“A Monkish Kind of Virtue”? For and Against Humility

Abstract

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.