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1994 Spitz Prize Winner

The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture
by George Kateb

George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Cornell University Press, 1992.

Kateb's book is the 1994 winner of the Spitz Prize--the sixth book on democratic theory to be honored by the CSPT. Inner Ocean is a fresh and exciting work, charged with moral passion, informed by deep learning, and written with grace and subtlety. On the premise that America "is not without indigenous resources," the book draws upon Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman to show us how a rights-centered democratic constitutionalism "makes possible what goes beyond it." This "beyond" is democratic individualism as "a distinctively democratic way of being" in a democratic culture sustained by "living the life of equal rights." A democratic culture requires the profane world of electioneering and conflicting self-interest even as it intimates a "democratic ecstasy" that one achieves through "an awareness that each individual owes to all persons as equal individuals, and to all creatures and things just for being what they are."

All members of the committee repeatedly argued with the book and, in the engagement, were compelled to rethink our understanding of the classic texts in political philosophy and our readings of contemporary philosophy and democratic theory. Inner Ocean combines in abundance the virtues of good teaching--provocative, playful, many-sided--with the merits of fine scholarship--wide reading, close attention to text and context, and respect for the work of others. This is a work of genuinely arresting and original intelligence.