Liberalism and pluralism: the politics of e pluribus unum

Liberalism and Pluralism

Also by Craig L. Carr THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF SAMUEL PUFENDORF (editor) (trans. Michael J. Seidler) ON FAIRNESS THE LIBERAL POLITY: An Inquiry into the Logic of Civil Association POLITY: Political Culture and the Nature of Politics

Liberalism and Pluralism The Politics of E pluribus unum

Craig L. Carr

liberalism and pluralism Copyright © Craig L. Carr, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62309–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carr, Craig L., 1948– Liberalism and pluralism : the politics of e pluribus unum / Craig L. Carr. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–62309–5 (alk. paper) 1. Liberalism—Philosophy. 2. Pluralism—Philosophy. 3. Civil society. 4. Political ethics. 5. Social justice. I. Title. JC574.C39 2010 320.51—dc22 2009024983 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: March 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Practical Liberalism Civil Unity and Social Diversity: The Politics of E pluribus unum

ix 1 5 12

1 Politics, Morality, and Pluralism Liberal Morality and Political Legitimacy Political Legitimacy and Social Justice Williams’s Concept of the Political Legitimacy, Stability, and Morality

17 18 21 28 31

2 The Politics of Morality A Moral Point of View Manners and Morality Morality and Conflict Moral Conflict and Political Theory

37 38 43 48 52

3 The Morality of Politics Feminism and Multiculturalism A Defense of Culture Politics and Normative Conflict The Political as Moral Viewpoint Morality and Politics: A Review

55 57 61 64 68 71

4 Political Unity and Pluralism The Liberal Archipelago Loose Linkage and Political Legitimacy Political Unity and the Body Politic Social Justice and Political Unity The Bonds of Civility

77 80 83 87 92 97

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5 Nationhood and the Liberal Polity The Nature of Nationhood Pluralism and Nationalism Civic Nationalism and Social Justice Deliberative Democracy and the Liberal Polity

101 104 111 119 124

6 Liberalism and Democracy Democracy and Deliberative Discourse The Terms of Deliberative Discourse Normative Discourse and Political Legitimacy Deliberative Democracy and Intragroup Politics Group Autonomy and Intergroup Discourse

129 132 136 139 144 150

7 Politics, History, and Reason Principle and Justice in the Liberal Polity Liberal Institutions and Liberal Ideals Stopping History Rationalism and Politics

155 158 162 167 170

Notes

177

Index

197

Acknowledgments

Many hands played a role in the development of this work, and it is a considerable pleasure to acknowledge my debt to them all. My thoughts on liberalism have developed over the years in friendly conversation with my friends and colleagues Gary Scott and Mike Philips. Birol Yesilada and Dave Kinsella, also friends and colleagues, have lent a kindly ear to my ruminations on liberalism and offered provocative and helpful suggestions and comments along the way. Ron Tammen has managed to shape a hospitable and supportable work environment out of the otherwise strange mix of intellectual concerns that shape the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State, and for this I am most grateful to him. I have also enjoyed the support and assistance of an unusually large number of most able graduate students with an interest in political theory. Chris Cooney, David Robinson, and Jeff Wade proved to be invaluable assistants, whose efforts I can hardly begin to repay. The sixth chapter of this work was the target of scrutiny and criticism in a graduate seminar on democracy and pluralism. I want to thank Lisa Johnson, Jesse Anderson, Robin Barklis, David Robinson, and Johnathan Beal for their many helpful comments on this part of the work. Finally, a special acknowledgment is due to Robin Barklis and David Robinson whose own work paralleled mine and from whom I learned much in the process of putting this project together.

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Introduction Liberalism, understood for the moment as a tradition of political discourse, is a historical artifact of philosophical design that once offered western societies a theoretical blueprint for realizing a stable and just civil arrangement. There is, in one sense, nothing very remarkable about this; philosophical spirits from Plato forward have often supposed that reasoned insight and theoretical inquiry can do something, and perhaps a great deal, to point humankind toward the type of civil order most suited to it. For those Enlightenment philosophers whose thoughts began to craft what we now recognize as the liberal tradition, this meant imagining a civil arrangement, premised upon the twin ideals of liberty and equality, where disparate and conflicting religious communities could coexist in the confidence that the coercive might of the state would not be used to impose one group’s preferred vision of the good on other groups whose members subscribed to an alternative vision. Even after Kant had managed to wean his posterity off a lingering reliance on moral teleology, the goal of classical liberalism remained the theorizing of a civil peace built upon an antecedent moral law whose strictures were understood to be authoritative for all persons. Reason, suitably focused on moral matters, would thus guide the construction of a vision of a just—and therefore stable and lasting—political order. Faith in reason, and in the corresponding ability of philosophy to discern its immutable dictates, thus drove the liberal response to social conflict and political unrest, and in large measure this remains the case to this day. Political thinking, according to this standard liberal view, belonged to, and for many continues to belong to, the realm of moral philosophy. That liberalism has become the dominant cultural influence in most western states hardly needs mention, and while it has arguably never made completely good on its promise of civil peace and social justice, there is little doubt that liberalism has contributed to the domestic peace and social tranquility that many of these states currently enjoy. Nonetheless, the liberal strategy for the instantiation of peace and good order is presently viewed by some theorists as dubious at best and

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by a small but vocal collection of philosophical spirits as completely misbegotten and confused. These critics think the liberal faith in reason is simply misguided; consequently, they doubt that liberal theorists can vindicate their faith in an immutable moral law holding for all persons.1 For others, including myself, the efforts of philosophers (working within the traditional view of liberalism) to articulate objective and eternal moral verities that might serve as the foundation for civil association are simply beside the point. Even if they are successful according to their own philosophical standards, these efforts are unlikely to move those who happen to hold sincerely and tenaciously to any of the numerous moral, religious, and/or ideological worldviews that constitute alternatives to the liberal vision.2 No matter how forcefully liberal thinkers insist upon their preferred moral viewpoint, there is little reason to think they can convince others, whose worldviews are shaped by different and perhaps incommensurable ontologies and normative frameworks, to abandon their beliefs and join the liberal family. Largely because of its continued reliance upon classical liberal strategy, contemporary liberalism now faces a substantial and important theoretical challenge. Liberal thinkers must confront problems driven by what I will call the fact of pluralism. Many modern western states powerfully influenced by the liberal tradition contain within their borders any number of non-liberal or illiberal groups whose ways and beliefs place them in conflict with the liberal culture that typically surrounds them. The depth of this normative difference and ontological diversity means quite simply that these non-liberal groups are unresponsive to and untouched by the moral arguments to which liberals invariably recur in order to justify the police powers of the state and defend liberal visions of political authority. Consequently, if the goal of liberalism remains, as I certainly think it should, the cultivation of a stable and just civil arrangement, the liberal strategy for realizing this end is no longer (if it ever was) suitable to the task. The perhaps rather pretentious liberal commitment to a specific moral vision, once considered the solution to the problem of civil conflict, is now a principal contributor to the problem. Seen from the outside (and perhaps from inside as well) liberalism, in both theory and practice, appears as a theory of the good, and problems emerge when the coercive might of the state is used to impose a liberal way of life on those who practice ways, hold convictions, and adhere to norms different from and inconsistent with liberal dogma. The moral comprehensiveness that once offered classical liberals a degree of theoretical solace is simply belied by the fact of pluralism.

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A suitable appreciation for the problem the fact of pluralism poses for contemporary liberal thinkers will invariably leave these thinkers facing some tough political choices. If they remain wedded to the traditional liberal game plan, they can succeed in achieving the desired end of domestic tranquility only by beating the non-liberal and illiberal elements of the polity into line—or in the more conciliatory language preferred by some liberals, by insisting on group assimilation into the mainstream of liberal political culture. Yet this choice can be made only at the considerable risk of jeopardizing the very domestic tranquility liberals presumably hope to achieve, for the more the dominant liberal culture attempts to impose its ways and beliefs on the non-liberal, the more the latter is likely to oppose the imposition. The result may lead to a growth in the type of intergroup conflict that classical liberals had hoped to overcome. Moreover, the success of this option is rendered dubious by certain demographic, cultural, and theoretical factors that are difficult, if not impossible, for the liberal state to control. For one thing, even states with impeccable liberal pedigrees, like the United States, contain non-liberal satellite communities that continue to orbit around the dominant liberal culture and seem impervious to assimilationist efforts.3 By enclaving themselves, these groups have proven to be both quite resilient and quite impervious to liberal pressures and influences. While they often remain largely invisible, they are also a constant source of political conflicts and legal disputes that defy evident legal or political remedies and continue to gnaw at the social fabric. If the conflicts and disputes generated by these groups have yet to prove a serious threat to civil peace and good order, there is little reason to think that they will not do so at some point in the future. For another thing, many if not all of those states with liberal pedigrees are also immigrant states with new ethnic, cultural, and religious communities entering the land and bringing their own worldviews with them. If assimilation has been a time-honored tradition for immigrants to the United States, for example, it has only rarely involved the complete abandonment of group ways and beliefs, and there is no particular reason to suppose that new immigrant groups will want to embrace the thorough assimilation that some Americans apparently expect of them.4 The recent arrival of Asian and Hispanic communities in the United States has brought about a curious twist on the old assimilationist motif, for the dominant culture has increasingly recognized the need to adjust to them and to amend its assimilationist expectations to be more accommodating. But this merely raises an important question about how to mediate emergent conflicts between the expectations of the dominant culture and the non-liberal practices of new arrivals.5

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Finally, liberal culture is, in some ways, its own worst enemy. It allows, perhaps even encourages, individuals to forge their lives for themselves and to pursue new and creative lifestyles—to author their own lives as they wish, so to speak. But this would also seem to permit individuals to question the very premises of liberal culture that assimilationists would like to see cultivated throughout society. When many of America’s youth in the sixties and seventies abandoned traditional lifestyles in favor of the commune and in allegiance to any number of self-proclaimed gurus, the cult became a social threat to be reckoned with. All this brought into view a logical incoherence embedded within liberal individualism. The hostility with which the dominant culture greeted the cult phenomenon suggests, at least in the United States, that individuals in liberal polities are at liberty to forge their lives for themselves as long as the lives they forge are acceptable to the dominant liberal culture. The promise offered by such a liberalism is belied by liberal practice, and the fact that promise seems inevitably to be compromised by practice introduces a source of ongoing conflict in liberal society.6 As a result of these three factors, then, there is reason to think that pluralism is going to be an ongoing issue in states whose dominant culture is fixed by the liberal tradition, and this makes the choice of trying to beat the non-liberals in the state into line even less attractive. Another strategy liberals might adopt for dealing with the problems posed by the fact of pluralism involves a reexamination of liberalism itself with an eye toward refashioning liberal theory to make it more hospitable to or more accommodating of normative difference and ontological diversity. The multicultural movement in the United States and elsewhere has inspired any number of liberal thinkers to consider this option. If we cannot browbeat non-liberals into joining the liberal family, perhaps we can enlarge liberalism to accommodate them. But while thinkers who have elected to make this choice may have given birth to a more capacious liberalism, they have hardly resolved the problem. While many liberal thinkers have worked to qualify their liberal morality to accommodate ethnic, cultural, religious, and ideological diversity, there is invariably some moral baseline that limits and restricts their accommodationist ends. Perhaps it is polygamy, perhaps female genital mutilation, or perhaps using Peyote during religious practice that elevates liberal disgust to the breaking point, but something is likely to do so.7 As William Galston has emphasized on more than one occasion, there can be “no free exercise for Aztecs.”8 The free exercise of religion, it seems, is just fine as long as it doesn’t involve human sacrifice or anything else anathema to liberal sentiments. And once we reach the breaking point, the trouble—that is to say, the conflict—begins again. While some liberal thinkers might find solace in the attempt to expand liberalism in an effort to accommodate

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the fact of pluralism, others might find in all this a stark account of how unaccommodating a liberalism that sticks to its moral guns really turns out to be. If this is right, then this choice also fails to address adequately the problem that the fact of pluralism poses for contemporary liberalism. This brings me to a third possible strategy liberals might adopt in response to the fact of pluralism. This strategy involves a rededication to the liberal goal of social peace and political stability but with the corresponding admission that the traditional liberal means for achieving this end is now inappropriate for the task at hand. As a first step, we might question and reconsider traditional liberal beliefs about the relation of morality to politics. While liberals who have come to believe that a particular moral perspective is central to liberalism will think this might signal the death of liberalism, such a conclusion follows only if the traditional liberal method of reasoning is taken to be definitive of liberalism and the historic liberal end of civil peace only a contingent feature of the tradition. There is, however, little practical reason to see things this way, and viewed in less dogmatic terms, it might serve only to get things backwards. It may be more appropriate to prefer a view holding that the heart of liberalism is given by its historic end, and considering the liberal means of argument (involving the insistence upon a particular moral vision) to be a contingent feature of the liberal project that should be abandoned when it can no longer realize the end it was once designed to serve. Elsewhere I have outlined the basic components of a liberalism premised on this third strategy and offered some reasons intended to suggest both that this liberalism can inspire a form of civil association that all groups living in a pluralist social setting, no matter how illiberal they might be, could reasonably accept and that these groups should in fact do so.9 My purpose in what follows is to develop this view of liberalism further by exploring how such a liberalism might embrace pluralism and still (and perhaps more importantly) weave the disparate groups existing under the conditions imagined by the fact of pluralism into a unified polity. The goal, of course, is to imagine in theory a stable and just civil order, the original end of classical liberalism, but achieving this goal even in theory involves a form of political alchemy—the demonstration of how civil unity is possible in the face of tremendous ethnic, cultural, religious, and ideological diversity. This work discusses how this might be done and in the process offers some reason to think that it can be done. Practical Liberalism A liberalism that takes the fact of pluralism seriously and attempts to imagine a polity capable of weaving tremendous normative and

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ontological diversity into a coherent civil arrangement will inevitably have several features that distinguish it from its more familiar cousins. For one thing, such a liberalism must abandon the effort to identify some underlying moral super-value that guides and informs the normative focus of the polity. This does not mean that this liberalism must forsake normative convergence on some basic standard of social justice. It means, rather, that the normative standard(s) required to galvanize disparate groups into a unified polity cannot be derived from antecedent moral considerations. This is a necessary aspect of taking the fact of pluralism seriously. The traditional liberal conviction that politics is derivative of morality must be reversed. It follows, of course, that civil peace and social order are to be regarded as practical needs rather than moral necessities. Similarly, this liberalism should be considered practical in the sense that it avoids any appeal to moral principle for the normative inspiration to converge upon the desirability of civil association. Instead, the logic that should incline group members to recognize the need to embrace civil association is driven by practical and prudential concerns. This introduces the primary (though not the only) reason why it seems appropriate to label a liberalism that takes seriously the fact of pluralism as practical liberalism. A second key feature of practical liberalism follows rather straightforwardly from the first. If prudential reasons are used to indicate why groups would be wise to join together in civil union, the resultant civil arrangement should be understood in terms of a modus vivendi.10 Groups enter such an arrangement because they understand that it is in their best interest to do so, and similarly, they will therefore remain committed to such an arrangement if, and only if, they continue to believe (and with good reason) that it is in their continued interest to do so. More than one critic has thought this to be a weakness that makes modus vivendi arrangements poor models for civil association. If power balances change with time, some groups may find it in their best interest to defect from the arrangement and, if they believe themselves powerful enough, to impose their will on their neighbors.11 So modus vivendi arrangements seem on their face to be inherently unstable. This problem, however, can be addressed by noticing a third feature of practical liberalism. Because it takes the fact of pluralism seriously, practical liberalism shifts theoretical focus from the individual to the group. Intergroup conflict is hardly the only sort of politically salient conflict present in pluralist polities of course, but given the realities of normative and ontological difference, a difference that displays itself in terms of intergroup conflict, it tends to be the most intractable and divisive conflict in need of some practical resolution. The individualism characteristic

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of more traditional moralized versions of liberalism, something I will call moral liberalism to distinguish it from the practical liberalism of concern here, is largely the result of taking persons as the primary moral unit whose rights and interests are to be protected and promoted by means of civil association. Practical liberalism has no quarrel with the moral visions of the individual that have traditionally inspired liberal theorizing, but it has neither a use nor a need for them either.12 Its focus instead is on a form of civil order and social peace between groups, and it regards the moralities (or normative schemes) embraced by different groups as a key source of the social conflict to be managed by recourse to civil association. Accordingly, practical liberalism employs a modest form of group sociology. While we might concede that some individuals can manage to go their own way and live by standards they have imagined for themselves, practical liberalism supposes that many people in the polity live within more basic and communal groups, encompassing groups as Avishai Margalit has called them, from which they draw an ontological understanding of things and a set of normative convictions about things.13 But such groups are not prisons; individuals, independently or in the company of others, can and often do break from their primary encompassing group(s) and form new ones. Group life, then, is best understood as dynamic and not static. Memberships rise and fall for any number of reasons, and the relative strength of a given group vis-à-vis other groups invariably changes with time and uncontrollable circumstance. Machiavelli’s fortuna continues to work its will in the social world, and group members need to appreciate what I have called the fact of flux—the fact that new groups may be born, older groups may die, and all groups invariably change with time. This builds a telling uncertainty into the modus vivendi arrangement, which, when fully understood, lends prudential weight to the prospects for its enduring stability.14 A prudentially guided choice in favor of civil union will work, however, only if the benefit gained from civil association by the groups present in the social setting is recognized as preferable to the alternative of living with the intergroup conflict and the social uncertainty, potential hostility, and general chaos that would likely exist without it. Putting the matter this way, of course, loads the rational choice problem in favor of civil association. Still, this is not a bad way to put the matter. If the alternatives are anarchy (or the threat of anarchy) with ongoing intergroup warfare, or oppression (or the threat of oppression) with more powerful groups dominating less powerful groups (and hence intermittent intergroup warfare brought about by shifts in the balance of power), the third option of civil association premised upon a modus vivendi should seem attractive

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indeed. Both anarchy and oppression threaten the ability of group members to live their lives as they wish, to practice their ways without external interference, to pursue their vision(s) of the good in the manner they deem appropriate, and to control their own affairs according to their own standards, values, and beliefs. In short, groups can be expected to value the freedom that enables them to function autonomously or as self-governing units. If this is the freedom groups can be expected to treasure, and if it is threatened by conditions of anarchy or oppression, the logic of civil association can be easily presented in neo-Hobbesian form. To preserve their desired freedom, groups need to abandon the freedom to coercively interfere with the autonomous operations of outgroups, a point that can be presented in principled form. The resultant principle may be formulated as follows: The members of each group present in the polity must be accorded a maximum amount of freedom to live according to their worldview and pursue the ideals associated with their moral vision of the human good compatible with the freedom necessary to assure that the members of all other groups in the polity can do so as well.

At the risk of sounding rather pompous, I will call this the liberal principle throughout the remainder of the discussion. Similarly, I will refer to the theoretical effort to establish the legitimacy of the polity by making recourse to a galvanizing principle of this sort as the pursuit of a politics of principle. No doubt those theorists who dislike reducing politics to the seemingly antiseptic and legalistic standard of galvanizing principles will wince at all this. This for some will seem like just another attempt, common in liberal theorizing, to hold politics hostage to theoretical principles. I will address these concerns in the final chapter; at present it should suffice to note that practical liberalism is not hostile to principled forms of civil association. It rejects the attempt to derive appropriate political principles from antecedent moral standards, but it affirms the common liberal view that political association is fundamentally a principled affair. Principles, however, are only as valuable as the interpretation they receive and the corresponding purpose they serve in civil association. By articulating an ideal intended and designed to serve as the animating spirit of the political morality of the liberal polity, the liberal principle also empowers government and limits the reach of its authority. It falls to government to police the ideal the principle articulates, but government is also prevented on principled grounds from serving the ends of some

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groups to the disadvantage or exclusion of others. Still these comments make sense only in the context of the intergroup conflict the liberal principle is intended to referee and the intergroup disputes the government will be called upon to adjudicate. The liberal principle, this is to say, is hardly utopian in the sense that dedication to it throughout the polity might be expected to end intergroup dispute. A principled form of civil association does not put an end to intergroup conflict; instead it reconceptualizes and rearticulates this conflict. It does this by reorganizing intergroup conflict into three (conceptually distinct though practically fuzzy) types of problems: tolerance problems, coordination problems, and jurisdiction problems. The first of these arises because the liberal principle requires that all groups in the polity tolerate the ways and beliefs of all other groups.15 But tolerance neither entails nor implies either indifference toward or respect for the ways and beliefs of outgroups; it requires only that groups put up with one another by allowing groups to practice their ways and pursue their beliefs in the manner their faithful deem appropriate. Problems may arise, however, when the members of one group (or a set of groups) are sufficiently concerned (given their own moral theory of the human good) about the existence of some outgroup (or set of such groups), or the practices of some outgroup (or a set of such groups), to feel the need to intervene in outgroup affairs to set things right. Insofar as this constitutes a coercive invasion into the equal freedom guaranteed by the liberal principle, such an intervention violates the toleration requirement that follows from this principle. But the intervening group might insist that its actions do not constitute a coercive invasion of or interference with outgroup practices. If its members are right about this, these actions constitute a legitimate exercise of group freedom, and the burden of toleration then falls on the group claiming a coercive interference with its practices. In practice, of course, both groups are likely to insist their actions are justified under the liberal principle, and the resultant dispute constitutes a tolerance problem that must now be adjudicated by government. It seems natural to think that tolerance problems will arise in pluralist polities where groups may be expected, by virtue of their differing and often conflicting worldviews and moral theories of the human good, to develop normative rivalries—rivalries generated by the fact that some group (or set of groups) considers the members of some outgroup (or set of such outgroups) damned, disgusting, misguided, or mistaken by virtue of who they are or what they believe. While such problems are not necessarily the most urgent or pressing problems a pluralist polity might need to face, they are nonetheless the most basic. If the polity cannot find an effective method for the successful adjudication of such disputes, divisive

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intergroup conflict cannot be abated, and the stability and good order of the polity is thus placed in considerable jeopardy. Coordination problems, on the other hand, are produced by the fact that groups are likely to become allocational rivals in the socioeconomic process by which social goods are distributed throughout the polity. Coordination problems are the standard stuff of distributive justice, and if social goods are sufficiently scarce, it is implicitly possible for all groups in the polity to be allocational rivals. Practical liberalism, however, takes a cautious approach to coordination problems, and to the subject of distributive justice more generally, principally because of the difficulties the fact of pluralism poses for gaining clarity or insight on precisely what is to count as a social good. Liberal, communitarian, and radical theories of social justice invariably proceed by first imagining some universally recognized set of social goods and then worrying about the way these goods are distributed throughout society. John Rawls, for example, supposes that an egalitarian society must justify inequalities in the distribution of money and wealth resulting from voluntary transactions among free and equal individuals. Money and wealth constitute but one set of the primary goods Rawls supposed are to be distributed throughout society. Primary goods, as he understood them, are the necessary means to whatever ends a person might have; they are social goods because they are the instrumental means necessary for the realization of individual ends and objectives.16 Their selection, however, reveals a fairly standard liberal American sense of what counts as a desirable end and supposes that ends of this sort are the only ones people are going to have, a claim that is blind to the difference in worldview and moral theory of the human good one should expect to find under the fact of pluralism. But if we take the fact of pluralism seriously, we cannot hope to successfully or effectively imagine abstractly or theoretically what will count as a social good for all possible elements of the polity. This does not obviate the theoretical need for anticipating coordination problems, however, for such problems are sure to arise within the liberal polity. While we cannot anticipate in advance what sorts of goods will be in dispute, it is possible to offer some theoretical reflections on how coordination problems might be approached and resolved. Put generally and abstractly, something will count as a social good for some group if it is considered necessary by group members to the practice of group ways and to their project of living in the fashion appropriate to group traditions, culture, and beliefs. Denying or compromising group access to goods of this sort prima facie violates the liberal principle, and when competing groups enter claims of this sort on some now recognizable social good rendered scarce by virtue of these

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claims, a coordination problem arises. It again falls to the state to adjudicate disputes of this sort, and to do so in a manner that respects and protects, to the greatest extent possible, the ability of these allocational rivals to live as they wish. Finally, jurisdiction problems arise when the government’s claim of jurisdictional authority over some issue conflicts with a group’s claim of autonomy. Is the issue in question a matter of internal group concern or intragroup politics, or is it an issue that matters with regard to the wellbeing of the polity itself? Classical liberalism qualifies the reach of state authority by insisting that the individual enjoys a realm of independence (the realm of the private) from the prying eyes of the state. Practical liberalism qualifies the reach of governmental authority further by conceding to groups autonomous control over their internal affairs and by permitting groups extensive authority in determining and conceptualizing what counts as an internal group affair. But the borders here are bound to be fuzzy, and jurisdiction problems—problems over the province of Caesar and the province of the group—are bound to arise. Again the liberal principle should be understood to provide guidance in the resolution of such disputes. It sets the conceptual structure within which such disputes are to be considered and resolved. According to the underlying and motivating logic of practical liberalism, the principled resolution of tolerance, coordination, and jurisdictional problems is presumed to be in the best interest of all groups in the polity, and to be recognized as such by group members. Consequently, groups will have powerful prudential reasons to prefer the liberal polity over the alternatives of anarchy or oppression. And from the standpoint of practical liberalism, these are the only possible alternatives; other forms of civil arrangement must be considered at least somewhat oppressive by at least some groups because the autonomy of some groups will necessarily be compromised in deference to the interests or beliefs of others. Thus practical liberalism claims to describe the only logical middle ground between anarchy and oppression of some form. It remains possible, of course, to be critical of any specific account of practical liberalism without also rejecting the logical claim that it occupies the middle ground between anarchy and oppression. Rejecting an inaccurate account of practical liberalism in favor of a more accurate one can only sharpen our sense of what this middle ground looks like. So then, the case for practical liberalism reduces to the claim that the benefits groups gain by accepting the liberal principle outweigh, according to the most modest cost/benefit analysis, the potential (and perhaps likely) costs associated with going it alone or with attempting to dominate the social environment and risking the expansion of intergroup conflict.

