The Politics of Hope and Optimism: Rorty, Havel, and the Democratic Faith of John Dewey - .Vaclav Havel, Richard Rorty - )

Patrick J. Deneen

Hope vs. Optimism

In a series of essays culminating in his recent book Achieving Our Country, the philosopher Richard Rorty has advised the Left to become more modest with regard to revolution and more fervent with regard to reform. Revolution, he suggests, according to the twentieth-century Marxist version assumes a vision of transcendent perfection that alone can justify the complete transformation of existing social structures, even at the cost of untold human misery and death. Condemning this version of transcendent history in his essay "The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope," Rorty asks that his fellow philosophers realize that "we have reached a time at which we can finally get rid of the conviction common to Plato and Marx that there must be large theoretical ways of finding out how to end injustice, as opposed to small experimental ways" (1998, 228). ] Rather, in Achieving Our Country, he urges the Left to adopt the poetic patriotism of Whitman and the pragmatic patriotism of Dewey--to love America enough to wish to change it for the better, not by attempting to make it into utopia, but rather to improve it in "small, experimental ways." Urging the Left to abandon its foray into "cultural politics," and rather to re-engage in "real politics" of reform in imitation of the left of Progressivism, Rorty seeks to move the Left from its flirtation with Germanic pessimism and rather renew its origins as "the party of hope" (Achieving Our Country; 1998, 14).(2)

Rorty's understanding of "hope" is curious here, because his embrace of hope appears in an essay in which he rejects the Marxist conception of history that typically has represented the immanent version of hope available outside the Christian eschatology.(3) Hope for Rorty appears to be entirely shorn of its metaphysical, transcendent or historicist moorings, and instead appears to represent a positive outlook toward the world that resembles more what might be described as "optimism." At some level, Rorty himself appears to conflate the two, particularly in the frequent invocation and seeming equivalence of Rorty's two intellectual heroes in his essay "The End of Leninism, Havel and Social Hope." I refer here to the two figures that Rorty cites as guiding his own thoughts in his critique of historicism--his accustomed hero, John Dewey, and the newer entrant Vaclav Havel. Both figures are appropriate for their apparent dismissal of any kind of theory of inevitability in history, and for a more thoroughgoing belief in gradualism in politics. Yet, further reflection suggests that they represent opposite positions on the spectrum of "hope" and "optimism." In particular, what I would like to suggest is that Dewey's approach represents a form of "optimism without hope," that is, the disposition that human problems are tractable without needing to resort to any appeals to transcendence or the divine in their solution. Alternatively, Havel represents more the position that can be described as "hope without optimism," a fundamental mistrust in the belief that humans have the ability to solve political and moral problems, but that the appeal to a transcendent source--through hope--can serve as a guiding standard, as well as an encouragement to action, but at the same time a source for humility and caution in that attempt.

The surface similarities are compelling. Dewey's universe is one in which human beings function without any belief in a transcendent answer to all questions or philosophical insight into the true nature of reality or essences. Rorty also lauds the thought of Vaclav Havel for similar reasons: Havel's writings appear to offer a similar condemnation of certainty as that offered by Dewey, and also holds the appeal of "substituting groundless hope for theoretical insight" ("The End of Leninism"; 1998, 236). Yet, while Rorty correctly contends that Dewey and Havel share a fundamental distrust for culminating historical narratives, upon further reflection not on the apparent similarities between Dewey and Havel, but rather on certain central differences, one is lead to question whether Rorty hasn't blurred those differences in a way that itself obscures fundamentally different approaches to politics and democratic theory. For, while in essential respects Dewey's commendation of "uncertainty" (the accompanying doubt that arises from his criticisms of "the quest for certainty") seems to resemble Havel's advice that "we have to be very careful about coming to any conclusions about the way we are, or what can be expected from us," in fact the source of those doubts are substantially and irreconcilably different. While Dewey's doubt is skeptical in origin, arising from his refusal either to place his faith in, or to even attempt to discover, any ultimate or transcendent "truth" or "being" that might afford final insight into the human condition, Havel's doubt arises from a different source: not, like Dewey, the complete absence of any transcendent objective Truth, but rather the human inability to wholly comprehend the transcendent, which, time and time again, Havel suggests exists as a necessary underpinning of human existence, morality and action. Given this feature of Havel's thought, Rorty's re-titling of his 1998 essay in order to highlight Havel is, in fact, quite surprising. While his very brief and selective citations of Havel's interviews appear to substantiate a sketchy theory of "social hope"--i.e., hope that arises solely from discrete human endeavors devoid of appeals to "a philosophy of history and without being placed in the context of an epic or tragedy whose hero is Humanity" ("The End of Leninism"; 1998, 243), generally much of Havel's writing, and especially those dealing with "hope" specifically, appear to contradict Rorty's characterization.

Rorty is attracted to Havel's use of the word "hope," and designates this form of "groundless hope" as the only form of positive aspiration that should be available to the post-Marxist Left. Havel's discussion of hope in Disturbing the Peace occurs most extensively in response to the question, "do you see a grain of hope anywhere in the 1980's?" While Havel's response cannot be said to rise to the level of high theoretical investigation, it is nevertheless revealing to what extent his ruminations appear to resist Rorty's conclusion that Havel's hope is finally "social hope."

The first part of Havel's response to the interviewer's question seems to accord with Rorty's interpretation. Describing what he refers throughout as hope in the "deep sense," he replies

   The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are
   particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of
   mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't;
   it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some
   particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is
   not prognostication. (Havel; 1991, 181)

This passage in particular appeals to Rorty, and he cites the concluding sentence with approval. According to this formulation, hope is appropriately internal, relying not on any belief in inevitability through history or transcendence outside of it. It is likely that Rorty also concludes that such hope is "social" since our efforts can only be directed at the improvement of society, not its transformation according to any "objective" measure, nor the transformation of the human soul according to a preconceived notion of what is good or virtuous.

To this point, Rorty appears quite correct in his interpretation of Havel's stance. However, Havel continues (in a passage not cited by Rorty):

   [hope] transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is
   anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don't think you can explain it as
   a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favorable
   sign in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental,
   just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of course I
   can't--unlike Christians, for instance--say anything concrete about the
   transcendental. (1991, 181)

While Havel's modesty about claiming any knowledge about the composition of the "transcendent" would undoubtedly remain appealing to Rorty, in fact the very affirmation of the existence of the transcendent as the source for hope (and not, therefore, solely "social hope") in fact presents a distinctly different perspective than that for which Rorty contends in the essay "The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope."

