Edward W. Said's Presidency

In a cogent and compelling opinion piece in the New York Times, "There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America," Jamelle Bouie writes: Outside of certain select phrases ("the dignity of labor"), we don't talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many groups for dignity and respect in public life have been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied. Douglass observed "that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it," the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in [The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass (Bromell, 2021)] "and one's own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others' recognition of it then flows back and confirms one's belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one's confidence in one's own dignity." It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. But Douglass explored this idea in other contexts as well. Writing after the Civil War on women's suffrage, Douglass asked his readers to see the "plain" fact that "women themselves are divested of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government." To "deny woman her vote," Douglass continued, "is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect." A woman, he concluded, "loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves."…. "A democracy," Douglass's work suggests, "is a polity that prizes human dignity," Bromell writes. "It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other's dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights." …. The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time-it inspired his support for women's suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act-and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.

2015

In this history of the development of ideas of honor in Western philosophy, Peter Olsthoorn examines what honor is, how its meaning has changed, and whether it can still be of use. Political and moral philosophers from Cicero to John Stuart Mill thought that a sense of honor and concern for our reputation could help us to determine the proper thing to do, and just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to do it. Today, outside of the military and some other pockets of resistance, the notion of honor has become seriously out of date, while the term itself has almost disappeared from our moral language. Most of us think that people ought to do what is right based on a love for jus­tice rather than from a concern with how we are perceived by others. Wide-ranging and accessible, the book explores the role of honor in not only philosophy but also literature and war to make the case that honor can still play an important role in contemporary life. Review CHOICE Choice Reviews July 2015. Olsthoorn (Netherlands Defense Academy) offers a timely philosophical examination of honor. He traces the intellectual history of honor and its transformation throughout philosophical and political thought in the West. He considers both honor generally and its various manifestations, such as the notion of honor among individuals, groups, and states. The book reveals important insights about comparative concepts such as integrity, respect, and humiliation. Though fewer people in today's world are concerned with honor in their everyday lives than in the past, the topic remains significant and continues to resonate in contemporary times in a variety of ways (as evidenced, for instance, by widespread interest in the phenomenon called "honor killing"). The book features an introduction, a conclusion, and five full-length chapters. Although the background framework is primarily philosophical, the scope of the book is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from political science, literature, military ethics, and related areas. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty. --B. Romaya, University of Massachusetts Lowell

International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2012

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 1999

American Political Science Review, 2022

Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas (1871) has become a touchstone of democratic theory. Commentators of unusual ideological range uphold the book as politically exemplary. This article demonstrates that recent theoretical celebrations of Democratic Vistas are sanitized and incomplete. I expose the antidemocratic side of Democratic Vistas by analyzing (1) its philosophy of death and (2) its politics of race. Whitman framed his immortalist response to death within an imperialist historical teleology. That teleology entailed violations of Native sovereignty, the political inequality of Black Americans, and the projection of both Black and Native peoples' evolutionary extinction. Democratic Vistas emerges from this analysis as both necropolitical and white supremacist. If, as Richard Rorty argues, Vistas models a salutary form of reformist "national pride," then it also illustrates the dangerous susceptibility of such pride to moral innocence and self-deceit.

Voegelinview, 2018

Walt Whitman revealed affinities between coolness in the face of death and the character dispositions and sensibilities most conducive to democracy. Whitman articulated three visions of death in his antebellum work: the first and second sought to allay readers’ mortal anxiety by intimating the self’s material immortality; the third sought to encourage affirmation of death, even in the absence of spiritual or material immortality. All three were intended to promote affirmation of the self and the world as they are, and therefore rejection of the idea that the self and the world are fallen and need supernatural redemption. Affirmation of the self and the world as they are both signals and compounds the generosity of perception and spirit necessary for democratic culture, a culture wherein every individual regards every other individual as beautiful and sublime. While George Kateb, Morton Schoolman, and Jason Frank have helpfully elaborated this idea of democratic culture in Whitman, none has analyzed Whitman’s tripartite poetics of death and explained their crucial role in Whitman’s quest to inspire democratic culture. This essay takes up this task, in the hopes it can enhance our appreciation of the radicalism of Whitman’s democratic theory, a theory which not only acknowledges but also celebrates human finitude.