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I have attempted to make good on this claim in my earlier exploration of a liberalism premised on prudential rather than moral argument. My concern at present is to consider how the disparate groups composing a pluralist social setting and endorsing the liberal principle might come together to form a unified polity. Under practical liberalism, this is what groups are understood to commit to by accepting the liberal principle. They commit, this is to say, to the formation of an enduring civil union, one that fashions civil unity out of tremendous normative and ontological difference. How, then, should this enterprise be understood, and how can it be constructed in a manner that enables it to make good on the promise of social peace and remain stable into the future? Civil Unity and Social Diversity: The Politics of E pluribus unum The above comments offer a necessarily truncated overview of the idea of practical liberalism and provide a point of departure for the discussion to follow. It is worth dwelling on this point of departure a moment longer, however, to get clear on the challenge it introduces and on the theoretical importance of the task at hand. Critics of practical liberalism might complain, and perhaps with some justification, that the vision of the liberal polity briefly sketched above does little more than invite the decline and even eventual decay of the state as that notion has been understood in the post-Westphalian world. By foregrounding groups and focusing upon persons as, for the most part, group members, practical liberalism offers a safe haven for the communal identities individuals invariably have with the primary or encompassing groups that do so much to fix and configure personal identity.17 But it might seem that practical liberalism will end up safeguarding this communal identity at the expense of the possible identification with one’s polity. Where this political identity is diminished or undermined, it might be objected, the stability of the polity is actually jeopardized. Civil associations are reduced in meaning and significance to a form of treaty association with a collection of different and perhaps objectionable others. The result is the fragmentation of the polity and the concurrent reduction of civil association to a loose federation of autonomous groups resembling something like the current linkages among states in the international environment. Missing from this picture is the sense of solidarity that some might consider necessary to hold the modern polity together. Absent such solidarity, the civil environment might develop and display the very uncertainty and instability that also typifies the international environment. If this turns

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out to be the case, practical liberalism might actually realize the opposite of its intended effect; rather than securing social peace and sustaining a just social order, it might instead generate insecurity and increased intergroup conflict as groups prize their own self-identification above their association with others their members might regard as foreign and objectionable. By safeguarding difference, practical liberalism may encourage distance, distrust, and disagreement, and if these things become sufficiently great, they may fracture the tenuous balance of group interests that seemingly holds the liberal polity together. The problem, then, is to see if it is possible to sustain the strong stand on group autonomy promised by practical liberalism and still cultivate the type of civil unity required by a stable polity. This problem may not be as great in actual practice as it might seem to be from a purely theoretical point of view. The aim of practical liberalism is not to start civil association anew and build in theory an image of the liberal polity from the ground up. Instead, the theoretical project speaks to pluralist states already present and offers some guidance on how best to manage the manifold problems generated by the fact of pluralism. The particular forms that tolerance, coordination, and jurisdiction problems will take in a given polity dedicated to the liberal principle is naturally conditional upon the specific group demographics of the polity in question. In the United States, for example, many, though hardly all, significant primary groups are integrated into the social landscape and lack a clear geographical connection. These social interconnections, and the quasi assimilation they generate, shape the nature of the tolerance and coordination problems that arise there and magnify the need for some method with which to manage their just resolution. Heading off to the sweet isolation of the frontier is no longer much of an option in American politics. Where various groups compete to control the politics of their shared social space, then, some recognizably legitimate method of dispute resolution is crucial to social peace. This explains why the modus vivendi is likely to continue to look like a good bet. But even here there is reason to cultivate a sense of identification with the polity itself, if for no other reason than to emphasize and sustain the sense of legitimacy that is required to make the polity viable. The problem of civil unity at issue here arises against the background of normative diversity and ontological difference. There is no fundamental moral or religious homogeneity or historical tradition, we must suppose, upon which to base a common civic identity. It is reasonable to anticipate, on the other hand, that there is some common identification with the state already in place. Pluralist states are hardly new arrivals on the political landscape, and even these states exhibit a degree of loyalty and

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patriotism among the citizenry. But while these sentiments might mitigate the problem of civil unity in practice, it would be theoretically myopic to suppose that they are sufficient to resolve it. What is needed instead is some theoretical account of how groups recognizing the need to commit to the liberal principle can craft a civil union that is both supportive of group autonomy and sufficiently unified to remain stable through time. How, in other words, might the members of disparate groups sustain their independent group identities and still come to regard one another as fellow citizens in a common polity? This is the problem of E pluribus unum. Identity, civil or otherwise, is always both an inheritance and a social construct. Inheritances must be manufactured anew as future generations struggle to understand and acknowledge their given identities. One’s civic identity is an inheritance from one’s political culture, but this culture, like all cultures, requires cultivation if it is to endure. Thus the members of any polity must be self-consciously aware of their political commitments and understand how these commitments are displayed in any given time and at any particular place in order to configure their roles and responsibilities as citizens. This too introduces a kind of jurisdiction problem. How should the liberal polity shape the identity of its citizens and reconcile this identity with the other identities its citizens will invariably have. In a pluralist setting, it is no longer appropriate to insist upon a complete and uncompromising identification with the polity to the exclusion of other identifications. So thinking through political identity and exploring its contribution to and necessity for civil peace and social order is an important practical issue that the polity must undertake; it is but another necessary task in getting clear on what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to the group. Because this is an important political task, it is also a substantial aspect of any theoretical enterprise that attempts to offer some general guidance to states that need to address the problems raised by the fact of pluralism. The logical place to begin such an inquiry is with the traditional problem of political legitimacy. A state that cannot make a legitimate claim to the allegiance of its citizenry—that is, a state that cannot legitimate the use of political power in ways acceptable to those subject to it—cannot hope to achieve the desired goal of civic unity. And a state that cannot make good on this goal cannot hope to offer its citizenry the desired political goods of social peace and political stability. All it can hope to do is manage to suppress the dissent and disgruntlement present there by means of force of arms. Under practical liberalism, the challenge of legitimacy might seem particularly acute since it is not possible to anticipate an antecedent moral unity that might justify the use of political power. Moreover, the demands of the liberal principle might require citizens to

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compromise their own fundamental normative convictions in a way that they might consider objectionable. An exploration of how political legitimacy might be established in the face of moral objection thus becomes the first challenge of the discussion to follow, and the first three chapters are dedicated to it. As the articulation of the liberal principle indicates, practical liberalism does not proceed in the absence of a principled foundation for civil association, nor does it offer a view of the liberal polity as a civil union premised only upon political contestation and compromise. It supposes, instead, that the problem of political legitimacy can be resolved only if citizens converge upon some normative commitment that justifies and guides the use of political power. The construction of the required normative convergence will necessitate, however, a reconsideration of the traditional liberal view of the relation between morality and politics. I shall argue below that a prudential commitment to the liberal principle establishes the foundation for a political morality capable of supporting the legitimacy of the government. Put more strongly, the prudential argument indicates that group members should embrace the political morality that follows from the liberal principle. Once the case for the legitimacy of the liberal polity is established, the discussion will shift, in the next two chapters, to a consideration of the problem of E pluribus unum. At issue here is the balance, as I will call it, between one’s responsibilities of citizenship and one’s allegiance to those primary groups that configure personal identity. Chapter 4 considers the tightness of the bonds of association that hold groups together within a common polity, while Chapter 5 takes on the question of whether these bonds are sufficiently tight to satisfy the stringent demands of nationhood that some thinkers have supposed is crucial to the ongoing stability of any form of civil association. The discussion will situate the liberal polity between the loose federation of groups imagined by Chandran Kukathas and the strong demand for a national identity defended by David Miller.18 The final two chapters develop the case for practical liberalism more fully by anticipating a variety of objections that might be directed against this strategy for addressing the problems raised by the fact of pluralism. Chapter 6 develops the democratic character of practical liberalism introduced in Chapter 4 and charts the parameters of democratic discourse in the liberal polity. This discussion will attempt to place practical liberalism between the democratic limitations introduced by Rawls’s concern for constitutional essentials and the democratic excesses of theories of deliberative democracy.19 The final chapter takes up several criticisms that thinkers, who might be associated in varying degrees with

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postmodernism, have directed against the traditional moralized versions of contemporary liberal theorizing. I consider here whether practical liberalism is vulnerable to these or similar criticisms, and I do so in an effort to forge a theoretical middle ground between a reliance on the moral principles of traditional liberalism and the abandonment of a principled politics altogether that often typifies much postmodern political theorizing. The middle ground I wish to defend retains the liberal commitment to a politics of principle, but it gets to this commitment through prudential rather than moral argument. If Aristotle was right to think that there is virtue in seeking the mean between extremes, then perhaps there is something to be said for the notion of practical liberalism imagined here, but it is probably more appropriate to suppose that my defense of practical liberalism will simply not make anyone very happy. The challenge here, however, is not to make people happy but to examine in some modest detail what this third strategy that liberals could adopt for responding to the problem of pluralism might look like.

Chapter 1

Politics, Morality, and Pluralism In his posthumously published collection of essays, In the Beginning Was the Deed, Bernard Williams identifies two ways in which moral philosophy might be thought to inform theorizing about civil life. The first, or enactment model as Williams calls it, holds that political theory, guided by moral insight, “formulates principles, concepts, ideals and values; and politics . . . seeks to express these in political action, through persuasion, the use of power, and so forth.”1 The second, or structural model, “lays down moral conditions of co-existence under power, conditions in which power can be justly exercised.”2 The enactment model is on display, according to Williams, in utilitarian theory, while the structural model is illustrated by Rawls’s theory of justice. The difference between these two models may not be as substantial as Williams supposes, but for present purposes the integrity of the distinction is less important than Williams’s claim that for many thinkers the enterprise of theorizing about civil association belongs to the realm of moral philosophy. “In both cases,” Williams notes, “political theory is something like applied morality.”3 Stripped of its disciplinary cover, the claim suggests that for many thinkers the realm of the political is a practical subset of the realm of the moral—that the pursuit of a proper understanding of civil association is an aspect of moral inquiry. But why, one wonders, has it become so commonplace for political theorists to understand their job in these terms? Why should we think that our concept of the political falls within the realm of the moral? One possible response to these questions is suggested by the fact that theorizing about politics has traditionally been concerned with the identification of proper rules and procedures for coordinating the relations of

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persons on a grand scale, and morality has often been understood to deal, at least in part, with the proper way that persons should treat one another. Since the former inquiry looks like a more specific version of the latter, it might seem reasonable to think that political theory is a form of applied morality. According to this view, moral reasons have a certain pride of place in our thoughts on how human beings should be treated; they have the power of trump and take precedent over nonmoral reasons for treating persons in some way in the event the two sets of reasons clash. Since political theory is concerned with the way the state may properly treat its citizens, it would seem to follow that we must consult moral philosophy in order to identify the legitimate parameters of state power. Insofar as political theory is concerned with (1) the legitimacy of the state and (2) the articulation of principles, values, ideals, and concepts that are intended to inform and direct the legitimate activities of the state, it must necessarily be considered a dimension of moral philosophy.4 If we endorse this viewpoint, the concept of the political will fall within the realm of the moral. Williams, however, wanted to provide a different account of political theory, one in which theorizing about civil association proceeds independently of moral philosophy. As it happens, I share Williams’s view that it would be good to theorize about civil association in a way that avoids thinking of this enterprise as a form of applied morality, but I shall not understand this to mean that political theory is unrelated to, or disconnected from, moral philosophy. For my money, the connection between political and moral thought is rather more complex than either Williams or proponents of his enactment and structural models let on. I would prefer to turn the standard view of political theory as applied morality on its head, and momentarily I will offer some reasons to think that there are dimensions of moral thought that are best regarded as a type of applied political theory. In other words, I want to suggest that some aspects of morality actually fall within the parameters of the realm of the political. Before we get to this, however, it seems appropriate to consider why anyone should want to drive a wedge between political theory and moral philosophy, or to distinguish the political from the realm of the moral in the manner Williams encourages. Liberal Morality and Political Legitimacy The “first question” of political thought, according to Williams, involves “the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation.”5 This isn’t really a question at all, of course; it is only a basic insight that invites one to ask how the goods of order, protection, safety, and so forth are best realized. This, according to Williams, is the

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issue that inspires theoretical inquiry into the logic of civil association. It does so because order, security, and (we should add) stability are the essential preconditions for a viable social enterprise. If these conditions are not met, social life, as it is commonly understood, would presumably be impossible; there would be only something like Hobbes’s war of all against all. If this is right and if one values social life, one must also value the goods of order, security, and stability regardless of the social unit at issue—be it the family, a tribal relationship, or a larger and more eclectic society. On this view, social life, as Aristotle recognized, is an essentially political endeavor. The securing of order, safety, stability, and so forth is ordinarily, and perhaps unhappily, presumed to necessitate political power. This is probably true regardless of the size of the social unit in question, whether it be a family, a tribal relationship, or a larger social setting. But it seems most obviously true in the latter case, where some form of civil arrangement is necessary in order to assure a degree of social peace and tranquility, and these are the settings of concern here. In these settings, some manner of organizational structure is necessary to promote and safeguard order, peace, and stability, and those individuals and institutions charged with providing and sustaining this structure will need to possess the power required to get the job done. This does not follow from some imagined Hobbesian understanding of human beings or human nature (whatever that means). It follows because the conflicts that arise in the natural course of social life require mediation in order to prevent them from pulling the social setting apart. Recognition of the need for organizational structures with the power to assure civil peace and good order does not, however, provide a full answer to Williams’s first question; instead it merely complicates the problem the question poses, for the alleged remedy to the problem of instability may prove worse that the imagined disease. Insecurity and instability may, and likely will, result in the event some group of individuals who happen to be subject to the power of some government believe they are being oppressed or disadvantaged by the individuals in control of this government’s coercive might. The resolution of this problem, as Williams claims with considerable justification, requires the government “to offer a justification of its power to each subject.”6 Following Locke on this score, Williams insists that legitimate government requires the consent of the governed. Civil order, social stability, and domestic tranquility cannot be fully achieved if the government is not accepted as legitimate, and the government cannot be accepted as legitimate if the people cannot consent to its authority. So theorizing political legitimacy would seem to be the first objective of political theory.

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The consent requirement necessary to secure the legitimacy of the state is both important and demanding. Williams emphasizes that the government’s claim to legitimacy must be one that all citizens can accept. It cannot therefore be based upon the normative or ideological convictions of some group, or coalition of groups, if other groups within the state happen to disagree with these convictions by virtue of their own normative or ideological views. What may look like the justified exercise of political power to those who happen to adhere to the convictions in question will look like domination or oppression when viewed from the vantage point of those outgroups whose members happen to hold alternative and conflicting convictions. There can be no legitimate political imposition upon any group in the polity simply because more dominant or more politically powerful groups consider these groups morally confused, ideologically mistaken, or religiously heretical. It is tempting to think that the consent requirement is both understandable and justifiable only against the background of a moral foundationalism that supposes controlling principles of civil association must be derived from antecedent (and objectively true) moral premises, but this is a rather serious mistake. The mistake, moreover, introduces a tension within a morally inspired political theory that leads ultimately to its fundamental incoherence as a theoretical venture and its failure as a practical political doctrine. Yet it is easy to see why the consent requirement will appeal to those traditional liberal thinkers who suppose that proper principles of civil association should be derived from their preferred moral vision. It is fashionable today for liberals of this stripe to view persons as autonomous beings and to valorize this vision in a way that generates the foundational belief that persons ought to be allowed to control their own lives and pursue their particular vision of the good as they see fit. If we accept this basic moral commitment, it would seem to follow that persons should also be allowed to choose the political conditions under which they are going to live. This seems like a simple extrapolation from the basic normative premise of moral liberalism, and it looks like this should mean that the government must justify its power to each person who is to be subject to it. If this view gives impetus to the belief that our sense of the political belongs to the realm of the moral, it also rests upon an unfortunate abstraction that is its undoing. Moral liberals who endorse this view emphasize an abstract individualism that diminishes the awareness of persons as group-centered beings whose ontological worldviews and normative theories of the human good are largely, if not entirely, derived from their primary and formative group associations and identifications. If it happened that all such groups (and hence all individuals) shared a

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relevantly similar (and liberal) moral vision, this would hardly be a significant oversight. But theorists working in social settings typified by an exceptional amount of ontological and normative diversity and difference have increasingly recognized this fact of pluralism (as I shall call it) and noticed the problem it raises for any attempt to build a case for political legitimacy on contentious moral grounds. If we acknowledge the fact of normative difference and moral diversity that is introduced by the presence of a plurality of moral, religious, or ideological viewpoints in the polity, the imposition of rules derived from and justified by one set of moral beliefs upon those who believe differently is bound to look like domination and oppression to those who are imposed upon. Such groups, we can suppose, will hardly consent to the authority of the state to oppress them in this manner. Therefore, the liberal state will not be accepted as legitimate by those non-liberal and illiberal groups within it if its claim to the justifiable use of political power involves the authority to enforce the standards of liberal morality—standards they happen to reject—throughout the polity. So it seems that the fact of pluralism introduces reason to doubt that the consent requirement can be satisfied if our concept of the political remains embedded in the realm of the moral, and this introduces the reason why Williams thought it necessary to divorce political theory from moral philosophy. If we cannot presume some convergence on a moral vision embraced by all elements of the polity, we cannot appeal to moral argument to meet the consent requirement, and the possibility of such convergence is ruled out of court by the fact of pluralism. So, if we think it important to satisfy the consent requirement in order to establish the legitimacy of the state in pluralist polities, we will need to separate our sense of the political from the realm of the moral. If, however, we think it important not to do this, we had best give up on the problem of political legitimacy. Political Legitimacy and Social Justice It is perhaps worth noticing at this point that contemporary moral liberals seem to be less concerned with the issue of political legitimacy than their predecessors were. To be sure, a concern for political legitimacy has hardly dropped from view, but it seems at present to have taken a back seat to the problem of social justice.7 This is worth noticing because I think it unlikely that moral liberals can satisfactorily address the problem of social justice without first resolving the problem of political legitimacy. Rawls, for example, was clearly onto this, as his liberal principle of legitimacy demonstrates.8

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There was a time, of course, when the problem of political legitimacy— or what we now recognize as the problem of political legitimacy—was uppermost in the minds of nascent liberals. Locke’s rather austere defense of the glorious revolution in the Second Treatise is fundamentally an extended discourse on political legitimacy. Locke presumes an antecedent moral purpose for the state—the defense of natural rights—and governments that fail to meet this purpose forfeit their right to rule, that is, they have lost their legitimacy and may rightfully be replaced.9 Needless to say, this argument presumes an element of moral certainty in the polity (we know natural rights exist, and we understand their moral authority) as well as a considerable degree of moral homogeneity (we are basically agreed on what natural rights are and what they require of us morally speaking). In the presence of such moral certainty and moral homogeneity, the problem of political legitimacy is rather easily resolved in the manner suggested by Locke. All this nicely exemplifies what Williams has in mind when he introduces his structural model of the relation between moral philosophy and political theory. Problems arise only when moral certainty or moral homogeneity or both are no longer present in the polity. The fact of pluralism, once it is recognized and conceded, puts an end to theoretical confidence in the existence of moral homogeneity in the polity. And it does something even more troubling than this, for by pointing toward existing normative diversity, it introduces an additional problem that arises from the necessary acknowledgment of competing and conflicting moral certainties within the polity. Once the fact of pluralism is acknowledged as something like a sociological truism, the competing moral certainties (namely, the differing and conflicting moral theories of the human good) that now come into plain view complicate the political landscape and introduce the possibility of serious normative and ideological conflict within the social setting, thus enlarging the need for some manner of political dispute resolution. Given the growing awareness of normative diversity in modern pluralist states, one might think that moral liberals would have seen the need to return to the problem of political legitimacy, but this has not been the response to pluralism that characterizes contemporary theories belonging to the tradition of moral liberalism. When confronted with the emergence of identity politics and the introduction of multicultural concerns, Rawls, for example, tempered his theory of justice by asking about the social conditions that must obtain if a just social order is to remain stable.10 He understood that political legitimacy required peoples to endorse the constitutional essentials of their government according to their own moral scheme, but he did not rethink the moral case for his theory of justice

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presented in Theory. Instead he inquired into the social conditions necessary if such a state is to remain stable in the face of a diversity of what he calls “comprehensive doctrines.”11 And he concluded, rather unremarkably, that such a state would be stable if the comprehensive doctrines that dominated it were sufficiently reasonable (i.e., homogenous). The legitimacy condition would be satisfied provided reasonable people could find within their own comprehensive doctrines reason to accept the constitutional essentials. Left unanswered was a question about how much normative space fell within the boundary of reasonableness. We might understand this to raise an issue about the moral bounds of liberal toleration. At what point do illiberal or non-liberal groups fall so far outside the basic parameters of liberal morality that their activities can no longer be tolerated? Now, the propriety of efforts by the liberal state to police some standards of liberal morality against illiberal groups is not placed in doubt by this question. Instead, the lines of debate are focused on what the liberal state should tolerate and what to do, consistent with liberal morality, when the bounds of toleration have been crossed. This has set the agenda for a considerable amount of theorizing that has taken place in recent years in the shadow of Rawls. If some moral liberals warm up to a liberalism capable of accommodating considerable diversity, others are more inclined to worry that basic liberal rights are endangered or compromised unacceptably by accommodationist agendas. As with Locke, however, the liberal state remains charged with the responsibility of policing some understanding of liberal morality, and its justness remains tied, at least in part, to this fundamental moral purpose. Contemporary theoretical battle lines only demarcate the rough edges of liberal morality and the uncertain boundaries of liberal toleration. But the question of the legitimacy of the liberal state has all but disappeared from the resultant thrust and parry of argument. Legitimacy has dropped from view because liberal thinkers are no longer in search of principled grounds capable of receiving assent from all elements of the polity; they prefer instead to consider who should be tolerated according to liberal morality and who should not be tolerated. There is, I think, a reason for this; the in-house squabbling that has characterized much liberal theorizing in recent years has never gone so far as to question two basic aspects of the liberal enterprise. First, liberals have never questioned the basic moral convictions that underlie their political thought, and second, liberals have never questioned their basic understanding of the relation of morality to politics. They remain wedded to something like the structural model Williams identifies. Consequently, liberals focus on what their morality permits in terms of embracing

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diversity, confident in the view that their answer to this matter determines, as a matter of course, what the liberal state should embrace in terms of an acceptable diversity. These points hold with equal force against both so-called political and comprehensive liberals. Rawls’s familiar claim that his theory is freestanding, for example, should not be taken to mean that he elected at some point to sever his views on justice from the moral foundationalism of Theory. As he emphasized on more than one occasion, his view of social justice remained a moral theory; he considered it freestanding only insofar as its acceptance as morally necessary by the reasonable groups present in the polity did not depend upon their acceptance of the argument for the moral reasons articulated in Theory.12 Things would be stable, thanks to the prospects of an overlapping consensus, if different groups found moral grounds within their own comprehensive doctrines for embracing Rawls’s vision of the liberal polity. Nonetheless, the parameters on toleration the theory introduces must still be considered by liberals as moral boundaries and defended as such. These two elements of liberal theorizing are also on display, perhaps in an even more evident form, in the comprehensive liberalism of William Galston. There is, to be sure, much about Galston’s accommodationist agenda with which I am in substantial agreement. For one thing, I agree that an exclusive focus on autonomy (and presumably also natural rights) as the moral grundlage of the liberal state is not sufficiently robust to offer effective protection for those illiberal and non-liberal groups that reject the liberal obsession with autonomy as the centerpiece of moral belief.13 Additionally, I agree that civic unity places limits (that we can and should reasonably identify as moral) upon the activities and practices of all groups present in the liberal polity. “Pluralism,” as Galston politely puts it, “does not abolish civic unity.”14 The great challenge, of course, is to explain how, if at all, it might be possible to craft the necessary political unity—the basic convergence upon and agreement with the liberal ideal of freedom—from the deeply pluralist normative and ontological viewpoints present among the groups constitutive of the liberal polity. If a moral liberalism that builds its political vision from the moral foundation of autonomy cannot achieve this end, what type of liberalism can? This is where I part company with Galston, who believes that the liberal commitment to freedom requires the liberal polity to safeguard certain “ineliminable requirements of liberal social unity.” As Galston puts it: The liberal state cannot be understood as comprehensively neutral. Rather, it is properly characterized as a community organized in pursuit of a distinctive ensemble of public purposes. It is these purposes that undergird

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its unity, structure its institutions, guide its policies, and define its public virtues.15

He offers three distinct examples of the required public purposes: (1) the protection of human life, (2) the protection and promotion of the normal development of basic capacities, and (3) the development of something he calls “social rationality,” which enables an individual to participate in the social, economic, and political life of the polity.16 In one of the latest statements of his position, he elaborates on this basic theme by emphasizing that the pluralist state should respect something he calls “expressive liberty.” though the state is justified in limiting this liberty for three separate reasons: it must (1) exercise its power “to solve inevitable problems of coordination among divergent individuals and groups,” (2) police “some core evils of the human condition that states have the right (indeed the duty) to prevent,” and (3) “defend itself against destruction, even if measures clearly essential to self-defense restrict valuable liberties of individuals and groups.”17 While (1) and (3) are hardly controversial, (2) is another matter entirely. It returns us to the basic liberal purposes the state is charged with defending. Thus the pluralist state should not, in Galston’s judgment, permit the human sacrifice he imagines within some “neo-Aztec cult,” apparently even if the neo-Aztecs sacrifice only their own and see this as a fundamental aspect of their religious practice. But while such a practice may violate core human values for Galston, it would, by definition, not do so for the neo-Aztecs.18 So, if Williams’s consent requirement is taken seriously, Galston must again face the now familiar problem that troubles all manner of moral liberalism. To meet this requirement, Galston’s liberal purposes, and the “core evils” they protect against, would need to be acceptable to all groups within the polity; if they are not acceptable in this way, groups whose ways were invaded by the state in order to require them to conform to these purposes could (and surely would) reject the legitimacy of the liberal state. To avoid this, Galston must explain why illiberal and non-liberal groups should endorse these liberal purposes, and this explanation must be presented in terms that they can accept and respect regardless of the normative and ontological worldview to which they subscribe. But this is something he fails to do—something, in fact, that he seems to think it unnecessary to do. Instead, he overtly, and it seems to me refreshingly, abandons any pretext to political neutrality on the part of the liberal state and insists that liberalism is, and should be, a comprehensive doctrine ultimately premised upon a particular (and particularly liberal) conception of the human good. Accordingly, groups, like neo-Aztecs, that

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might happen to reject this particular vision of the human good, or at least some aspects of it, cannot expect much in the way of support from the liberal state. When and if illiberal or non-liberal groups engage in practices offensive to Galston’s conception of the good, he supposes that the state is justified in the coercive intrusion into group affairs to defend endangered individuals against what he perceives as abuse by group members. Thus Galston would permit the state to require parents to immunize their children and make sure they receive necessary medical attention regardless of the parents’ religious convictions.19 It turns out, then, that we do not have to go so far as to imagine neoAztecs to find groups whose ways will be offensive to Galston’s liberal conception of the good. Those Pentecostal religious communities that might object to immunization or medical interference with their religious practices would be vulnerable to state intrusion into group affairs, and consequently, they would have reason not to consent to the authority of the liberal state and to reject its claim of legitimacy. In the terms introduced by Williams, some group of people would now consider themselves justified in the coercive intrusion into the lives of some other group of people. But Galston would surely insist that this is as it should be; the concern for legitimacy must yield before the demands of liberal purposes. Further, Galston wants to avoid the charge of arbitrariness (arbitrarily stipulating what counts as being free and what does not) by insisting that his liberal purposes are ultimately legitimized by virtue of their standing as basic conditions of the human good.20 Groups within the liberal polity, Galston contends, may practice their respective theories of the human good because this way of life really is good “for those who are actually leading it.”21 But the claim carries with it an important qualification: group practices that happen to conflict with “the minimum content of the human good” are not to be tolerated by the liberal polity.22 Galston, in effect, elevates his own liberal morality to an objectivist status by using it to identify certain “core evils” quite inconsistent with the human good. His liberal sense of the good thus becomes something that belongs to all humanity, whether other humans recognize it or not. On display in all this is Galston’s version of the first aspect of the liberal enterprise mentioned above: Galston does not question the moral convictions that underlie his political thought. This is hardly problematic in itself, of course, and I think it possible for a legitimate liberal polity to live tolerably well with individuals who hold this and similar views. There is no political reason to begrudge moral liberals (or anyone else) their particular normative theory of the human good—a theory that, as it happens, I tend to share.