This amorphous "hope," deriving from the transcendent and informing human actions even against the greatest of odds, Havel quite clearly distinguishes from a different kind of positive response to the world--optimism. "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out" (1991, 181). While optimism results from tangible or assumed success in the world, hope informs human aspirations regardless of the current composition of the world, and, as Havel contends, is derived from a source outside or beyond the world. As he concludes his discussion of this form of hope, "I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from `elsewhere'" (1991, 181).

In more recent writings, Havel has become more explicit and even less hesitant about his invocation of the "transcendent" nature of hope (opposed to what he considers to be the more "internalized" aspects of optimism). Speaking before "The Future of Hope Conference" in Hiroshima, Japan in December, 1995, Havel stated ("to the delight of some and the astonishment of others," he admitted):

   I have always come to the conclusion that the primary origin of hope is, to
   put it simply, metaphysical. By that I mean that hope is more, and goes
   deeper, than a mere optimistic inclination or disposition of the human
   mind, determined genetically, biologically, chemically, culturally, or
   otherwise .... Somewhere behind all that, acknowledged or unacknowledged,
   and articulated in different ways, but always most profound, is humanity's
   experience with its own Being and with the Being in the world.... Without
   the experience of the transcendental, neither hope nor human responsibility
   has any meaning. (1997, 238-239)(4)

Havel remains mostly silent about what he means by the "transcendent": while he refuses to clarify, one can conclude that he might mean any variety of "entities," "beings," "Being," or "ideas" that transcend purely human experience in the world. He refuses to identify explicitly the identification of "hope" with the divine, at some level he appears to recognize its theological origins, since "hope" is one of the three theological virtues of Christianity, fides, spe, and caritas--faith, hope and love (or charity). It is through that tradition, especially, that one recognizes the great appeal of "hope" over "optimism" in Havel's estimation--not only to the extent that hope affords the basis for political action and resistance--but to the extent that hope, in its classical conception, offers a defense of an accompanying attitude of humility, cautiousness, and even, at some level, uncertainty.

On Hope

While both faith and hope are obviously distinguishable from caritas so as not to invite extensive comment on any apparent similarity, many commentators have been forced to acknowledge that two of the three theological virtues in fact resemble each other extensively, faith and hope. In his Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love Augustine acknowledges the similarity of the two concepts, addressing the question in the eighth section whether there is a "distinction between faith and hope" (1961, 7). He acknowledges that it is possible to have faith in something for which we may nevertheless not hope. "What true Christian, for example, does not believe in the punishment of the wicked? And yet such a one does not hope for it" (1961, 7). Thus, Augustine continues, "faith may have for its object evil as well as good; for both good and evil are believed, and the faith that believes them is not evil, but good." A further significant distinction for Augustine is the temporal nature of faith and hope respectively. Faith is directed toward beings and events in the past, the present, and the future. Thus, Christians are asked to have faith not only in redemption in the future, but to believe in the life, words and deeds of Jesus as described in the Bible. In distinction, hope "has for its object only what is good, only what is future." While both faith and hope are both directed toward that which is not seen (i.e., known definitively through our senses), they differ in these two fundamental regards according to Augustine. However, closer examination suggests not that faith and hope are "essentially different" as Augustine contends, but rather that hope represents a subset of faith. Faith represents the belief in that which exists in any temporality and which has as its object things that may be either good or bad; hope represents only the belief of a happy outcome in the future. Hope is form of faith, finally, but only taking some of the features of faith--those features that are most positive and which (oriented toward the future) are least provable from the standpoint of sensory evidence.

Yet, for Augustine hope cannot be extended to inappropriate objects. Hope is directed only toward the eternal: hope as the aspiration for good things beyond sensory evidence cannot be accorded to the human activities by Augustine's estimation. Accordingly, of the "true objects of faith, those only pertain to hope which are embraced in the Lord's prayer. For, `cursed is the man that trusteth in man' is the testimony of holy writ; and, consequently, this curse attaches also to the man that trusteth in himself" (1961, 132).(5) Of the few things that Augustine writes about hope in the Enchiridion, worth noting is this immediate emphasis on the limitations of hope's object--solely divine, not secular. There is a suggestion that a danger accompanying the pious belief in hope is a form of confidence in the human potential for hope's realization within the earthly sphere. Augustine's immediate and stern reminder of hope's simultaneous infinite extent yet the limitations to human endeavors appears as a consistent rebuke to the overweening ambitions of a hopeful humanity.

Aquinas echoes this understanding in several discussions of the "theological virtues." He writes in his work "On Hope" (De Spe) that hope must be distinguished from "fear, because its object is good; from joy, because future; from desire, because difficult; and from despair, because possible" (1955, 203). Because hope necessitates faith, and the object of our faith is the divine, Aquinas simultaneously holds that hope contemplates the possible, but that the possible is only attainable through the divine in which we hope, not purely human efforts. As he states, "No man is able of himself to grasp the supreme good of eternal life; he needs divine help. Hence there is here a twofold object, the eternal life we hope for, and the divine help we hope by" (1955, 203).

Aquinas distinguishes this final hope in eternal life from more realistic hopes that can be attained through our own efforts. This latter kind of hope is less perfect than that directed toward divine ends; for "to have faith and hope about things which are subject to human power falls short of the nature of virtue" (1966, 122). Thus "hope goes wrong and is mistaken when you rely on your own strength" (1955, 203-204). However, while hope should be directed at divine objects, Aquinas praises the shared attempt to seek hope's realization, since when we pursue our aspirations in combination with others, we are reminded of our own insufficiency in its pursuit, even as our resolve is strengthened through a shared undertaking. He writes, "although our hope rests on divine help, be mindful how we should lean on one another in order to gain the more readily what we seek" (1955, 204).

