II. Hegel and Mill: An Alternative Philosophical Inspiration

If we look more closely at the more “progressive” or “democratic” modes of thought during this period, however, we find another important philosophical orientation at work—one that cannot be shoehorned into the standard republican or rights-based categories. If we look at apologists for Jacksonian democracy like George Bancroft (whose historical meta-narratives performed core functions of public philosophy), at Abraham Lincoln, at Walt Whitman, at John Dewey and Jane Addams, there seems to be a political sensibility on display which is not a derivative of either rights-based theories or civic republicanism. That is not to say that these interpreters of democratic purposes do not believe in government based on consent, or in the kind of rights guaranteed by the first ten amendments to the Constitution, or in public-spirited equal citizenship, or in the rule of law. They accept all these core liberal tenets which John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and the republican tradition championed, but their principal concerns lie elsewhere and their goals are more ambitious and extensive. Taking rights and civic equality for granted, they want to address the deeper and larger purposes and hopes of democratic society. They see these purposes as historically novel to some extent, and they see the hopes as a work in progress.

For want of a better name, I want to call this genre of democratic public philosophy “populist perfectionism.” Each of the terms immediately invites misunderstanding and therefore needs some specification. By “populist” I do not mean to refer to a straightforward class-based politics in which the economic interests of the many are promoted over the vested interests of the wealthy and powerful—although a concern for the general economic well-being of the commoners is certainly part of the equation. Moreover, I do not mean to refer to the championing of a straightforward plebiscitary form of democratic decision-making—although a concern for the political participation and competence of the citizenry at large is also part of the picture. The central meaning of the word “populist” in my characterization is pretty much what G. W. F. Hegel depicted as the axial moral claim or discovery of “the Germanic peoples”: that is, the insistence that it is not just the one or the few but the many—indeed, all people—who are able and destined to be free. For most of human history, the common folk were not able or entitled fully to pursue lives of their own, to build their lives around purposes of their own determination, so much as they were externally dominated functionaries in the service of the purposes of their masters and governors. The true motto of populism in this sense was captured in the words of Thomas Rainborough, a colonel in Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, when he said during the Putney Debates of 1647: “For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.” The ultimate goal of “populism” in this signification is to achieve what political scientist Benjamin Barber has called, in a deliberately paradoxical phrase, “an aristocracy of everyone.”⁸

The second term in my formula, “perfectionism,” has served in contemporary debates and analyses within democratic theory to designate political philosophies that incorporate some teleological conception of human fulfillment. In a broad and general sense, the American expositors of the meaning and purpose of democratic society whom I am concerned with here can be said to fall into this category. This is not to say that they have some single, narrow, and fully comprehensive model of the good human being whose creation it is democracy's purpose to accomplish. It means that these theorists believed that the larger purposes of a novel form of social order only in its infancy—a democratic one—were not confined to or exhausted by mere mechanisms of political authority and governance and were not concerned only with protecting the security and effective functioning of the basic civil order. Instead, the ultimate aspirations of democratic society as these theorists conceived them extended to matters of the mind, heart, and spirit. The ultimate glory and justification of a democratic society would be its success in fashioning social institutions incarnating a “way of life” conducive to the flourishing of the human capacities of all of its members.

Insofar as this orientation received inspiration from canonical works in political philosophy instead of being an indigenous American amalgam, the most relevant figures are not Locke, Kant, or Algernon Sidney so much as Hegel and John Stuart Mill. The nineteenth-century representatives of what I am calling “populist perfectionism” broadly shared the conviction that brought Alexis de Tocqueville to American shores in 1831. Like Tocqueville, they believed that the seemingly inexorable historical trend toward more democratic forms of governance had the status of what he called “a Providential fact.” As Tocqueville wrote, “It has all the chief characteristics of such a fact: It is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.” Also, like Tocqueville, they believed that “the magnitude of what already has been done prevents us from foreseeing what is yet to be accomplished.”⁹

These convictions made nineteenth-century American democrats like Bancroft and Whitman amenable to Hegel's historical metaphysics. The inexorable progress of democratization represented the unfolding of freedom and spirit through time. A major part of the task of political philosophy, therefore, was to do what Tocqueville said was difficult: to “foresee what is yet to be accomplished in this process.” That meant that a political philosophy which began with a proper understanding of the determinative dynamics of historicity would be, to borrow the terminology of the third-generation neo-Hegelian Friedrich Engels, an exercise in visionary “science” more than a “utopian” attempt to conjure up happier social circumstances by an act of free-wheeling imagination. What would make this exercise “scientific,” however, was not the crystal-ball gazing of pure positivist prediction but the unpacking of the full implications of the logic of democratization: what would human life and society look like when everyone was politically equal and genuinely free?

