Civic Humanism

Abstract

Brought up as many modern critics have been on a highly technical vocabulary derived from linguistics, sociology and/or philosophy, we might find humanistic enquiry disarmingly lucid and thus simplified. There is a wealth of difference, however, between a sense of humanistic emphases (on human agency, moral responsibility, conscious critical choice and answerability) that fights shy of ‘Theory’ and one that embraces it as a means rather than an end. For what set of humanist goals might we note différence or dialectical materialism or patriarchal entrapment? Similarly, it is still a matter of judgement to winnow away adventitious formative influences from more lasting and valuable ones, the commercially opportunistic, say, from the genuinely alternative gestures of contestation or negotiation. We are not prey to everything that intervenes between a text and our subsequent understanding of it, in some prison-house of artistic, social or intellectual history. We can be at the same time well-read in Theory and yet not be overwhelmed by it. And, as the Introduction to this volume attests, we can make humanism itself more theoretically robust, without codifying it to the point where it becomes static and unresponsive to changing circumstances.