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prospect that current authoritative policies and judgments do not (cannot) settle questions
of justice once and for all. Of course, difficult, at times tragic, decisions must be made.
By highlighting the incompleteness and manifold contingencies that enter into our
necessary enunciations of what is just, true, or good, democratic humility does not
counsel passivity in the face of such judgments, but it does caution us against the
complacency and forgetfulness that can set in once those paths have been taken, where
quite unexpectedly and without much fanfare, contestable questions are taken as fixed,
the range of acceptable differences and identities are narrowed, dissent has become
uncivil if not immoral, and physis seems to have quietly switched places with nomos. In
this respect democratic humility can be a salutary and edifying virtue for fluid and rapidly
changing late-modern pluralistic societies by freeing democratic citizens and their leaders
from the dangerous dream of completeness.
1
The one important exception of which I am aware is Thomas Spragens. Civic Liberalism (Lanham, MD:
Rowan and Littlefield, 1999), ch. 8. I discuss Spragens’ contribution to the idea of humility later in this
essay. For other examples of a renewed interest in virtue, see Ronald Beiner, What’s the Matter with
Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of
Modern Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997); George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London:
Continuum, 2002); Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); William
Galston, Liberal Purposes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Amy Gutmann and Dennis
Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996); Stephen Macedo, Liberal
Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1984); George Sher, Beyond Neutrality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Convention