Because “freedom” in this democratic neo-Hegelian sensibility was understood not merely as a “negative” liberation from all impediments to desire but also as the “positive” fulfillment of the potentialities of the human spirit, the abstract answer to this latter question was understood to be essentially coterminous with what Jürgen Habermas has designated as the fundamental moral and political aspirations of the revolutionary liberal Enlightenment: autonomy and self-realization. This “revolutionary consciousness,” Habermas writes, “gave birth to a new mentality” which incorporated “the understanding of political practice in terms of self-determination and self-realization…. Autonomy and self-realization are the key concepts for a practice with an immanent purpose, namely, the production and reproduction of a life worthy of human beings.”¹⁰

These core ideals of autonomy/self-determination and fulfillment/self-realization received expression and some degree of elaboration in the epigram and the justly famous third chapter (“Of Individuality”) of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). To be truly human, Mill wrote there, people cannot live lives of mere “ape-like imitation,” abjectly conforming to preexistent models prescribed for them. Instead, “it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way.”¹¹

Devising and pursuing one's own “plan of life” not only constitutes that autonomy which is the hallmark of a genuinely human existence but also constitutes an essential component of the other core goal of self-realization. The “grand, leading principle” to which On Liberty was devoted and which was expressed in its epigram taken from Wilhelm von Humboldt “is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” And it is in the conscious choosing and planning of one's life that a person “employs all his faculties.”¹² Moreover, because human beings are “not indistinguishably alike” but instead possess many different talents and capabilities, when they do each and all freely and fully develop these talents and capabilities in all their multifarious glory, “human life becomes rich, diversified, and animating,” and “human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation.”¹³

III. Liberal Perfectionism: Walt Whitman and John Dewey

Walt Whitman's “Democratic Vistas” (1871) provides us with one of the best and most important exemplifications of a perfectionist account, inspired in part by Hegel and Mill, of the purposes and justification of American democracy. Whitman was not much of a philosopher. He was a poet and a journalist, not a systematic normative theorist who constructed the kind of logical arguments that make their way into the philosophical canon. Nevertheless, he thought a lot about the meaning and significance of America's experiment with self-governance, and his hopes and understandings pretty clearly fell into the pattern of what I have called “populist perfectionism.”

America should be understood, Whitman tells us, as a “grand experiment of development.”¹⁴

It represents the leading edge in a vast cosmic process of spiritual unfolding animated by “divine purpose.” Citing Hegel, Whitman admonishes us that “we have peremptorily to dismiss every pretensive production, however fine its esthetic or intellectual points, which violates or ignores, or even does not celebrate, the central divine idea of All, suffusing universe, of eternal trains of purpose, in the development, by however slow degrees, of the physical, moral, and spiritual kosmos. I say he has studied, meditated to no profit, whatever may be his mere erudition, who has not absorbed this simple consciousness and faith. It is not entirely new—but is for Democracy to elaborate it.”¹⁵

American democracy, in the context of this cosmic drama, should be seen as only in the earliest stages of its own development. It is “at present in its embryo condition.” Its “fruition” and “the only large and satisfactory justification of it … resides altogether in the future.”¹⁶

This ultimate “fruition” of democracy will consist in its attainment of purposes that are not simply material and institutional but moral and spiritual in nature. “The world evidently supposes … that the States are merely to achieve the equal franchise, and elective government—to inaugurate the respectability of labor, and become a nation of practical operatives, law-abiding, orderly and well off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of America; but they not only do not exhaust the progressive conception, but rather arise, teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher progress…. For so long as the spirit is not changed, any change of appearance is of no avail.”¹⁷

What, then, are these deeper and higher purposes of democracy? As jumping-off places from which to answer that question, Whitman refers us to two famous texts. The first of these is Lincoln's peroration in his Gettysburg Address. “Few probably are the minds, even in these republican States,” Whitman writes, “that fully comprehend the aptness of that phrase, ‘the government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ which we inherit from the lips of Abraham Lincoln; a formula whose verbal shape is homely wit, but whose scope includes both the totality and all minutiae of the lesson.” The second text is “John Stuart Mill's profound essay on Liberty,” which is the place to look to understand “the distinctive points contrasting modern European and American political life with the old Asiatic cultus,” and which explains “the lessons of variety and freedom” with which Mill “begins his speculations.”¹⁸

Whitman, as we shall see, weds Lincoln's version of “populism”—the insistence upon democracy as governance of, by, and for the people—with Mill's “perfectionism”—the insistence that the criterion for judging political regimes is their contribution to the mental and moral development of the people.¹⁹

And in doing so, Whitman winds up celebrating the two axial social aspirations that Habermas identified in his account of the “new concept of political practice” found in the “revolutionary consciousness” of the Enlightenment: “self-determination and self-realization.”²⁰ Whitman may not be the clearest and most precise of political theorists, but he does very clearly indicate to his readers at one point in “Democratic Vistas” that he is zeroing in on the most fundamental purposes of democratic governance. He wants to tell them about “the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands” and about “the ulterior object of political and all other government.” These ultimate purposes are the deeper meaning of the phrases “by the people” and “for the people” respectively.

