination of a generation of
radicals and political activists from the late 1950s to the close
of the 1960s. So, why did participatory democracy fail to
materialize in any recognizable form? Why was it forced to retreat
from mainstream public discourse into the academy? Its fate,
political scientist Robert Lacey asserts, was determined in large
part by its intellectual origins. The idea of participatory
democracy germinated in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce
and William James, founders of American pragmatism, and fully
blossomed in the work of John Dewey, who argued that democracy
should (and could) be a "way of life" for every person. Dewey
rested his democratic faith on three pragmatist tenets: truth is
probabilistic and socially determined; humans are malleable and
educable; and humans, endowed with free will, can act collectively
for their individual and social betterment. When the realities of
modern life in the mid- to late-twentieth century posed serious
challenges to these tenets, the very foundation of participatory
democratic thought began to crumble. Yet, willfully disregarding
the rubble, C. Wright Mills, Sheldon Wolin, Benjamin Barber, and
other theorists have continued to support participatory democracy
as a viable political idea. Today's participatory democrats have
constructed a fragile theoretical enterprise that rests on
questionable assumptions inherited from the pragmatist tradition
about truth, human nature, and free will. Tracing the history of a
salient idea in American political thought, Lacey elucidates the
assumptions underlying participatory democracy, assesses both its
usefulness and coherence, and ultimately reveals it to be less a
theory than a faith-a faith that has largely failed to follow
through on its promise.
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