ABSTRACT
The ‘rich North Atlantic democracies’ face novel challenges today, and the role of citizens must be at least partially re-imagined if we are to face those challenges in an admirable fashion; that is, in a way that neither denies, in the name of tradition, the force of what is new, nor imagines that we can adequately confront it by rejecting wholesale the traditions of modern Western political thought.1 In what follows, I want to offer an interpretation of the current condition of democracy and elucidate how a late-modern ‘ethos’ of citizenship might constitute part of an exemplary response to democracy’s challenges. I want to suggest that Western democracies face a serious predicament, the
nature of which I will lay out in a moment. I choose the word ‘predicament’ because it can indicate deep and complex troubles, without implying an unmitigable bleakness of prospects. In recent years, a variety of political theorists have suggested that democracy is in a condition that is clearly disastrous and whose prospects are dismal. I want to resist this deeply negative judgment, at least to a degree. ‘Ethos’ is very old concept that we get from classical Greek political
thought (Aristotle, 2007).2 But it has come increasingly into vogue over the past twenty-five years or so. Why has this occurred? My sense is that it results from commentators finding that their repertoire of standard concepts fails to capture adequately a certain dimension of experience to which greater attention needs to be paid in political theory. Foucault was perhaps the first, and certainly the most famous, philosopher to use ‘ethos’ in this distinctively latemodern way in the 1980s (Foucault, 1984: 373-377; 2003a: 28-30). His work continues to provide an initial orientation toward the terrain of experience that is at issue. Another influential figure is William Connolly. He has developed a well-elaborated perspective in political theory in which ethos plays a crucial role. My reflections below draw heavily upon his insights, although I sometimes augment them in ways he would resist. In the first section, I will elaborate further upon why ‘ethos’ has emerged as
an important topic in the last quarter century, how it is entangled with our
ontological imagination, and what a contemporary ethos should look like, if we want to respond in an exemplary fashion to the challenges of democracy today. In the second section, I identify three phenomena that constitute a specifically late-modern challenge to democracy. Democracy’s current predicament results from: (1) the new growth in economic inequality; (2) the changing social bases of the democratic polity; and (3) the unavailability now of the classical ideal of an autonomous Demos. As a way of better locating the character and significance of my own response to this democratic predicament, I start in the third section with a consideration of two others. The responses of Sheldon Wolin and Jacques Derrida will be shown to have significant flaws. On the basis of this critique, I then argue for the comparative superiority of a third response in which the idea of a late-modern ethos and the weak ontology that animates it play a central role. In the final section, I take up criticisms that this response is not really convincing. The claim is that an approach through weak ontology and a late-modern ethos ends up too focused on ethics and not enough on politics. I will argue that the distinctive focus provided by an ethos creates no such avoidance of politics.
