Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, Transformation (review)

In recent years, scholars of American philosophy have done considerable work to unearth, rediscover, reclaim, and otherwise bring to the attention of the philosophical community a great number of American thinkers whose works fell into obscurity for the usual kinds of reasons—they were women, they were African American or Native American, they taught at obscure little places (that is, not Harvard), they didn't study or teach in philosophy departments, they didn't teach at all. Thanks to the scholarly work of people such as Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Leonard Harris, Scott Pratt, Johnny Washington, Marilyn Fischer, Eugenie Gatens-Robinson, Greg Moses, Anne Waters, and Cornel West, the fabric of the history of American philosophy has been given a much more complex, richly textured, and interesting weave. Their scholarship has, among other things, made it possible to teach the history of American philosophy as something other than a survey of the works of the "big three" (Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey). Now, such a course may well include figures such as W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alain Locke, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the ideas of governing institutions such as the Iroquois Confederacy.

Deep Democracy (1999), by Judith Green, illustrates that this scholarship has also helped make it possible for contemporary American philosophers to draw upon the insights of these thinkers to investigate current philosophical problems and questions. Yes, Deep Democracy carries out a sustained interaction with the work of troika member Dewey, in the course of exploring the nature of, obstacles to, and prospects for strengthening the fabric of democracy in the contemporary world. But Green also puts Dewey in conversation with Jane Addams (one of Dewey's actual philosophical companions), Alain Locke, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Cornel West. Green draws these thinkers together, and draws out the links between them, in order to develop her notion of "deep democracy."

Not incidentally, Green also brings into the conversation thinkers entirely outside the American tradition—most notably Iris Young and Jürgen Habermas—in developing her "radical critical pragmatism" that "engage[s] with liberalism, communitarianism, postmodernism, critical theory, feminism, and cultural pluralism" (x). Indeed, one of the most striking things about Deep Democracy is its impressive grasp of a very large number of philosophers both inside and outside the American tradition.

Green notes that "each chapter of this book plays both critical and reconstructive roles in framing a philosophy of deep democracy" (8). This approach is more successful in some chapters than in others; at times, Green's critical approach overshadows and effectively obscures the reconstructive project. For instance, in the opening chapter, entitled "The Diverse Community or the Unoppressive City: Which Ideal for a Transformative Politics of Difference," Green advocates the diverse community as the model for deepening democracy. However, she does so chiefly by sharply critiquing Iris Young's critique of the notion of community and her proposed alternative, the "unoppressive city" (quoted in Green 1999, 1). While the critique of Young may well be apt, I do not find it an adequate vehicle for setting up Green's positive project of developing a model of deep democracy.

In other chapters, I also lose Green's voice in her long expositions of the theories of more unfamiliar thinkers. Green no doubt rightly worried about giving her readers enough grounding in these theorists' ideas for us to be able to adequately assess the appropriateness of incorporating their ideas into her own model. Nevertheless, I often wished for stronger, or more frequent, articulations of Green's democracy-deepening project, as I was being drawn through the concepts of a new thinker.

At still other points, Green focuses on arguing for including a figure in the pragmatist tradition. She makes this case for Martin Luther King, for example, arguing that Cornel West ought to look to him, not Antonio Gramsci, to find the "theoretical inspiration [for his] prophetic pragmatism" (136). Again, the arguments may be entirely to the point, but they...