Democracy and Solidarity
Join Professors Casey Blake and Richard John (Columbia) for this series reading and discussing James Davison Hunter’s Demoracy and Solidarity.
All sessions will be held at 6 PM. Dinner will be served. Please RSVP for all meetings on this page, or on individual pages for specific sessions. Copies of the book will be provided to students committing to attending all four sessions.
Schedule
Tuesday, April 1 | Cultural Crisis
The crisis of American democracy is obvious to all. Ordinary Americans of all backgrounds and viewpoints believe that our politics—not only in its leaders and institutions, but in its ideas and ideals—is failing. This crisis is made more acute by the fact that Americans are unable to communicate across their differences and unable to work together to solve the problems they face. In Democracy and Solidarity, James Davison Hunter examines the cultural unraveling behind our political predicament. He explains how the values, symbols, and myths that once formed the basis of a broad national consensus became weakened. What happens when frameworks of meaning lose their authority? How deep are the cultural problems facing democracy? And how can they be fixed?
(Reading: preface and chapter one.)
Tuesday, April 8 | The Hybrid Enlightenment
From the beginning, the foundation of America’s cultural and philosophical structures were built on embryonic and historically provisional ideas, sometimes inconsistent with each other. From biblical, classical, and Whiggish sources, a new and generative ideal was formed. But was it adequate? Can American faith in reason and progress be the source of enduring democratic solidarity?
(Reading: chapter four.)
Tuesday, April 15 | Enlightened Exhaustion
After two centuries of reliance on a disparate and shaky foundation of Enlightenment and religious ideals, James Davison Hunter argues that America is exhausted. No longer can we turn to the sources of America’s ideals: some lay forgotten or irrelevant, while others are distorted for partisan advantage. Are there still bonds of solidarity to be found in the vestiges of America’s hybrid-Enlightenment? Or is America fundamentally flawed?
(Reading: pp. 252–277 from chapter ten.)
Tuesday, April 22 | Nihilism and the Future
Having exhausted its primary sources of solidarity, James Davison Hunter diagnoses America with a pathology of nihilism and identifies some of the leading proposals for treatment. Will such an effort be led by the coercive power of the state, or by some kind of cultural renewal? Would it come from the Left or the Right, or something beyond them both?
(Reading: chapters twelve and fourteen.)