Democracy and the Humanities

Those who seek to rule over others recognize the humanities’ subversive quality. Democracy, Dewey notes, has always been allied with humanism. The conventional argument for the humanities is that they teach critical thinking and empathy. But this casts the humanities as merely instrumental when their role is foundational. Self-governance presupposes that the decisions we make matter. If events were the product of fate, divine plan, or the natural order of things, there would be no point to democracy. It is only with the recognition of contingency that human agency and political self-governance become imaginable. The humanistic disciplines reveal the situated, but uncertain nature of human action; they serve as a repository of past experience; and they emphasize the possibility and promise of democratic agency.