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Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict

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In 1858, challenger Abraham Lincoln debated incumbent Stephen Douglas seven times in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. More used to be at stake than slavery in those debates. In Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, John Burt contends that the very legitimacy of democratic governance used to be on the line. In a United States stubbornly divided over ethical issues, the overarching question posed by the Lincoln-Douglas debates has not lost its urgency: Can a liberal political system be used to mediate moral disputes? And if it cannot, is violence inevitable?

As they campaigned against each other, both Lincoln and Douglas struggled with how to behave when an ethical conflict as profound as the one over slavery strained the commitment upon which democracy depends―namely, to rule by both consent and principle. This commitment isn’t easily met, because what moral sense demands and what it is in a position to persuade others to consent to aren’t all the time the same. Whilst Lincoln in the long run have shyed away from a politics of morality detached from consent, and Douglas have shyed away from a politics of expediency devoid of morality, neither found a way for liberalism to mediate the conflict of slavery.

That some disputes gave the impression to lie beyond the horizon of deal-making and persuasion and could be settled only by violence revealed democracy’s limitations. Burt argues that the unresolvable ironies at the center of liberal politics led Lincoln to discover liberalism’s tragic dimension―and in the long run led to war. Burt’s conclusions demand reevaluations of Lincoln and Douglas, the Civil War, and democracy itself.

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