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But Galston is also committed to the second aspect of the liberal enterprise noted above, as displayed by his effort to derive the political morality that unites the polity from the standards of his own version of liberal morality, and given the fact of pluralism, it does seem difficult for the liberal polity to live with this. It is, as we shall see, one thing to say that moral liberals should not be willing to sit idly by while illiberal groups do what they consider to be terribly immoral things and quite another to say that they are therefore justified in enlisting the coercive might of the state to prevent others from doing things that they think wrong and immoral. When liberals make this move, the problem of political legitimacy again pops up, that is, if one accepts Williams’s consent requirement. This in turn erodes the possibility of the civil unity that Galston (and I) think necessary for a viable polity because the liberal standards of social justice will almost certainly not receive general acceptance by those illiberal and non-liberal groups present in the polity. Contemporary moral liberals continue to hold the Lockean (and Kantian) conviction that principles of political association are to be derived from (their) antecedent moral principles—that political theory is and should be the handmaiden of moral philosophy. Given the fact of pluralism, then, there is reason to conclude that moral liberals cannot offer a theoretical strategy for meeting the consent requirement and thus cannot establish, in theory, the legitimacy of the liberal polity. This might not seem to matter much, however, if moral liberals are right to de-emphasize a concern for political legitimacy in favor of a concern for social justice, something that follows rather straightforwardly from their own animating moral concerns. But there is something strikingly odd about this, for legitimacy at least intuitively seems like it should be a condition of social justice. Yet even if these intuitions are misguided, the moral liberal focus on social justice seems to invite social unrest and conflict in pluralist social settings and to raise a specter of what some elements of the state might regard as liberal oppression and injustice. All this suggests that it might be good to see if it is possible, at least in theory, to reunite political legitimacy and social justice. One way to proceed here is suggested by Williams’s efforts to develop a political realism that considers the problem of political legitimacy independently of and prior to moral concerns. Such a strategy can succeed, however, only if it is possible to articulate a theory of political legitimacy that also allows for a unifying sense of social justice (otherwise the two will not be reunited). It is hardly clear how such a realist theory of civil association might satisfy this requirement, particularly since the argument must presume a pluralist polity typified by deep and irreconcilable normative difference and diversity.

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Williams’s Concept of the Political A legitimate polity, that is, a polity where the consent requirement is in fact satisfied, is not one in which the government may never coercively interfere in the lives of people belonging to different groups. It is, rather, a polity in which any such interference must be justified in terms that the members of these groups can accept. Given the fact of pluralism, we can now take it as axiomatic that no political argument that proceeds from antecedent moral premises can hope to achieve this goal. But if we cut our concern for political legitimacy loose from antecedent moral considerations, why should we worry about political legitimacy at all? If there is no underlying moral reason to think that we should justify coercive interference in the lives of the members of those groups that are constitutive of the polity (particularly those with whom we have substantial moral disagreement), why does the issue political legitimacy remain problematic? Williams provides a rather complicated answer to this question that is worth exploring in some detail. He begins by suggesting that the need to justify the coercive interference in the lives of others is inherent in our concept of the political. “The situation of one lot of people terrorizing another lot of people is not per se a political situation: it is, rather, the situation which the existence of the political is in the first place supposed to alleviate (replace).”23 Successful domination and oppression by one lot of people over another lot of people, the point appears to be, cannot solve the problem of political legitimacy, even if it does manage to generate an element of social stability. Still, if we suppose, again following Williams, that stability is the great good and chief end of civil association (the aim of the political so to speak), and if successful domination generates stability, one wonders why we should worry further about the question of legitimacy. But power, as Williams is quick to point out, cannot justify its own use; it only makes the need for justification rather otiose. Recourse to power to achieve stability is simply not a political condition; it is something else. And this something else (perhaps military domination) is inconsistent with our sense of the political; it is a solution to the problem of stability that our sense of the political inclines us to reject. Williams develops his theory of political legitimacy by contending that from a political point of view some justification is required if and when “A coerces B and claims that B would be wrong to fight back: resents it, forbids it, rallies others to oppose it as wrong, and so on.”24 The justification required here rides with the presumption that “B would be wrong to fight back,” for this involves the claim that A is right to coerce B.25 But Williams seems to think his claim is somewhat stronger than this, for

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he continues to elaborate his position by saying, “By doing this [claiming B is wrong to fight back], A claims that his actions transcend the conditions of warfare, and this gives rise to a demand for justification of what A does.”26 As Williams recognized, this elaboration makes sense only if the required justification is understood to be one that B can (and not merely should) accept. The required justification must indicate to B that she is not justified in fighting back because A’s coercion is justified; the justification means that B should understand that she should accept A’s actions and yield to the exercise of power directed against her. We ordinarily understand such strong claims of justification to involve a claim of authority.27 A’s right to command follows (though perhaps not exclusively) from B’s acceptance and acknowledgment that A is authorized to issue her commands (though this authorization may be circumscribed by specific jurisdictional boundaries). Acceptance and acknowledgment of this sort cannot legitimately be coerced from B by, for example, the types of strategies that lurk within the pages of Orwell’s 1984; they must be given freely and deliberately. We also commonly think that the legitimacy of the government rides with a granting of authority; this is why the exercise of power cannot generate its own justification. The consent requirement central to the establishment of political legitimacy is essential if the demands of the government are to qualify as genuinely authoritative (and hence legitimate) and not merely as the commands of an oppressor. Nonetheless, Williams’s argument moves forward a bit too swiftly. The claim that B would be wrong to fight back does not entail the further claim that A must legitimate his exercise of coercion in terms that B can accept because this claim need not necessarily be understood as a claim to authority, the granting of which would move A and B from a condition of warfare to a condition of civil association. We may think that A is required to justify the coercive interference in B’s life (required, we can suppose, by some moral principle), and we may accept the reason A gives for doing so (the justification) without B also doing so. If we share A’s moral sensibilities, we might think A’s justification acceptable and sufficient to legitimate A’s coercive measures against B, but this is insufficient to establish the authoritativeness of A’s demands against B, in a de facto sense, if B does not share these moral sensibilities and does not accept A’s justification. We may conclude, then, that B would be wrong to fight back because A’s commands are morally legitimate but admit that B’s moral blindness prevents her from recognizing this fact. If A’s moral viewpoint legitimates his sense of the political, he will necessarily understand the social good and the rules governing the relations of citizens in these terms, for this morality naturally guides his thinking on how human beings ought to get along. This returns us to something

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like the structural model of the relationship between political theory and moral philosophy. More importantly, it also means that A need not expect his justification for the exercise of political authority to be acceptable to B, but A need not worry much about this if he is powerful enough to impose his own moral vision on B. His moral viewpoint legitimates and justifies his use of coercive force in his own mind, and his confidence in this viewpoint is sufficient for him to think that B should obey his commands even if B fails to do so by virtue of the fact that she holds a different and irreconcilable moral viewpoint. Here A’s authority is self-validating if it is based on his own particular moral understanding of things, and it will be accepted as such by all who share this understanding. In this event, the issue of whether B can accept A’s authority now seems irrelevant to the legitimacy of A’s commands. This, of course, is not the conclusion Williams had hoped to reach. His argument is intended to show that political legitimacy requires consent from all elements of the polity and hence that under these circumstances citizens cannot claim that the power of the government is unjustifiably directed against them. But the argument underestimates the legitimating power of moral certainty. To succeed, Williams’s argument must establish not simply that A’s claim to authority should be accepted by B but that it can be accepted. This means that it cannot be pressed in moral terms that B would be inclined to reject given her own particular normative view of the world. So, A must hope for some type of an overlapping moral consensus (getting to the same normative end from different moral positions), or he must advance a nonmoral justification for his claim to authority that will still resonate with B. But given A’s own moral convictions, one might reasonably wonder why he would feel the need to do this. Why, under these circumstances, should A worry further about his authority? Why, that is, should A think (with Williams) his legitimate (and not just de facto) authority depends upon B’s ability to consent rather than on what he considers to be incontrovertible moral foundations? At this point, it would seem, Williams is thrown back upon his own conceptual argument. The reason that A should worry further about his authority is that our sense of the political inclines us to think that civil association is a condition in which all elements of the polity are on the same side—fellows in a common enterprise so to speak—and not an arrangement in which one lot of people terrorize another lot of people. Though merely paraphrasing Williams, this way of putting things may seem offensive because if one lot of people think they are enforcing morally appropriate standards on another lot of (morally wayward) people, they would hardly want to conceptualize their actions in terms of terrorism. Because their sense of the political is informed by their own

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moral sense, they simply would not share, and would be inclined to reject, Williams’s concept of the political. So we reach an impasse. If we want to hold to the structural model of the relation between political theory and moral philosophy (and accept the consequences this has for the relation between dominant moralities and political practice), we had best give up on efforts to conceptualize modern pluralist polities as places where everyone can be on the same side, that is, where principled grounds exist to fashion a political unity that all persons can accept. If, however, we wish to defend the idea of political unity within diverse pluralist polities, we will need to reconsider the presently dominant view about the relation between morality and politics. Legitimacy, Stability, and Morality It seems, then, that the real issue raised by the consent requirement is why anyone should worry about the consent of groups whose members practice immoral ways, or ways considered immoral when measured against the dominant standards of morality (if such there be) that inform the sense of the political present in the polity. By way of defending his political realism Williams must now insist that the consent requirement should be observed because it is a crucial factor in the establishment of political legitimacy, and legitimacy is a necessary condition of political stability. Underlying this reply is Williams’s concern for the first question of political theory, for political stability is possible only by securing “order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation” into the future. Such a future cannot be guaranteed if one lot of people believe they are imposed upon and oppressed by another lot of people. This, according to Williams, is simply built into our concept of the political. Once again, he thinks civil association is different from a condition of warfare, a condition in which one lot of people control another lot of people by force or fraud. So, civil association, on this view, is conceptually understood to involve government by and with the genuine consent of the governed. Therefore, the problem of political legitimacy is conceptually prior to moral concerns because it moves (a practical concern for) stability to the center of the political. Because of the priority of the political, moral liberals cannot justifiably insist that their moral considerations are prior to, and foundational for, theorizing about civil association. In spite of what illiberal groups are up to, then, our understanding of the political requires political theorists to work to fashion a theory of civil association to which all groups, including the illiberal, can genuinely consent. If the consent condition is not satisfied, political legitimacy cannot be achieved, intergroup warfare cannot be overcome, and the stability of

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the state cannot be assured, for any putative stability can be secured only by the uncertain means of force or fraud. Put in these terms, it becomes more difficult for moral liberals to reject Williams’s political realism on the grounds of conceptual fiat. He is not merely stipulating a controversial realist notion of the political and then deriving his political realism from it; his argument, this is to say, is not fatuously circular. If we take political stability seriously and suppose that it is the aim of civil association, it is the challenge of political theory to imagine how this stability might be achieved at least in theory and to point the way toward its realization. This cannot be achieved by endorsing a situation where one lot of people terrorize another lot of people because such a situation is inherently unstable. The terrorized will work to find ways to undo things, and this looks like a condition of ongoing warfare— a condition inconsistent with our sense of civil association. So Williams’s sense of the political actually rests upon important underlying prudential considerations. Given everyone’s general and substantial interest in a condition of political stability and social tranquility—evident prudential goods—there is clear reason to work to realize them. This is the challenge conceptualized in terms of the political, and it can be realized only where and when government is accepted as legitimate by all those subject to its power. But moral liberals may want to press a different objection at this point. It may be argued, in the fashion suggested by Galston, that civil association also involves a normative unity that is apparently lacking in Williams’s concept of the political. When they are asked to consent to government, people must have some sense of what they are consenting to, and this implies that they have some grasp of the principles and ideals presumed to authorize and legitimate the use of political power. These principles and ideals, in turn, must be supplied by basic and foundational moral reflection. Groups whose ways are such that they cannot endorse these basic moral principles in effect reject good civil order and thus place themselves in a condition of warfare with the social world around them. They elect, this is to say, to behave uncivilly because they refuse to acknowledge and embrace the basic moral conditions that govern the relations of civil—that is, political—beings. This objection has considerable merit and suggests that there might be something wrong with Williams’s political realism, for the argument implies that the political is not really prior to moral considerations as Williams supposes. In fact, the political from this point of view is inherently moral in nature. Williams’s argument can succeed, the objection concludes, only by ripping the concept of the political out of its normative moorings and ignoring the way the sense of the political, in

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liberal theory and practice, has grown up within an encompassing moral philosophy. This is objectionable because it would leave civil association with no galvanizing and unifying moral purpose, and without such a purpose there can be no sense of justice upon which to anchor the concerns of orderliness. Ironically, this lack of moral focus may also erode the very political stability Williams hopes to secure. Without some normative glue to bind the polity together, what would prevent a collection of disparate and possibly conflicting social groups from flying apart and forming their own independent micro-states? From this point of view, it seems that the key to establishing political legitimacy lies not with the consent requirement but with the validity of the moral principles and ideals that authorize, legitimate, and restrain the use of political power. Civil (i.e., moral) beings should accept the authority of the state if this authority is justified by acceptable moral principle and thus qualifies as just; if it is not so justified, they should not accept it. As Rawls intimates, this cannot guarantee political stability; stability is the happy outcome of general convergence on the animating moral principles of the polity for reasons of moral sociology rather than either moral or political necessity. Sociological convergence means that the polity comes together and forms a political unity for differing, yet overlapping, moral reasons.28 In this way, Rawls attempts to reconcile the need for normative unity, as a necessary component of the political, with the fact of pluralism. At the heart of this quagmire is a contested understanding of the political. Williams, following Hobbes on this score, supposes that politics is about forging political unity from exceptional normative diversity, while moral liberals prefer to understand the political in a Lockean sense that relies upon an underlying moral foundation.29 Thus moral liberals think a type of moral unity must precede civil association; otherwise there is no normative glue to hold the polity together and legitimate the exercise of political power. Admitting the fact of pluralism, Williams is reluctant to think that this gets the job done; if there is not willing consent to the terms of civil association, there is still no normative glue to hold the polity together and legitimate political power. And stability, at least in principle, cannot be realized under such circumstances. If, ala Hobbes, stability is the great goal of political theorizing, then moral liberalism is unable to articulate an effective strategy for achieving it in polities characterized by the fact of pluralism. So if stability is the end of political theorizing, political theory must proceed independent of moral philosophy and keep fully in mind the realities of ontological and normative pluralism. But if it does so, it must confront the need for some normative glue capable of binding the polity into a coherent unit, for it

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is also not clear that political realism can offer a viable theory of stability in the absence of a normative account of the political. It seems, then, that the theoretical enterprise will need to either supply the necessary normative element or explain how a polity might hang together in its absence. Without this glue, the polity may well fragment as various groups, feeling no particular attachment to one another, elect to go their own way. The social environment would then take on the character of the international arena, with all the problems of instability that accompany this arena. To avert this possibility, political theory must manage to bring social justice into a proper relation with political stability and find some theoretical method for the marriage of these two basic political ends. These comments are intended to suggest that an effective resolution to this impasse cannot be achieved by simply opting for a realist conception of the political over a moralized conception, or vice versa. Instead, the proper challenge of political theory now seems to involve hitting upon a viable synthesis of these two competing conceptions of the political. This is the aim of the account of practical liberalism that follows. In the tradition of Hobbes and Williams, to mention but two kindred spirits, I shall suppose that political stability is the central challenge that political theory must address. In the undeniable face of the fact of pluralism, political theorists working within pluralist polities have no alternative but to take this challenge seriously. I shall also suppose that this challenge can be met only by developing a theory of political legitimacy in which the consent requirement is fully satisfied. But normative unity remains an essential component of the political as this notion will be understood under practical liberalism, and so a successful theory of political legitimacy must also establish the necessary grounds of civil unity—that is, it must also articulate a viable theory of social justice. Further, a satisfactory theory of political legitimacy must also take seriously the moral viewpoints of all elements of the polity and accept the view that moral norms matter greatly to people. The challenge, in other words, is to show that a conception of the political that is prior to moral philosophy is both possible and necessary for the legitimate use of political power and that this conception need not stand in opposition to those disparate moral theories of the human good on display in contemporary pluralist polities. The basic justness of the theory depends, in turn, upon the satisfaction of this latter requirement. The practical liberalism to be fleshed out below decouples the political (and hence political theory) from the realm of the moral (and hence from moral philosophy), but it does so in order to recouple the moral (and hence moral philosophy) to the realm of the political (and hence to political theory) once the normative basis of the liberal polity is established.

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This will require a reconceptualization of the relation between political theory and moral philosophy—one that transforms a dimension of the latter into an appendage of the former. I don’t think, however, that this does an undue violence to either field of inquiry; instead, it merely rights the imbalance between these two fields that has emerged in the wake of the faltering Lockean liberal tradition, from which the idea of political theory as applied morality has emerged.30 This, in turn, is the necessary antidote to the rather benign warfare that currently typifies much moral reflection and political conflict within today’s pluralist states.

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Chapter 2

The Politics of Morality Perhaps the best way to begin an inquiry into the relation between morality and politics is to start with an exploration of the nature of morality. This, in any event, is what I plan to do here, and when we turn to this issue, two seemingly contradictory aspects of morality quickly stand out. On the one hand, the notion of morality often seems to carry with it a sense of certainty, universality, and objectivity. To say, for example, that prima facie promises ought to be kept is to articulate a moral rule that is ordinarily supposed to be binding upon the will and in this sense true. The rule concedes that there may be some occasions when one ought not keep promises, but this is because there may be occasions when the rule is overridden by more urgent or pressing moral rules or principles. The rule does not assert, on the other hand, that it is simply true for some particular person at some distinctive point in time that promises ought to be kept. To say that a moral rule is objective is not to say that it is only true for some people at some point in time, though from a sociological point of view this is surely the case if the people in question believe the rule to be true. Instead, thinking some rule is objective implies that it is true tout court; the truth of the rule is not conditional upon the beliefs of those people who happen to ascribe to it. The idea of relativism, which may make some sense sociologically, seems inconsistent with our notion of morality. Yet on the other hand, moral belief is also a subject of considerable contentiousness and controversy. This is true in two separate senses. It is an anthropological commonplace, for example, to notice that different peoples, communities, cultural groups, and religions hold distinct and widely disparate normative belief systems. Seen from the outside, that is, seen

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anthropologically, the distinct manners and mores of different peoples— the normative schemes to which they adhere—form an important aspect of what it means to see these peoples as peoples (groups, communities, religions, etc.) and thus to see them as different in important respects from other peoples. But seen from the inside, the manners and mores identified by the anthropologist may and probably will constitute moralities that matter, and matter greatly, to the peoples in question. Anthropology and philosophy come together when those who study the manners and mores of distinct peoples attempt to analyze and understand their moralities—those normative belief systems that do much to regulate conduct within their community and give meaning and significance to them and their place in the universe.1 But the contentious and controversial character of morality does not end here, for there is also considerable contention and controversy regarding the meaning and nature of morality among philosophers working to understand what morality involves. Perhaps we should not speak of different moralities when looking at differing and competing philosophical accounts of morality, but we can, and perhaps should, speak of different conceptualizations of morality. Philosophical dispute over the nature of morality matters to the political theorist because it complicates the effort to understand the relation between morality and politics. My concern at present is to explore the way differing conceptualizations of morality affect our understanding of this relationship. I shall introduce three differing and competing conceptualizations of morality in order to explore the way these conceptualizations influence thinking about the nature of politics. The three conceptualizations I shall dwell upon hardly exhaust the philosophical parameters of moral thought, but they are sufficiently representative of philosophical difference on the nature of morality to suffice for present purposes. By exploring what might profitably be called the politics of morality, then, we should be better positioned to appreciate the differing possible relationships between morality and politics. A Moral Point of View Two questions dominate the subject of moral philosophy: what is morality, and why should anyone be moral? One popular way to start thinking about the first question is suggested by the so-called Golden Rule, which is generally formulated as, “Do not do unto others as you would not have others do unto you.” Presumably, this principle appeals to self-interest in order to indicate when and why one should not behave in ways motivated by self-interest alone. If A would not care for B to do X to her, she ought not do X to B, even if she might want to do X to B or even if she

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has other reasons to think she should do X to B. As Kurt Baier puts it, “A moral being must be able to keep his natural impulses in check, to control himself, to do what is required by the weightiest moral reasons, even if this means thwarting the strongest present inclination.”2 There is, however, a bit more to what Baier calls the moral point of view than this. A person’s willingness to avoid doing things she would not want done to herself is but the first step in a process that involves recognizing the need for a system of rules that will enable everyone to pursue their own interests without interference or meddling from others. The rules of morality, Baier argues, should serve “the good of everyone alike,” something Baier equates with the “common good.”3 A moral being will commit herself to a set of rules that serves the good of everyone alike. Baier offers some rather obvious examples: “thou shalt not kill,” “thou shalt not be cruel,” and “thou shalt not lie.” Rules such as these do not necessarily promote the good of everyone alike, but they do establish the necessary precondition under which reasonable beings can pursue their own sense of the good in the company of others. Seen from the moral point of view (i.e., from the point of view of “an independent, unbiased, impartial, objective, dispassionate, disinterested judge”), they facilitate the operation of social life. The moral point of view, Baier thus supposes, equates to “a God’s eye view” on the rules necessary to enable beings such as ourselves to coexist.4 The key to understanding which rules pass moral muster, according to Baier, is the condition of reversibility. “When we teach children the moral point of view, we try to explain it to them by getting them to put themselves in another person’s place: ‘How would you like to have that done to you!’ ”5 To pass the reversibility test “the behavior in question must be acceptable to a person whether he is at the ‘giving’ or ‘receiving’ end of it.”6 All nonreversible behavior, Baier concludes, is morally wrong.7 Of course, recourse to reversibility at this point appears to reduce Baier’s account of morality to a form of universalized self-interest, and one might legitimately wonder what all this has to do with morality. But this reading is mistaken; his appeal to reversibility is not intended to provide a reason why one should be moral. Instead, it merely illustrates the kind of behavior that runs afoul of the moral point of view. The general spirit underlying the moral point of view might be effectively expressed by the maxim, “Don’t harm others.” And in reply to a question about what counts as harm to others, Baier responds that harming others involves anything that you would not want to have done to yourself. The underlying presumption that powers the argument is the belief that harm is a constant for all human beings. If behavior X would harm A, as A understands it, if done to A, then A should not do X to B.

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Why, then, should anyone adopt the moral point of view? Why, that is, should one be moral if being moral means acting on reasons that pass the test introduced by the moral point of view? There is an obvious reason why one might not want to be moral: doing so means disregarding one’s self-interest when self-interest comes into conflict with the demands of morality. Baier repeats, at this point, the common theme that morality works as a trump against the pursuit of individual self-interest. “Moral rules,” he insists, “are universal rules designed to override those of selfinterest when following the latter is harmful to others.”8 So, the question, “why be moral?” equates to the question, “why act morally when and if it is against my self-interest to do so?” And by way of response, Baier emphasizes that one must give reasons for acting morally that are weightier than the reasons one has for acting in one’s self-interest. To make his case for the priority of moral action, Baier makes a distinctively Hobbesian move. He asks us to imagine two worlds: one in which everyone acts upon their own self-interest even when it causes harm to others and one where everyone acts according to the dictates of the moral point of view. He concludes, perhaps rather predictably, that the former world would be the hellish place imagined by Hobbes, and few, if any, reasonable beings would want to live in such a world. The latter world, however, would be a reasonably safe and secure place, the type of place where people could pursue their own interests with the confidence that they will not be harmed by others. The cost of this world, as Hobbes would put it, is the surrender of the freedom to put ourselves first and pursue our own self-interest without any regard for the interests of others. “Moralities,” Baier concludes, “are systems of principles whose acceptance by everyone as overruling the dictates of self-interest is in the interest of everyone alike, though following the rules of a morality is not of course identical with following self-interest.”9 To make sense of this we must say that the reason why one should be moral is provided by an appeal to what Tocqueville eloquently called an “enlightened self-interest.”10 This enlightened sense of one’s self-interest invites one to embrace the moral point of view and adhere to a system of rules, inspired chiefly (though not exclusively) by the principle of reversibility, and correspondingly to abandon acting upon one’s self-interest when doing so would violate those moral rules associated with this moral point of view. Baier’s answer to the question of why one should be moral is thus both practical and prudential in character. To be sure, he thinks everyone will be better off if everyone accepts the moral point of view and acts accordingly, but this cannot be the explicit reason why a particular agent should endorse the moral point of view. To argue that this is the reason

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for endorsing the moral point of view is to argue in a circle; one would have to adopt the moral point of view before one would have moral reason to have concern for everyone’s interest. To save the argument from circularity, then, we must suppose that A understands the need to adopt the moral point of view because she recognizes that it is in her best interest to live in a world where everyone accepts the moral point of view. This is the prudent choice, given the presumption that everyone else will recognize this and adopt the moral point of view as well. It follows that Baier gets to a moral conclusion (one ought to behave morally) from nonmoral premises (behaving morally is the prudential thing to do + one ought to follow prudence because it is in one’s best overall interest to do so). Though this might look like an example of Hume’s fallacy, Baier doesn’t make this mistake. He is not reaching a normative conclusion from purely descriptive premises because the prudential premise required to make his argument work is quite normative—to best promote one’s interest given the presence of others, one ought, prudentially speaking, to accept the moral point of view. The real problem here is to explain how one can get to a moral conclusion from nonmoral premises. But this issue needn’t trouble Baier either, for his conclusion that one ought to accept the moral point of view need not, and probably should not, be considered a moral one. Instead, it is a prudential conclusion to accept and follow what he conceptualizes as the moral point of view. Moral conclusions are those things that guide individual decision making after one commits to using the moral point of view as a guide to one’s conduct. Compelling though this argument might seem to be, Baier’s moral theory (i.e., his theoretical picture of morality and his account of why one should be moral) is not without its difficulties. For one thing, the argument proceeds by opposing moral behavior with self-interested behavior and implicitly regards persons as rational self-interest maximizers only. The moral point of view, this is to say, envisions morality as a way to check the conflicts generated by crude self-interested conduct.11 Absent from this view of things is any appreciation for the various normative schemes that motivate people and give point and purpose to their lives. Absent, this is to say, are the various senses of the good to which people subscribe and which legitimate their conduct even when it requires them to demonize certain others and possibly even coercively interfere with their lives. But much of the conflict that courses through human history and troubles humankind is the product of deep normative difference and disagreement that cannot be properly understood as (or reduced to) a clash of individual self-interests. The moral point of view, in other words, seems hard pressed to address the conflict created by normative disagreement.