Theological understandings of hope, then, appear to consistently recommend humility as an appropriate accompanying attitude with hope. The modern Thomistic scholar, Josef Pieper is quite explicit in this regard. He argues that two virtues must accompany hope: magnanimity and humility. Magnanimity necessarily joins with hope, since "it is the aspiration of the spirit to great things." Yet, taken alone, magnanimity tends toward overconfidence, leads one both to attempt too much and to crave more than human infirmity justifies. Thus, he writes that "humility is the protective barrier and restraining wall of this impulse [of hope]" (1986, 101). Humility for Pieper naturally joins with the magnanimity of hope, since the object of hope (as with Augustine)--the divine--implicitly reveals humanity's fundamental limits. "Humility, with its gaze fixed on the infinite distance between man and God, reveals the limitations of these possibilities and preserves them from sham realization..." (1986, 102)

The explicit distinction between the humility born of faith in a transcendent existence in contrast to the confidence born of faith in human abilities--those two attitudes denoted by Havel as hope and optimism--derive from an ancient theological tradition that finds continued resonance well into the twentieth century and to our day. Yet, while "hope without optimism" implies humility, just as often its modern proponents have turned to this concept of hope--one that continues to be replete with its ancient theological resonance--in order to combat quiescence or resignation in the face of injustice or overwhelming obstacles, or simply to reject the overwhelming temptation for pessimism in this most brutal age.

Hope motivates, if humility moderates. Martin Luther King evoked the distinction between hope and optimism both early in his career in his rejection of the "unwarranted optimism concerning man... [that] leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness," and late in life, after many triumphs and setbacks, when he declared in his Montgomery sermons that he was not an optimist, but he still had hope (Lasch; 1991, 389).(6) Neither wishing to succumb to the temptations of optimism evinced around him by those attracted to Marxist stories of historical culmination or religious stories of radical divine intervention, nor to the temptations of pessimism born of a too slow and difficult process of achieving recognition and true equality, King returned constantly to the theme of hopefulness as distinct from optimism in his sermons and speeches (King, 1991).

More recently, asking whether "the tradition of struggle can be preserved or expanded," Cornel West has evoked this language of King in his own exploration of our "moral obligations" as democratic citizens. Noting that "we are living in one of the most terrifying moments in the history of this nation, [that] we are experiencing a lethal and unprecedented relative economic decline, cultural decay and political lethargy," West nevertheless concludes this pessimistic essay with an invocation of tempered hope understood in a similar way to that of Augustine, King, and Havel:

   Hope has nothing to do with optimism. I am in no way optimistic about
   America, nor am I optimistic about the plight of the human species on the
   globe. There is simply not enough evidence to infer that things are going
   to get better. That has been the perennial state and condition of not
   simply black people in America, but all self-conscious human beings who are
   sensitive to the forms of evil around them. We can be prisoners of hope
   even as we call optimism into question.

   To be part of the democratic tradition is to be a prisoner of hope. And you
   cannot be a prisoner of hope without engaging in a form of struggle in the
   present moment that keeps the best of the past alive. To engage in struggle
   means that one is always willing to acknowledge that there is no triumph
   around the comer, but that you persist because you believe it is right and
   just and moral. (West; 1999, 5, 9, 12)

In praising democracy for its singular aspect of according to all citizens "mutual respect, personal responsibility, and social accountability," West concludes that such values can only be cultivated, maintained and deepened by recognizing their "spiritual dimension." Echoing the view of Havel in this regard, he notes that "spirituality requires an experience of something bigger than our individual selves that binds us to a community" (1999, 10). Absent this dimension, West fears, the bases of democratic virtues succumb all too readily to consumer excess and market-driven "gangsterization of culture."

I think we do better to understand Havel's understanding of "hope" in the context of this background, not as "social hope" as Rorty's more conventionalist understanding would suggest. To conclude this point with one final observation about the more tragic nature of Havel's hope, in contrast to Rorty's praise of "the comic frame," one should consider a speech that Havel delivered at Stanford University in 1994 and published under the title "Forgetting We Are Not God." There, Havel firmly resists the notion that his belief in the transcendent sources of democratic legitimacy should result in a heightened level of certainty or fanaticism often associated with religion, instead evoking the connection of hope and humility. As he concluded the speech,

   Obviously, this is easy to say but hard to bring about. Unlike many
   ideological utopians, fanatics, and dogmatists, and a thousand more or less
   suspect prophets and messiahs who wander around this world as a sad symptom
   of its helplessness, I do not possess any special recipe to awaken the mind
   of man to his responsibility to the world and for the world.... Given its
   fatal incorrigibility, humanity will probably have to go through many more
   Rwandas and Chernobyls before it understands how unbelievably shortsighted
   a human being can be who has forgotten that he is not God. (1995, 50)

While hope remains for a day when humans will eradicate the worst of our violent and technological evils, there is little optimism of an imminent solution here. Notable about this rejection of easy optimism is not only Havel's assumption that human barbarity will continue indefinitely, but that human confidence in science, technology, and progress is a comparable phenomenon. Such a view repudiates the common assumption that Western confidence in its own mastery of nature represents purely rational expression that is fundamentally opposed to ethnic or nationalist or any particularistic fanaticism.7 Suggesting that both these forms of confidence represent a form of unjustified "optimism," Havel attempts to distinguish a more modest form of hope that at once allows for aspirations of political improvement and democratic self- and mutual-respect, and finally for communities based on shared experiences (what Rorty calls "contingency") yet at the same time attentive to claims of justice, without concluding that the culmination of such a hope is entirely likely through any optimistic engineering on the part of humanity.

The Democratic Theory of Optimism without Hope--Dewey's Democratic Faith

Both the positive expressions of hope and optimism involve at some level a form of faith at base. As observed in the discussion of Augustine, "hope" represents a subset of faith more generally; similarly, "optimism" partakes of the more "secular" undertones of the word "faith" in the sense of "belief" or even "confidence." As Rorty notes, even the optimism of Dewey--the belief in human ability to manipulate and control both nature and human institutions in a fairly thoroughgoing way--represented a form of faith, albeit a secular form of faith ("optimism without hope," as I am describing it, would have to be by definition a faith in something secular, although the object of faith itself can vary). This faith for Dewey resided in democracy, an organization of human beings that he thought could be improved indefinitely. Like his pragmatist compatriot William James, Dewey often equated democracy and religion: according to James, "democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest of exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture" (Rorty, Achieving Our Country; 1998, 9). Of course, the objects of the e respective forms of faith differ substantially, and thus lead to different implications both philosophically and politically. These implications can be observed especially by examining the intimate connection between Dewey's optimism in democracy's prospects--even in the face of considerable challenges and setbacks--and the religious writings that he developed throughout his lifetime. While one shouldn't minimize Dewey's non-religious writings in this regard, the general absence of attention to the connection between those writings and his political thought is somewhat striking. As Steven C. Rockefeller has suggested in his definitive study of Dewey's religious writings, "the roots of important aspects of Dewey's later thought may be traced back into the early period and his later thought is a reconstruction of his earlier philosophy. This is especially true of his religious thought" (1991, 19). Thus, his lifelong unbroken "faith" in the possibilities of democracy led to a striking form of optimism that, at base, can only be comprehended by means of his writings on religion and his "democratic faith"--the faith grounded in "optimism without hope."

