Michael Hogue's American Immanence draws from some of the fundamental features of American philosophy: philosophy is not alienated from life, but rather, part and parcel of the structure of our experiences, a way of living. His notion of “resilient democracy” is particularly representative of this tradition of thought. Resilient democracy is, first of all, an ethos, grounded in “the collective experience of uncertainty and animated by the living desire to bring about a more beautiful world.”2 This ethos is an associational, relational one, and it is democratic because, for Hogue, it must be “empathetic, emancipatory, and equitable,” assuming that each member of the association can be enriched by other members” (AI, 172–73). Vital to this democratic ethos is its anti-foundational politics; we start not with an immutable reality, but rather with the vulnerable reality of our actual, political, experiences (AI, 176). We start with where we are, not...
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