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Imagine, for example, a diligent Nazi during World War II who fervently believes in Aryan supremacy and just as fervently believes in the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” If this person really is a true believer, the reversibility condition would hardly prevent him from participating in the extermination of Jews. Should he suddenly discover that he was Jewish, he might quite consistently submit himself for transportation to a concentration camp. Germany, he might think, would be a better place without Jews, and if this belief is sufficiently strong, he might cling to it even if he learned that he too was Jewish. His own self-interest is here subservient to the interest he has in his cause. It is the cause that matters, and thus our diligent Nazi would have little pertinent self-interest outside of what the cause allows and supports.12 For another thing, Baier’s response to the question of why one should be moral introduces a classic rational choice problem. If A does live in a world dominated by the moral point of view, she will have reason to defect from the practice of morality if doing so will enable her to realize her own self-interests. One defection need not take us closer to the world dominated by the self-interested behavior that Baier imagines. If everyone defected, A would be in trouble, but if A is confident that others will not defect, then it would be in her interest to do so. But this leaves a world dominated by the moral point of view inherently unstable, and Baier provides us with no reason to think that this world would not decay over time, though he does suggest that the presence of the moral point of view is itself a defense against decay.13 This is the point behind insisting that moral rules and principles should be taken as authoritative, or perhaps as objectively valid, because their normative force must be linked to their moral nature. But in the absence of either a theory of the good or an effective theory of socialization, his confidence in the moral point of view seems poorly placed. By imagining persons as rational calculators, he introduces both the condition under which it makes sense for individuals to accept the moral point of view and also the condition that might incline them to defect from this point of view if it looks like they might get away with it. Hobbes, of course, recognized this problem, and resolved it, in what is now classic fashion, by appeal to political power. An enforcing agent is required to punish defection from good social order, and for Hobbes, this was the job of the sovereign. If we suppose that the moral rules Baier thinks necessary in order for social life to go smoothly can be understood as the basic conditions of sociability, and not only or exclusively as moral rules, their support and defense can be supplied by the authority of the state. Now Baier’s moral theory would reduce to a form of political realism. Prudence recommends adherence to a set of norms that

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enable social life to go smoothly, and there is certainly nothing wrong with insisting that these norms hold with sufficient force to trump individual self-interest. Such insistence may well capture the conscience of many; indeed, prudence of this sort can hardly succeed in realizing its socially domesticating end if it does not capture the conscience of at least a great many—hence the need for a viable theory of socialization. But in a social environment where people have reason to defect from these norms, an enforcing agent remains an important addition to the fabric of social life. These comments suggest a connection between morality and politics, on the other hand, only if the norms of sociability are construed as moral and only if morality is construed as a system of social norms required in order to make sure social life goes well, norms supported, in turn, by a basic appeal to the prudential need for such things. Calling them moral norms thus seems to be rather beside the point. They can retain a moral sense if, like Baier, we suppose that the purpose of morality is to trump self-interest in the name of overall sociability, that is, in the name of making social life go well for all elements of the social environment in question. If this is a viable sense of morality, it is also a viable sense of the political, and so the former notion collapses into the latter. The legal rules enforced by the state, or at least some of these rules, should not, under this scenario, be understood to derive from an antecedent morality; instead, we should understand these rules to be the basic elements of a political morality necessary for life to go well in the polity. Manners and Morality I should like to introduce another way to think about morality by noting something that Stuart Hampshire has said about the relation between manners and morality: Any one social group may in fact believe that its good manners are the only good manners, and that its good manners ought ideally to be recognized by all groups as constituting good manners. Anyone who seriously makes this claim, and who supports it with argument, and who argues that other conceptions of good manners are in some way mistaken or inferior, is in effect claiming that his good manners are a proper part of morality. He has crossed the uncertain frontier between manners and morality, as they are now recognized, when he makes the claim that there is a good reason why everyone ought to behave as his particular norm of good manners prescribes, whether these are the manners of a man’s social group or not. If there is a right way to behave to which all men are required to conform, and if there is some coherent reason why this behavior is required of all

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men, it is difficult to see how the label ‘moral’ could be withheld from this requirement.14

The manners to which Hampshire refers are the “rules, conventions, and habits of behavior” that govern interpersonal relationships within a group.15 The norms constitutive of good manners are, Hampshire suggests, largely “habitual, unconsidered, and wholly internalized”; they constitute the proper way to do things within a given group and define a proper mode of association unreflectively and unselfconsciously. Let me add, however, that Hampshire is playing sociologist at this point and noting something about the type of belief systems people have that we identify as moral; he does not add his philosophical endorsement to this view of the matter. All groups, we can suppose, must have habits and conventions that belong to the realm of manners. But must they also have codes of conduct that belong to the realm of morality as Hampshire describes it? Philosophically (rather than anthropologically) the difference between manners and morals that Hampshire notices has two key components. First, moralities, unlike codes of manners, are understood to have an objectivity about them; the norms that constitute a morality are supposed to be true, in some strong sense, and not just true for the group in question. The truth claim inherent in a morality, moreover, needs to be supported by reasons; the claim of truth must be supported by an argument that presumably demonstrates the truth of the moral norms at issue and vindicates the belief that these norms are true. Second, the norms constitutive of a morality are regarded as prescriptions for all humankind to follow; that is, these norms are not just objective but also universal. They speak to all humankind and identify “the right way to behave to which all men are required to conform.” Groups whose members regard their manners as moralities are thus well positioned to be judgmental; outgroups with manners that incline members to do things differently will be regarded as mistaken or perhaps inferior, and this may provide these groups with reason to prevent great wrong by intervening in the lives of these outgroups to protect them from themselves (or others), so to speak. Needless to say, this confidence in the truth of a group’s morality, coupled with the understanding that this morality identifies the way all peoples should do things, introduces the real possibility of great social conflict and unrest. Implicit in the belief in a morality is the view that one should not stand by idly and let innocent others suffer great wrong if one can possibly intervene in order to prevent this wrong. Conflict results when two incompatible moralities collide.

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A central challenge of political thought is to suggest strategies to mediate intergroup conflict of this sort. Before turning to this, however, it is necessary to appreciate how this view of morality inspires a conception of politics that works to exacerbate the problem of political legitimacy. To begin, we might note the self-reflexive (and philosophical) character of the sense of morality that Hampshire has called to our attention. That a group should develop rules, conventions, and habits of behavior that form its realm of distinct manners seems altogether reasonable and unavoidable. It is hard to imagine social life in the absence of such things, and it is probably not too great an exaggeration to say that having a system of manners is largely (though hardly entirely) determinative of what makes a given group a group unto itself. As we noticed previously, these are (some of ) the things that distinguish one group of people from another and help fix their identities as members of a distinctive group. It seems considerably less reasonable, and a good deal more avoidable, on the other hand, for a group to come to think that its system of manners is true and objective, that it governs, and should govern, not just the interpersonal relations of the group but of all humankind. If the notion of group manners is understandable enough, the notion of a morality seems in many ways to be quite inexplicable. Why make the move from manners to morals? We could ask a second, more anthropological question here: why did some groups of people make the move from manners to morals? No doubt answering this question would also offer something of a reply to the first question, though probably not much of one. But this is hardly the place for an anthropological account of western morality, and there is, in any event, another way to respond to the first question that is more germane to the question of the relation between morality and politics that concerns us here. This response makes much of a need, which may arise in some groups, for group self-understanding and social attunement. More explicitly, it makes much of the idea that the challenge of social life introduces an important complexity that leaves communities facing certain intellectual problems. As groups grow in size, as distinct groups merge into larger and more eclectic communities, and as internal fissures within the groups generate group divisions, the challenge of living together is bound to take on intellectual dimensions. People have choices; they can either fight over their differences or reason about them. And as Baier has noticed, it doesn’t seem difficult to appreciate that the latter strategy has far less devastating consequences than the former.16 Reasoning doesn’t end fighting, of course, but the adoption of this strategy does inspire the conviction that groups might vindicate their faith in their own manners by demonstrating that at least some of the norms

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constitutive of them are true and binding upon all persons at all places and in all times. In one sense, this claim seems positively outlandish, but it has set the agenda of much moral philosophy for a good part of the western intellectual tradition, influenced as it has been by Christian thought. The objectivity and universality required of the morality envisioned (though not endorsed) by Hampshire, the objectivity and universality of moral principles that has been the Holy Grail of much western philosophy in more recent and more secular times, has a depth and significance about it that cannot be reached, for example, by appeal to something like Baier’s moral point of view. Baier insists, to be sure, that morality is constituted by “a body of moral convictions which can be true or false, that is, a body of rules or precepts for which there are certain tests.”17 But for Baier, morality itself is neither true nor false and cannot be true or false strictly speaking.18 The moral point of view provides the moral test by which moral claims can be evaluated; if a moral claim is vindicated by the moral point of view, one has reason to accept it. But the moral point of view is just that—a point of view—and such things can be neither true nor false. Imagine, for example, that A elects to reject the moral point of view, perhaps after reading Ayn Rand, and to go his own way, disdainful of the moral rules that satisfy the reversibility requirement. Some of the things A might do, let us suppose, will violate rules that matter according to the moral point of view. Can we condemn A for behaving immorally? In one sense, of course, we most certainly can. A has acted in ways prohibited by important moral rules, and this is what it means to act immorally. But A may elect to dismiss moral wrongdoing of this sort as simply the conventional simplicities of the herd that have no claim to his attention. He may insist, this is to say, that he has not done anything wrong in an objective sense, and this is because he rejects the moral point of view. We may reply that he ought not reject the moral point of view, that it is imprudent of him to do so. But A might say in reply that his adopted normative scheme rejects the prudential concerns of the herd, concerns that he might think serve only to level social life and rob individuals of their own initiative. More to the point (and as we have seen), A might insist that the concerns of prudence that provide reason to endorse the moral point of view have nothing to do with morality. So, A might insist that he cannot be accused of being immoral or behaving immorally by virtue of not endorsing the moral point of view because holding this point of view is not itself a moral requirement. It is one point of view, and A just happens to hold another. Of course, A might also insist that his normative scheme is actually true and that those who happen to subscribe to the moral point of

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view are mistaken, and he may have reasons, internal to his own normative outlook, to vindicate this claim in his own mind. I am supposing, however, that A is not an objectivist and prefers to see his own normative scheme in the same way Baier sees the moral point of view, namely, as a perspective that one has reasons to adopt and not as an epistemic claim about the world. Such perspectives cannot be said to be either true or false; points of view aren’t propositions about the way the world is. They are ways people elect to see the world, and if they give birth to propositions that may be true or false from inside the point of view in question, they are neither true nor false themselves. The claim of objectivity and universality associated with the sense of morality presently on center stage is not like this; it is a claim that people cannot get around by mere acts of will, truculence, or dreams of selfgovernance. According to the objectivity and universality claimed by this sense of morality, to be human is to be subject to certain laws that hold against all persons at all times and regardless of one’s choice in the matter. This way of understanding morality, of course, is a powerful inheritance from stoicism, Christianity, and the classic natural law tradition both helped to generate, and it still has a powerful hold on the sensibilities of ordinary folk and moral philosophers alike. As should be evident, this sense of morality directly shapes the nature and subject of politics for those who subscribe to it in the way imagined by Williams’s comment about political theory as applied morality. If the moral law prescribes the rules by which all human beings should live, it becomes a relatively simple matter for people sharing a common social environment to charge the state with the responsibility for enforcing those elements of the moral law that are capable of being externally enforced.19 Accordingly, the state becomes a moral agent charged with fulfilling a specific moral purpose, namely, the external enforcement of the moral law, and civil association, in turn, is a form of moral union, both shaped and necessitated by the demands associated with bringing the moral law to life within a particular social environment.20 Moral skeptics may wish to challenge the viability of this notion of morality on the grounds that it is simply a mistake to think that such a morality can vindicate the strong claims of objectivity and universality that are typically associated with it. There is no reason to explore this issue here, however, for two other, and perhaps related, issues are raised by this conception of morality that are more relevant to a concern about the relation of politics to morality. The first of these asks whether a satisfactory understanding of the point and purpose of civil association follows as automatically, and as deductively, from this conception of morality as is commonly supposed. The second asks whether this

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conception of morality might be reconcilable, at least in principle, with alternative understandings of politics that reject the view of civil association, implicit in the view of political theory as applied morality, as infused with and driven by the moral law. These questions introduce the subject of the chapter to follow, but before turning to these matters, there is one final conception of morality that I wish to explore, for it introduces yet another way to understand the relation between morality and politics. Morality and Conflict While Hampshire appreciates the sense in which the idea of a morality implies the existence of moral norms possessing objectivity and universality in the strong sense introduced above, he is nonetheless a staunch opponent of the view that morality is little more than a process of rational deduction from basic moral principles. The idea of such a “computational morality,” as Hampshire calls it, obfuscates and obscures the desperately agonistic, complex, and controversial nature of our lives as moral beings.21 As moral beings, we are subject to disparate and conflicting concerns and challenges that demand a dedication to different virtues and the juxtaposition of different values. The challenge of living a moral life, accordingly, involves working our way through the differing and often conflicting kinds of moral demands that we encounter. It is simply not possible, according to Hampshire, to draw upon rational speculation for the theoretical construction of an ideally good life and then set about to live the life imagined. The lives we live and the roles we play are simply too complicated, too textured for this. The best we can do is to encounter the moral complexity and conflict that awaits us and deal with it as our best judgment indicates that we should. The challenge that morality thus imposes upon us involves the construction and maintenance of “a way of life of which we are not ashamed and which we shall not, on reflection, regret or despise, and which we respect.”22 What philosophical inquiry into the nature of morality should thus impress upon us, Hampshire concludes, “is that there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality.”23 Of the various sources of conflict and controversy that Hampshire exposes for the purpose of illustrating the texture of moral life, he places a particular significance on the distinction between public and private morality. These separable realms of morality are perhaps best identified in terms of the respective, and seemingly inconsistent, virtues at home in each. The realm of private morality, the realm of living as an individual with other individuals, necessitates “absolute integrity, gentleness, disposition to sympathy, a fastidious sense of honour, generosity, a disposition

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to gratitude.”24 The realm of public morality (the realm of political management and public organization; in short, the realm of the political) demands, on the other hand, that individuals exhibit another set of virtues: “tenacity and resolution, courage in the face of risk, intelligence, largeness of design and purpose, exceptional energy, habits of leadership.”25 Hampshire’s concerns here are motivated in large part by an appreciation for the Machiavellian insight into the particular demands required by political leadership and effective policy formation. These demands place a significant emphasis upon a set of individual virtues that have little to do with the virtues a person should exemplify in her personal life. His claim is that the assumption of a political role, and of powers to change men’s lives on a large scale, carry with them not only new responsibilities, but a new kind of responsibility, which entails, first, accountability to one’s followers; secondly, policies that are to be justified principally by their eventual consequences; and thirdly, a withholding of some of the scruples that in private life would prohibit one from using people as a means to an end and also from using force and deceit.26

Of course, Hampshire does not strictly follow Machiavelli in his appreciation for the unique demands that politics places upon those who assume the reigns of political power. Machiavelli warns his imagined (and hoped for) prince that he had best put the concerns of morality aside and learn from history the demands of effective political leadership, for the dutifully moral prince will surely be brought to ruin in a world where so many are willing to do what they can to promote their own interests at the expense of the public good.27 This insight is frequently taken as a justification for a form of political realism—for the conviction that politics is an essentially amoral affair. For this type of political realist, politics is played by a set of rules distinguishable from moral rules and is best conducted according to methods that have little or nothing to do with the rules and ideals of morality. But while at least officially inspired by Machiavelli, Hampshire’s vision of the relation of morality to politics is rather different than this. He does not suppose that political leaders must be willing to be “good or not” in order to be effective and successful; unlike Machiavelli, Hampshire is not concerned with the political success of some imagined prince. Instead, he holds that political leaders face extraordinary moral concerns and challenges, ones that demand of them the display of a distinct set of virtues and a distinct concern for outcomes.

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In addition to the moral seriousness in justice and fairness to individuals, in love and friendship, constituting the sphere of private life, there is also political seriousness, seriousness of the use of power; and this requires higher priority for some duties and corresponding virtues and lower priority for refinements. In particular, it requires priority for duties of careful and responsible calculation, for the virtues of prudence and ‘cleverness’, cleverness being that Aristotelian component in moral virtue which political responsibility demands.”28

This is no claim of realpolitik; instead, it is an account of political leadership that is fundamentally moral in nature. It is a claim that politics really is, or ideally really should be, directed by moral concerns, albeit moral concerns that are distinct from, and largely incompatible with, those moral concerns that matter to individuals in the course of living private lives, lives far removed from the demands of political office and the responsibilities that come with the assumption of political power. Yet if political morality calls for the exercise of virtues both foreign to and inconsistent with the virtues at play in one’s private life, Hampshire also insists that it is possible to notice some basic moral conditions that aid in the guidance of political life. Although some basic virtues abound both in the private life of individuals and the public lives of political actors, the concerns of morality are hardly exhausted merely by noticing them. Virtues guide individuals in the pursuit of whatever ends they have chosen; they matter—one wants to say they are virtuous—because they are important means for the realization of desired ends. They enable human beings to go forward, to live together, and to prosper in one another’s company.29 They enable people to cope with the manifest challenges they must confront in the process of pursuing whatever ends they have chosen. But the choice of ends, Hampshire emphasizes, is also a moral matter; the theories of the good that we adopt and endorse also belong to the realm of morality. And here Hampshire argues for an inescapable plurality of moral visions. “I have been arguing,” he writes, that the diversity in conceptions of the good is an irreducible diversity, not only because no sufficient reasons have been given, and could ever be given, for taking one end, such as the general happiness or the exercise of reason, as the single supreme end; but also because the capacity to develop idiosyncrasies of style and imagination, and to form specific conceptions of the good, is the salient and peculiar capacity of human beings among other animals.30

The plurality of theories of the good Hampshire recognizes, on the other hand, is both deeper and more genuinely pluralist than the idea of moral

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pluralism made famous by Isaiah Berlin.31 Unlike Berlin, Hampshire does not imagine a pluralism justified by the fact that it is not possible to pursue all instances of the good given by the nature of things.32 Instead, Hampshire’s pluralism is derived from his belief in the basic indeterminacy of human life, from his sense that human life is something that happens to be adrift upon social and evolutionary forces no one can hope to grasp or fully understand. “Just as we know that each of the many natural languages evolves, and that linguistic conventions of grammar and idiom change with changing circumstances, so also the moral conventions that support a particular way of life change.”33 Hampshire well understood that moral pluralism is an unavoidable source of conflict in social life, and for reasons already encountered. Just as manners are transformed into morality with the conviction that they hold for all persons at all times, theories of the good ossify in ways that permit and support claims of objectivity. Hampshire was fully mindful of the political implications of moral conflict driven by competing and contesting moral theories of the good. He could foresee no philosophical remedy capable of ending the strife and struggle resulting from this conflict, for the prospects of a theoretical common ground from which to resolve this conflict is simply not available. “We ought not,” he argues in Morality and Conflict, “to plan for a final reconciliation of conflicting moralities in a perfect social order; we ought not even to expect that conflicts between moralities, which prescribe different priorities, will gradually disappear, as rational methods in the sciences and in law are diffused.”34 But by the same measure, we ought not suppose that there is no aid that politics can receive from morality at this juncture. The great difficulty groups holding different moralities (different conceptions of the good) must face is the challenge of getting along. This is, to be sure, fundamentally a political challenge, but it is also a moral one in Hampshire’s judgment. Here another side of the complex notion of morality can be, and should be, of considerable service. Even if there is, and can be, no universally shared good holding for all humankind, there can still be standards of fairness and justice, “for a shared negative morality,” that operate outside these competing moralities.35 Because it is possible (and necessary) to share such a (negative) morality in order to diffuse (though not eliminate) moral conflict, the challenge of living together, the challenge of civil association, is not hopeless. But neither is it a challenge that reason can reduce to clearly identifiable laws and principles. Conflicts must be mediated, and those faced with the challenge of mediation must often balance their personal convictions against their public responsibilities. This

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is where those two faces of morality of such concern to Hampshire clash; this is where the virtues of publicness bump up against the virtues of private life. Hampshire’s theory of morality, or rather, his theory of moral conflict, animates politics in several important ways. It supplies, first of all, much of the stuff of politics; it is the source of a great deal of the conflict that must be addressed and dissipated, if not resolved, if civil association is to be possible. But it also provides much of the substance of politics, in particular certain key values of civil association (the shared negative morality of fairness and justice), along with certain essential virtues (tenacity and resolution, courage in the face of risk, intelligence, largeness of design and purpose, exceptional energy, habits of leadership). Finally, it characterizes political decision making as an essentially moral enterprise. Individuals who find themselves responsible for the exercise of political power face difficult moral conflicts in the process of resolving the disputes it is their job to face. They must draw from different dimensions of the moral virtues in the effort to resolve these conflicts and disputes. By way of a (modest) reply to Machiavelli, or to the presumption that political realism proceeds without moral guidance, Hampshire insists only that the political environment is informed by “a minimum procedural justice” (a shared negative morality) and that “in weighing in politics conflicting moral claims and competing conceptions of the good, this minimum justice plays the role of the scales, while considerations derived from different conceptions of the good can be seen as the weights that have to be assessed.”36 Moral Conflict and Political Theory Hampshire’s account of negative morality, and its connection to politics, might seem to offer little solace to the student of political thought. If we take Hampshire seriously, we must abandon (with Williams) the view that political theory is a form of applied morality because we cannot sustain any Enlightenment enthusiasm about a natural moral law, accessible by reason, that can guide the actions of the state and legitimate (or expose the illegitimacy of ) the exercise of political power. In Hampshire’s own words, “We shall not find ourselves, as the Enlightenment philosophers hoped, citizens of a world, unclothed in the sole light of reason, computing what is best for mankind as a whole, or computing abstract justice, and guided by no considerations of another less rational kind.”37 It might seem that if Hampshire is right, there is little left for political theory to do; in particular, there would seem to be little reason to press forward with an inquiry into the issue of political legitimacy—with the

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effort to domesticate political power. If it is to be domesticated, it must be done in practice, as those who hold political power weigh the moralities in conflict on the scales of a minimum procedural justice and judge accordingly. But there is reason for political theorists to want to say more than this; there is reason, in fact, to think that some of the most compelling aspects of Hampshire’s analysis provide reason for political theorists to think that something more should be said about the problem of political legitimacy. “Conflict between competing ways of life—religious, ideological, national, family and class conflict—” Hampshire notes, has been perpetual, and conflict is always to be expected; and the conflicts are not only in the realm of ideas, but are often also political conflicts, involving force and the threat of force. A way of life is protected and maintained by the exercise of political power, and that way of life will evolve, and will change with changing forms of knowledge, as long as sufficient political protection of it lasts.38

There is, to be sure, great insight in this point, but it is worth noting that the opposite is also true; a way of life may be compromised, truncated, disrupted, and even destroyed by the exercise of political power as well. Sometimes the efforts of some group to sustain its own way of life by recourse to the exercise of political power will involve an intrusion upon, and the disruption of, other ways of life pursued by different groups. Hampshire’s presumption that a minimum procedural justice will assure a degree of defense for minority groups caught in deep conflicts with more dominant groups offers little solace on this score.39 The problem to which I wish to call attention at this point is actually anticipated by Hampshire when he notices that some groups suppose their manners are really moralities, that their theory of the good is really the theory of the good, holding for all persons at all times and in all places. Hampshire is surely right to suppose that this is an integral aspect of what it means to have a morality. As we have seen, to insist that killing is prima facie wrong is to insist that killing is prima facie wrong for all persons at all times and in all places. When moralities come into conflict, then, there is little moral room for compromise—little moral room for Hampshire’s minimum procedural justice, or his shared negative morality. Where does this other side of morality that is so important to politics come from—this shared negative morality that helps dissipate the intergroup hostility that might be expected from clashing theories of the good? What currency does it have within a particular theory of the good? And what weight

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could the standards of minimum procedural justice carry when placed on the scales to be balanced against the demands of a dominant theory of the good? Hampshire wants to avoid domination by finding a place for justice within his complex and fluid sense of morality. The justice Hampshire has in mind stands outside conflicting theories of the good and is available to policy makers as a means for moderating this conflict. But this seems like scant protection for minority and marginalized social groups facing dominant groups with great confidence in their moralities, that is, with great confidence in the view that their moral viewpoint rightly governs all persons at all times and in all places. If policy makers are from dominant groups, for example, these individuals will likely be inspired by the moral vision of the dominant groups to which they belong, and this moral vision, rather than the concerns of negative morality, may well determine their actions. If such dominance is to be avoided and moral conflict effectively mediated, clear and sufficient standards of political legitimacy must be established and promulgated. Hampshire’s moral pluralism, in other words, merely reissues the problem of political legitimacy, for dominant groups confident in their moral outlook will have little reason to practice tolerance when they confront groups with whom they have moral disagreements. On the one hand, it is important that these dominant groups be allowed to hold and act upon their moral convictions, but given the consent requirement, it is also important, from the standpoint of political legitimacy, that this does not mean that dominant groups be allowed to impose their will upon those groups whose ways and beliefs are considered morally wrong or anathema by them. If something like Hampshire’s minimum procedural justice is to be applied to resolve this problem, and thus to support a case for political legitimacy, there must be some reasons why appeals to procedural justice should be acknowledged and respected by groups confident in their own moral theory of the human good, some reason why those who still see morality in the strong objective terms advertised by moral theories that owe much to the natural law tradition should think that their moral theories do not automatically supply politics with the basic norms and fundamental rules of civil association. In support of this possibility, we may need to have recourse to the understanding of morality, and the logic of moral necessity, that has been introduced and defended by Baier. Or so I want to suggest in the chapter to follow.

