Author's Keywords: Tocqueville, Emerson, Shklar, William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, individualism	Convention All Academic Convention makes running your annual conference simple and cost effective. It is your online solution for abstract management, peer review, and scheduling for your annual meeting or convention. Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: American Political Science Association URL: http://www.apsanet.org
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Dutton, Denise. "Between Hubris and Humility: Considerations on Cynicism as a Form of Democratic Faith" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, Aug 27, 2003 <Not Available>. 2009-05-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p62942_index.html>

Dutton, D. , 2003-08-27 "Between Hubris and Humility: Considerations on Cynicism as a Form of Democratic Faith" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia, PA Online <.PDF>. 2009-05-26 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p62942_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Review Method: Peer Reviewed Abstract: In her book, After Utopia, Judith Shklar argues that “since we know too little to feel justified in solid despair and we know too much to fall into even the slightest utopianism, a reasoned skepticism is the sanest attitude for the present.” Almost 50 years later, her defense of a reasoned skepticism remains relevant. Indeed it is hard to imagine any alternative attitude by which liberal democracy might withstand the fatalism, alienation and despair that corrupt our political actions and impoverish our moral commitments, without indulging the illusions of grandeur and ambitions of idealism that tempt us to pursue (and be disappointed in) utopian projects. And yet at the same time, however reasonable this skeptical stance is, it regularly comes under attack (or is experienced) as being inadequate to the task of defending and cultivating the liberal democratic commitments. How can reasoned skepticism give us enough to live by? What positive commitment or aspiration is affirmed by emphasizing the “uncertainty as to what we ought to do [and] a distrust of the value of what we do”? What remains worthy of our protracted efforts and what significance do those efforts retain, when we adopt the skeptical stance? Motivated by these concerns, I wish to defend Shklar’s reasoned skepticism by embellishing it a bit, by considering the democratic commitments such a doubting and distrusting stance possesses and practices. To do this, I consider how democratic commitments encourage a kind of cynicism that chafes at both the hubris of democratic idealism and the humility of democratic resignation in order to examine how Shklar’s reasoned skepticism might be transformed into a positive, even passionate, commitment to democratic ideals that is expressed in a way that guards against both the danger of dogmatism and despondency.

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