Tradition and the Deliberative Turn

Ryan R. Holston is Professor and Jonathan M. Daniels '61 Chair at the Virginia Military Institute. He is the coeditor (with Justin D. Garrison) of The Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal in a Post-Constitutional Age, also published by SUNY Press.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Rousseau's Divorce of the Good from History2. Kant Formalizes the Divorce3. Democracy's Deliberation4. The Rehabilitation of Prejudice5. Tradition's Deliberation6. Deliberation and ModernityConclusionBibliographyIndex

"…the volume presents a case in defence of the relevance of practical wisdom, communal practices, and traditions in politics, and raises questions that can help to uncover historical links between liberal and conservative self-understandings, and in this way can encourage both sides to maintain a capacity for dialogue." — The European Conservative"Holston's approach to his topic is interesting and important in that it occupies a middle ground between two extremes." — University Bookman"Holston presents a fascinating history of rationalism that points to epistemological issues going back to Plato." — Modern Age"Gadamer saw the fruitfulness of his hermeneutics in its possible applications to other fields. Ryan R. Holston's insightful study achieves just such an application in political theory by showing how Gadamer's fusion of morality with history could help us overcome the instrumentalist understanding of morality, prevalent in modern deliberative theory, which construes values as something from which we could stand apart and look at from the outside. No, Holston powerfully argues, morality is who we are and cannot be viewed apart from our historical being. Renewing the debate between Gadamer and Habermas, this study successfully criticizes the utopian and irreal nature of many strands of contemporary democratic theory." — Jean Grondin, University of Montreal