Democracy's insistence on government “by the people,” Whitman writes, is grounded in its moral conviction that “each single individual” is entitled to be “a separate and complete subject for freedom.” Therefore, “the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands, is not repression alone, and not authority alone, not even of law … but … to train communities through all their grades, beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves.”²¹

Democracy's insistence on government “for the people” translates into a dedication to the development or actualization of their personal capacities—the very “grand leading principle” of “the absolute and essential importance of human development” in the von Humboldt quotation Mill uses as his epigram to On Liberty. This is what Whitman refers to as “the grand experiment of development—whose end, perhaps requiring several generations, may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman.”²² So it is that “the ulterior object of political and all other government” is “not merely to rule, to repress disorder, etc., but to develop, to open up to cultivation, to encourage the possibilities of all beneficent and manly outcroppage, and of that aspiration for independence, and the pride and self-respect latent in all characters.”²³

I do not believe, moreover, that what I am calling the “populist perfectionist” persuasion in democratic public philosophy is an isolated nineteenth-century phenomenon. If we examine John Dewey's explanation and justification of the goals and animating principles of democratic governance, for example, it seems fairly clear that his account is a lot closer to John Stuart Mill than it is to John Locke, John Rawls, or civic republicanism. It would be silly, of course, to style Dewey as simply a later version of Walt Whitman. There are important differences and important innovations here. But there are also enough similarities to warrant the claim that Dewey's democratic pragmatism conforms broadly to the pattern I have been describing.

Like Whitman and Mill, Dewey understands democracy not merely as a set of institutions of governance but as a larger way of life. We must, he writes, “get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and to acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life.”²⁴

Like Whitman, Dewey sees democratic society as very much a work in progress, with its realization something to hope for in the future rather than a fait accompli with the implementation of representative institutions. And, again like Whitman, he cites Hegel with approval for his “attempt to fill in the empty reason of Kant with the contents of history” and for the way he “lifted the idea of progress above that of fixed origins and fixed ends, and presented the social and moral order, as well as the intellectual, as a scene of becoming” and “located reason somewhere within the struggles of life.”²⁵ The common attraction to Hegel in Dewey and Whitman reflects not simply their belief in the historical unfolding of a democratizing entelechy, but their common conviction that the achievement of this process—and of history—is ultimately a self-realization of the human spirit, of Geist. Dewey interprets this spiritual achievement mostly by reference to the pragmatically rational communal practices paradigmatically embodied in scientific inquiry, rather than by reference to the artistic creations of the “great literatus,” as in Whitman. Nonetheless, both of these accounts depict the essence of the democratic way of life as cultural and spiritual rather than as merely economic and governmental.

Most importantly, when he seeks to articulate the ultimate purposes and defining norms of democratic liberalism, Dewey seems to stand clearly within the tradition of the “revolutionary consciousness” cited by Habermas. In Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Dewey argues that the “social control of economic forces” is necessary in the context of advanced industrial societies, but it is a necessity not in order to change the social goals traditionally associated with liberalism but rather to achieve them. These “enduring values,” he writes, “are liberty, the development of the inherent capacities of individuals made possible through liberty, and the central role of free intelligence in inquiry, discussion, and expression.”²⁶

The first two of these “enduring values” are Habermas's self-rule and self-realization, the same “ulterior” purposes of democracy Whitman cited in his own rendering of what government “by the people” and “for the people” meant. And Dewey's endorsement of the third of these values, which he creatively developed in his model of pragmatic and scientific inquiry, closely resembles the argument of the second chapter of Mill's On Liberty, which Whitman cited as inspiration for his “Democratic Vistas.”

These accounts of the social hopes and moral preoccupations of Whitman and Dewey are cursory and cryptic. Even so, I hope they provide adequate grounds for the claim that there is another important American liberal tradition in addition to those more commonly accorded pride of place within attempts to characterize the philosophical genius of American politics. This is a perspective on democratic purposes that takes its bearings not so much from Locke's account of legitimate government, or from rights-based philosophies more generally, or from the dominant themes of civic republicanism. Instead, it takes its bearings more from nineteenth-century philosophies of historical progress such as those of Mill and Hegel. And it takes as its ultimate social aspirations not the protection of life, liberty, and estate or the creation of civic communities modeled on Sparta, republican Florence, or Geneva: instead, it sees it as the mission of democratic politics to achieve freedom for everyone—to create a form of social life in which everyone becomes, to cite Whitman once again, “a separate and complete subject for freedom” and a “full-grown man or woman.”

