In a synthesis of separate studies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Martin Luther and John Calvin, Martin Heidegger, and Leo Strauss, Hancock (Brigham Young Univ.) critiques "the spiritual-intellectual framework of modern democracy." His thesis is that modern democracy rests on the unsustainable modern "illusion of the simple superiority of 'theory' to 'practice'" and that "the circulation of meaning between these poles must be accepted and assumed into the very self-understanding of reason." Though critiques of democratic theory abound, Hancock holds that in the postmodern age, the analysis and resolution by Tocqueville is superior to that of Heidegger, Strauss, and contemporary philosophers such as John Rawls and Charles Taylor. The "responsibility of reason" must be a political responsibility, deeply informed by inherited values and practices that sustain individual and social flourishing while offering a critical standpoint from which to question them. Humility in the face of what cannot be known is part of this responsibility....Recommended.
CHOICE
Hancock suggests that a humanly responsible reason depends on a renewed respect for Christian morality instead of a continued pursuit of an ultimately destructive autonomy. He echoes (knowingly or unknowingly) a paradoxical theme emphasized by the two most recent popes: Reason achieves its full stature—judging the goodness of the ends we pursue, not merely calculating the means to achieve whatever we happen to want—only when it is united with faith. While those captivated by the secular rationalism that dominates so much of our elite culture will surely resist Hancock’s conclusion, his valuable book shows the only way to overcome democratic modernity’s loss of confidence in moral reason.
First Things
For anyone seriously committed to assessing the stakes of contemporary Mormon theology, Hancock's recent book, The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age, is essential reading. . . .In the end, Hancock has productively and successively provided an account of the basic stakes of what remains the central question of Western thought.
BYU Studies Quarterly
Ralph C. Hancock has written a book that combines thinking at the highest level with deep moral seriousness and an admirable attentiveness to the requirements of political responsibility. His theme is the relationship between theory and practice, politics and philosophy, a subject that he explores with rare depth. He sets out to restore a conception of reason that is truly open to the transcendent purposes and norms that provide reason’s compass, and thus avoids the illusion that philosophy is a radically 'autonomous' enterprise, even as it never forgets its debts to ordinary experience and decent politics.
Daniel J. Mahoney, Assumption College Ralph C. Hancock has written a magisterial work of prodigious scholarship, sharp synthesis, and elegance which concentrates on the responsibility of reason in relation to both revealed theology and political life. His work identifies the liberal democratic dilemmas of the modern theological-political problem in Calvin and Tocqueville, the contrasting insights of Maimonides, the Kalam, and Aquinas. Hancock provides us with an elegant and compelling case for the view that liberal democracies must confront the truths of philosophy and theology and that without these two truths apprehended in tension, the vitality of liberal democracy is greatly diminished.
Kenneth L. Deutsch, State University of New York at Geneseo