Dewey is rightly renowned for his skepticism in the service of pragmatism. In works like The Quest for Certainty, he criticizes ancient philosophic conceptions of a fixed human nature and the attempts by traditional philosophy to separate the "real" from the "true." For Dewey, that which exists is necessarily "true," or at least correct for present circumstances. There can be no separation of "knowledge" from "doing": only through experience can one gain a foothold of knowledge about the world, and only in the world can any real form of knowledge be acquired. Anything less stands accused of what he called "the spectator theory of knowledge," a false attempt to contemplate some eternal verity on high which foolishly ignored the necessary realities of current existence (1929, 23).

Above all, what should be avoided is a "quest for certainty." Solutions to existing problems arising from human affairs are always provisional and tentative. As he stated in Quest for Certainty, "no mode of action can give anything approaching absolute certitude; it provides insurance but not assurance. Doing is always subject to peril [and] to the danger of frustration" (1929, 23). But rather than prompting us to avoid such precariousness in our knowledge, Dewey suggests such an attitude is the necessary and desirable consequence of adopting a kind of knowledge that is constantly and rightly in danger of obsolescence. We should avoid reaching the conclusion that the opposite of uncertainty is knowledge. Calling this "the commonest fallacy," he urges a kind of patient willingness to submit to doubt, noting the undesirable tendency by which "thought hastens toward the settled and is only to likely to force the pace" (1929, 227). The attempt to secure knowledge about any aspect of human life is always discrete, and any resulting answer to questions about human affairs is always limited and momentary. Not only can our experience change in such a manner to render the old solutions moot, but new applications of human ingenuity and questioning can easily overthrow momentarily "settled" beliefs.

The proper method of investigating apparent truths, of constantly improving them through outright rejection or incremental adjustments, was called by Dewey the "method of intelligence." As described by him,

   Some of its obvious elements are willingness to hold belief in suspense,
   ability to doubt until evidence is obtained; willingness to go where
   evidence points instead of putting first a personally preferred conclusion;
   ability to hold ideas in solution and use them as hypotheses to be tested
   instead of as dogmas to be asserted; and (possibly most distinctive of
   all), enjoyment of new fields for inquiry and of new problems. (1986, 118)

The openness and provisionality of this approach lends itself most appropriately to the democratic temperament, given its willingness to entertain disagreement and variety of opinions. Dewey perceived the "method of intelligence" and democracy as intimately bound together: the "method of intelligence" could only fully find expression in an appropriately open society like a democracy; while democracy could only be improved from within by the application of the "method of intelligence." The "method," then, had explicitly democratic and progressive application:

   The purpose [of the method of intelligence] is to set free and to develop
   the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class or
   economic status.... Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral
   meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political
   and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the
   all-around growth of every member of society. (1950, 147)

Dewey's confidence in the ability of the "method of intelligence" to create conditions of moral and material growth is almost unbounded: nature holds an incalculable bounty for human use, if only its secrets can be unlocked by the proper attitude of inquisitiveness and the development of certain technical adeptness. Noting his indebtedness to Francis Bacon in this regard, Dewey wrote that "scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry" (1950, 46).(8) The job of the modern, and especially modern science--a realm of inquiry that extends to the human sciences as well as to the natural sciences--is to extract the secrets of nature by whatever means possible, even if these methods at times evoke ominous overtones. Indeed, again echoing Bacon, Dewey reveals the severity with which the modern scientist must approach his task:

   [he] must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those
   in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the
   truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to
   reveal what he has been concealing. (1950, 46; emphasis mine)

Only through such a ruthless and single-minded manner has humanity begun to achieve "the conquest of physical nature"; and only by extending this method of inquiry to the "social-moral" realm can humanity hope to achieve an equilibrium between the physical and social sciences, the latter which would permit true "social or humane knowledge and human engineering" ("Democratic Faith and Education"; 1944, 277).

At no point does Dewey suggest what the conclusions of such inquiries either will entail nor what they should conclude. The ends of scientific inquiry are determined entirely by the facts that the method will uncover: no "values" need be introduced a priori into the inquiry itself.(9) Dewey remains nevertheless confident that the conquest of nature, both human and social, will result in an opening of technological, biological, and political vistas. Nature is a bountiful source, and the administration of a scientific "inquisition" will "open up marvelous possibilities in industry and commerce, and new social conditions conducive to invention, ingenuity, enterprise...." (Human Nature and Conduct; 1944, 212-213). If any end of human activity can be suggested at all, it is an open-ended one, described often by Dewey as "growth." Noting that "growth" is the only "moral `end,'" Dewey leaves the aim or object of growth as entirely undefined, concluding solely that "growth, or growing [is] developing, not only physically but intellectually and morally." (Human Nature and Conduce, 1944, 141).

Dewey's view that human ends are "defined" through a process of intelligence that will constantly make obsolete previous conclusions, relies ultimately on a kind of secular faith in two respects: the ability of humans to adequately uncover, or "torture" nature to disclose its truths; and second, the belief that the secrets of nature, once disclosed, will prove nothing but beneficial to human moral ends. Among others, Max Weber recognized that such trust in the supremacy of technique or method finally involved a "matter of faith" (1949, 55-56).(l0) Indeed, notwithstanding Dewey's reliance on rationality, scientism, and praise of "uncertainty," he would nonetheless be the first to acknowledge that his confidence in the prospects of science, and especially science in the service of democracy, contained an element of faith that derived from a kind of "reconstruction" of religious tenets. This project of "reconstruction" began quite early in Dewey's career, but continued throughout his life and served as a constant well of optimism for Dewey.

