“Make No Little Plans”

The concluding chapter turns back to wider questions of democracy, taking up some of the challenges associated with the book’s project of democratizing digital environments. In particular, it addresses the authoritarian impulses of architecture—and the corresponding lack of faith in citizens that leads us to cede the work of building to others in the first place—as well as the “proper” role of experts in any project of democratization. It responds to these challenges by reaffirming a democratic faith in citizens’ capacities and highlighting the role of the built environment in nurturing them; by redesigning our digital environments, it argues, we can create conditions for these currently under-realized capacities to flourish. The chapter concludes by outlining strategies through which experts and citizens might collaborate to rebuild digital spaces democratically.

Catholic Cosmopolitanism and the Future of Human Rights

Political Catholicism began in the 20th century by presenting a conception of confessional politics to a secularizing Europe. However, this article reveals the reworking of political Catholicism’s historical commitment to a balance of two powers—an ancient Imperium and Sacerdotium—to justify change to this position. A secular democratic faith became a key insight in political Catholicism in the 20th century, as it wedded human rights to an evolving cosmopolitan Catholicism and underlined the growth of Christian democracy. This article argues that the thesis of Christian democracy held a central post-war motif that there existed a prisca theologia or a philosophia perennis, semblances of a natural law, in secular modernity that could reshape the social compact of the modern project of democracy. However, as the Cold War ended, human rights became more secularized in keeping with trends across Europe. The relationship between political Catholicism and human rights reached a turning point, and this article asks if a cosmopolitan political Catholicism still interprets human rights as central to its embrace of the modern world.

Civility and Civil Religion before and after the French Revolution: Religious and Secular Rituals in Hume and Tocqueville

In his critique of religion, Hume envisages forms of religious ritual disconnected from the superstitious “neurotic” mindset; he considers simple rituals fostering moderation. In this paper, I claim that one can profitably interpret Hume’s obsession with secular rituals, such as French highly ceremonial manners, in the sense of anxiety-soothing institutions that bind citizenry without the appeal to a civil religion, properly speaking. Let us call this path the Old Regime’s civil ritualism”. Overall, Tocqueville conceives rituals in a Humean spirit, as existential anxiety-soothing institutions. Moving beyond the Humean line of thought, he focuses on the ambiguous role of religious rituals in the context of democratic faith and the Christian civil religion that he deems appropriate for the US. Yet, he also detects novel forms of superstition firmly embedded in secular, democratic faith.