Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America

Notes

N O T E S I N T RO D U C T I O N Discursive Democracy and the Culture of Reform 1. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860, 141; Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers, 72. 2. Gutmann provides a very useful analysis of the relation of interested and identity groups as a social form within democracy in Identity in Democracy, 8–30. 3. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 25–74; Rawls, Political Liberalism, xliv–xlix, 16–21. 4. Wiegman, American Anatomies, especially section 1, “Economics of Visibility,” and section3,“WhiteMythologies”;Fanuzzi,Abolition’sPublicSphere.Fanuzzidrawsextensively fromWiegmanandappliesheranalysisofpublicembodimenttoFrederickDouglassand, by contrast, William Lloyd Garrison. See also, by contrast, Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship. 5. The ebb and flow of the transcendentalists’, especially Emerson’s, relationship to reform culture has a long history. Fuller, though she is increasingly central as a founder of women’s reform thought, kept out of the antislavery movement and was in Europe when the organized women’s rights movement emerged in the late 1840s. Emerson’s reputation as a reformer is thoroughly studied in Gougeon’s chapter titled “Abolition and the Biographers” in Virtue’s Hero. See also the introduction to The Emerson Dilemma, ed. T. Gregory Garvey, xi–xxviii; and Lopez’s chapter, “The Anti-Emerson Tradition,” in Emerson and Power. Particularly thoughtful recent arguments against Emerson’s value as a progressive thinker are Newfield’s Emerson Effect and Rowe’s At Emerson’s Tomb. Rowe, especially, has provoked response: Gougeon and von Frank react in “‘Fortune of the Republic,’” and “Mrs. Brackett’s Verdict,” respectively. 6. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 150. 7. Ibid. 8. See Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement; Dryzek, Discursive Democracy ; Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model”; and Bohman, Public Deliberation, Pluralism, Complexity. 9. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action. See also Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” This idea, though, is also very similar to that which Sennett describes in Fall of Public Man; see, for example, his chapter “Proof or Plausibility?” in the section titled “Roles,” 28–45. 10. Honneth and Joas offer a very useful analysis of communicative action as both an epistemology and a critical theory. Their introduction to Communicative Action summarizes and contextualizes the theory. Taylor’s essay in this collection, “Language and Society,” situates communicative reason in debates about contemporary pluralism. Dux’s essay “Communicative Reason and Interest” theorizes efforts of disenfranchised people to participate in norm-defining dialogues. The Dux essay serves as a bridge between Habermas’s theory and the liberalism of Rawlsian communications theory. Barry lucidly 204 n o t e s t o i n t r o d u c t i o n articulates the way Rawls’s “original position” links liberalism and the Marxists’ interest in capital: “Rawls’s first principle of justice . . . articulated the classical ideal of liberal citizenship, while his second principle gave recognition to the demands of social and economic citizenship. [This] . . . second part made their justice of social and economic institutions depend on their making the worst-off socio-economic group in the society as well off as they could under any set of institutional arrangements” (Culture and Equality, 7). 11. See Rawls, Political Liberalism; Habermas, Moral Consciousness; and Habermas, Justification and Application. 12. Through “hermeneutic conversation,” Warnke tries to integrate the idealism of Habermasian “discourse ethics” with the irreducible overlapping pluralism that Rawls addresses in Political Liberalism. By bringing these together, Warnke constructs a model of civil dialogue that retains pluralism as a virtue but also seeks the level of transparent mutual understanding that Habermas attributes to the ideal speech situation. Warnke writes: “The idea behind the notion of hermeneutic conversation is the idea that an interpretive pluralism can be educational for all parties involved. If we are to be educated by interpretations other than our own, however, we must both encourage the articulation of those alternative interpretations and help to make them as compelling as they can be. . . . Democracy thus turns out to be the condition for the possibility of an enriching exchange of insight. Democratic conditions act against the entrenchment of bigoted interpretations by offering others a fair fight as equals and hermeneutic conversation itself acts against the reduction of diversity by allowing that more than one rational interpretation might ‘win.’” See Warnke, Justice and Interpretation, 157. 13. See Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 284–88. The major distinction of strategic action is that it is a form of purposive-rational, or goal-achieving, action that functions within social or communicative action. It thus hides a problem-solving...