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"A Monkish Kind of Virtue"? For and Against HumilityUniversity of Utah Over the past several decades, scholars of liberal and democratic theory have shown a heightened 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 essay, I critically address this lacuna and offer a defense of a particular form of humility, what I call democratic humility. After considering a range of moral and political objections to the concept of humility, I provide an account that seeks to address some of these long-standing difficulties 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 ethical and cultural pluralism.
Key Words: humility virtue democracy citizenship pluralism attentiveness
Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6,
840-868 (2005) This article has been cited by other articles:
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