Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Over the past several decades, scholars of liberal and democratic theory have shown an increasing interest in the role that various virtues might play in promoting the good/free society. Yet within this recent “return” to the virtues, one quality that has been almost entirely left out of the discussion is humility. In this paper I critically address this lacuna and offer a defense of a particular form of humility, what I call democratic humility. Before making my case for democratic humility as an essential virtue for liberal citizenship under conditions of diffuse pluralism, I first explore some of the problems with humility by tracing its intellectual and moral history within the Jewish and Christian traditions. Next, I explore the “hidden” relationship between humility and pride in order to ask, with Hume and Nietzsche, whether humility is any kind of virtue at all. With this moral and historical terrain established, I offer an account of humility that seeks to address some of the historical difficulties with humility while arguing that the idea of humility, recuperated as an ethos of civic attentiveness, may be one of the most important virtues for late-modern societies marked by incommensurable ethical and cultural pluralism.