28 quotes
The partnership between the progressive school and the deepened democracy may help to nourish the childlike intensity of ordinary people as they grow older.
Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998)
In history obedience rarely pays; what pays is defiance.
The Left Alternative (2009)
Philosophy is a concentrated deployment of the transgressing facilities of the mind.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
We can, we must, jumble up the categories of reform and revolution, preferring change that, though perforce piecemeal, may, in its cumulative effect, become revolutionary.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
We cannot form and enhance personality without encouraging strong impulse and strong vision in the individual. Such impulse and such vision must seek a collective voice and a social expression.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
Philosophy is neither a discipline among others nor the master discipline. It is the imagination at war, exploring what the established methods and discourses do not allow to be thought and said.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
A democratic experimentalist will not stand waiting for the next magical moment. Rather than have us be crowned by history, he will insist that we crown ourselves.
What Should Legal Analysis Become? (1996)
The radicals want something of the quality of the hot moments of social life—the periods of accelerated collective mobilization—to pass into the cold moments—the ordinary experience of institutionalized social existence.
False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987)
Imagination over dogma, vulnerability over serenity, aspiration over obligation, comedy over tragedy, hope over experience, prophecy over memory, surprise over repetition, the personal over the impersonal, time over eternity, life over everything.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
The individual, his character, and his fate are for real. Each individual is different from every other individual who has ever lived or who will ever live. A human life is a dramatic and irreversible movement from birth to death, surrounded by mystery and overshadowed by chance.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
[T]he project of the modernist visionary: the search for individual and collective empowerment through the dissolution of the prewritten social script.
False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987)
Obama is probably smarter than Franklin Roosevelt was but lacks the full thrust of Roosevelt's providential self-confidence.
There is no permanent canon of forms of normative argument. Our ways of arguing about ideals are, like our other practices, the mutable products of a specific history and the expressions of our ideas about society and thought.
False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987)
We shall melt down, under the heat of repeated pressure and challenge, all fixed orders of social division and hierarchy, and prevent them from working as the inescapable grid within which our practical and passionate relations to one another must develop.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
We cannot wait until we agree upon the truths of a new social theory to think and act as democratic experimentalists. We must find the ideas our efforts and commitments require, and try to make no assumptions that the facts of social reality and historical experience invalidate.
Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998)
I am a leftist, and, by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary .... Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could do only harm.
Democratic experimentalism sees the core of the good of human liberation in a softening of the tension between two great competing demands upon our vitality and greatnessː the need to engage in group life and the need to diminish the price, in subjugation and loss of self-identity, that we regularly pay for such engagement.
Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998)
A radicalized pragmatism is the operational ideology of the shortening of the distance between context-preserving and context-transforming activities. It is thus a program of permanent revolution—however, a program so conceived that the word “revolution” is robbed of all romantic otherworldliness and reconciled to the everydayness of life as it is.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)
To come out from under the protective wall of role, habit, and frozen perception, a person must throw himself into a situation of heightened exposure. He must put himself at greater risk to the harm that other people may do to him and to the destructive influence that enlarged experience may have on what he had previously regarded as his enduring core of identity.
Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987)
I ask myself in this bookː on what assumptions about the world and the mind, the self and society, do these beliefs—mere translations and developments of a creed that has already taken over the world and set it on fire—continue to make sense? Within what larger combination of ideas can we ground, develop, and correct them?
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)