Democratic Faith

Dewey described his early project of reconstruction of religion as

   devoted to making explicit the religious values implicit in the spirit of
   science as undogmatic reverence for truth in whatever form it presents
   itself, and the religious values implicit in our common life, especially in
   the moral significance of democracy as a way of living together. (1939, 79)

From the outset, Dewey considered democracy to be a modern incarnation of the religious spirit, and he effectively transferred the faith that was once directed toward transcendence instead toward the prospects and promise of democracy. In his earliest writings (often dismissed as immature neo-Hegelian attempts), Dewey insisted that faith was an essential component of human experience.(11) In 1884, he uncharacteristically adopted the traditional religious language of faith in God, but in an entirely consistent manner with later writings, insisted that faith is a matter of attitude: "man's knowledge or lack of knowledge depends wholly upon this original attitude of his will and desires toward God; and because these are under his control, because these express his moral tendency, his knowledge does also" (1939, 79).(12) Even more central than our belief in God per se, is the importance of our own control over our will and desires. Faith, as conceived in this early essay, is not in some crucial regard a release of control or admission of human insufficiency, but rather a moment of mastery over our own will, and hence is for Dewey comparable to the control that we can exert over the external world through our knowledge. Even framed in the traditional language of sin and moral culpability, Dewey is already engaged in a reconstruction of the idea of faith that would support his democratic aspirations.

This reconstruction becomes quite explicit in Dewey's 1892 essay "Christianity and Democracy." Dewey sought to equate the role that religion once played--before its institutionalization--and the role that democracy must now play. The common feature that each shares, he argues, is revelation--not now understood as the unveiling of true doctrine from divine sources, but rather (in a Hegelian manner) as a process of "unfolding." Christianity, in its original form, reflected a "continuously unfolding, never ceasing discovery of the meaning of life." By suggesting that revelation is a process of unfolding--rather than the singular revelation of unchanging Truth, as might be suggested by some more traditional accounts--Dewey is able to argue that the truest agent of religious faith available to modern man is not organized religion, which has crystallized into a defender of unbending doctrine, but rather the more open-ended activity of democratic life. Rather than a revelation from on high, democracy "enables us to get our truths in a natural, everyday and practical sense" (1892, 8). Since one of the guiding principles of democracy is freedom, and it is not presupposed in democratic societies that one way of life or system of belief must be the sole road to truth, democracy is most suitably said to be the contemporary incarnation of the process of revelation.

   Democracy thus appears as the means by which the revelation of truth is
   carried on. It is in democracy, the community of ideas and interest through
   community of action, that the incarnation of God (man, that is to say as
   organ of universal truth) becomes a living, present thing, having its
   ordinary and natural sense. This truth is brought down to life; its
   segregation removed; it is made a common truth enacted in all departments
   of action, not in one isolated sphere called religious. (1892, 9).

Dewey, in effect, is able to equate democracy and religion not by making politics "religious" per se, but rather by suggesting that religion (and even here, while speaking of Christianity, he notes that this analysis might apply to any religion) in its most authentic incarnation does not seek to dictate Truth, but rather to encourage an open-ended search for truth. Dewey comes close here to associating "true" Christianity with the broad process of education he was to embrace in coming decades.

Democracy also proves the most promising manifestation of this religious "unfolding" in modern life since, quite in contrast with most organized religion, it remains open and even sympathetic with the scientific pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, he explicitly accuses the churches of "faithlessness" for their opposition to the rise of science. Arguing that the example of Jesus gives a true example of openness toward human innovation, Dewey criticizes organized religion for disregarding the parable of the two sons, the younger of whom "went out into the vineyard of nature and by obedience to truth revealed the deeper truth of unity of law, the presence of one continuous living force, the conspiring and vital unity of all the world" (1892, 6). The churches have assumed the role of those who seek to hold back revelation rather than allow it to unfold through the modern auspices of democracy and science. Dewey admonishes the churches to "remember Lot's wife, who looked back, and who, looking back, was fixed into a motionless pillar" (1892, 10).

Alternatively, Dewey enthusiastically (and in almost with Whitmanesque tones) celebrates the rise of the scientific era coincident with the rise of democratic society:

   Here then we have democracy! On its negative side, the breaking down of
   barriers which hold truth from finding expression, on its positive side,
   the securing of conditions which give truth its movement, its complete
   distribution or service. It is no accident that the growing organization of
   democracy coincides with the rise of science, including the machinery of
   telegraph and locomotive for distributing truth. There is but one fact--the
   more complete movement of man to his unity with his fellows through
   realizing the truth of life. (1892, 9).

Here Dewey explicitly links the scientific development of human capacities, the conquest of nature, the process of "growth" that occurs in a democratic setting, and subsumes all these elements into a grand new reconstruction of faith--a faith that holds for a transformation of human life in the wholly secular sphere. Especially notable is his faith in the benefits of technology, represented here by the telegraph and locomotive. Both permit for wider dissemination of knowledge, of greater movement of people and ideas, and of greater overall "growth" of the restless American spirit. Dewey trusted implicitly that these and other developments always promised an unconditional boon to the human condition. Indeed, it is striking that Dewey retains and develops many of these themes in the most notable "religious" work of his later period--A Common Faith, published in 1934--in which he would return explicitly to the example of the telegraph and locomotive as exemplars of human progress and tools of the democratic faith.