IV. The Contemporary Relevance of Whitman and Dewey

The question that now presents itself is whether this insistence upon the historical presence within American political thought of an alternative conception of democratic hopes centered around self-rule and self-realization is of merely archaeological significance or whether it can serve constructive contemporary purposes. Should the form of democratic liberalism represented by people like Whitman and Dewey be regarded as a historical curiosity best placed in an academic museum, or can it provide relevant inspiration for us as we contemplate the moral and political challenges of the twenty-first century? One prominent voice in debates about contemporary democratic theory and practice, Richard Rorty, has recently argued that a recovery and reinvigoration of Whitman's and Dewey's form of democratic idealism is precisely what American reform liberalism needs in order to recapture its waning vitality and political relevance. In contrast, Rawlsian rights-based liberals would rather clearly regard any attempt to resurrect teleological or perfectionist conceptions of democratic purposes—including those of Whitman or Dewey—as both unnecessary and inappropriate. I want to conclude my argument, therefore, by engaging these different responses to the question I have posed about the contemporary pertinence of the “populist perfectionist” account of democratic purposes. I want to concur in part with Rorty but also dissent in part from his views. I agree with him that Whitman, Dewey, and “populist perfectionism” represent a form of public philosophy that remains pertinent and useful for all of us who concern ourselves with the future strength and success of democratic regimes. I do not, however, find his postmodernist reading of the content and implications of Whitman's and Dewey's political philosophies fully compelling. Finally, I want to explain why I think that neither I nor Rorty should be deterred from our endorsement of democratic idealism of the Whitman/Dewey sort by the standard objections to perfectionist theories.

In his recent book Achieving Our Country, Rorty argues that the American left—or at least the academic American left—has largely become politically irrelevant in the sense of having any meaningful stance or impact upon real-world political issues and battles.²⁷

This self-disempowerment, he contends, is a result in the first instance of disgust and shame at America's past oppressions, enslavement, and violence against African Americans and Native Americans—and at its more recent role in international politics, which is seen as imperialistic and supportive of authoritarian regimes. This dismay at American transgressions has, Rorty argues, engendered in the left unfortunate theoretical inclinations. It has led American leftists to be too much in thrall to the antiquated economics, the delusionary philosophy of history, and the sectarian puritanism of Marxism. This fixation has been misleading and destructive. In point of fact, “Marxism was not only a catastrophe for all the countries in which Marxists took power, but a disaster for the reformist left in all the countries in which they did not.”²⁸ Even worse, perhaps, members of America's academic left have allowed their dismay with American political transgressions to seduce them into accepting Martin Heidegger's depiction of American democracy as a totalitarian technological moral wasteland and into accepting Michel Foucault's account of liberal polities as disciplinary regimes grounded in discourses of power that legitimate elite dominance.

Rorty holds that viewing America—and, by association, liberal democracy—in this way makes “pride in American citizenship impossible.” It makes American patriotism seem “an endorsement of atrocities” and national pride seem “appropriate only for chauvinists.” But “national pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.” Thus, the American left has become alienated, politically irrelevant, and impotent. It has succumbed to “the spirit of detached spectatorship” in the mode of Henry Adams's incapacitating political cynicism, and to an “inability to think of American citizenship as an opportunity for action.”²⁹

Here is where Rorty's embrace of Whitman and Dewey comes in. They played a central role “in creating the image of America which was ubiquitous on the American left prior to the Vietnam War.” Their optimistic narrative of American society as a liberating work in progress gave liberal reformers the hope and the national pride they needed in order to be constructive participants in political struggles on behalf of greater inclusion, equality, and social justice. Moreover, Rorty argues, the views of Whitman and Dewey remain capable of giving us “all the romance, and all the spiritual uplift, we Americans need to go about our public business.” And that is a good thing, too, for “nobody has yet suggested a viable leftist alternative to the civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets.”³⁰

I agree with Rorty's insistence that Whitman, Dewey, and the account of democratic purposes they provide remain pertinent and valuable guides and resources for reform liberalism today. They are valuable in part for the reason Rorty emphasizes: that their hopeful narratives encourage avoidance of the temptation for reform liberals to fall into the politically self-defeating posture of alienated spectatorship. They are also valuable because their most central hermeneutic and normative claims are important and correct. American democracy is a work in progress: it may continue to exhibit patterns of dominance and deep inequalities that systematically thwart the aspiration that all may be free; but it has also exhibited the ability to overcome many of these barriers over time, to become less discriminatory, to become more inclusive, to provide more equal protection of the law, and to enhance the life chances of more of its disadvantaged members. The normative insistence of Whitman and Dewey upon what Dewey called the “enduring values” of self-rule and “the development of the inherent capacities of individuals made possible through liberty” is also crucial, because it recalls us to the deepest purposes of liberalism and democracy.

That does not mean that Whitman and Dewey should be disinterred fully intact and unmodified. It would be unreasonable to expect that they need no revision to be serviceable to us in the altered circumstances of the twenty-first century. Values may endure, but times do change: we learn from intervening events, and we encounter new problems and opportunities. Let me give several examples—not a complete list—of needed emendations. First, the residual influence of a Hegelian philosophy of history should be set aside, or at least greatly attenuated. The at times dismaying evidence of the past century undermines any belief in democracy as the inexorable wave of the future. We should also know that this belief in providential guarantees and authorization can be dangerous, leading to self-arrogating claims of “manifest destiny.” And we should by now clearly understand that creating a stable, free, self-governing society is a difficult—and fragile—achievement. This recognition may be discouraging, but need not be crippling, to the democratic hopes championed by Whitman and Dewey. Those dedicated to the promise of democracy may have to give up the comforting delusion of guaranteed triumph; but the enduring values and goals Whitman and Dewey champion can be fully grounded in and logically derived from the basic moral premises and legitimacy claims of liberalism and democracy. Civil rights, civil liberties, and popular sovereignty retain their moral purchase for all those who retain Hegel's hope that all shall be free even after we abandon his assurance that the self-actualizing rationality of history will bring this freedom about.³¹

