The Crisis of Democracy—Part 2

Redefining Democracy

In Part One of “The Crisis of Democracy,” I reviewed the story told by Edward A. Purcell Jr. in his underappreciated book, The Crisis of Democratic Theory. In the early decades of the twentieth-century, the ascendant disciplines of the social sciences advanced a vision of a new regime governed by experts in the name of progress and efficiency. Leaders of the social sciences called for American’s “democratic faith” to lose its “halo” in favor of rule by a small cadre of experts whose decisions would be ground in the value-free data distilled by the various social sciences.

This vision was opposed by the likes of Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, who proposed a renewed engagement with the classical metaphysical and natural law tradition. Without a grounding in beliefs in an unchanging human nature in a world governed by foundational law, Hutchins argued that politics would inevitably revert to a vicious struggle for power and rule by the strong. Witnessing the rise of fascism in Europe—premised upon a rejection of the classical tradition, and embracing the inegalitarian findings of modern social and natural sciences—Hutchins and a sizable number of Catholics concluded that the fate of the West rest upon a renewal of the classical tradition. One of his legacies was the “Great Books” program at Chicago, intended to educate future generations of American leaders in a tradition which, he believed, was the only legitimate basis for politics that assumed the basic dignity and equality of all human beings.

In part 2 of a projected three-part series, I explore how the partisans of the social sciences (led by John Dewey) “struck back,” now by associating their relativism as democracy, and the metaphysical objectivity of Hutchins and Catholics as “absolutist” and therefore tantamount to totalitarianism. Part 3 will explore the legacy of these developments down to the present day, with particular focus on the ways that contemporary “conservatives” have (ironically, if predictably) come to embrace what was once the Deweyan tradition of “democracy as pluralism.”

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