A Common Faith

In his A Common Faith, widely considered to be Dewey's "definitive" work on religion and politics, Dewey attempts a reconstruction of religion with a view toward reconciling the religious impulse with the more expansive and progressive possibilities he saw arising from a modernizing American democracy. The first chapter of A Common Faith is almost entirely devoted to an attempt to distinguish between "religion" as organized institutions, largely explicable through anthropological and historical references; and "the religious," by which he means a sentiment or attitude toward the world, one of openness and a willingness to discover the meaning through whatever available means (1934, 9-10). One could view the world in two possible ways, neither of which rejected the possibility of God per se, but one of which led to the stultifying approach of organized religion, the other which was more sympathetic to the project of democracy and science. He describes these two attitudes thus:

   We begin to select, to choose, and say that some present ways of thinking
   about the unseen powers are better than others; that the reverence shown by
   a free and self-respecting human being is better than the servile obedience
   rendered to an arbitrary power by frightened men; that we should believe
   that control of human destiny is exercised by a wise and loving spirit
   rather than by madcap ghosts or sheer force--when I say, we begin to
   choose, we have entered upon a road that has not yet come to an end. (1934,
   7)

At some points Dewey calls the belief in "madcap ghosts" nothing other than simple superstition, and dismisses it due to the sense of fear it creates, a fear which prevents an adequate approach toward control of seeming uncontrollable forces that inhere in nature, and not some inaccessible "sheer force."(13) Elsewhere, however, Dewey recognizes this to be a form of faith, however imperfect. Calling this "religious faith" (here meaning the faith associated with organized religions), he describes as "a kind of anticipatory vision of things that are now invisible because of our finite and erring nature" (1934, 20). Because this form of faith denigrates human knowledge, it lends itself to control by authorities--and hence the creation of "systematic propositions" and doctrine. Moreover, it sets forth an unprovable ideal end to human activity, an end which however remains outside our ability to achieve. Such "conviction" implies "being conquered, vanquished, in our active nature by an ideal end.... The authority of an ideal over choice and conduct is the authority of an ideal, not a fact, of a truth guaranteed to intellect, not of the status of the one who propounds the truth" (1934, 20-21). Such faith, born of fear and superstition, reminds Dewey of "the old saying, [that] fear created the gods" (1934, 24).

By contrast, Dewey asserts there is a different kind of faith which does not first pose an ideal then formulate doctrines arising from any stipulated or pre-formulated end. He seeks "to reverse the ordinary statement and say that whatever introduces genuine perspective is religious, not that religion is something that introduces it" (1934, 24). If the old faith assumed a hostile nature over which people could exert little control, the new faith assumes a more cooperative nature from which humans can extract support and sustenance. Rather than viewing ourselves as wholly subject to, or as indivisible parts of nature, we should rather assume a kind of "natural piety" which rests on the "just sense of nature as a whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable" (1934, 25). Returning to the definition of Christianity from his earlier essay "Christianity and Democracy," Dewey described this attitude as the preferable form of faith: "Faith in the continued disclosing of truth through directed cooperative human endeavor is more religious in quality than is any faith in completed revelation" (1934, 26).

Since human beings can exercise a choice over how they view the universe and its controlling spirits, it is to be preferred that our faith assume that the universe is benign, controllable, nonarbitrary and malleable. Not only is the object of our faith chosen, but since it is to be chosen because it is subject to human control, in effect all aspects of faith--its content, its object, and human relation to that object--are essentially under human command. Dewey seeks to reject at every turn the notion that faith somehow implies a loss of human control, a surrendering to real or potentially intractable forces, or an admission of human insufficiency. Faith is an affirmation of human potential and the possibility of "growth" in every instance.

Nor does Dewey's faith in human control--in the successful manipulation of the mechanisms that result in human progress--dismiss the doubt that is so central to the scientific project. Noting that his position might be misconstrued with a kind of "agnosticism," Dewey rejects in a final way the notion that we should be occupied at all with any concerns about the existence or non-existence of any supernatural being, or that our lack of knowledge on this front should have any deep significance. "Generalized agnosticism is only a halfway elimination of the supernatural. Its meaning departs when the intellectual outlook is directed wholly to the natural world. When it is so directed, there are plenty of particular matters regarding which we must say we do not know; we only inquire and form hypotheses which future inquiry will confirm or reject" (1934, 86). From our doubts we are able to fashion creations of control--Dewey again notes the invention of the telegraph and locomotive as concrete manifestations of human imagination and creativity--innovation that can only be created from a kind of productive doubt over which human agency and creativity can work to overcome (1934, 49). The doubt remains as a general motivator toward action and scientific analysis, but never about the positive outcome of the scientific exploration inspired by doubt: conundrums and unsolved problems, both in nature and politics, are ultimately subject to beneficent solution arising out of human grappling with doubt.

This is finally Dewey's faith: human ability to overcome all specific problems through "the method of intelligence." Notably, he recognizes it to be a kind of faith--an open-ended one, one devoid of doctrine, but in the final estimation, a faith nonetheless. He writes, "such doubts are the incident of faith in the method of intelligence. They are signs of faith, not of a pale and impotent skepticism. We doubt in order that we may find out, not because some inaccessible supernatural lurks behind whatever we can know. The substantial background of practical faith in ideal ends is positive and outreaching" (1934, 86-87; Dewey's emphasis).

Dewey's attempt to transfer from the domain of religion a concept of faith in the "supernatural" to the secular entities of science and democracy remained consistent throughout his life. Even if that faith was shaken, it was never broken; only by proceeding under the assumption that everything would improve by the application of the "method of intelligence" in a democratic setting, one surmises, was it at all possible for Dewey to accept the seeming doubt that his philosophy insisted on in the first instance. Rejecting "the quest for certainty" required a kind of certainty born of a reconstructed faith that Dewey time and time acknowledged and to which he returned for sustenance against the grim reality of the twentieth century.

Dewey scholar Charles Frankel has observed that "Dewey's trust in science gives a bit of the feeling of listening to a Strauss waltz, a melody from the time when the world was young" (Rockefeller; 1991, 170). This observation seems partly true: Dewey's faith in science--indeed, his unique attempt to link faith to the secular ends of science and democracy--does have about it the restless and perhaps understandable optimism akin to that trust in the future exhibited by one of the favorite books of his youth, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (Ryan; 1995, 43-44). Yet, by 1944, Strauss' waltz is increasingly played out of tune: what allows Dewey to overcome the perceptible obstacles to progress is not empirical evidence to the contrary, but his continued faith in the progress arising from doubt.(14)

A curious paradox arises out of this faith, a paradox that is rarely commented upon either by inheritors of Dewey's position or critics of his brand of skepticism. Admirers of Dewey embrace his skepticism as a healthy rejection of any kind of "foundationalism" in politics, a willingness to throw politics open to the mutual exploration of citizens and experts in the attempt to discover the best possible answer to existing problems at any given time.(15) Few modern commentators, however, acknowledge Dewey's reconstruction of faith as applicable to secular ends. Herein lies the paradox: Dewey, and those like Dewey who embrace "doubt" as the fundamental "anti-foundation" of modern politics, ultimately rest that doubt on a deeper foundation of faith in the capacity of humanity to fundamentally master its environment (natural, social and political) and alter it in appropriate ways that can permit of answers to seemingly intractable problems. The embrace of "doubt," the rejection of "certainty" rests on a curious absence of doubt about human abilities and the potential for politics to resolve all challenges.(16) Of course, no resolution is to be assumed to be final or complete; provisionality remains the watchword of Deweyan skeptics. Nevertheless, the assumption underlying the embrace of doubt is not a kind of even-sided showdown with the problems confronting humanity, but rather a process of continual improvement and mastery--a process with no necessary culmination, but one in which even acts of horrible barbarism are viewed solely as "setbacks," not as intractable manifestations of human depravity.