If Rorty is correct to say that for Whitman “we are the greatest poem because we put ourselves in the place of God,” and that Whitman would urge us to “redefine God as our future selves,” this also is a notion that begs to be jettisoned. Self-deification is more corrupting morally and much more dangerous politically than either orthodox belief in God as “wholly other” (Karl Barth's phrase) or straightforward atheism. Rorty does not explicitly endorse this kind of cosmic narcissism, but he also does not criticize it. Perhaps he thinks this is what life as strong poets in a purely contingent universe means. If this is the case, then Rorty's postmodernist version of touting humanity—perhaps the democratic portion of it—as divine should also be rejected. Again, however, none of this anthropotheism seems essential to the democratic faith of Whitman or Dewey or Rorty about the desirability and possibility of creating a society where all people can run their own lives, participate in communal self-governance, and have the opportunity and resources to pursue happiness.

Lastly, some have depicted Dewey as a positivistic technocrat and as someone who ignored the role of power and self-interest in democratic politics. Reinhold Niebuhr famously levied the latter criticism of Dewey, seeing him as sharing the utopian delusion of Enlightenment figures like Condorcet, who told us that “all errors in politics and morals are based on philosophical errors and these in turn are connected with scientific errors.”³²

I will not try to judge here whether these are justified criticisms. Dewey was, to put it kindly, not always the clearest and most consistent of philosophers. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once waspishly observed, Dewey spoke to us as God would speak to us were He somewhat inarticulate but exceedingly anxious to tell us how things were. Thus, while there are textual warrants in Dewey for these criticisms, there are other words of his which seem more politically realistic than utopian and more inclined toward participatory politics than toward governance by experts. The proper conclusion here, I think, is to say that if Dewey was in fact guilty of naiveté about the corruptions of power and interest or guilty of temptations toward technocracy, these failings can properly be rejected without damage to his core conception of the virtues and aspirations of democratic governance.

V. Assessing Rorty on Whitman and Dewey

Although I endorse Rorty's recommendation that reform liberalism should identify itself with the democratic hopes and aspirations of Whitman and Dewey, I have some reservations about his philosophical construction of the two theorists. Especially given the undeniable polyphony and ambiguity of both men, it is hard not to grant Rorty—or anyone else who tries to interpret them, for that matter—a considerable degree of hermeneutic license. It is nonetheless pretty clear that Rorty chooses to characterize Whitman's and Dewey's beliefs in ways that make them assimilable to his own philosophical outlook. Moreover, I think that in turning Whitman and Dewey into proto-postmodernists, Rorty arguably misconstrues them in several respects. Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that he says things about them that amount to misleading half-truths. Some of these discrepancies, as I see them, have implications for both democratic theory and democratic practice. Thus, while I am willing to grant Rorty the hermeneutic license to rhetorically redescribe these two thinkers he admires in ways he finds comfortable for his own convictions, I want to enter a few reservations that are no doubt driven in part by my own somewhat different philosophical commitments.

There are three points at issue here. The first is Rorty's attempt to ascribe to Whitman and Dewey the postmodern depiction of human selves as entirely contingent. The second is his characterization of Whitman and Dewey as thoroughgoing secularists. The third is his claim that they “substituted social justice for individual freedom as our country's principal goal.”³³

Each of these claims includes an important truth about Whitman and Dewey. But each of these assertions also includes—or at least could easily be taken to imply—something about them which is inaccurate and misleading.

Rorty tells us that “Dewey's philosophy is a systematic attempt to temporalize everything, to leave nothing fixed. This means abandoning the attempt to find a theoretical frame of reference within which to evaluate proposals for the human future.” He attributes to both Whitman and Dewey the idea that “the trouble with Europe … was that it tried too hard for knowledge: it tried to find an answer to the question of what human beings should be like.” He claims that von Humboldt, whose advocacy of “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity” was used by Mill as his epigram for On Liberty, suggested “abandoning this hope” for finding such an answer. Moreover, Rorty claims that in “picking up this particular ball from Mill” Whitman bought into this view—that Whitman's “romance of endless diversity” assumed that there was nothing fixed in human nature, no “template on which to model our future.”³⁴

There is some truth to this characterization. Dewey did indeed speak about modern man as inhabiting “a wide open universe, a universe without bounds in time or space, without final limits of origin or destiny, a universe with the lid off.” He also spoke of “the abandonment of a fixed and static moral end.” However, Dewey also took seriously, as I have noted, what he called the “enduring values” of liberalism: freedom, individual development, and the techniques and norms of rational inquiry. These were, for him, not merely contingent constructs up for grabs. The abolition of the notion of a single “final goal” of humankind was not, in his mind, to be succeeded by mere whimsy or custom but instead by a “diversity of specific goods.” And the abandonment of the idea of “the separate and infallible faculty in morals” (Dewey's characterizations of positions he opposed were sometimes as caricatured as Rorty's rhetorical reconstructions of the views of his own targets) was not to be succeeded by mere will or emotion but by a “progressive science of both things and morals.”³⁵