10.1057/9780230106055 - Liberalism and Pluralism, Craig L. Carr

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of Groningen - PalgraveConnect - 2011-02-05

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Chapter 3

The Morality of Politics We can now return to the problem of political legitimacy. Williams, it will be recalled, supposes that the legitimacy of the state can be established only if the consent requirement is met. On this view, the power of the state is illegitimate if it is exercised over groups whose members do not consent to be subject to this power.1 As we have seen, Williams believes that the cogency of this view depends upon a conception of the political that is independent of the realm of morality. But we have also seen that there is another sense of the political, at home in traditional moral liberalism, that supposes that legitimate principles of civil association follow from antecedent moral considerations that are held to be objective and universal in nature. On this view, the legitimacy of the state is established not by advancing reasons those subject to political power can accept, but by advancing reasons they should accept, morally speaking. The contest between these two conceptions of the political generates the impasse noted at the end of the first chapter. If we accept the first view of the political, we seem unable to produce a theory of civil association capable of articulating a vision of social justice that is able to supply the normative foundations necessary to unite the polity, and this is an important factor in securing the stability of the polity. If we endorse the second view, however, we still cannot meet the challenge of political stability, at least in pluralist polities, because the fact of pluralism all but guarantees that illiberal and non-liberal groups in the polity will want to reject the legitimacy of the state. While liberal spirits might think these non-liberal groups should, morally speaking, accept the legitimacy of the state, the distinctive non-liberal moral viewpoints these groups hold incline them not to do so. In Williams’s terms, then, the consent condition requires

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that political legitimacy be established by providing reasons for endorsing the legitimacy of the state that all groups can accept. Outsider thinking that some group should accept the state’s legitimacy is neither here nor there. The problem of political legitimacy matters because its resolution is crucial for political stability. So, if political stability matters and if political theory takes political stability as its first challenge, as Williams thinks it should, only two moves are available to the theorist. We must either accept Williams’s sense of the political and look for a way to craft a theory of justice within it or rely on a strategy of assimilation to homogenize the polity and bring its various groups into alignment with moral liberalism. (A third strategy on display in Rawls is to simply beg the question by supposing an overlapping consensus.) The second move is hardly viable practically, and if we suppose that “ought” implies “can” here, we must then conclude that it is not viable theoretically either. As John Gray has noticed, it seems rather naïve at this point in history to suppose that the second move is realistically possible; thus from a theoretical point of view, it amounts to little more than a denial of the problem of political stability.2 This leaves us with the challenge of developing a theory of justice within the context of the political that does not follow from antecedent moral premises. Of course, the resultant theory of justice must also be one that all groups in the polity can accept. Insofar as such a theory must be universally acceptable (i.e., acceptable to all elements of the polity), it makes some sense to think of it as having a certain moral status. Consequently, the required theory must stand the common view of the relation between politics and morality (and political theory and moral philosophy) at home in moral liberalism on its head. The effort to develop an effective political morality might thus be viewed as a type of applied political theory. If this is a form of political realism, it is also one that acknowledges a place for a morality of sorts within the realm of the political. The discussion in the previous chapter has pointed toward the direction we might take to develop the required theory. By taking a cue from Baier’s moral theory, we can explore the possibility of articulating nonmoral reasons for why all groups in the polity should accept the legitimacy of the state; nonmoral reasons of this sort will do the job if they are also reasons that all groups can recognize as compelling. While the fact of pluralism rules out the practical possibility of finding a foundational moral reason for accepting the legitimacy of the state, and while tripping over an existent overlapping consensus seems to be an unlikely possibility, there is no reason to suppose ex ante that it is not possible to hit upon nonmoral reasons that might be sufficient to satisfy the consent requirement.

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These reasons should also indicate the principled basis of the government’s authority, and from this basis, it will then be possible to develop a theory of justice constitutive of the political morality of the polity. This morality will stand alongside and moderate the various normative convictions, including liberal convictions, present in the liberal polity. Needless to say, this argument will likely seem wrongheaded to most everyone in the liberal polity because its strictures may make demands upon citizens that conflict with their own primary and group-based normative convictions. Thus we can anticipate nearly universal opposition to the introduction of a political morality with something like a claim of trump over perceived primary moral beliefs. This makes the theoretical enterprise something of a hard sell, but it is not the sell that concerns me at the moment.3 Instead, I want to explore the type of political morality that follows from this approach to the problem of political legitimacy to see if it can meet, at least in theory, the rigorous standards of political stability that must be met by any political theory capable of accommodating ontological difference and normative diversity. Taking another cue, this time from Hampshire, I want to suggest that the political morality that evolves out of the theoretical project adds a texture and complexity to our moral lives. It has a command upon our moral reflections that can, and likely will, conflict with some of our primary moral beliefs, and dealing with this conflict becomes an important moral challenge in its own right that the citizens of the liberal polity must invariably address. The purpose of this chapter is to expand on these comments and to indicate how this theoretical trajectory can effectively resolve the problem of political legitimacy in a way that meets the needs of political stability. Feminism and Multiculturalism Perhaps the best way to proceed at this point is to give a practical shape to the problem of intergroup conflict and normative disagreement that complicates the problem of political legitimacy. To do so, I want to bring onto center stage a lively theoretical exchange invited by Susan Okin in her book Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? 4 Okin elects to answer affirmatively the question her title posits, and if one buys her operative premises, it seems difficult—and hardly desirable—to quibble with this. But if we conclude that multiculturalism is bad for women, another (and arguably more pressing) question arises: what, if anything, should a liberal polity do about this? Okin’s response to this question seems to be that the liberal polity should do a great deal; it should come to the defense of women and intervene in cultural practices that disadvantage women to set matters right. It is this latter conclusion that concerns me here.

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The tension Okin elects to explore is “between feminism and a multiculturalism commitment to group rights for minority cultures.”5 To understand the tension she thinks to exist between feminism and multiculturalism, we should note first that she thinks feminism involves “the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.”6 From the point of view of a liberal morality that takes individual autonomy seriously, this normative claim is unassailable, and we needn’t be troubled here with just how free many men actually are to choose precisely how their lives will go. By multiculturalism Okin understands the normative claim (arising primarily in liberal political cultures) that “minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by the practice of insuring the individual rights of their members, and as a consequence these should also be protected through special group rights or privileges.”7 Okin generally follows Kymlicka in explaining the case for group rights.8 Since individual autonomy is expressed and explored in minority cultures by the norms and traditions of the culture itself, respecting the autonomy of the members of minority cultures means respecting their cultural practices. Therefore, the culture should be left free to live according to its norms and to practice its group ways, and this requires assigning rights to the group itself, rights that protect group ways against any outside interference that would restrict the ability of the cultural community to live as its members wish.9 Thus understood, group rights are derivative of the individual rights that allow persons to function freely and optimally as autonomous agents. And this introduces an evident tension within the liberal defense of cultural autonomy. While group rights might be necessary for the members of cultural communities to operate autonomously, cultural practices that would seem to inhibit or compromise the autonomy of some of the members of a cultural community should not be tolerated. Thus an extension of special rights to groups should not permit groups to engage in practices that restrict the autonomy of (some of ) their members. Non-liberal or illiberal cultural communities, in other words, should not be accorded special group rights when and if the practices they claim to be protected by such rights violate the standards of liberal morality.10 Multiculturalism thus construed would not provide much protection for minority cultures existing within a liberal state if we suppose that part of what makes these cultures a minority is that they do not accept or endorse standards of liberal morality. The multicultural argument, as we have seen, reduces to the claim that moral liberals ought to tolerate

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disparate ways of life, cultural practices, and so forth, provided that they are liberal at heart, that is, provided that they exemplify a commitment to respect persons as autonomous agents.11 There is, of course, still room to quarrel over what this means in practice, or over how normatively diverse a cultural community can be and still fall within the parameters of moral propriety as liberals understand this notion. Much of the contemporary discussion of multiculturalism in liberal circles reduces to a question of the moral boundaries of liberalism itself. But the line must be drawn somewhere, and once it is drawn, illiberal members of the polity whose ways are held to offend liberal morality are simply out of luck. Moral liberals are disinclined to acknowledge a claim of a group right to practice illiberal ways, and such a claim would not be acceptable to a polity in which the state existed to enforce the standards of liberal morality throughout. So, if illiberal groups existing in liberal polities of this sort want to insist upon a group right to practice their illiberal ways, they will need to provide moral liberals with a compelling reason to set aside their morality and tolerate these illiberal practices. But let me put this matter aside for the moment and focus on Okin’s claim that respecting cultural diversity by extending special rights to minority groups may disadvantage women. It will do so, Okin argues with considerable justification, if a particular culture is generally patriarchal and if cultural practices (that Okin supposes are supported and promoted by men) exist to enable men to control women.12 The most controversial of these practices, Okin notes, involve clitoridectomy, polygamy, and coerced marriages, including the marriage of children without their consent.13 But it is possible to imagine here a host of less immediately offensive (as seen from a liberal point of view) practices that still pressure women to adopt specific social roles (e.g., spouse, mother, homemaker, etc.) rather than choose “to live independently of men, to be celibate or lesbian, or to decide not to have children.”14 By way of conclusion, Okin insists that women might be much better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct (so that its members would become integrated into the less sexist surrounding culture) or, preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women—at least to the degree to which this value is upheld in the majority culture.15

This conclusion is remarkable in at least one sense; Okin’s suggestion that minority cultures that disadvantage women should be encouraged to alter their practices seems rather tepid given her strong defense of women’s rights. If minority cultures are blind to women’s rights, and if these rights

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receive defense from a moral point of view considered objective, why not insist that the offending cultural communities be required or forced to change their ways? Why put up with them at all? This latter position seems to best describe U.S. policy, at least with regard to the more controversial minority group practices that Okin finds objectionable. Polygamy has long been criminalized in the United States, for example, and clitoridectomy more recently so. At least at the extreme end of the scale that matters to Okin, American law provides support for women’s rights that correspondingly denies recognition of group rights by criminalizing inter-gender practices considered obnoxious or intolerable by the majority (liberal) culture. A strong defense of group rights, one would think, should allow minority groups to practice their own ways, even if this means allowing the men of these minority groups to “control” the women members of these groups. One might even suppose there is an element of cultural arbitrariness in the American recognition of tolerable and intolerable group inter-gender practices. American law permits Catholics to deny women access to the priesthood, for example, but it is hostile to the Mormon practice of polygamy. Okin would probably be willing to argue that many sexist practices continue to plague the more dominant groups present in the United States; American society still falls short of the feminist ideal of seeing that gender does not count in terms of the options and opportunities available to a person charged with deciding how her life will go. Society ought not route people into specific social roles or practices by virtue of their gender. But she has a more immediate concern in the work now under discussion, a concern driven by the emergence of the so-called culture defense in American law.16 The problem cultural diversity poses for American law comes into focus when one notices that some cultural communities may permit or even encourage their members to adhere to group practices even when doing so might violate the criminal law of the state in which they reside. Should a person be punished for doing something considered proper, or even obligatory, according to his or her cultural standards? Okin’s concern about the culture defense is that “by failing to protect women and sometimes children of minority cultures from male and sometimes maternal violence, cultural defenses violate women’s and children’s rights to equal protection of the laws.”17 The issue posed by the culture defense is rather more complicated than this.18 At the moment, however, I want merely to see how this claim might be vindicated. Suppose we start by thinking about feminist claims in defense of gender equality. One way to do this is to insist first that women constitute a group in their own right and then note that this group has historically been dominated, marginalized, and oppressed by another

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(and generally male) group. Feminist thinkers sometimes talk this way and insist that women be liberated from the oppressive thumb of men and allowed to practice their own ways, live their own lives, and control their own destinies on an equal footing with men.19 In a sense, this move involves a claim of a special group right of the sort favored by multiculturalists. The right asserts, quite simply, that women should be allowed to live as they wish and that social offices and opportunities not be closed to them because of their gender. This parallels, say, the Amish claim to a right to live as they wish and not be forced to adopt the ways and practices of the dominant culture that surrounds them. It is the claim of groups that have a sense of themselves as such by virtue of the disadvantage, separation, or second-class status they have been forced to endure at the hands of the dominant culture. Political recognition of a group as a group with its own ways and practices should thus require the state to afford group members the opportunity to live as they wish, and this vindicates the claim of a right to the equal protection of the laws. But Okin’s claim may also be defended by a different and more familiar move. This move makes reference to a moral claim that those who make it consider objectively valid and beyond controversy. In this case, the claim belongs to liberal morality. Women are human beings and as such deserve the dignity and respect that accompanies their status as autonomous agents. It is wrong to impose upon this autonomy, and this moral wrong looks through the artifices of cultural practice to condemn those practices that do obstruct personal autonomy. Accordingly, cultural ways that offend against the autonomy of the individual should not, from this moral point of view, receive support from the state in terms of either group rights or the culture defense. The state, on this view, should be guided by something like the structural model of the relation between morality and politics that Williams mentions; that is, the state should enforce the basic standards of (liberal) morality. The normative judgment built into this conclusion receives a necessary, though generally only implied, justification from the assumed claim that it belongs to an objectively valid morality. This morality provides the substance to the basic laws that should govern human relationships, and cultural difference cannot— and therefore ought not—stand against these basic laws. Culture, liberal moralists are inclined to insist, matters, but not enough to trump the moral law. A Defense of Culture These two strategies for the defense of gender equality are not necessarily distinct, of course; in the hands of the liberal moralist the first strategy

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usually folds quietly into the second, which ends up doing most of the heavy lifting. But none of this is likely to move some groups whose members are not persuaded in the least by either liberal morality or feminist argument. The members of these groups, we can suppose, are not moved by such matters because they have their own normative convictions and worldviews that matter to them and shape their group standards with regard to the treatment of their female members. These normative standards matter to these groups, it is fair to suppose, in just the way liberal morality matters to liberals—they are formative elements of group identity. They establish a large part of what it means for the group to be a group. And so it seems reasonable to think that such groups would see efforts to impose these moral standards upon them as a form of oppression, marginalization, and/or domination. They have their own internal normative reasons to oppose the imperialist domination of the dominant culture that surrounds them and invades their group ways. Is this a reason to support a strong position on group rights, to embrace something like the culture defense, and to tolerate group activities even if they violate standards of liberal morality as expressed in current American law? I propose to approach this question circumspectly by considering several of the replies to Okin collected in her text. Perhaps predictably, these responses range from the generally supportive to the largely hostile. Nor is it difficult to imagine the source of the hostility displayed by some of the respondents. As we have seen, Okin challenges several cultural practices on the grounds that they are oppressive to women, but this judgment is contentious and need not be shared by those groups that are the target of her concern. Seen from inside the group, so to speak, these practices may be considered little more than a part of the life of the culture in question. “This,” one might say, “is how these people do things.” And if there is something oppressive going on, this must be recognized and acknowledged from within the culture, not by some outsider who elects to evaluate what others do according to her preferred ways. This reaction to Okin’s position is aptly put by a question Sander Gilman raises about some of Okin’s examples: “But is it possible that the projection of Western, bourgeois notions of pleasure onto other people’s bodies is not the best basis for anybody’s judgment?”20 Azizah al-Hibri puts a related point even more strongly: If Western feminists are now vying for control of the lives of immigrant women by justifying coercive state action, then these women have not learned the lessons of history, be it colonialism, imperialism, or even fascism. After all, such feminists “think that the best community is one in which all but their preferred . . . [gender] practices are outlawed.”21

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Finally, Bonnie Honig wonders importantly if the adherents of one culture might naturally judge the practices of another rather unfairly, for it is difficult to be certain, when seen from the outside, that a practice that appears oppressive really is oppressive, particularly when seen from the inside.22 In the absence of an acknowledged objective morality, claims about oppression become little more than a matter of perspective. These are, I think, all valid concerns, and they place Okin’s feminism on the horns of a troubling dilemma. The moves available to her by way of reply, it would seem, are fixed by the two possible strategies of defense noted above. She could insist that women are a group with distinct interests and some of these are compromised by patriarchal cultures, or she could invoke the claims of an objective (liberal) morality and insist simply that some cultural practices are inconsistent with the moral obligations people owe to others. If she makes the first move, she is vulnerable to the kind of objection pressed by Gilman: Okin claims that “women” are the prime victims of religious practices. But can one really speak of “women” as a unitary category? Her representation of “woman” as a singular, monolithic category is difficult to understand at the close of the millennium. The claims of the Enlightenment construction of “man” have been (at least since Theodore Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment) shown to be specious; Okin’s “woman” suffering under the patriarchal rule of “religion” is a similar composite creature. And “she” must be rescued from the ignorance of superstition by “Western” women!23

When confronted with this difficulty, the second move seems more promising and seems, in fact, to be the move Okin wants to make, albeit obscurely. She insists, for example, that children should be permitted to forge their lives for themselves and not be indoctrinated into a given way of life by their parents.24 This seems to play the role in her thinking of an objective moral claim that trumps the concerns of culture and parents alike. Moreover, she also insists that the majority in a liberal culture has “a special responsibility to members of minority groups whose oppression it may promote or exacerbate by granting group rights without careful consideration of intragroup inequalities.”25 To make this claim stick, she must be confident that equality can be effectively measured by some objective scale and that anything that fails to meet this measure qualifies as oppression. Neither equality nor oppression, this is to say, can be considered relative to culture; there must then be some objective moral standard that allows us to judge these things cross-culturally. But if this is the move Okin elects to make, the fact of normative difference still causes problems.26 Okin may be confident in her moral

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sensitivities, and she may also be right about all this. The great problem, of course, is that she will almost certainly be unable to persuade several of her respondents, or the groups she elects to criticize, of this fact. Normative disagreement goes all the way down, so to speak; it is enmeshed in the normative viewpoint and ontological worldview that substantially shapes a distinctive cultural community. There is no discernible common ground that might serve as a foundation for mediating the type of normative disagreement Okin’s argument brings to light. Instead, we should expect the type of response offered by Gilman, al-Hibri, and, to a lesser degree, Honig. This is not just the response of the multiculturalist who wishes to give cultural diversity its due; it is also, and more importantly, the response of different normative outlooks (moral theories of the human good) and the communities that hold them, communities that invariably believe imperialism and oppression to be on display when the members of outgroups resort to the coercive might of the state to force them to abandon their ways and endorse and practice the ways of these outgroups. The type of normative conflict that Okin invites thus reaches the level of the political for fairly obvious reasons. Okin, it seems, has little difficulty asking the liberal state to abandon efforts to tolerate certain cultural practices by means of recognizing special cultural rights if these practices offend her moral sense. Writing this moral sense into law would require the polity to criminalize certain minority practices (e.g., polygamy, cliteridectomy) and refuse to consider cultural practice as an excusing, justifying, or mitigating factor in those instances when a minority practice runs afoul of the criminal law. But if the liberal polity endorses this view, it cannot meet the standard of political legitimacy because this sort of imposition will surely fail to meet the consent requirement. Of course, Okin might not care about this, just as anyone with great moral confidence in the validity of her or his convictions might not care about this. But if political stability and hence political legitimacy matter, they certainly should care about this. Politics and Normative Conflict This rehearsal of the normative conflict between (some) multiculturalists and (some) feminists sets the problem of political legitimacy in dramatic relief. Given the genuine and divisive nature of this conflict, what kind of civil arrangement could qualify as legitimate for both of these contending groups? A government that did not allow the culture defense for disparate cultural communities would be one that these communities would surely find coercive; thus they would not want to concede its legitimacy. But a government that allows this defense in cases involving the apparent abuse

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of women would just as surely be objectionable to feminists, and things would only get worse if the government prevented feminists from working as they see fit to improve the plight of the women members of these communities in order to protect them as a whole. One way to address this problem is to suppose that the government should be neutral with regard to intergroup conflicts. But it is unclear what this would mean in practice, or how this supposed neutrality could be put into effect.27 If this means the state should not take a stand that privileges one of these competing theories of the good over the other, neither side is likely to be very happy. Feminists will object that the government is standing by idly while women are suffering at the hands of men. If, however, feminists take matters into their own hands and pursue policies on their own designed and intended to interfere with the practices of these cultural communities, these communities will object and insist that the government provide them protection from the possibly coercive interference of feminist groups. A government that adopted a policy of noninterference would, in effect, license groups to coercively intrude into the affairs of outgroups.28 The problem of political legitimacy is apparent enough when the government exercises its coercive might to intervene in the internal affairs of a group. A requirement of state neutrality might prevent this sort of thing, though this will simply make neutrality seem like a bad idea to those groups that suppose the state should intervene to prevent what their members see as a manifest injustice in the internal practices of certain outgroups. But a concern about the legitimacy of the state also arises in the case of intergroup coercion. There is little practical difference between a state where the government acts as the vehicle of dominant groups and coercively interferes in the internal practices of outgroups in order to force them to comply with the ways of the more dominant groups and one where government does nothing while dominant groups act on their own to impose their ways on outgroups. If state neutrality permits intergroup coercion to take place, it will not be considered legitimate by minority groups that naturally look to government for protection from this sort of thing. But the government can come to the aid of these outgroups only at the price of state neutrality. In more general terms, the conflict between (some) feminists and (some) multiculturalists illustrates nicely two aspects of normative intergroup conflict that are worth emphasizing. First, each side has considerable intellectual ammunition at its disposal to fend off the arguments of the other side. Each side has a case that makes perfect sense given its own particular scheme of things and its own understanding of the nature of the human condition. Consequently, each side has reasons of

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its own to reject the arguments of the other side and to be confident in its normative position. This introduces the second aspect of normative intergroup conflict worth emphasizing. The conflict in question is not a competition over interests; nor can it be adequately understood in terms of a bargaining game. The conflict cannot be resolved, this is to say, by strategies of trade-off and compromise. Group interests are at issue only insofar as group belief and group self-determination are at issue—because either group belief is under attack from outgroups or group belief drives groups to interfere in the internal affairs of rival groups. Neither side is particularly concerned with advantaging itself materially or economically vis-à-vis the other side; instead, both sides think they are in the right and that morality is on their side. This is the point behind describing conflict of this sort in terms of normative rivalries and of insisting that normative rivalries cannot be reduced to allocational rivalries. Allocational rivalries may also exist in the polity, of course, but they introduce a different type of intergroup conflict that is worth separating from normative conflict. It is important to appreciate the particular nature of normative intergroup rivalries because the resultant conflict seems to defy typical conflict resolution strategies; it cannot be mediated by bargaining, discourse, or trade-offs. There is no trade-off in normative matters of the first importance; these are moral issues that people will go to the mat for. And this makes dealing justly with intergroup normative conflict challenging indeed. An appeal to state neutrality does no good here because there simply is no neutral position the government can take that will be acceptable to the disputing groups. Nor does it seem possible to imagine a modus vivendi arrangement arising between these groups, for there are no grounds of compromise that would allow the contending groups to find an acceptable equilibrium. Left to their own devices, it is likely that the groups in question would rather fight than compromise. In the face of this difficulty, there would appear to be only one way to approach the problem of normative intergroup conflict in a manner that offers some hope of meeting the challenge of political legitimacy. As might now be apparent, the first step involves understanding the problem of political legitimacy in the manner introduced by Williams. To be legitimate, a polity must provide reasons for the legitimacy of its use of coercive power that all groups subject to this power can accept (and, of course, also should accept, though this is not the issue of concern here). The second step is to identify some basic principle, or set of such principles, that informs and directs the exercise of governmental power and that all groups present in the polity can (and should) also accept, regardless of their particular worldview and moral theory of the human good.29

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These two steps introduce the basic elements of what I will call a politics of principle. I shall understand a politics of principle to involve the political convergence by all elements of the polity upon a principle (or set of principles) that everyone can endorse and that provides the standard of justice to be applied for purposes of resolving intergroup conflicts (both normative and allocational).30 The great challenge faced by a politics of principle, of course, is to craft an argument that really does promise to get everyone to embrace some principle (or set of principles) that can serve as the standard of measure of justice in the polity.31 This will require a shift in the focus of rival groups, a shift that encourages rivals to see their own particular rivalries as but an instance of the larger sociopolitical problem of intergroup normative conflict that jeopardizes the stability and orderliness of the polity. Since I have addressed this challenge elsewhere, I shall not bother to repeat the basic elements of my argument here.32 But a brief reprise of the argument is necessary as a first step in clarifying the way a politics of principle can manage to resolve the problem of political legitimacy. To begin, it is important to appreciate that the type of deep normative disagreement that serves as the source of potential political conflict between (some) feminists and (some) multiculturalists is neither unique nor atypical of modern pluralist polities. It is but one instance of the normative disagreements that separate any manner of religious, cultural, ethnic, or ideological groups from one another. Nor should these disagreements be considered static and fixed through time. Instead, they are fluid and change as the configuration of groups changes. The American Nazi Party is hostile to Jews and vice versa; in some cities Koreans are hostile to Hispanics and vice versa; some self-proclaimed communist groups are hostile to anarchist groups and vice versa; the Ku Klux Klan is hostile to Catholics and vice versa. The list could go on almost endlessly, and tomorrow new groups and new conflicts will extend the list. The picture being drawn here is hardly of a Hobbesian state of war, of course. It is intended to state only what from a historical point of view might be regarded as a simple truism: people tend to disagree, and at times to disagree violently, about normative issues that matter greatly to them. As a corollary, we might add that power differentials between groups exacerbate the problem of normative intergroup conflict, sometimes because the more powerful groups control the government and use the coercive might of government to achieve their desired ends vis-à-vis their rivals and sometimes because more powerful groups can act against their rivals summarily without concern for reprisal or interference from the government. Built into this scenario is the legitimizing nature of moral certainty; as we have seen, groups confident in their own normative convictions will

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likely have little hesitation in using the coercive might of the government to achieve their own moral ends. If this was not so, the problem of political legitimacy would be quite different than it in fact is. If not exactly a Hobbesian state of war, on the other hand, the postulate of ongoing intergroup normative rivalry is also reasonably unsettling, largely because it describes a recipe for intractable social conflict arising in any quarter of the polity and often for unforeseen and unpredictable reasons. Should the children of fundamentalist religious groups be required to use a liberal text in the public schools that contains passages offensive to their religious convictions?33 Should members of the American Nazi Party be allowed to march in a suburb of Chicago known for its large Jewish population.34 Should the Boy Scouts of America be permitted to exclude homosexuals from membership in their organization?35 Such matters invariably need a political resolution, and from the standpoint of political legitimacy, the resolution needs to be recognizable as just by all parties concerned. If the controversies that surround such low-level disputes rarely spill over into the streets, there is no guarantee that they will not do so, for sometimes they clearly do. In the United States, such low-level disputes are generally resolved through litigation. But litigation only ends cases; it doesn’t end the conflict. It leaves us only with a type of benign warfare among groups that will press in the direction of either an increased intergroup hostility and potentially less benign warfare or a more oppressive state as force and fraud become the dominant strategies for dealing with civil dissent and unrest. The Political as Moral Viewpoint How then might a politics of principle suggest a theoretical resolution to the problem of political legitimacy as seen against the background of normative intergroup conflict? This question returns us to the view of morality introduced and defended by Kurt Baier.36 Recall that Baier builds a theory of morality by noticing the unsavory aspects of living in a social condition where people act strategically and solely to promote their own particular interests. To avoid this predicament, Baier argues people should adopt a point of view that requires them to take account of the presence of others and behave in a manner that satisfies the condition of reciprocity. They should not, this is to say, act in ways they would consider unacceptable or undesirable if they were on the receiving end. Instead, they should consider the social implications of their actions and act only in ways that meet the requirements of the moral point of view, that is, the view provided by rules and principles that enable everyone to live as they wish.

