Democracy and Tradition by Jeffrey Stout (review)

462 BOOK REVIEWS Thomas is not beyond the subject matter of this work. On the contrary, this debate invites us to reflect on what kind of form the necessary re-theologization of St. Thomas should take. The neo-Thomist schema of a totally independent philosophy, espousing the model of rationality proper to the Enlightenment, is without doubt obsolete. The analytical approach hardly seems to have noticed that it retains from Scholasticism only its argumentative rigor while not questioning itself on the fundamentally traditional presuppositions which form the base of this structure of thinking. But the primacy given to theology would not amount to a total supernaturalism which would reduce philosophy to a purely functional role at the heart of theology. The encyclical Fides et ratio has reminded us that a fruitful dialogue always presupposes two partners. (Translated by John Langlois, O.P.) Dominican House ofStudies Toulouse, France SERGE-THOMAS BONINO, 0.P. Democracy and Tradition. By JEFFREY STOUT. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. 348. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-691-10293-7. Aristotle held that the central analytic category for politics was that of the "regime" (politeia), which not only indicated who ruled in a city and to what end, but also suggested a privileged way of life. Regimes made claims about justice and about the best life one could live. Aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, and the rest were not simply sets of procedures and institutions. Modern liberal democracy has often resisted this sort of view, insisting that democracy specified only the rules of the game and allowed citizens to pursue whatever life they thought best within the boundaries set by the rules. It was a fruit of the liberalcommunitarian debates of the 1980s and 1990s, provoked largely by John Rawls's seminal 1971 book, A Theory of]ustice, that this procedural or neutralist view was sharply challenged by critics of liberalism like Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair Macintyre, who all pointed out its moral and cultural aspects. It is a merit of Jeffrey Stout's large and complex book that he takes this challenge seriously; indeed, he pleads guilty as charged. He then helpfully argues for a view of just what modern democracy does and should claim for itself and against its "communitarian" or "traditionalist" critics. Democracy and Tradition is one of the most substantive answers to the critics of liberal democracy to have emerged from the new set of debates over neutrality that emerged in the wake of Rawls's important 1993 book, Political Liberalism. To be fair, the neutralist paradigm had already been rejected by a number of liberal writers, notably Stephen Macedo in his Liberal Virtues (1990). But where BOOK REVIEWS 463 Macedo's critique of liberalism's communitarian critics constituted little more than a series of caricatures, Stout's engagement is sustained and considerably more nuanced, if not altogether convincing. This is doubtless in part a function of Stout's somewhat unusual perspective: he is a professor of religion and a serious student of American pragmatism and his understanding of democracy is shaped by a perspective that, while not seemingly orthodox, is rooted in the specifically Christian sensibilities of the civil rights movement (91, 173). This is a democratic theory different from the usual purely secular variety. Stout proposes an account and defense of the democratic "tradition" against the "new traditionalist" critics of democracy, especially Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair Macintyre, and John Milbank. Against secular political liberalism, Stout rejects neutrality and the notion of public reason that goes along with it, accepting the importance of religious language and ideas in the formation of modern democratic culture and the notion oftradition-constituted rationality; against the "new traditionalists," he defends modern democracy against the charge that it is necessarily individualistic, morally impoverished, and relentlessly secular. The most important component of Stout's democratic traditionalism is rooted in "discursive social practices" of "holding one another responsible" through deliberation and discussion (6, 13, 42, 82, 109, 184, 197, 209, 226, 246, 297, 299, 302; cf. 272, 280). This view is "pragmatic in the sense that it focuses on activities held in common as constitutive ofthe political community," but activities understood to embed substantive normative commitments, albeit always...