Similarly, the undeniable “romance of diversity” exhibited by Mill, Whitman, and Dewey entailed their common recognition of valuable differences among human beings and their common anticipation of unimaginable and novel forms of human life in the future. Mill, however, found that view entirely compatible with his insistence that not only were there such things as mental and moral development but that these provided the paramount standard for judging the goodness and legitimacy of various political regimes.

Rorty is also correct, but only partly so, in saying that “the most striking feature of [Whitman and Dewey's] redescription of our country was its thoroughgoing secularism.” “Secularism” is an ambiguous and multivalent notion. It is surely correct to call the political ideals of Whitman and Dewey “secularist” both in the sense that they were interested in the fulfillment of human potentialities in this world rather than in a posthumous Kingdom of God and in the sense that their account of this fulfillment was not governed by religious doctrine. But “secularism” is also taken at times to mean a fixation upon material rather than spiritual goods and to connote ideas incompatible with religious belief. Although Whitman and Dewey (and Mill also, for that matter) were unbelievers in the traditional sense, their enthusiasm for democracy was clearly a function of what they thought it could achieve for the human spirit rather than for material advance. Their account of democratic faith was, as Rorty says, a kind of civic religion. This is a civic religion, moreover, that—though no doubt incompatible with some forms of religious faith—is not necessarily beyond acceptance on the part of believers in transcendental verities. An example of such a believer comes from Rorty's own extended family, in fact: his maternal grandfather, the social gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch.

It is also, I believe, only partly true—or only true in a certain sense—that Whitman and Dewey “wanted the struggle for social justice to be the animating principle” of their civic religion.³⁶

This claim may be correct in the sense that Whitman and Dewey thought the promise of democracy was that all should and could be free—that all the members of a fully developed democratic society should be “full-grown” men and women, as Whitman put it. And for that to happen, the distribution of material resources in the society had to permit it—had to be less unequal than in previous forms of society, where the serfs, plebes, or commoners essentially served more as fodder for the lives of their betters than as “separate and complete subjects for freedom.”³⁷ In that sense, a demand for “social justice” is indeed an important part of their vision of a more democratic future.

That said, two caveats need to be entered, not only to understand the civic religion of Whitman and Dewey properly, but also to make clear the difference between them and contemporary rights-based social justice liberals. The first caveat concerns what Whitman and Dewey considered as the content of social justice; the second concerns what they saw as its status in the pantheon of political goods. Social justice, for them, did not mean the greatest possible degree of social and economic equality. They presumed not only that some differences in social standing and economic achievement would be part of the democratic future but that these differences were “pre-institutionally” justifiable, as contemporary analysts of conceptions of justice would put it. Rorty himself, in his characterization of “the reformist left,” probably gets this about right: “By ‘justice’ they all meant pretty much the same thing—decent wages and working conditions, and the end of racial prejudice.”³⁸

For Whitman and Dewey, social justice did not mean maximum feasible equality of what Rawls calls the “social primary goods” of power and opportunities, income and wealth, and social status. It meant the achievement of civic equality and an end to economic exploitation, political oppression, and social exclusion. Moreover, so far as the status of social justice among political goods was a question for people like Whitman and Dewey—and for those I have called “populist perfectionists” in general—they certainly considered it an essential virtue of social institutions. But they would not have considered it to be the first virtue of social institutions, if that were to mean its attainment was the highest purpose of democracy. That pride of place goes instead to the neo-Aristotelian good of self-realization, along with the self-rule necessary for it. “What does civilization itself rest upon?” Whitman asks rhetorically. “What object has it, with its religions, arts, schools, etc., but rich, luxuriant, and varied personalism? To that, all bends, and it is because toward such result democracy alone … breaks up the limitless fallows of humankind, and plants the seed, and gives fair play, that its claims now precede the rest.”³⁹

VI. Liberal Deontology or Liberal Perfectionism?

This last point, indeed, provides a point of departure for what I earlier mentioned as a needed supplement to Rorty's brief on behalf of Whitman, Dewey, and those who share their account of the hope and ideals of democracy. That supplement is a few words in explanation of why Rorty could recommend the Whitman-Dewey account of the moral foundations of democratic society to us over the account of those foundations offered by rights-based social democrats. This latter account, after all, remains a very influential one which arguably has as many or more adherents as does the “cultural left” that Rorty takes as his rhetorical adversary. The absence of any riposte in this direction seems a notable and curious one: it is striking to observe that the index of Rorty's Achieving Our Country includes eight references to Foucault, six to Heidegger, three to Jacques Lacan, and exactly zero to John Rawls. Moreover, Rawlsian rights-based liberals would certainly be in agreement with Rorty's contention that social justice should be “the country's animating principle” and that it should be “substituted for individual freedom as our country's principal goal.”⁴⁰

So the obvious question—to which Rorty offers no apparent answer—becomes: Why bother trying to resurrect Whitman and Dewey for our edification and inspiration? Why not just say something like: American political reformers should forget Continental theorists like Heidegger and Foucault and just stick with John Rawls?