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Pressed into the service of political theory, Baier’s argument suggests that the best way to order civil association involves endorsing a principled order in which the pursuit of personal or group convictions is constrained by conditions that all groups can accept. This may be possible if a principled system of social organization and coordination can be imagined that corresponds to something like Baier’s reciprocity condition. To avoid the dual evils of intergroup warfare (even benign intergroup warfare) and the omnipresent threat of oppression that exists under conditions of warfare, groups may think it in their best interest to accept constraints upon their intergroup behavior in order to safeguard maximum control over their intragroup activities. On its face, this seems like an unlikely possibility given what has been said about the intractable character of intergroup normative rivalries. This, it might seem, is just what the feminists will not want to do when confronted with paternalistic outgroups and just what paternalistic cultural communities will not want to do when confronted by feminists. But the logic of Baier’s argument, extended to political theory, invites all groups in the social setting to notice the ongoing, multifaceted, and pervasive character of intergroup conflict. Seen against the unstable and conflictual background of pervasive intergroup normative hostility, the problem of social stability rises in prominence and the specific normative rivalries that matter to particular groups are accordingly diminished in significance. From a prudential point of view, it would seem preferable for all groups to accept a stable social order over a condition of warfare or oppression even if this means qualifying the strategies they can use to attack their normative rivals. This, of course, is the logic of Hobbes pressed into service to address the problem of intergroup hostility. The adoption of this viewpoint points naturally in the direction of a governing principle for the polity that states the need for groups to be secure in a maximum amount of group autonomy compatible with a like amount of autonomy for all other groups. I presented above a principle that articulates the point behind this view of the matter and labeled it “the liberal principle,” and I have previously referred to the theory that defends and promotes the liberal principle as practical liberalism.37 For present purposes, it seems reasonable to regard the argument for the liberal principle as a political extension of Baier’s case for a moral point of view. Morality, in Baier’s judgment, involves the construction of an outlook that serves the need of tranquility and good order. The power and priority of this viewpoint over individual interest is given by its necessity for assuring that people will be able to get along amicably. Morality thus understood matters not because its rules and principles are objectively true in some cosmic sense (of the sort that mattered to

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natural law thinkers), but because these rules and principles are necessary preconditions for viable human sociality. Recognition and acceptance of this point establishes the moral point of view I want not to associate with practical liberalism. Thus understood, there is a dimension to morality that belongs to the realm of the political. If the challenge of moral philosophy is, perhaps among other things, to recommend rules and principles by which human beings with differing worldviews and moral theories of the human good can manage to coexist amicably in a shared social setting, then this is a challenge quite obviously at home within political theory, and this aspect of morality takes on the appearance of a type of applied political theory. So, in the sense of morality imagined by Baier, practical liberalism can stand as a moral theory of civil association, even though the case to be made for the liberal principle rests on what is normally recognized as prudential reasoning rather than, say, the distinctive moral reasoning that was of concern to Kant. It is important to emphasize that this view of the matter does not require the additional and stronger conclusion that claims about the objective truth of a given group’s moral beliefs are false or misguided. It is not intended, that is, to shake the objective foundation of moral belief as this is understood from the internal viewpoint of a group. The argument indicates only that there are reasons for constraining the kinds of actions that one can take in the name of moral belief and that these constraints make sense and seem necessary when considered from the (moral) point of view introduced by the need for civil order and social peace—goods that group members should value as the precondition of avoiding intergroup conflict and living securely within the context provided by their own groups. Now a fully developed practical liberalism will need to strengthen the prudential case that recommends the endorsement of the liberal principle. This might be done by exploring how actual intergroup normative rivalries can be justly adjudicated by a thoughtful application of the political morality that follows from, and is inspired by, the liberal principle. This is perhaps the best if not the only way to demonstrate practically that the costs associated with a politics of principle do not outweigh the benefits gained by the assurance of civil order, domestic tranquility, and political stability that accompanies such a politics. (Once again, I have addressed this matter in considerable detail previously, and there is little need to reprise the argument here.38 ) But there is more to a fully developed practical liberalism than the cost/benefit analysis that asserts the prudential case for the liberal principle. It is also necessary to explore how the type of abiding political unity imagined under a politics of principle is possible through time in the face of deep normative diversity

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and hostility. The prudential case for the liberal principle indicates why, from a theoretical point of view, groups are well advised to opt for a politics of principle. At issue here is an additional question about how groups can foster a political culture that promotes and guarantees the stability of the modus vivendi resulting from the acceptance of the liberal principle. This involves thinking about the civil environment that must be constructed in order to enable normative rivals to see themselves as fellow citizens of a common polity, or as members of the group that is the polity. Since willing the end also involves willing the means, steps must be taken in order to cultivate the political morality that makes political stability possible under practical liberalism, steps that transform the pluribus into a unum. While this might be viewed as an exercise in nation building, I think it preferable to regard it as an exercise in what might be called statecraft, for the aim is a political unity that maximally respects normative and ontological diversity. This requires, in turn, the articulation of the proper boundaries between the obligations of citizenship and what falls within the jurisdiction of groups themselves. Morality and Politics: A Review Practical liberalism, simply put, is a political point of view, but if Baier’s moral point of view is the least bit cogent, it is also a political point of view that brings into being a distinctive political morality. If the case for the liberal principle remains prudential in nature, the principle itself may be regarded as the first principle of the political morality of the liberal polity. It articulates a normative standard that introduces the subject and substance of social justice within the polity. It establishes, in other words, a normative litmus test that enables us to critique the justness of a pluralist polity. Seen from inside the polity, the principle introduces the spirit and vantage point through which and from which citizens reason through the meaning and requirements of social justice. Accordingly, it is the standard of measure against which state policies and actions are evaluated to determine their justness. But it also introduces an ideal to which the polity aspires, an ideal that takes shape, and can take shape, only through an ongoing colloquy involving all groups present in the polity. This ideal configures the point of view that all group members engaged in the public colloquy on the demands of justice must adopt. In a manner reminiscent of Rousseau, group members must reason through the requirements of social justice from the point of view introduced by the liberal principle and not from the point of view supplied by the normative outlook of the group(s) to which they belong.

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The prudential argument further illustrates how practical liberalism addresses the problem of political legitimacy. Prudential arguments, like moral arguments, are invariably normative, of course, and in this sense, the logical implications of the prudential argument indicate only that there are strong prudential reasons why groups should endorse the liberal principle. This is hardly sufficient to demonstrate that they can (would be willing) to endorse it. But the normative recommendation inherent in the prudential argument, as with Baier’s argument for the reciprocity principle, does not issue from any particular moral theory of the human good. The prudential argument does not promote social stability as an end in itself; it promotes it merely as a means by which groups can be secure to live as they wish free from unwanted intrusion from outside. The presumption behind the prudential argument is that this is an instrumental good that will matter to all groups regardless of whatever else matters to them. So, if group members are prudentially rational in the sense required by the prudential argument, we can conclude that the case for the liberal principle is something they can accept. Needless to say, some groups might not be prudential in the requisite sense, and this possibility introduces an objection to practical liberalism that I shall take up at the end of the discussion. But prudence of this sort does not reside within the normative scheme of an objective and universal morality; consequently, the prudential case for the liberal principle is not troubled by the usual problems we have seen to cause difficulty for traditional moral liberalism. Because it does not derive a conception of social justice from an antecedent set of moral convictions that might be rejected by some groups in a pluralist polity, practical liberalism offers a promising resolution to the problem of political legitimacy. And because it does not make any claim for the objective truth of the moral viewpoint it introduces, it is at least not inconsistent with any of the moral theories of the human good extant in the liberal polity. Insofar as the idea of truth claims in moral matters is linked to the presumption of a preexisting moral law, a concern about the truth of the liberal principle is simply beside the point. In Rawls’s language, the moral point of view inherent in practical liberalism is freestanding.39 But this apparent strength of the argument can quickly be turned into an apparent weakness by noting that it is reasonable to suppose that at least some groups in the polity may well have reasons, internal to their moral theory of the human good, to reject the liberal principle and the political morality it instantiates if and when the demands of this political morality conflict with their moral vision of the good. One can suppose, for example, that some feminists will have strong reasons to reject practical liberalism and the political morality it advertises

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at least when it comes to the case of patriarchal groups. Under practical liberalism Mormons would remain free to practice polygamy, cliteridectomy may continue to be practiced within those groups committed to this sort of thing, and so forth. From the feminist point of view (and mine) this is morally objectionable. I have already indicated that the broadened social perspective inherent in the prudential argument counsels in favor of giving a back seat to these moral objections in favor of political stability, but this still leaves citizens to face something like a problem of bad moral faith. Practical liberalism requires a trade-off between moral propriety and political stability; in order to realize political stability citizens are seemingly asked to close their eyes to what they consider the objectionable moral practices of some groups. Given the depth of moral disagreement that normative rivalries reach, this is asking a great deal of (some) group members, and if some conclude that it is asking too much, the problem of political stability again arises along with the problem of political legitimacy.40 The argument might even be pressed further to suggest that practical liberalism collapses under its own moral weight at this point. It advertises a maximum amount of group independence and autonomy compatible with a like amount of independence and autonomy for all other groups in the polity. This can be understood to mean that groups in the polity will be required to tolerate the internal practices of other groups that might seem horribly wrong and objectionable according to their moral theory of the human good. This toleration requirement may itself seem like an intolerable intrusion upon the autonomy of the group; group members qua citizens are denied the right to oppose and remedy the grievous moral wrongs on display in their own polity. And for some this will not seem like much in the way of a defense of group autonomy. A full response to this concern will be forthcoming as the discussion continues, but it should suffice for the moment to notice only that practical liberalism does not require groups to abandon the demands of their moral theories of the human good. It merely places limits upon the strategies groups can use to pursue their moral ends. To be permissible under practical liberalism, adopted strategies must be reconciled with the demands of liberal toleration.41 Groups may, as we shall see, converse and even argue with offending outgroups and lobby them in an effort to get them to reconsider offensive practices and perhaps change their ways. What groups cannot do consistent with the political morality associated with practical liberalism is coercively interfere with internal outgroup practices or enlist the coercive might of the government to force outgroups to change their ways. This does not seem like much of an intrusion upon group autonomy, especially when one considers that the alternative

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of ongoing intergroup hostility and conflict may well lead to far greater intrusions. To bring this problem into the perspective advocated by practical liberalism, we should think of the polity as a group unto itself, and citizens should see themselves as members of this group just as they see themselves as distinctive members of other social, cultural, ethnic, religious, and ideological groups. As such, citizens should be recognized as subscribing to differing, and oftentimes conflicting moral viewpoints. The normative tension bound to arise from this conflict may be viewed against the textured background of moral diversity explored by Hampshire. Competing normative viewpoints introduce moral conflict, and individuals face the existential challenge of working through this conflict and reaching decisions about the most defensible course of action for them to take all things considered. The pull of political necessity that Hampshire associates with political policy makers is imposed on all citizens by practical liberalism. Here the practical liberal will want to say, with Hampshire, “In addition to moral seriousness in justice and fairness to individuals, in love and friendship, constituting the sphere of private life, there is also political seriousness, seriousness in the use of power; and this requires higher priorities for some duties and corresponding virtues and lower priority for refinements.”42 This does not resolve the problem of bad moral faith introduced above, but it does place the problem within a broader, more encompassing, and more nuanced moral perspective. Part of the challenge of cultivating a unum out of the pluribus of normative diversity involves getting citizens to recognize the texture and complexity associated with living a moral life. To meet this challenge, the liberal polity must encourage citizens to embrace a politics of principle and consequently to recognize existent and ongoing normative intergroup conflict and hostility as a moral problem (as a problem of political morality) in its own right and one importantly distinct from the normative rivalries in which they participate by virtue of their own moral theories of the human good. Given the unavoidable reality of intergroup conflict, some method of management is desirable, and this makes a politics of principle an attractive prudential move. But this move implicates citizens in a different type of moral relationship, and one that makes important demands on them, demands that I’ve associated with a type of political morality. It is not bad moral faith to set aside some strategies for the elimination of moral wrong if the cure, when universalized across all groups in the polity, turns out to generate an evil reasonably considered worse than the evil at issue. To live peaceably with others, we must learn to practice justice, but first we must construct a vision of justice all can

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accept. And from the point of view of some substantive moral theories that make claims of objectivity, practicing justice, in the sense of that term at home in practical liberalism, will come with a price. The strongest defense of practical liberalism rests with the conviction that for prudent group members the price will not seem unacceptably high. Practical liberalism does not end intergroup conflict; instead, it introduces the political as a method for refereeing intergroup conflict and consequently for sustaining political stability and peaceful group coexistence within a common polity. Feminists remain at liberty to question and challenge the practices of cultural communities they find morally objectionable, just as they remain free to align themselves with dissident elements within these groups and work for cultural or normative change. In return, cultural communities remain at liberty to tell feminist groups to mind their own business. But under practical liberalism, feminists must also tolerate the cultural practices they abhor, and this means that they are not allowed to take coercive action against these groups themselves or to enlist the government as a coercive agent for imposing their own moral standards upon the cultural communities they consider objectionable. Still, feminists can find some solace in the fact that patriarchal groups must tolerate them and their noncoercive efforts at reform as well. Thus practical liberalism imagines a condition of peace and social stability within the polity as the necessary requisite for its political legitimacy. Williams recognized this as both a great political good and as the central aim of civil association, and it inspired his belief that the political must be given a certain priority over morality. Practical liberalism adds to this only insofar as it insists that the primacy of the political inspires the adoption of a distinctive moral point of view in its own right—the point of view that houses the ideal of social justice.

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Chapter 4

Political Unity and Pluralism Practical liberalism addresses the problem of political legitimacy by assuring all groups in the polity a maximum amount of group autonomy compatible with an equal amount of autonomy for all other groups. Given the fact of pluralism—that is, given the presumption that groups exist in a pluralist social setting typified by differing and most likely conflicting group ways and beliefs—this is the most reasonable and prudent choice for groups to make in order to secure, as far as possible, the great civil good of social peace and political stability. Insofar as groups recognize this (instrumental) good as a precondition of all else that matters to their members, they can be expected to converge upon and accept the liberal principle as the keystone of civil association. So, under practical liberalism, civil association is properly conceived as a practical and prudential necessity. Government supplies the organizational structure and institutional mechanisms required to implement and enforce policies designed and intended to make the political ideal of a maximum amount of equal freedom for all groups in the polity an existential reality. This is not the only job for government in the liberal polity, of course, but it is the primary job that must be done in order to cultivate an atmosphere of social justice.1 All this indicates the theoretical maneuvers employed under practical liberalism to satisfy the consent requirement and demonstrate how the liberal polity can qualify as legitimate in the eyes of the citizenry regardless of the deep normative and ontological pluralism presumed to be in evidence there. But two problems arise at this point. First, it may be objected that practical liberalism still cannot make good on its promise of political stability because the modus vivendi arrangement it imagines is inherently

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unstable. By seeing civil association as a prudential good only, it must insist that the polity can hang together only because, and only so long as, groups view it as in their best interest to accept the terms of civil association. If and when existential conditions change, groups may well have reason to defect from the modus vivendi; thus theories of civil association that see political unity in purely prudential terms remain inherently unstable. The remedy for this, it is frequently argued, is to insist that civil association take on the status of a community, and absent such a standing, civil arrangements are bound to remain unstable.2 Second, the normative importance practical liberalism attaches to the polity, and to the value of civil association more generally, may seem a bit archaic in a time when the traditional notion of the state is under attack from different and conflicting directions. On the one hand, the trend toward globalization, including a trend toward the international defense of standards of global justice pressed in terms of the rhetoric of universal human rights and humanitarian intervention, has begun to chip away at the very idea of state sovereignty upon which the postWestphalian state system is premised. On the other hand (and perhaps as something of a reaction against the pressures that inspire globalization), internal state pressures—driven often by nationalist movements, intergroup hostilities within the state, identity politics, and group separatist movements—threaten state sovereignty from the inside. With the notion of the modern state itself thrown into doubt, one may reasonably conclude that practical liberalism will be hard pressed to address the emergent pressures that seem to pull the modern state apart from both within and without. I want now to take up both these concerns, a project that will serve as the subject of this and the following chapter. By way of introduction to the discussion, let me suggest that while it might seem rather unbelievable, at least at this point in time, to suppose that the internal and external forces noticed in the second objection will lead to the complete collapse of the state system, it does seem entirely plausible to suppose that the modern state will need to be reconceptualized in response to these pressures.3 The reconceptualization required will need to focus on two primary concerns: (1) the spheres of influence or responsibility that are appropriate for the state given the revised functions appropriate for it to have as mediator and referee of intergroup disputes—this we might think of as a question of internal sovereign jurisdiction—and (2) the nature of the identity relationships associated with the polity as opposed to both larger and smaller identity relationships that complete the web of political associations that configure personal lives—this we might think of as a question of civic identification.

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Practical liberalism responds to the first concern by holding that polities should retain sovereign control over (at least) the management of intergroup conflict—the resolution of problems associated with the distribution of social goods among groups in the polity and problems associated with the defense and promotion of tolerance throughout the polity—provided they are dedicated to the idea of maximum equal group freedom. And it responds to the second concern by crafting a theory of citizenship composed of two necessary and crucial elements. The first details what citizens owe to the polity and what features of their lives belong to the jurisdiction of the (other) groups to which they happen to belong, while the second develops the spirit of citizenship necessary for the polity by examining the sense of membership in the group that is the polity that must be cultivated throughout the body politic and that helps configure the members’ identities as citizens. I have said something about the first component of this theory of citizenship elsewhere and will not bother to consider it further.4 Instead, the second component of the theory of citizenship will be the focus of the present discussion. As should become evident, the theory of civil association at home in practical liberalism imagines the polity as a group in its own right and encourages/requires citizens to see themselves as members of this group (i.e., to see themselves as citizens) regardless of whatever other groups they might belong to. To borrow the conceptualization popularized by J.N. Figgis, the polity takes on the characteristics of a community of communities.5 As a community of communities, the liberal polity has some important work to do, work that can be done only if the liberal polity retains certain characteristics commonly associated with the postWestphalian state. Whether its standing as a community of communities satisfies the stringent conditions of nationhood that some theorists have insisted is essential for political stability will be the topic of the chapter to follow. We should note at the outset that conceptualizing the liberal polity as a community of communities might seem to expose a tension within practical liberalism. If practical liberalism provides groups with a maximum amount of autonomy compatible with a like amount for others, it effectively permits groups to be self-governing units, at least insofar as, and to the extent that, they wish to be. The members of the disparate groups constitutive of the liberal polity are permitted to go their own way; live according to their own ways, customs, and traditions; and regulate their lives according to their group practices provided doing so does not intrude upon the right enjoyed by the members of outgroups to do so as well. But at the same time, as citizens, these people are also expected to meet their responsibilities of citizenship; recognize themselves as members

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of the polity; and see the members of outgroups that are also present in the polity (some of whom they may have reason to think them damned, disgusting, or misguided by virtue of who they are or what they believe) as fellow citizens with whom they share a common (and not altogether insignificant) identity. The tension, of course, results from the fact that these dual conceptualizations may seem quite incompatible, and an effort to reconcile them may look a bit like trying to square the circle. The sense of dual membership required by practical liberalism thus raises what might be called a question of balance between the demands and requirements of citizenship and the roles and obligations of membership one has with one’s more primary group affiliations. How tightly are the bonds of civil association to be drawn under practical liberalism? The aim of practical liberalism (in fact, the aim of liberal theory in general) is to protect diversity (cultural, religious, moral, and ideological difference) and yet to weave the diverse presences in evidence in a given social setting together within the context and spirit of a common civil union. But how is it possible to preserve what one wants to protect with regard to the pluribus and still achieve the required and desired unum? Or to put the question in the reverse, how possible is it to really construct a unum if one wishes to sustain the presence of a pluribus? These questions pose a challenge that invites theoretical inquiry into just what political unity amidst social, cultural, and normative diversity looks like. Thus we have the problem of balance. How is citizenship in the liberal polity to be balanced against the other roles a person has by virtue of her or his membership in other groups? The ability of practical liberalism to make good on its promise of showing in theory how political stability in the liberal polity is possible depends upon the effectiveness with which this question can be addressed by the theory. The Liberal Archipelago If the basic raison d’être of government in the liberal polity is to promote and defend equal group autonomy, it might seem that group members will have little practical reason to identify with the polity as a group in its own right or to take the polity seriously as such. As a necessary prudential compromise seemingly required of groups by virtue of the realities of group difference, disagreement, and conflict, there is reason to suppose that no one in the polity will have an overly favorable view of liberal government. This is particularly to be expected if the liberal polity defends the autonomy of some groups that outgroup members consider damned or disgusting by virtue of who they are or what they believe. As with feminist objections to patriarchal groups, it is fair to suppose

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that hostile groups will find little solace in being permitted to oppose the objectionable practices of outgroups within the constraints imposed by the demands of liberal toleration. It seems a mistake of some magnitude, however, to infer from this that the institutions of liberal government could not or would not receive much support from hostile groups simply because they are prudentially necessary. This mistake, or something like it, is on display in Lucas Swaine’s claim that theocratic groups may have “no reason to accept the full legitimacy of liberal governance” if it rests only upon a prudentially inspired modus vivendi.6 Swaine’s concerns go as follows: Where theocrats lack reasons other than prudential ones to affirm liberal institutions, governing structures that allow them to practice their religion without fear of outright persecution simply will not yield reason enough to value those institutions deeply. The mere fact that simple pluralism is inescapable can hardly inspire the theocrat to exalt liberal institutions or to enjoy his religious freedom on his own terms; instead, existence in such circumstances will be construed as a prison term in a liberal penitentiary, and one that the theocrat will not suffer gladly.7

Swaine is probably right to notice that theocratic groups may not wish to exalt liberal institutions. The liberal polity is a compromise of sorts, and as such, it can hardly be regarded as anyone’s first choice in how social life should ideally be organized and operated. But without some such compromise, social life is likely to decay into little more than the “ignorant armies clashing by night” that worries Charles Larmore.8 Given the possible and likely alternatives to the liberal polity, even the theocrat within the liberal polity should find comfort in the opportunity to live by his or her religious beliefs free from coercive interference. Granted, the liberal polity protects a pluralism that the theocrat may consider objectionable—this is a practical and empirical question upon which it is difficult to speculate— but a stable pluralism may also be far preferable to ongoing hostility and religious warfare. This in any event is the counsel of prudence, and if the theocrat is unwilling to listen to this, it is hard to imagine that he will be inclined to listen to any other manner of liberal argument. (Some theocrats may still have religious reasons to reject this prudential claim, of course, and I will consider this situation in the final chapter.) In any event, practical liberalism does not insist that group members exalt liberal institutions; nor is exaltation necessary for political legitimacy. Theocrats remain at liberty in the liberal polity to work against pluralism and toward religious homogeneity, though they must do so in ways consistent with the requirements of liberal toleration. If this is part of what it

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means for some theocrats to enjoy religious freedom on their own terms, then the modus vivendi that establishes the liberal polity does not necessitate much of a compromise. No doubt things could be better for the theocrat, but even theocrats must live in the world as it is. Facing this fact, and thus conceding the fact of pluralism, provides a powerful incentive to respect the practical necessity of liberal governance and the liberal polity more generally. This, in turn, is all that is required to establish the legitimacy of liberal institutions, provided these institutions adhere to the standards of social justice introduced by the liberal principle. This begins to move us in the direction of a theoretical resolution to the problem of balance, but there is still some way to go. To effectively address the problem, it is necessary to do more than indicate simply that prudence is a sufficient incentive to bring people together in civil union; we must also consider why coming together in a civil union is the theoretically proper response to the problems posed by the fact of pluralism. Toward this end, it will be helpful to compare the requirements of practical liberalism with a theory of the liberal state with which it has a certain and rather pronounced affinity. In his powerfully argued work, The Liberal Archipelago, Chandran Kukathas has developed and defended a theory of liberal toleration that supports and protects an extensive right of group autonomy.9 Kukathas shares my suspicion of any liberal theory that presses for a form of political unity by working from antecedent normative and epistemic premises. As with practical liberalism, this suspicion inclines Kukathas to side with Williams and suppose that the most acceptable form of (liberal) civil association “will be one in which politics is given priority over morality.”10 Accordingly, he thinks the liberal state should be regarded “as an archipelago of different communities operating in a sea of mutual toleration.”11 The imagery of the archipelago invites Kukathas’s readers to view the liberal state, or Kukathas’s image of it, as a loose collection of largely independent communities—or groups—that hang together under a limited political authority whose central purpose is to preserve order and sustain civil peace. This, of course, sounds very much like practical liberalism. But his argument quickly turns away from the spirit of practical liberalism as I understand it. As he puts it, “A political community need be no more than an association of people who recognize the terms of coexistence.”12 There need not be and, given the realities of diversity and pluralism as Kukathas understands them, cannot be any underlying sense of justice that is embraced by all elements of the polity and serves as a unifying force for the “community” that is the state. To amend Figgis somewhat, Kukathas has imagined the liberal state not as a “community of communities” but as a “loose federation of

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communities”—something Jeff Spinner-Halev has called a type of “group libertarianism.”13 Kukathas’s strong defense of group autonomy and his reluctance to think that a reliance on the premises of moral liberalism can serve as a unifying foundation for a liberal state both parallel the focus of practical liberalism. But his rejection of any unifying theory of justice seems inconsistent with the emphasis practical liberalism places on the ends of political unity. Practical liberalism promotes a theory of social justice intended to unify the liberal polity in a fashion that seems inconsistent with Kukathas’s imagery of a liberal state that resembles an archipelago of independent groups coexisting in a “sea of mutual toleration.” So, in order to develop and defend a theoretical account of the political unity able to address the problem of balance, I want to discuss why practical liberalism diverges from Kukathas’s theory on this score. This can be done by exploring some reasons to entertain reservations about the legitimacy and acceptability of the imagery Kukathas employs to give substance to his own version of the liberal state. Loose Linkage and Political Legitimacy It seems that liberal theorists sometimes have a difficult time distancing themselves sufficiently from their moral mind-set to effectively identify the problems that the fact of genuine pluralism raise for theoretical responses to the question of political legitimacy. Perhaps the inclination to moralize simply runs deep within the liberal psyche, or perhaps the spirit of Enlightenment optimism simply makes it difficult for liberals to bracket off their moral and epistemological convictions thoroughly enough to appreciate the nature of the problem the fact of pluralism poses for a theoretical construction of political legitimacy. In either case, liberal inclinations have a nasty habit of sneaking into even the most earnest efforts to take the fact of pluralism seriously. Sometimes, as in the case of Kukathas, this is because the liberal desire to accommodate diversity actually follows from discernible, albeit inchoate, liberal convictions. This introduces the first concern I have with Kukathas’s vision of a liberal archipelago. This is a serious problem for Kukathas because his argument is intended to defend a maximum amount of cultural autonomy within the liberal state. In doing so, he voices many of the same concerns about moral liberalism that were discussed previously. In particular, he insists in a fashion intended to pose an objection to moral liberalism that taking pluralism seriously means that one cannot hope to resolve the problem of political legitimacy by appeal to antecedent and objective moral standards

