INTRODUCTIONScherer uses the motif of saintliness, a term that must first be historically and contex-
tually situated, then analyzed and formalized in rigorous ways, to highlight aspects of
the ‘‘religious’’ elements and dynamics in post-Enlightenment or post-secular thought.
Drawing on the tradition of spiritual exercises (as theorized by Pierre Hadot and Arnold
Davidson) and on the ideal of moral perfectionism (a term coined by Stanley Cavell), he
focuses on how ways of life, modes of acknowledgment, and forms of loyalty enable and
structure the experience of the political in a fashion that interpretations of utilitarianism,
political liberalism, communicative rationality, and rational choice cannot, for conceptual
reasons, appreciate. He compellingly argues that motifs such as saintliness—and, in addi-
tion, the miraculous, faith in shared concepts, and belief in the world—form the very
heart and fabric of political experience.
Democratic Republicanism, Secularism, and Beyond
Can the concept of political theology be retrieved within the wider tradition of ‘‘moral
perfectionism,’’ of imagining philosophy as a way of life? In his contribution, Bhrigupati
Singh examines this strand of thought, which runs from Emerson and Thoreau not only
to Stanley Cavell, but via Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche to Deleuze, and also to Gan-
dhi, who invokes Emerson and Thoreau as intellectual sources of inspiration. Stating the
case against persistent cynicism and intellectual despair, Singh claims that the current
international scene, determined by 9/11 and ongoing globalization, requires philosophy
to speak otherwise than with wholesale condemnations of the Enlightenment or a ‘‘bellig-
erent, stupid, and white America.’’ He asks, ‘‘what would it be like to demand intelligence,
to show that there is evidence of it in this milieu, that thinking has been possible here?’’
Or, again: ‘‘In what ways has America expressed itself philosophically?’’ (p. 367). Cavell
and via him Emerson suggest an alternative route in which the ‘‘distrust of the present or
actual state within which one finds oneself,’’ that is to say, of culture and its institutions,
is less cause for exhaustion, let alone ‘‘withdrawal,’’ than for ‘‘a turning toward the even-
tual, in the task of attempting to sense the new, to create a philosophy of the future’’
(p. 369).
Singh recognizes this disposition in Gandhi’s ‘‘anticolonial manifesto’’Hind Swaraj
(Home Rule for India), as well as in his autobiographyMy Experiments with Truth. Here,
he notes, Gandhi establishes an intrinsic link between the Emersonian ‘‘impulse to the
perfectibility of the self ’’ and ‘‘a call for the transformation of the world as a whole, not
a lament for a world gone by but a summons to one still to be borne.’’ Such hopes,
mediated for Gandhi by Thoreau’s ‘‘Civil Disobedience,’’ circumvent simple oppositions,
such as that between individualism and communitarianism. Singh finds their echo in the
meetings of the World Social Forum, which has followed in the footsteps of the antiglobal-
ization movement. Gandhi’s way of ‘‘reinhabiting,’’ more than simply reformulating or
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