This is a large and important question requiring a lot more space than is available here to answer properly. Let me settle for stating in cryptic form what I think Rorty might have and should have said in response to the question he begs. The best one-sentence answer to the question “If social justice is the principal goal of American progressivism, why not just endorse Rawls?,” I think, was provided by William Galston when he wrote that “Rawls offers us a dangerously one-sided reconstruction of the liberal tradition, the inadequacies of which are mirrored in the national electoral disasters of contemporary liberalism.”⁴¹

I agree with both the theoretical and the practical judgments encapsulated in this assessment; but I will confine my remarks here to the theoretical issues at hand, and of these issues I will focus on what seem to me the most central fissures between Rawlsian liberalism and the Whitman-Dewey version that Rorty and I favor.

Rawls has two basic reasons for rejecting the kind of liberalism found in people like Whitman and Dewey. Each of these reasons is embedded in the central thesis and underlying assumptions of one of his two major books. The first reason is set out in the argument of A Theory of Justice.⁴²

Based upon that argument, Rawls would insist that the conception of social justice in the Whitman-Dewey tradition was unnecessarily vague and inadequately demanding. Instead of settling for the rather general and indeterminate conception of social justice found in this older tradition—more or less the “decent wages and working conditions and the end of racial prejudice” referred to by Rorty—we can, Rawls argued, ascertain a much more precise standard for social justice. By taking the moral intuitions at the foundation of contemporary liberal democratic societies as our axioms and working out their implications for distributive principles, we can produce a “moral geometry” whose conclusions will provide us a determinate conception of social justice. When we perform this rational-choice thought experiment, moreover, we can say with confidence that the demands of social justice are highly egalitarian—that what justice demands is that our constitutional provisions and social policies operate so as to maximize the absolute welfare of the least well-off members of society. Returning to the earlier, more indeterminate, and less demanding account of social justice found in people like Whitman and Dewey, therefore, would constitute, in Rawls's view, a kind of moral backsliding.

Rawls's second basic objection to the Whitman-Dewey tradition is the central difficulty he seeks to surmount in his Political Liberalism.⁴³

The problem Rawls seeks to solve with his account of “political liberalism,” he would argue, is one that afflicts and ultimately morally invalidates not only the Whitman-Dewey version of democratic hopes but all other versions of “perfectionist” liberalism. The self-delegitimating difficulty Rawls sees as common to all “perfectionist” social theories is this: If the highest goal of a society is to be “self-realization,” the society must de facto endorse a particular conception of the human good. We can orient our social enterprise around “mental and moral improvement” (Mill) or “the forming of a full-grown man or woman” (Whitman) only if we have and enforce a single determinate model of human perfection. In a morally and religiously pluralistic society, however, where citizens affirm multiple divergent conceptions of the good life, this must have the consequence of violating the norms of reciprocity at the heart of the equal protection of the laws and must also have the consequence of constraining the freedom of those who do not accept the officially endorsed account of human self-realization. In short, all perfectionist accounts of democratic purposes—and that includes those offered by Whitman and Dewey—are discriminatory and oppressive. To retain our liberal bona fides, therefore, Rawls would insist, we must reject their accounts, limit our common purposes and the moral foundations of our society to the principles of justice upon which we can agree despite the variance in our conceptions of human fulfillment, and simply leave it to each of us freely to pursue happiness as we see fit after we get the distribution of social resources properly taken care of.

These are weighty objections, which have seemed compelling to many. Neither of these objections, however, is in my view finally persuasive. In defense of Whitman, Dewey, and what I have called their “populist perfectionism,” Rorty could have responded as follows.

To the complaint that their conception of social justice is too indeterminate and insufficiently stringent by egalitarian standards, there are two proper rejoinders: First, any fully determinate account of absolute fairness in the distribution of social and economic resources is delusionary. Second, the moral assumptions necessary to sustain a rigorously egalitarian conception of social justice, such as the one offered by Rawls,⁴⁴