In that other "faith" expressed through "hope without optimism," belief in an end or aspiration outside of human control and even perception necessarily involved the simultaneous acknowledgment of human fallibility and incompleteness. No activity in the secular sphere--not science, not politics, not worship--can overcome this knowledge of radical uncertainty. Yet a part of this "faithfulness" remains its hopefulness, even amid its attitude of humility. Politics and human community remain realms of possibility, and hold forth the prospect of justice. Reinhold Niebuhr seemed to express the same sentiment when he wrote that "there must always be a religious element in the hope of a just society. Without ultra-rational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible" (1932, 81).(17) Acknowledgement of human insufficiency does not result in a form of desperate resignation, in this view, but a tempered approach to the project of realizing justice within human communities with a mind toward the grim realities of human weakness but elevated by the prospects provided by hope.

Alternatively, Dewey's was an optimistic worldview, a "faith" perhaps as unreasoned as any, but in whose name he believed might be accomplished substantial acts of human transformation. One of his primary objections to "supernaturalism" is precisely Niebuhr's view that justice could only be imperfectly achieved. Dewey rather saw the need to eliminate this belief, even lack of faith based on another faith, and hence liberate ambitions toward fundamental transformation in political and social life:

   The objection to supernaturalism is that it stands in the way of an
   effective realization of the sweep and depth of the implications for
   natural human relations. It stands in the way of using the means that are
   in our power to make radical changes in these relations. (1934, 80)

The object of Dewey's faith--democracy and science wholly under human control--permits of a kind of optimism that a faith acknowledging human infirmity finally resists. Such is the curious "certainty" that Dewey's "doubt" finally permits, and one which he was willing to acknowledge as finally nothing more or less than faith.

Rorty's Comic Frame

Rorty, for one, recognizes and embraces this Deweyan form of faith. For Rorty, like Dewey, our faith can and should be transferred to democratic practice and contingent narratives which articulate our hopes and through which we act.(18) Rather than place our hopes in external or transcendent objects, Rorty urges us to look more toward the potentials and possibilities of human creatures and creations in the present and the future. "The kind of religious faith which seems to me to lie behind the attractions of both utilitarianism and pragmatism is, instead, a faith in the future possibilities of mortal humans, a faith which is hard to distinguish from love for, and hope for, the human community. I call this fuzzy overlap of faith, hope and love `romance'" (1997, 96).

This is especially true of modern societies for which secularism has become increasingly possible due to material amelioration. "Nonreligious forms of romance have flourished--if only in those lucky parts of the world where wealth, leisure, literacy, and democracy have worked together to prolong our lives and fill our libraries. Now the things of the world are, for some people, so welcome that they do not have to look beyond nature to the supernatural and beyond life to an afterlife, but only beyond the human past to the human future" (1997, 97). Echoing Dewey in the first part of A Common Faith, the superstitions of our primitive forebears can be left aside with the modern amenities of literature, television, and the internet to comfort and divert us instead. Our fears can be explained by modern methods, by scientific inquiry, by uncovering or--in Dewey's language--by torturing the nature that hides its answers from us. What fears can't be explained or fully accounted for--bad luck, inevitable unexpected consequences, and finally death--can at least be assuaged by material comforts.

More than mere self-satisfaction, however, Rorty echoes Dewey's confidence that a new era continues to dawn in which accustomed human forms can be transformed by sheer human will alone--that by our own efforts and willingness to believe in the optimistic narratives we might weave, we can bring to fruition any of our most cherished "social hopes." "Modern, literate, secular societies depend on the existence of reasonably concrete, optimistic, and plausible political scenarios, as opposed to scenarios about redemption beyond the grave. To retain social hope, members of such a society need to be able to tell themselves a story about how things might get better, and see no insuperable obstacles to this story's coming true" (1989, 86). Like Dewey after World War II, Rorty admits that "social hope has become harder lately," but elsewhere insists that we must "think of our sense of community as having no foundation except shared hope and the trust created by such sharing" (1991, 33). At base, this hope is as wholly unfounded as the more traditional religious faith that Rorty rejects; it simply presents a more appealing narrative, one that is simultaneously contingent yet optimistic, resting only on the human ability to both will the narrative into existence and will its hopes into reality.

With the unshackling of humanity from diverting narratives that direct us toward an unseen and unreachable transcendent beyond (his attempt to claim Havel's authority notwithstanding), Rorty optimistically expects not merely that we will continue to improve our condition materially and expand our leisure opportunities, but rather that as we throw off older forms of superstition, that humanity will have the opportunity to wholly alter its composition, its very existence. Rorty argues that "it does not greatly matter whether we state our reason to believe--our insistence that some or all finite, mortal humans can become far more than they have yet become...." Such belief "carries us beyond argument, because beyond presently used language" (1997, 97). Our technology in part frees us from the wretchedness of the past; in turn, our imagination--or "romance"--can be unleashed to conceive new forms and wholly new ways of being that cannot even yet be expressed, described, or debated, since language can't do the work of capturing a wholly new human reality. In a frank moment, Rorty admits the appeal of Dewey's attempt to transmute "early religious belief into a belief in the human future, [and] come to think of God as Friend rather than as Judge and Savior." Yet, as an atheist he admits wavering between "romance" and "needy, chastened humility. Sometimes it suffices to trust the human community.... Sometimes it does not" (1997, 98). One can't help wondering, however, given his profound optimism in the human ability to conceive of new forms of life beyond present language and also his confidence in our ability to realize that new yet undefined existence, why we should on the one hand be chastened by humility, or, if humility is called for, why we should conceive of God as our friend? That is, those with the optimism to confidently posit an auspicious future can only tenuously call upon humility to temper that vision; whereas those who would cautiously suggest that nature or God may not be wholly beneficent toward human ambitions can't claim "optimism" or "social hope" as their share. The embrace--or rejection--of optimism in the service of politics finally makes the difference.