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from which a theory of justice can be derived. “The problem with liberal justice as a solution to the problem of diversity and disagreement,” he argues, “. . . is that people may disagree not only over such matters as religion but also about justice. Indeed, they may differ over justice precisely because they differ over such things as religion.”14 But Kukathas seems unable to remain true to this view when he attempts to develop an affirmative case for a theory of civil association that meets the stringent requirements of political legitimacy within a genuinely pluralist social setting. Sensitive as he is to the deficiencies of moral liberalism, Kukathas recognizes the need for liberal theorizing to begin with premises that will seem both morally and ontologically neutral (i.e., inoffensive and unobjectionable) from the standpoint of any and all groups asked to accept a liberal theory of political legitimacy. In criticizing moral liberals on this point, Kukathas notes that “what is characteristic of society, and even more so of modern societies, is that people disagree about questions of morality, and thus also about questions of social justice. In short, we need a different starting point, and an altogether different theory.”15 Yet ironically, his starting point is reminiscent of traditional moral liberal argument, for he takes as his starting point “the perspective of the individual rather than the group or culture or community.”16 “People,” we are told, “should be free to live as conscience dictates; and not required to violate conscience.”17 No doubt moral liberals of various stripes would be happy to accept this claim, but the claim also looks like a basic moral premise of the sort that he has suggested should be avoided. It is worth noticing, for example, that Kukathas’s insistence upon respect for individual conscience secretes an egalitarianism familiar to and typical of liberal morality and that often goes unnoticed by liberal apologists. If Kukathas is taken at his word, he seems to insist that all persons be allowed to live according to the dictates of their conscience. But elitist cultures may have reason to object to this, and if so, they would abandon Kukathas’s argument at the outset. Simply put, the presumption that all persons possess a degree of moral integrity that must be respected is an inherently liberal notion, and part of what makes some illiberal groups illiberal is that they reject this way of seeing persons in favor of something different. Where liberals see people as equal, independent, and valuable beings in their own right, illiberals may see a bundle of different things or a collection of similar things with characteristics and attributes that introduce morally significant differences between persons.18 Nor is Kukathas’s particular version of foundationalist argument limited to the expression of an implicit liberal morality. In defense of his emphasis upon the integrity of individual conscience, he delves into the

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workings of human nature and the nature of human interests, a move that is again reminiscent of traditional moral liberalism. He introduces two basic points that he thinks are incontrovertible and summarizes their contribution to his argument as follows: The first [point] has been that there is indeed a universal human nature underlying the diversity of human settlements, and at its core is the idea of the individual as being ruled by conscience—though also motivated by self-interest and affection—and guided by reason. To understand the universality of this human nature, however, it is necessary to recognize what is universally prized in human life. The second point, therefore, has been to argue that what is of value for human beings is the good life, with the good life understood as the life which is, at the very least, not lived against the dictates of individual conscience.19

Insofar as these claims are presumed to be objective and immutable, and insofar as Kukathas’s theory of the liberal state follows from and hangs upon them, his argument relies upon a foundational and universal grundlage for civil association that is quite typical of traditional liberal argument, and this certainly distinguishes Kukathas’s liberalism from practical liberalism. As a prelude to considering the deficiencies of a theory of civil association that rests upon claims of human nature, it is necessary to ask about the proper audience for such theoretical remarks. As a corollary, we should also be clear on whether the problem of political legitimacy should be considered a theoretical or practical problem, where the distinction parallels the classic division between theoretical and practical knowledge. If we think of a theory of civil association in the same fashion that we think of, say, a theory of economic efficiency, we should need to know, first, what kinds of things people are, and second, what kinds of rules and regulations are suitable for the social organization of such creatures. The problem, this is to say, would be considered an intellectual matter to be resolved by appropriate factual information about the way the world is, and a normative leap that justifies moving from claims about the nature of things and persons to conclusions about what kinds of social arrangements are best for creatures with such natures. None of this will do, however, if we decide that the problem of political legitimacy is really a practical problem. As a practical problem, the difficulty is to provide an argument that plays successfully to a specific audience, namely, those individuals (complete with group identifications, preexistent worldviews, and specific moral theories of the human good) who must acknowledge and accept the government’s exercise of political

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power as legitimate. Viewed as a theoretical problem, political theorists may ruminate on the problem of political legitimacy among themselves, but these ruminations will have very little effect on the world if they are couched in terms those who feel the pinch of political power cannot understand or appreciate. Recognition of normative and ontological diversity, on the other hand, matters only if the inclination of the theorist is to regard political legitimacy as a practical problem. The underlying presumption is that groups and persons should be able to recognize and appreciate the governmental exercise of political power as legitimate and correspondingly to grasp when and why it is illegitimate. This means that these groups must accept and appreciate the legitimacy of the government in their own terms, or in terms reconcilable with and understandable within their own worldviews and moral theories of the human good. Williams understood the problem as practical in this way, and so do I. If the problem doesn’t matter in this way, there is little political point to taking it seriously. Though evidently aware of this problem of audience, Kukathas’s argument for a liberal theory of civil association that maximizes a political commitment to group and cultural autonomy still fails to meet it. The moral ambivalence of his appeal to conscience is hardly rendered benign by his efforts to justify the move by appeal to controversial and equivocal epistemological claims that, like the moral liberal’s sense of justice, may be unacceptable from different religious, cultural, or ideological viewpoints. His first point, for example, introduces an epistemological claim that might well be rejected by some groups given their own understanding of human beings and human interests. It remains an open question, for example, whether all groups must have and share a univocal sense of conscience of the sort that underlies Kukathas’s particular vision of human beings. But even if some such concept is present and shared in all the various groups present in the liberal polity, it still doesn’t follow that the members of all these groups must place such great moral importance on the dictates of individual conscience. Given the paternalistic, patriarchal, elitist, and hierarchical character of many groups and cultural communities, it seems exceptionally unlikely that this point will gain much acceptance in a genuinely pluralist political setting. It follows, as a practical (and not theoretical) matter that Kukathas’s case for the modus vivendi he thinks should characterize the liberal polity cannot meet the very test of pluralism he uses to critique traditional moral liberalism. Or rather, it will do so only if all groups belonging to the archipelago just happen to share the normative and epistemic preconditions from which Kukathas derives his notion of a sea of mutual toleration. But as we have seen, it is this very need for some underlying

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homogeneity in liberal argument that renders it unable to resolve the problem of political power if we suppose, under the presumption of pluralism, that no common normative or ontological ground exists among the groups inhabiting the liberal polity. Given the presumption of pluralism, this is no way to attempt to generate political unity. Such unity must make sense from the standpoint of the groups asked to accept the legitimacy of the polity. Unity clearly requires that the groups coming together to constitute a common unit actually share something in common and recognize that they share something in common. At its most basic level, this means that these groups must share a common understanding about why civil association matters, why it is a good idea, and why it deserves their allegiance. Liberal argument cannot hope to forge such a unity by relying solely or exclusively upon contentious liberal claims that are presumptively suspicious given the fact of great normative and epistemic difference and disagreement. Groups need reasons they can understand according to their own worldviews to join larger groups and to consider these groups communities in their own right, and they need reasons they can similarly understand in order to care about the welfare of this new community in which they may find themselves. Civil association should be considered an odd sort of community in this sense; it is not obviously or immediately an inheritance. Instead, it is a contrivance (though one that can with time become an inheritance), and if it is to be a contrivance that is to matter to the groups that compose it, it must be presented in its own right as a valuable and meaningful community of disparate sorts. This demonstrates the importance of the second feature of the problem of balance mentioned above. Political Unity and the Body Politic The cultivation of a sense of civic identity with the group that is the polity will naturally require a good deal of political socialization in practice. Central to this project is continued emphasis upon the practical necessity of the polity and its crucial place in the shared lives of those individuals constitutive of the body politic, and regardless of their more primary group identifications and attachments. Individuals qua citizens must come to recognize that the polity matters, that it plays an integral role in their shared lives, and that it warrants their collective effort in making the civic enterprise work now and into the future. A theoretical response to the problem of balance can do little more than explain and emphasize the importance of these various points, but doing so provides an important explanation why groups collectively, and their members individually, should recognize and respect their place and presence in the liberal polity.

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To illustrate the importance that attaches to identifying a proper balance between one’s identification with primary groups and one’s identification with the group that is the polity, I want to explore the implications of Kukathas’s vision of a liberal archipelago a bit further. In spite of his subtle reliance upon a form of moral and epistemological foundationalism, Kukathas supposes that the liberal state should not impose, coercively or otherwise, an antecedent and morally inspired theory of justice upon a diverse and eclectic citizenry. Instead, its sole function appears to be dedicated to sustaining social peace and maintaining order and tranquility throughout the polity. His imagery of an archipelago of separate and distinctive groups suggests a terribly transient and disconnected vision of the state. It implies, and is seemingly intended to imply, little in terms of political unity among the discrete groups constitutive of the state. In Kukathas’s own words, “The liberalism that identifies this state is the liberalism of the archipelago of discrete and separate, though sometimes overlapping and interacting communities, jurisdictions, and associations. And in this picture, the state is only one community, jurisdiction, or association among many.”20 While this vision is generally shared by practical liberalism, it is not entirely clear just how much of a group, or what kind of a group, Kukathas thinks the state to be. On this score, he emphasizes rather candidly that “it [the state] does not make up a body politic.”21 Insofar as this claim is inconsistent with the end of a shared sense of meaningful political unity within the polity, which it seems to be, Kukathas’s understanding of the liberal state displays a more tenuous and far weaker linkage among the groups (and individuals) present in the polity than practical liberalism. Rather than address the problem of balance, Kukathas dismisses it by taking a strong stand on group autonomy. But it is worth asking why Kukathas thinks the liberal state, conceived as a collective of interacting and overlapping groups, fails to meet the standards of a body politic, or why it cannot meet these standards. Might not things go better, at least in terms of achieving the end of political stability, if the polity could meet these standards? Might not the state’s primary responsibility of sustaining social peace and defending intergroup toleration be realized more effectively if a shared sense of civic identification in a common polity existed throughout the citizenry? Kukathas elaborates on his image of the liberal archipelago in a manner that is again consistent with practical liberalism: The liberal archipelago is a realm of mutual toleration, in which mutual authorities coexist. To the extent that authority is not devolved entirely to smaller units, but is also exercised by agencies that govern across

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jurisdictions and subsume a number of associations, that authority is limited in its scope and constrained in its power.22

Since any theory of civil association that places great emphasis upon the right of group autonomy must concede to groups the right to manage their own internal affairs, it must also defend a theory of political legitimacy in which governmental authority is restricted in scope in just the way emphasized by Kukathas. The jurisdictional boundaries between the political realm belonging to the group and the political realm of the group that is the polity must be respected by governmental authority until and unless a group permits a more extended jurisdiction over its internal affairs to the government of the polity. But the need to articulate the conditions that define jurisdictional boundaries and correspondingly limit the authority of the government implies the need for a shared theory of social justice. Groups need to be agreed on the parameters of governmental power, just as they need to understand the boundary between their jurisdiction over their own affairs and the jurisdiction of the government. Similarly, they must understand and accept the normative role the group that is the polity plays in their lives and recognize themselves as members of this larger civil community. These are ends to be accomplished by a theory of social justice, and it seems plausible to think that the shared adherence to these common political norms (as inspired by the liberal principle) should suffice to permit us to talk about the existence of a body politic. It is not altogether clear why Kukathas should have a problem with this view of the liberal polity; in fact, it is suggested by his claim that the demands of mutual toleration set the authoritative ends of the state. Correspondingly, the state exists to police these ends; therefore, the rudiments of a theory of social justice are in place. But the imagery of the archipelago invites the conclusion that the liberal state is little more than a collection of disconnected groups that should mind their own affairs within the confines of their own space, surrounded, as they ideally should be, by a sea of mutual toleration, where toleration implies a form of group indifference to the actions and activities of outgroups. Such a view of the liberal state would seem to leave very little for the state to do, and one might ask why the state is necessary in this picture at all. Why should these groups not elect to go their separate ways and establish themselves as independent nation-states with full sovereign authority over their own affairs? The sea of mutual toleration that matters to Kukathas can be established among separate sovereign nation-states without any further need for the greater political identification implied by unity within a common state or polity. If, as Spinner-Halev thinks, Kukathas wants to liken group

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relations in the liberal state to international society, it might be more effective and efficient for groups to deal with one another solely on a treaty basis.23 Multilateral treaties among regionally identifiable groups might be used to establish and regulate a loose confederation of states with the treaties stipulating the specific jurisdiction and authority of any intergroup institution established to police toleration and defend peace in the region. Thus conceived, the post-Westphalian state would be abandoned in favor of what might literally be called a regional United Nations. Curiously, if Kukathas’s image of the liberal archipelago invites ruminations of this sort, the vision of the liberal state as nothing more than a collection of independent islands is inconsistent with much that he has to say about intergroup relations. Consider a few of his comments on this subject: All societies, to varying degrees, harbour a variety of religions, languages, ethnicities, and cultural practices and so, a variety of moral ideals. The public realm is the product of interaction among these various ways. Indeed, it is a kind of settlement reflecting the need of people of different ways to develop some common standards by which to regulate their interaction—given that interaction is unavoidable.24 * * * Unless individuals or groups intend to live in isolation, which in the modern world is not an option readily available, they will have to coexist with others, and find some modus vivendi. To the extent that they will have to interact, they will have to abide by mutually accepted laws, and to accept the authority of some third party who will adjudicate disputes.25

It is precisely because groups differing widely in normative outlook and ontological understanding find themselves living among one another that some organizational matrix is required to both enable groups with differing beliefs to get along and allow groups with conflicting practices to pursue their own ends without bumping into one another. The fact of pluralism necessitates organization, management, and coordination in order to enable groups to live as they wish in the company of others. The trick is to determine how this might be done in a manner acceptable to all groups sharing a common social setting. Jeff Spinner-Halev has thoughtfully objected to Kukathas’s argument on the grounds that Kukathas has simply gotten his sociology wrong. The imagery of an archipelago of basically disconnected and geographically separate groups is hardly descriptive, according to Spinner-Halev, of the sociological nature of most, if not all, modern pluralist polities.

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Spinner-Halev’s preferred description, one self-consciously inspired by the American context, imagines numerous minority satellite groups orbiting around a large liberal group that constitutes the dominant culture.26 And he thinks something of importance hangs on this sociology. In his view, the presence of a large liberal group anchoring the political morality of the polity makes exit a viable possibility for dissident elements of minority groups. More importantly, he argues with considerable justification that overlapping and multiple group identifications should be recognized in the liberal polity, and while his imagery allows for this situation, Kukathas’s does not. There is much to be said for Spinner-Halev’s more contextualist imagery, though since Kukathas does not spend much time developing the demographics of his disparate groups, it isn’t clear that he must take exception to what Spinner-Halev has to say on this score. No doubt some realistic vision of the social demographics of the polity should be considered when building a political theory intended to offer remedies for certain problems that trouble real states; the job of theorizing about politics would be far easier but considerably more vapid of the theorist confined herself to theoretical heaven. But it is a mistake of a different sort to depend too heavily on an exact modeling of social reality, for group life is dynamic, groups come and go, grow or diminish in size and strength, and so forth.27 An account of group demographics suitable to the theoretical enterprise needs to be flexible enough to remain germane even in the face of group and social evolution and transformation. It is hardly possible to imagine the ebb and flow of group life, and consequently, it is terribly difficult to sketch accurately in theory the precise nature of intergroup conflict. Perhaps the best way to model all this uncertainty is to build uncertainty into the model itself. Here the ever-changing matrices of the kaleidoscope come readily to mind.28 Faced with the prospect of ongoing kaleidoscopic change within the social environment, groups face the daunting challenge of manufacturing a stable arrangement in which any possible change in the nature of groups and group demographics does not unsettle or destabilize the environment. More isolationist groups will want to seek protection to guarantee that they are not forcibly overrun by more imperially minded groups. More gregarious groups will treasure the rich opportunities generated by dynamic intergroup social and economic activity and interrelationships, and they will want to insure against radical and destabilizing group conflict driven perhaps by more conservative groups that have little use for the new ways introduced through social and economic developments. More conservative groups, on the other hand, will want to find ways to safeguard their practices and beliefs against the onslaught of social and

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economic change. Thus Spinner-Halev’s account of group presences in the United States might be regarded as a specific frame in a slowly moving movie. This projected ebb and flow of social activity throughout the social environment also makes Kukathas’s imagery of the liberal archipelago seem overly and misleadingly static. It is highly improbable to think that all groups will simply want to go their own way in a sea of mutual toleration. And it is because groups will not be content to go their own way that toleration and deference become such important political values in the liberal polity. That is, the fact of flux—the fact of the social transformation, development, division, and reconstitution of groups along with the likely introduction of new and possibly conflicting intergroup ideals and interests—constantly introduces a source of social and economic instability and potential conflict.29 The great end of civil association is the domestication of the ongoing intergroup conflict arising within the context of the fact of flux. But this can be realized only by means of the continuing effort of all groups constitutive of the polity to make this happen. Like it or not, groups must work together to construct and defend a civil union where the conflicts that emerge as a result of the fact of flux are held in check. Political power, in other words, simply is a practical necessity. Because the large and eclectic modern states present in the world today now house groups with widely disparate ways and beliefs and because these groups are intertwined in a variety of economic and social practices, mutually acceptable laws (laws capable of being considered authoritative by all elements of the polity) are essential if the problem posed by the need for political power is to be resolved in a practically acceptable manner. This introduces the shared end that makes the polity into a community in its own right, and it is the need to recognize this end as one that is shared by all elements of the polity—an end to which all elements of the polity must dedicate themselves in common—that is crucial for a resolution to the problem of balance. The recognition and acceptance of this end enables group members to see themselves and value themselves as citizens in addition to their other group-based conceptualizations and identities. Social Justice and Political Unity It would seem, then, that the moral bonds (i.e., the bonds of political morality) that unite and unify the polity need to be reasonably thick, or at least considerably thicker than is implied by Kukathas’s imagery of the liberal archipelago. At the very least, these bonds need to be thick enough to inspire in the citizenry a commitment to a common polity that shapes

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an aspect of personal and group identity. Identity is shaped here by the citizen’s acknowledgment that membership in the group that is the polity is a formative and not insignificant aspect of one’s identity. One’s sense of oneself as a citizen involves understanding oneself as someone who belongs to a specific community of others along with the acknowledgment of the normative commitments connected to this recognized status (i.e., the realization that belonging to this community of fellows carries with it an independent set of moral responsibilities, rights, and obligations deriving from the liberal principle). For such a shared understanding of membership to be possible, however, the problem of political power must first receive a practical solution in a manner sufficient to establish the legitimacy of the government for all groups present in the social setting. Moreover, and for reasons noted previously, this must be accomplished without recourse to controversial antecedent moral premises. And here there is reason to press the distinction between Kukathas’s vision of the liberal archipelago and practical liberalism one step further. The mutual toleration that Kukathas supposes to characterize the liberal state is derived from his antecedent commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience. Groups should practice toleration in order to allow outgroups and individuals to live according to their own consciences, and it falls to government in the liberal polity to make sure groups live up to the demands of toleration and do not coercively interfere in the internal affairs of outgroups. Correspondingly, government (whose authority is also limited by the demands of toleration) should also leave group members alone to live according to the ways and practices of their more primary group(s)—a requirement necessary in order for the government to make a rightful claim of legitimacy. The standard and altogether familiar objection to this begins by noticing that some groups may practice ways that harm or disadvantage some of their members, and to leave groups free to engage in such internal “injustices” is to sit by idly while group members suffer at the hands of their fellows. This, of course, repeats the feminist objection to multicultural protections for patriarchal and/or elitist groups noticed in the previous chapter, an objection clearly shared by many liberal thinkers though not by Kukathas.30 So far I have made two responses to this objection. First, I have argued that practical liberalism does not prohibit the members of group A from opposing and condemning the internal practices of group B if the A’s deem these practices harmful to some of the members of B according to the A’s own preferred standards; it prohibits only coercive intervention by the A’s into the affairs of the B’s to prevent such practices from taking place. Second, I have insisted that the

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arguments associated with moral liberalism that would justify intergroup intervention in such internal practices cannot meet the consent requirement associated with political legitimacy, and thus cannot establish the basic conditions for the justified exercise of political power. It is worth adding here that practical liberalism also defends a right of group exit, though it is far from clear that this provides much solace for the problem at hand.31 But there is still another response to this problem that is worth exploring at this point. Suppose we consider again Kukathas’s use of the notion of conscience. He notices importantly, “The more we talk to neo-Nazis the less we may like them.”32 This insight is intended to demonstrate that getting to know the members of groups with normative views that differ significantly from our own does not guarantee that we will develop an appreciation for them or their group ways; it erodes rather nicely the somewhat naïve, but also curiously popular, view that familiarity with difference will generate appreciation for the vision expanding insights that the introduction to difference can bring into our lives. Familiarity need not breed acceptance; it might just as easily, and as the old saw goes, breed contempt. But Kukathas’s comment about neo-Nazis invites one to ask why, if we don’t like them, we should bother to tolerate them. Kukathas’s natural response indicates that we should do so because even neo-Nazis are entitled to live according to their consciences. But the question inspired by the recognition that we don’t like them (and for what we will surely consider good reasons), should be understood to ask how we can in good conscience tolerate them. If we are to live according to the dictates of our own conscience, we might think it necessary to do something about scoundrels of this sort. Why should our ability to live according to our conscience be circumscribed so that neo-Nazis can live as they wish? Why honor their rights of citizenship, for example, to practice free speech and march in full regalia to advertise their noxious ideas? For reasons discussed in the previous chapter, I think Kukathas is right when he addresses problems of this sort by insisting that “communities have thus to strike a balance between retaining their own practices and moral ideals and compromising them in order to enter the public realm of civil life.”33 But this does little to resolve the problem posed by whether honest liberals should, in good conscience, tolerate people like neo-Nazis, and there seems to be nothing implicit in the notion of conscience to indicate how one should go about striking the required balance. One way to address this problem is to make more of the notion of conscience and its logical implications than Kukathas is willing to do. This strategy is put to good effect by Lucas Swaine in his response to the problems posed for liberal societies by what he calls theocratic groups. Such

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groups, according to Swaine, are impervious to standard liberal moral arguments because they are locked into their own theocratic convictions, which trump, in their judgment, liberal moral concerns. Swaine’s strategy for dealing with such groups is to hunt for something implicit in their own normative convictions that traps them into conceding aspects of his liberal agenda once the implications of these convictions are properly analyzed and their logical (or rational) implications are correctly understood. Accordingly, Swaine argues that theocrats must respect individual conscience insofar as this is required in order to allow individuals to discern right religious belief and distinguish it from false religious belief. “Conscience must be free,” Swaine claims, “to distinguish among rival doctrines so that it can refuse the bad and begin to gravitate toward the good.”34 Swaine concludes that respect for freedom of conscience—a freedom theocrats should concede as a precondition for the pursuit of religious truth—logically requires them to prefer liberal governmental institutions over theocratic ones. By analogy, the argument might be extended to ideological groups as well. Neo-Nazis should prefer liberal government to Nazi government because the former, though not the latter, defends the freedom of conscience required of people intent upon exploring the proper mode of civil association. This would seem to strike the balance Kukathas is seeking, but it would do so by stopping neo-Nazis from being real Nazis. Swaine’s rather substantial debt to Mill is fairly clear at this point; the pursuit of truth is an individual quest that all must be free to tackle. But the disinclination of neo-Nazis and theocratic groups alike to be moved by this argument should also be apparent. Such groups are— and we can suppose by definition—hardly interested in the pursuit of religious or political right belief; as they see it, they already have this. Their agenda is largely one inspired by the desire to have others come to see things their way if at all possible, an agenda that does little to separate them from some putatively liberal thinkers. Such groups are likely to have little use for the idea of freedom of conscience as Swaine understands it, and theocratic groups in particular may reject the claim that conscience is a necessary condition of true religious belief. Faith, they might insist, is not a matter of individual conscience but rather of learning to see and understand things in the way ordained and promulgated by their preferred deity. Correspondingly, such groups are not likely to have much sympathy for the implied liberal egalitarianism built into Swaine’s argument. Patriarchal, elitist, and authoritarian groups will surely insist that religious (or political) insight is the proper province of certain chosen, insightful, inspired, or properly trained individuals, and it is up to the rank and file to defer to these leaders in religious (and political) matters. Ironically, Swaine’s effort to liberalize theocratic groups

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looks a good deal like forcing them into the very liberal prison he thinks something like practical liberalism would put them in.35 On the other hand, practical liberalism is not opposed to engaging in philosophical arm-twisting of the sort that might transform illiberal groups into liberal ones, though there is reason to wonder if this will do much good and also reason to expect illiberal groups to twist back. It is opposed only to forcibly demanding that illiberal groups alter their ways and become more liberal (in the moral sense), and largely because of the destabilizing and unsettling effect this will have on the polity. So, the compromise it requires of all groups is the practice of toleration and deference as required by the standard of social justice associated with the liberal principle. What matters in this regard—and here is a point that needs emphasizing—is that those inevitable intergroup disputes in the polity also be seen (and at the same time) as intragroup disputes, that is, as disputes internal to the group that is the polity. As an intragroup dispute, the chief concern to be addressed is how we are to get along amicably with one another in spite of all that separates us. If our conscientious distaste for neo-Nazis is the impetus for this intergroup animus, it still factors out of the larger challenge we face in deciding how normative rivals can learn to get along with one another in a viable civil arrangement. This is why it is important to emphasize what it is that unites us, namely, a shared sense of social justice to which we must appeal to decide in practice and on particular occasions what all owe to each and what each owes to all. In spite of all that separates groups within the polity, practical liberalism encourages all groups to recognize and respect the fact that we are still fellow cooperators in a shared enterprise—the ongoing welfare of the group that is the polity—and we must do our part to make the enterprise work. This hints at the thickness of the civil bonds that transforms the pluribus into a unum. It also returns us to the complicated and textured nature of our moral lives and again places morality back within the realm of the political. Once again, then, Hampshire’s sense of conflicting moralities takes center stage. The morality taken from our primary group identifications cannot and should not take a backseat to our political morality, if this means abandoning the former altogether in deference to the latter. But similarly, our political morality should be understood to enjoy a certain pride of place when it comes to the adjudication of intergroup disputes, for it is what protects us against decaying into a collection of warring and hostile enclaves. So neo-Nazis must be accorded the same rights of free expression we value for ourselves, and in return, we must learn to tolerate their expressive activities. But neo-Nazis must also tolerate us and not forcibly harm or endanger those elements of the polity they consider

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damned and disgusting by virtue of who they are. Perhaps neo-Nazis can convince the rest of the polity to embrace their ways and transform the polity into a Nazi nightmare, but this seems unlikely. Perhaps we can convince them to reconsider their beliefs and abandon their views, though this too might seem unlikely. But until this happens, we must manage to tolerate one another. This does not mean, of course, that we should abandon our consciences or doubt our moral theory of the human good; it means, rather, that our consciences need to be informed on this matter by differing and often conflicting moral concerns. Practical liberalism invites us to think that our political morality and the concerns of social justice at home there should rightly have a pride of place in our reflections on how to deal with such matters. Dealing with objectionable differences is unavoidably a practical affair, but it should also be seen to have a moral stature in its own right. This moral stature comes into proper perspective when viewed through the realm of the political. The Bonds of Civility The commitment to the liberal principle that follows from a prudential understanding of the need for civil association carries with it a responsibility of civility on the part of the citizenry. To be civil in the pertinent political sense is to recognize oneself as a member of the larger community that is the polity and to understand and appreciate the obligations and responsibilities that follow accordingly. The misleading aspect of Kukathas’s recourse to the imagery of an archipelago for purposes of characterizing a liberal polity that maximally protects group autonomy is that it fosters a sense of group atomism and a corresponding sense of general isolation and independence from those other groups present in the polity. Given the realities of modern pluralist states, for which the idea of the liberal polity is intended as a guide, it makes far greater sense (as Kukathas seems at times to recognize) to emphasize the interconnectedness of group presences within the polity. An emphasis upon interconnectedness, on the other hand, is not intended to minimize group difference or to ignore the potential for considerable normative and distributive conflict among the various groups constitutive of the polity. Instead, practical liberalism acknowledges this difference and appreciates the considerable conflict likely to accompany it. But the commitment to the liberal principle, and the consequent commitment to civil association that naturally accompanies it, should, when fully conceptualized, expose the need for group members to see themselves as fellow cooperators in the group that is the polity. The conditions

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of cooperation, moreover, are given by the standard of social justice, deriving (though hardly deductively) from the liberal principle. This standard identifies the political morality—the normative vision of how the shared life of the group that is the polity should ideally go—that unites the disparate and possibly hostile groups of the liberal polity into a coherent and singular unit. Without such a standard of justice, it is difficult to see how a liberal polity could hang together and resolve the intergroup differences that are bound to arise within the polity in a peaceful and satisfactory manner. But adherence to this standard—a condition that involves (as we shall see) participatory discourse in the elaboration of its practical meaning—demands a cooperative spirit, and the key to manufacturing political unity from the extraordinary group diversity imagined under conditions of pluralism involves getting group members, who may regard at least some outgroups as damned, disgusting, misguided, or repugnant by virtue of who they are or what they believe, to recognize the members of these outgroups as fellow cooperatives or fellow citizens (which should be recognized as the same thing). All of this takes cultivation in practice to be sure, but once again, to will the end is also to will the means. Consequently, the prudential acknowledgment of the liberal principle commits citizens to the project of political socialization and the internalization throughout the citizenry of the ideal of social justice that transforms the pluribus into a unum. The imagery, suggested by Dworkin, of an orchestra thus seems more appropriate as an account of the relationships that hold between groups within the liberal polity than Kukathas’s liberal archipelago.36 But still more germane perhaps is the imagery of athletic competition. Like an athletic team, the polity is a collection of autonomous units linked together for the purpose of engaging in a common enterprise and realizing a shared end—an end realizable only by virtue of the efforts of all participants in the enterprise. But it also takes two teams to have a competition, and while competing teams have different and conflicting interests and goals, both must share a common commitment to the enterprise of their sport if the competition is to make any sense. Thus not only must teammates learn to get along in spite of what separates them, but competing teams must learn to do so as well. Even the most competitive practice is manageable and possible only against a background of cooperation. And just as athletic competitors must learn to see one another as fellow cooperators in a shared social enterprise, so too must fellow citizens. In the case of the liberal polity, of course, it is not athletic competition that sets the end of cooperative association but civil peace and social tranquility. And unlike athletic teams, citizens cannot go their separate

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ways when the game is over. What matters more than the effort to get the imagery right, however, is the recognition that a strong defense of group autonomy does not also necessitate a correspondingly weakened or libertarian conception of the state. What divides us need not diminish the importance—and here I want to say, following Baier, the moral importance—of what unites us, and if civil order and political stability are the desired end, it ought not be allowed to divide us. This too is the counsel of prudence. Needless to say, the unity anticipated and advocated by practical liberalism is political in nature only, and this may still seem to be an objectionably weak form of civil association for those who would insist upon a more robust or republican form of identification with the polity. These concerns will be addressed in the following chapter. But it seems appropriate to close this chapter by emphasizing that while practical liberalism steadfastly avoids moving toward political unity by building upon antecedent moral or ontological foundations—the sort of thing that might generate a tighter connectedness among citizens—it nonetheless supposes that a viable and enduring form of civil association is hardly possible in the absence of some unifying sense of social justice. The shared commitment to bring social justice to life in a fashion appropriate to the particular circumstances of the polity in question provides the unifying factor that enables us to understand how a singular polity can be forged from a collection of pluralist groups exhibiting the greatest imaginable normative and ontological difference. This, in turn, is some indication of the balance practical liberalism seeks to establish between what individuals owe to their primary group affiliations and what citizens owe to the polity.

