Coming Together: James Davison Hunter Wins the 2024 Palmer Prize

James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis (Yale University Press 2024), winner of Chicago-Kent College of Law’s 2024 Roy C. Palmer Prize on Democracy, Civil Liberties, and the Rule of Law, is written on the premise that American democracy is undoubtedly in peril. Where Hunter sees room for disagreement is in the source of the conflict, and how to go about fixing it.

Hunter, the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, introduced the concept of “culture wars” 30 years ago, and he continues to explore how cultural divides are affecting American democracy—while offering places where citizens can find common ground.

“Solidarity is not just about the will to come together to do the work of democratic politics,” Hunter writes. “It is about the cultural preconditions and the normative sources that make coming together possible in the first place.”

While many lament the ever-growing partisanship in American politics, Hunter offers readers a reason to hope.

“My argument is that all partisans are drawing—albeit differently—from the same cultural sources in the never-ending contest over position,” he writes. “How could they not?”

Hunter will deliver the 2024 Palmer Prize lecture during a visit to Chicago-Kent’s Conviser Law Center on April 2, 2025, from 3–4 p.m. The event is free, but prior registration is required.

The Chicago-Kent/Roy C. Palmer Prize on Democracy, Civil Liberties, and the Rule of Law was established in spring 2007 by alumnus Roy C. Palmer ’62 and his wife, Susan M. Palmer, to honor a work of scholarship that explores threats to, or supports of, the liberal democratic constitutional order. The $10,000 prize is designed to encourage and reward public debate among scholars on current issues affecting the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of governments throughout the world.