(*) I would like to thank the following people for their comments and conversations about various aspects of this essay: Benjamin R. Barber, Wilson Carey McWilliams, Bruce Wilshire, George Kateb, David Fott, Jacob Levy, Jason Scorza, Denise Dutton, and Jonathan Allen. Omissions and errors are due entirely to my own shortcomings, in spite of all their efforts.

Notes

(1) The essay appeared originally under the title "The End of Leninism and History as Comic Frame" (1995). The change in title seems significant enough to mention, below.

(2) Rorty's self-identification with "the party of hope" of course represents the opposite of Shklar's idenification with "the party of memory" (Shklar, 1998). The portrayal of a "party of hope" and a "party of memory" is taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay "The Conservative."

(3) The classic understanding of hope in the Marxist conception remains Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope (1986), especially Ch. 55 in Volume 3 entitled "Karl Marx and Humanity: The Stuff of Hope."

(4) Of course, this speech had not been delivered when Rorty delivered the remarks on which his original essay was based in 1991 (Philosophical Papers Vol. 3, op. cit., 14, note 12). However, the re-publication and rerifling of Rorty's essay in his Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 in 1998 post-dates the publication of Havel's speech on Hope in 1997.

(5) Of the respective sections addressing faith, hope and love respectively in Augustine's Enchiridion, a full 94 deal with faith; merely 3 with hope; and 5 with love. In keeping with what we have seen in the essays by Rorty and Havel, while hope "occupies" a central place in the thought of Augustine's work, it is in fact little discussed, perhaps reflecting its ultimate mystery.

(6) On distinction that both Niebuhr and King draw between hope and optimism, see Lasch, 1991, Ch. 9 ("The Spiritual Discipline Against Resentment") and especially the section entitled "Hope without Optimism" (390-393).

(7) This view of science as a corrective to narrow local prejudice is of course one of the great assumptions of the Enlightenment, animating, for example, Diderot's introduction to the Encyclopedie. While such optimistic expressions would appear to be largely discredited in the late-twentieth-century, they survive less in academia (with the exception of departments in the Natural Sciences), and more in the arena of popular non-fiction, such as in the recent book by Virginia Postrel, The Future and its Enemies (Free Press, 1998). For an exploration of some contemporary expressions of this confidence in the natural sciences, (for example, in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Engineering), see David F. Noble's The Religion of Technology (1998), Ch. 8-11.

(8) In Reconstruction in Philosophy Dewey describes Bacon as "the real founder of modern thought" (1950, 10).

(9) In this regard, Dewey criticizes existing education practices as consisting of "the inculcation of fixed conclusions rather than the development of intelligence as a method of action..." (1950, 252).

(10) Weber here criticizes those who believe that policy is solely the result of applying the correct technique, a view that Dewey himself endorsed. As Weber argued, "the distinctive characteristic of a problem of social policy is indeed the fact that it cannot be resolved merely by technical considerations..." (1949), 55-6.

(11) Dewey's early struggles with his traditional religious upbringing suggests that even the seemingly "traditional" religious writings of the late 1800's were already pervaded with a different understanding of the role that faith and religion were to play in Dewey's philosophy. As Neil Coughlin relates (via a second hand source), "`one evening [in 1879] while [Dewey] sat reading,' he had his one mystical experience. It came by way of `an answer to that question which still worried him: whether he really meant business when he prayed': `It was not a very dramatic mystic experience. There was no vision, not even a definable emotion-just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries were over.... "I've never had any doubts since then, nor any beliefs"'" (1973, 8-9).

(12) In a remarkable passage, Dewey wrote that "the scriptures are uniform in their treatment of skepticism. There is an obligation to know God, and to fail to meet this obligation is not to err intellectually, but to sin morally. Belief is not a privilege but a duty -- `whatsoever is not faith is sin'" (1884, 61).

(13) While Dewey is careful to avoid associating Christianity too closely with more "primitive" religions, he does ask,

   have not some religions, including the most influential forms of
   Christianity, taught that the heart of man is totally corrupt? How could
   the course of religion in its entire sweep not be marked by practices that
   are shameful in their cruelty and lustfulness, and by beliefs that are
   degraded and intellectually incredible? What else than what we find could
   be expected, in the case of people having little knowledge and no secure
   method of knowing; with primitive institutions, and with so little control
   that they lived in a constant state of fear? (1934, 5-6)

(14) See Dewey's 1944 essay "The Democratic Faith and Education" for a late and succinct reaffirmation of the themes found in A Common Faith. In that essay he continues to call for "the conquest of nature" and "human engineering" (277)--two aspects of Dewey's thought that are fashionable in 1898, but become more troubling by 1944.

(15) The best expression of this aspect of Dewey's thought is to be found in The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1927) esp. Ch. 4-6. In addition to Rorty, see also Benjamin R. Barber's "Foundationalism and Democracy" In Democracy and Difference. Ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

(16) John Patrick Diggins is among the few that I have encountered who is attentive to this paradox (1994, Chs. 6-7). Another scholar attuned to this paradox in Dewey's thought is David Fott, who observes that "when [Dewey] says that he is willing to put his faith in scientific method to the test, he mentions an experimental test. If science is to test science, he is obviously begging the question" (1998, 148). (John Dewey: America's Philosopher of Democracy. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Press, 1998), p.148.

(17) Jean Bethke Elshtain suggests a similar appreciation of hope can be found in the work of Hannah Arendt: "Hope, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted, is the human capacity that sustains political being. Should hopelessness triumph, then and only then will it be rightly said that democracy is forlorn" (1995, 118).

(18) In a footnote in the essay "Private Irony and Liberal Hope" Rorty writes, "Nietzsche said, with a sneer, `Democracy is Christianity made natural' (Will to Power, no. 215). Take away the sneer, and he was right" (1989, 87).

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Patrick J. Deneen is Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published on ancient and American political thought, and is the author of The Odyssey of Political Theory (forthcoming).3

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