are not only at odds with the considered judgments of many, if not most, of the members of contemporary democratic societies, but also stand in tension with other widely held moral beliefs that are intimately connected with liberal democratic practices and principles. Given the moral tragedies, complexities, and uncertainties endemic to the human condition, that condition admits of no “moral geometry” when it comes to arriving at principles of distributive justice. The various members of all societies, including democratic ones, differ in their natural talents, in the contingent circumstances in which life places them, in their levels of productive effort, in their willingness to delay or sacrifice gratification on behalf of future benefits or common purposes, and in the conceptions of the human good that shape their actions. Moreover, our cognitive limitations do not permit us to know with any great degree of reliability the relative causal contributions of these various differences in creating the inequalities of social and economic goods found in all societies. Nor do reasonable people fully agree about which of these differences in our attributes and behaviors provide moral justification for such inequalities and to what extent they may so function. As a result, claims that there is such a thing as a moral geometry of social justice and that its conclusions can be consensually subscribed to by all reasonable citizens of contemporary democracies are not sustainable. Once these claims are rejected, we no longer have grounds for dismissing the conception of social justice within the Whitman-Dewey tradition because its standards are not fully determinate: all accounts of social justice are contestable by reasonable people, even within the bounds of adherence to liberal and democratic norms. What Rawlsians depict as a failure of the older account of social justice is, therefore, no failure at all, but simply an unavoidable concession to reality and a proper recognition of the moral complexities of fairness within the somewhat tragic circumstances of justice.

Upon examination, moreover, it turns out that the Rawlsian identification of distributive justice with the greatest degree of equality consistent with collective rationality depends upon the assumption that nothing people do can provide them any moral warrant for claiming they have “earned” anything. This denial of all pre-institutional desert, in turn, seems to depend on a “naturalistic” account of behavior incompatible with standard notions of moral responsibility. And the abandonment of that notion serves not only, as Galston observes, to “sever [liberalism's] bonds with the moral convictions of the working class,” but also to “flatly reject the conception of the person underlying our beliefs and practices.”⁴⁵

The stringency of the content of their conception of social justice, which Rawlsian liberals cite as a sign of the superiority of their account to earlier liberal accounts, turns out instead to be a moral step backward in other respects.

Rawls's charge that the kind of perfectionism embodied within the political tradition represented by Whitman and Dewey is oppressive and violates the liberal principle of legitimacy also seems unconvincing. This argument is based on a stylized distinction Rawls seeks to make between “political” and “comprehensive” models of liberalism. “Political” conceptions “remain on the surface” philosophically, resting only on moral assumptions regarding fair terms of social cooperation and eschewing any commitment to particular conceptions of the human good. “Comprehensive” conceptions, in contrast, endorse and depend upon some complete and particular account of the human good. Thus, the argument runs, “political” models of liberalism can deal even-handedly with all the citizens in a pluralistic democratic society, who govern their lives by different and incompatible moral and religious beliefs about the good life. In contrast, “comprehensive” models of liberalism cannot treat all citizens in such a pluralist society with equal respect and will not allow them all the same freedom to pursue happiness as they see fit.

The defect in this argument is that the stylized contrast it rests on may make sense in abstract philosophical space but breaks down when applied to the real world. The fact is that no liberal theory—probably no public philosophy of any sort—can fulfill the neutrality condition of the abstract ideal-typical model of a “political” conception. None can be so teleologically abstemious. All are at least “minimally perfectionist,” as Galston puts it; and that certainly includes Rawls's own favored model.⁴⁶

And on the other side of the ideal-typical dichotomy, only extremely detailed and dogmatic conceptions of the good society (such as, say, a Taliban-style theocracy) approach dependence upon a genuinely “comprehensive” conception of the form of human life to which the social order is dedicated.

Certainly, in any case, the minimally perfectionist norms of self-realization found in Whitman's and Dewey's democratic idealism do not answer to Rawls's characterization. The implausibility of this way of characterizing, and consequently rejecting as illiberal, the role and degree of commitment to a specific account of the humanly good life in Whitman, Dewey, or Mill seems obvious when one wonders how these theories could be depicted simultaneously as dependent upon a comprehensive conception of the good (by Rawls) and as exhibiting a quasi-postmodernist affirmation of riotously diverse ways of life (by Rorty). The truth of the matter, I believe, falls somewhere between these extremes. The form of democratic idealism represented by Whitman and Dewey is properly seen as perfectionist, but theirs is a partial and “open-ended” perfectionism. They envision all the members of the democratic societies they hope for as displaying all the capacities people require in order to be able to be full subjects of freedom and as exhibiting those civic virtues necessary for democratic self-rule to succeed. After that, the members of society are turned loose—free and able to pursue their own versions of personal fulfillment. Whitman, for example, hopes for “the copious production of perfect characters among the people,” but that refers to the democratic civic virtues. Whitman certainly does not envision or celebrate the kind of “narrow theory of life” that Mill attributes to Calvinism or the alleged “Chinese ideal of making all people alike” that Mill specifically denounces in the very text Whitman cites as the inspiration for his “Democratic Vistas.”⁴⁷

Instead, although all the citizens in the democratic future Whitman envisions will share a “democratic character,” the lives they lead will be “rich, luxuriant, and varied.”⁴⁸ He anticipates and exults in the prospect of the open-ended and unimaginable individual diversity that Mill celebrates as “noble and beautiful.”⁴⁹ To construe this kind of partially perfectionist democratic idealism as oppressive and inappropriate for a pluralistic society such as ours could seem plausible, I think, only to someone in the grip of a profoundly misleading kind of academic scholasticism.