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Chapter 5

Nationhood and the Liberal Polity The image of the liberal polity developed so far is of a civil union united by a common political morality that supplies the normative glue necessary to hold the polity together. In turn, citizens are considered to be bound together in a common civic enterprise that involves the pursuit of social justice—a notion inspired and informed by the shared commitment to the liberal principle. This is illustrative of the responsibilities of citizenship that fall upon members of the group that is the liberal polity, and inherent in this view of citizenship responsibility is a partial response to the problem of balance—the problem getting clear in practice on the nature of one’s role as citizen as juxtaposed against those other roles one has in life by virtue of one’s involvement or membership in more primary groups. It might be objected at this point, however, that practical liberalism suffers from a problem, familiar to other versions of liberalism as well, that raises doubts about the stability of the liberal polity. The problem is that the bonds of social identification with the polity that follow from this account of citizenship may seem insufficient to guarantee citizen dedication to the civil enterprise into the future. In part, this problem lurks beneath the surface of lingering reservations about the stability of a modus vivendi arrangement. If the balance of power that seems to make the modus vivendi a good idea shifts, groups that emerge as dominant may elect to defect from the arrangement and proceed to take action against their normative rivals. But as we have seen, this is not much of a problem when considered from a prudential point of view. Given the fact of flux, groups can never be sure that their ascendancy will last. The future of group dominance

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is uncertain, and consequently, prudence recommends staying with the modus vivendi since the cost of defection is possibly great and the benefit gained for group welfare evidently considerable.1 This is reason for citizens to cultivate in future generations a commitment to the civil enterprise and a strong dedication to the political morality necessary for its success. But this is only a part of the problem. Critics of liberal argument insist on occasion that political stability requires more than a commitment to basic principles; it also requires the cultivation of what might be called a patriotic attitude—an identification with and consequent commitment to this place and this people.2 Moral liberals want to see the liberal polity as a moral community typified by a commitment to universal and objective moral ends and not just as a precarious modus vivendi. Practical liberalism shares the belief that the polity should be viewed as a moral community in spite of the fact that it is not premised upon universal or objective moral claims. But this still leaves the problem of determining why citizens should feel any particular warmth for their fellow citizens, particularly since the fact of pluralism invites us to suppose (and it is hardly much of a supposition) that some citizens will not be disposed to look fondly upon their normative rivals. If liberal argument captures the head, if that is it manages to offer compelling reasons why group members should accept civil association and acknowledge the legitimacy of the state, it fails (this criticism goes) to capture the heart. It fails, that is, to explain how the polity can become the “community of sentiment,” as Weber put it, necessary to guarantee that citizens will care about one another’s welfare and work and sacrifice to assure the polity’s existence into the future. Moreover, attempts to remedy this situation by searching for strategies that might tighten citizen identification with the polity might have the unintended consequence of eroding or decaying individual identification with one’s more primary groups, thus jeopardizing the integrity of these groups in a fashion that might threaten the very group autonomy group members seek to defend by means of civil union. Put metaphorically, we might wonder if it is possible to serve Caesar and to be faithful to one’s more primary group identifications at the same time. If this is not possible, practical liberalism will have little to recommend it to group members. This is the final aspect of the problem of balance that I want to discuss. How tight, or how comprehensive, are the bonds of civil identification with the polity, and what room is left for identification with one’s primary group affiliations? Some—let us call them nationalists—think the withering of primary group identifications and the corresponding increase in one’s

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identification with one’s polis is a good thing. If political unity is to be either possible or desirable, from the nationalist standpoint, the state should become one’s patria, and one should have no other. Others— among them a good many self-proclaimed liberals—prefer to diminish identification with the state in order to promote primary group identifications. From this point of view, it is simply a mistake to make too much of civil association; it should be considered a constitutional arrangement that loosely aligns people and groups within a legal system and under a system of constitutional (and hence institutional) architecture. A loose confederation of allied groups is necessary, the argument goes, in order to guarantee that groups have the self-determination and selfcontrol necessary to enable group members to live their shared lives as they wish. Now, if group pluralism is to be taken seriously, neither viewpoint seems overly attractive. Nationalism prioritizes civil life over group identity and will consequently be objectionable to group members for this reason. But the liberalism of loose confederation seems unable to sustain a common polity and protect against the decay of the state into a collection hostile and potentially warring nation-states. This explains why the notion of a “community of communities” matters from the standpoint of practical liberalism. It would seem that the only viable strategy for providing a theoretical defense of social peace and political stability is to find a common ground between the excesses of nationalism and loose confederation. In turn, this indicates why the problem of balance is an issue of such concern within practical liberalism. Balance is a challenge to practical liberalism because practical liberals understand the importance of having it both ways and providing a theoretical account of a coherent and communal polity composed of groups enjoying the maximum amount of equal autonomy possible. The coherence of this conceptualization of the liberal polity is problematic because those normative rivalries that trouble the polity incline group members to regard at least some outgroups as damned, disgusting, repugnant, or misguided by virtue of who they are or what they believe. Nonetheless, while the citizens (qua fellow cooperators) of the polity may not like one another all that much, recognizing oneself as a fellow citizen may do something to create a shared sense of community. If commonality is a crucial, if not defining aspect of community, then the commonality created by a shared commitment to the political morality of the liberal polity may be said to forge a type of political community. Whether this sense of community is thick enough to conclude that citizens of the liberal polity can come to regard themselves as compatriots in the sense championed by nationalist thinkers will depend, of course, on what we understand a compatriot to

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be. And to resolve this matter, it is necessary to explore the normative strength of the civil bonds that unite the polity. By way of prelude to the discussion to follow, we should notice that much of the issue that separates nationalists and loose confederationists is troubled by a confusion of purpose. Both sides concede that a stable polity is one in which citizens have some degree of identification with their patria. The attachments of the head that matter to liberals need not, and perhaps cannot, reach the heart as a consequence of theoretical argument, of course, but the identification of the heart need not be lacking in the liberal polity for this reason. This identification seems often to be a natural and perhaps inevitable result of the deeply political nature of social life. It is an inheritance that seems to matter often in spite of the problems and deficiencies of one’s political home. This association with a homeland shapes personal identification and informs part of our sense of who we are largely because it happens to be where we are. People customarily overlook the fact that their polity houses others they happen to dislike and supports practices they happen to disagree with. The familiar phrase, “My country right or wrong,” is no doubt a bit too strong, but it approaches an important insight: right or wrong, country still tends to matter, and for most people it does so in spite of the warts. A sympathy for nationhood, I’m suggesting (and perhaps displaying my American ethnocentrism in doing so), seems largely typical and commonplace today, and perhaps because the recognition of one’s presence in and dependence upon one’s state has become such a standard feature of modern life. I say this not to diminish the problem of balance but to diffuse some of the exaggerated theoretical concerns of nationalists who often fail to recognize that many of today’s pluralist polities—and here the United States is perhaps prototypical—house considerable intergroup animosity along with extraordinary patriotic zeal. The Nature of Nationhood One way to approach the problem of balance is to ask if the bonds of identity that should ideally tie the liberal polity together are thick enough to permit the conclusion that the liberal polity qualifies as a nation as opposed to, say, a simple confederation of groups. The notion of nationhood implies a fairly thick sense of citizen identification with the patria, and if it makes sense to consider in theory the liberal polity as a nation in this sense, we might be able to vindicate the claim that the polity should be regarded as a community in its own right. So then, should we conclude that cultivating a liberal polity means forging a sense of nationhood in the citizenry—understood in terms of the group that is the polity? An

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effective answer to this question depends, of course, upon reaching some agreement on a fairly disputatious question: what should we understand a nation to be? To begin working toward an element of clarity on this question, I want to explore some of the thoughtful and challenging things that David Miller has had to say about nationality and nationhood.3 Miller’s account of nationality is undoubtedly one of the most thorough and compelling analyses of the notion available, and his claim that both social justice and deliberative democracy—two great political goods in his view—depend mightily on upon a sense of nationality in the state deserves the most careful consideration.4 Perhaps more importantly for present purposes, while Miller’s defense of nationality and its importance for civil association make him something of a nationalist, he also insists that a nation can accommodate pluralist groups. Consequently, the fact of pluralism is no reason, in his judgment, to give up on thinking that a pluralist state cannot also qualify as a nation.5 Even if we conclude, as I think we must, that the liberal polity falls short of qualifying as a nation in Miller’s sense, his efforts to reconcile pluralism and nationhood can help us understand why group difference and intergroup hostility do not preclude the possibility that the members of disparate groups can come to regard one another as fellow cooperators in a common civil enterprise and identify with each other accordingly. The liberal polity, as it is imagined under practical liberalism, is a theoretical construct and does not necessarily replicate the political condition (or consciousness of the citizens) of any existing state. In addition to offering a recommendation about how at least some pluralist states might promote social peace and political stability, the theoretical construction offered by practical liberalism provides a regulative ideal against which to measure the relative legitimacy and justness of existing pluralist states and from which to recommend specific policy options and judicial decisions for these states. But viewing the liberal polity as a theoretical construct makes it all but impossible to think of it as a nation in Miller’s sense, for nations, as Miller understands them, have histories. They emerge through time as historical events shape and construct a particular political culture.6 In the absence of a historically shaped, and thus commonly shared, culture, Miller thinks it impossible to speak of a nation. So, nations must exist, if they exist at all, in fact and not in theory. But it is still possible to ask if there are any analytic features of a nation that the liberal polity cannot or should not be presumed to possess that would preclude it, in theory, from qualifying as a nation. Getting clear on this issue should do much to provide an effective resolution to the problem of balance that practical liberalism must address, and thus to

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indicate how it might be possible to have in practice a community of communities. The idea of nationality, according to Miller, involves three rather complex aspects. First, nationality helps structure a person’s sense of identity. Belonging to a nation means understanding oneself as someone who belongs to a nation and having this understanding as a significant constituent element of one’s personal identity. Among other things, this condition anchors the reality of nationality; to have this identity, the nation must really exist, and one must really belong to it and understand this to be the case. Second, Miller supposes that nations are ethical communities. By this he means that the members of these communities have special duties to one another that they do not owe to outsiders who do not belong to the nation. Third, he thinks that people belonging to a nation “have a good claim to political self-determination.” That is, nations have justifiable and powerful reasons to claim sovereign authority over their internal affairs and thus to be independent, self-governing units.7 Except for the existential condition contained in the first point, none of these conditions are necessarily antithetical, in principle, to practical liberalism. Practical liberalism expressly endorses the second and third conditions, at least in some form and perhaps with some (not insignificant) qualifications, and it also accepts, and even insists upon, the theoretical component of the first condition.8 By accepting the liberal principle, groups in the liberal polity agree to govern themselves according to the standards expressed by the principle, and this means resolving intergroup disputes accordingly. This standard of dispute resolution covers two general areas of intergroup conflict. First, groups may legitimately claim those fiscal and territorial resources necessary for them to practice their ways and live as they wish, but where resources are too meager or limited to enable all groups to have and enjoy the resources they need, allocational rivalries will emerge that give rise to coordination problems. Second, and as we have seen previously, groups may find the ways and practices of outgroups immoral and feel the need to intrude into their affairs to prevent perceived wrongdoing, and this will give rise to tolerance problems. Acceptance of the liberal principle and the political morality that follows from it thus commits group members to special duties of deference (to address coordination problems) and toleration (to address tolerance problems).9 But these three conditions give only a partial and somewhat misleading picture of the notion of nationality as Miller understands it. To appreciate the richness of Miller’s sense of nationality, and also to notice where this sense of nationality comes into conflict with elements of practical liberalism, it is necessary to understand the distinction Miller

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draws between nationality and the notion of civic nationalism.10 By civic nationalism Miller understands a civil arrangement in which citizens are bound together by little more than “a common set of laws and political institutions.”11 In his judgment, this is a desperately thin form of civil association; there is no “common history, language, culture, etc. but merely recognition of the authority of a constitutional or political framework.”12 A civil association of this sort falls rather short of qualifying as a nation in Miller’s judgment, and largely because of the distinction he draws between constitutional loyalty and national identity.13 Civic nationalism simply fails to provide the sense of personal identity Miller considers crucial to the notion of nationality—a sense of identity he takes to be common in states that qualify as nations. Part of the web of identification a person may well have, this is to say, involves one’s identification with the nation. The question, “who am I?” requires a complex and variously textured response. As a part of this response, many Americans, for example, might say, “I am an American,” and as predications of this sort invariably do, this one works to individuate and associate. It works as something of a shorthand way to express something like, “I am a member of a distinct group known to one another (and perhaps to outsiders as well) as Americans.”14 But Miller supposes that Americans must mean more by this than that they simply subscribe to a specific set of political beliefs, principles, and ideals in order to consider themselves members of a nation. NonAmericans may subscribe to these or very similar ideals as well, but this obviously does not mean that they are a part of the nation that is the United States. Subscribing to these political ideas may identify one as “a liberal rather than a fascist or an anarchist, but it does not provide the kind of political identity that nationality provides.”15 So then, to reach the level of nationality, Miller thinks more is required than simple “allegiance to a constitution”; there must also be “important historical and cultural elements in that identity.”16 In a similar spirit, Margaret Canovan has argued that “what unites co-nationals is less the characteristics they possess as individuals than the inheritance they share as members, typically a heritage compounded of ethnic, political, cultural, and other elements.”17 While there might be something to all this, there is also reason to question the importance of the point. We may understand Miller’s concern in either of two ways. We might take him to be pointing out that states whose citizens share only a political identification cannot qualify as a nation, or that the notion of “political nationalism” is incoherent.18 But we need hardly worry about this unless the missing elements required to transform a polity into a nation are integral to the

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stability of the polity. If they are not integral in this way, there is little reason to value nationhood in the thick sense that concerns Miller. But we might also understand him to mean that a dedication to political principles does not entail any particular commitment to a specific polity. It is the principles that matter and shape one’s identity, not the polity; thus one might best be considered a citizen, say, of the liberal community who owes nothing to a particular polity. Liberals are occasionally accused of this sort of thing; while they may be exemplary moral characters, they are also stateless. There is reason to take both these interpretations seriously, but I will start with the second because it seems the more frivolous of the two. Suppose we consider again what it means to be an American. We might understand this in a legal sense—to be an American is to have the legal status in the United States as citizen, or we might understand this in a fairly practical and commonplace sense—to be an American is to reside in the United States, to have done so for some time, to work there, to participate in the daily activities of life in the United States, and to consider it home even when one travels in foreign lands. The identification “American” understood in either of these ways refers to a particular locus and displays an association—legal or physical or perhaps both—with a particular place. It puts one on the map so to speak. But we might also understand the notion of being an American in a more cognitive sense. To be an American according to this point of view means to hold certain views, beliefs, or ideals and to subscribe to the practices they involve or inspire. Thus being an American might involve, say, an obsession with baseball, a fondness for hotdogs, a belief in democracy, and so forth. In practice, it seems that both the locational and cognitive aspects of what it means to be an American need to be acknowledged in order to provide a comprehensive account of American identity. Emphasizing either side of this prong will likely generate the confusion noticed above. Suppose, for example, most Americans hold liberal political beliefs (meaning let us say that American political consciousness is influenced predominantly by the liberal tradition of political discourse) and that these beliefs matter greatly to them. We may take this to mean that at least one aspect of an American’s cognitive identification with the place involves a commitment to liberalism. To say at this point that this can’t count as a source of national identification because there are also liberals who are not Americans merely confuses the locational sense of being an American with the cognitive sense. A nation can easily extend beyond the parameters of a single state, but a shared political belief within a specific locus may also provide a powerful and important element of a citizen’s national identification—where the notion of national

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identification comprehends both locational and cognitive elements of one’s identification with the polity. Civic nationalism, as I will understand the notion here, holds that the only cognitive element of national identity with the polity that must be pervasively present in the citizens is a belief in and acceptance of the legitimating and animating political theory that shapes the state into a polity, that is, into a community of citizens. But this cognitive element is presumed to exist within a specific locus defined by the legal boundaries of the state. The fact that other polities may embrace a similar political theory is hardly sufficient to indicate that these other polities belong to the same nation unless the cognitive element is taken to be all there is to national identity. This is hardly an acceptable account of national identity, however, for (as we will see) location matters in terms of the evolutionary history of a political culture. Someone might dislike baseball and object to hotdogs and still qualify as an American even in the cognitive sense because it is not necessary to share a fondness for either of these things in order for people in the polity to coexist. But if there is not considerable convergence on animating political ideals, it does become difficult, if not impossible, for groups sharing a common social setting to get along. Getting along demands common agreement on the basic conditions of association, but it doesn’t require much else. If the polity is a place where getting along is understood to matter in order to make social life go well for everyone in a preestablished locus, then the sharing of political ideals and principles becomes an important element of the shared identity of those present in this place. It might now seem, however, that the real challenge that confronts the idea of civic or political nationalism is the possibility that, say, not all Americans are liberal. If there is no shared political principles and no fundamental political theory that unite the polity (or that unifies the state into a polity), the notion of national identity in a pluralist polity will be possible in a locational sense only. Under such a condition, the problem of political legitimacy can be resolved, if it is to be resolved at all, by the lucky emergence of an overlapping consensus, and this begins to look like a terribly thin and arbitrary reed to balance a stable civil union upon. This is reason for practical liberals to build a version of civic nationalism into their political theory and insist that the manufacturing of a liberal polity requires civic education regarding the necessity of accepting the liberal principle and explaining the value of the theory of social justice that follows from it. Does this mean that there cannot be any fascists or anarchists in the liberal polity? Not exactly; it means only that even fascists and anarchists will be expected to accept the liberal principle and abide by the requirements of toleration and deference, if they elect

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to remain within the jurisdiction of the polity. While practical liberalism might not be the favored political arrangement of anarchists and fascists, if they live under the conditions of pluralism, the prudential case for the liberal principle should (prudentially speaking) command their allegiance as well. If it does not, they will remain at war with the polity around them until and unless, they exit, manage to secede, or successfully convert the remainder of the population to their way of thinking. Recognition of the need to accept the liberal principle, as noticed previously, does not require one to set aside other deeply held normative and ontological viewpoints. One can be faithful to both, but when and if these respective normative convictions come into conflict, the responsibilities that follow from civic nationalism should be understood to matter greatly because they safeguard the atmosphere that permits the normative concerns and commitments of one’s primary group(s) to flourish free from external invasion. This, in any event, is the message to be conveyed by the civic education required by the liberal polity. Still, it might be good to see if it is possible to put more meat on the bones of civic nationalism than Miller allows. As should be apparent, there is more to civic nationalism, as I understand this notion, than merely a shared constitution and code of law. Underlying these institutions one will find a set of political beliefs, ideals, and commitments—a political theory, in short—that round out the notion of civic nationalism. Americans, for example, characteristically look at their constitution not simply as a legal document that both limits and authorizes the exercise of political power by the state, but also as a symbol that represents the political ideals of liberty and equality that characteristically matter to Americans, even though these ideals (as such) are hardly mentioned in the document itself. With time and interpretation, these ideals are written back into the document and in the process given a distinctive meaning that seems to become rather uniquely American. The history of free speech law in the United States, for example, is a product of the vicissitudes of political struggle across the land that has helped shape both the law and the animating political ideals of the country. When Americans praise the right of free speech, they have in mind, from a practical point of view, a rather complex civil liberty that is applied to specific problems in order to chart more concretely one dimension of the ideal of liberty that they typically claim to cherish. This provides a more specific meaning to the claim, proposed earlier, that polities have evolutionary histories that distinguish them from one another and provide them with a type of locational uniqueness that can serve as a source of pride for citizens. But this unique identity, and the history behind it, belongs to the realm of civic

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nationalism; it remains an element of the political bond that coheres the state into a polity in spite of all else that happens to separate and distance the groups living there from one another. This pushes us in the direction of the integration that Ronald Dworkin has suggested is required for a stable liberal polity.19 It would seem, then, that there is no reason to think that the political morality that arises around the liberal principle cannot in principle serve as a galvanizing force for the unification of the state into a common polity. This suggests, in turn, that the political convictions and political commitments that may, and ideally should, arise around the skeleton of civic nationalism can be, and ideally will be, rather robust. The distinctive histories these convictions and commitments have within a given polity (ideally under practical liberalism the product of political discussion and discourse linked to the resolution of coordination and tolerance problems as inspired by the liberal principle) generate an element of uniqueness for those states whose histories are at issue. Nonetheless, even this enriched sense of civic nationalism is not sufficient to move us to the thicker sense of nationhood preferred by Miller, and necessary in his judgment to make deliberative democracy and social justice viable in the polity. We move in this direction, Miller supposes, when we introduce such factors as a common language, distinctive national histories, and a common culture. Nations, in other words, are something more than groups of individuals collected together randomly like so many poor souls finding themselves thrown together in a lifeboat.20 Yet he also thinks that pluralist states, like the United States, can qualify as nations even though they may well contain a variety of languages, religions, and ethnic and cultural identities. But pluralist states of the sort that face the challenges of political legitimacy that practical liberalism is intended to address do seem, at times, to approximate something like a group of individuals thrown together in a lifeboat each with an independent desire to survive and willing to work together for this reason alone. Such a description, in any event, may seem to be an accurate account of the modus vivendi that characterizes practical liberalism. So, there is reason to ask if such polities can meet Miller’s rigorous standards of nationhood and whether they are imperiled in the fashion Miller imagines if they cannot. Pluralism and Nationalism If Miller is to make good on his claim that pluralist states can qualify as nations, it must be possible for these states to meet his basic conditions of nationality—linguistic, cultural, and historical commonality—in spite of

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all else that separates them. As we shall see, I don’t find Miller’s arguments on this score convincing, and consequently, I don’t think it possible to understand pluralist states as nations, at least in the terms advocated by Miller. But this is problematic only if states must qualify as nations, as Miller thinks, in order to effectively promote social justice and function as deliberative democracies. Suppose we consider first the matter of linguistic commonality. Nations require a common language in Miller’s judgment, but pluralist states are likely to contain many groups possessing their own language. While assimilation and integration into a national culture would seem to require the manifestation of a national language, Miller notes with considerable justification that this does not mean that different ethnic groups cannot retain their own languages. The common language standard can be met if a single language is established as the common language of the polity and those alternative language communities present in the polity become bilingual.21 From the standpoint of practical liberalism, this suggestion hardly seems outrageous. If group autonomy is to be preserved, groups should be free to retain their own language, particularly since an indigenous language is deeply linked to the cultural and ethnic practices of disparate cultural groups.22 Yet there is also reason to insist that the members, or at least the elites, of different linguistic groups be able to talk to one another. As we shall see in the chapter to follow, bringing the liberal principle to life within the polity will require discourse and deliberation between groups as they articulate their own sense of the jurisdictional boundaries that define group rights and citizen responsibilities. Even under conditions of civic nationalism, the ability of citizens to talk to one another is of the first importance. If citizens cannot talk to one another, they cannot consider together differing viewpoints on the nature of civic ideals, make their case in the public forum for consideration when discussing coordination problems, or defend their claims to autonomy when addressing tolerance problems. The requirement that citizens be able to talk to one another might be satisfied in any of several ways and does not lead automatically to the conclusion that an official language of the community that is the polity be established. The requirement could be satisfied, for example, by requiring all citizens of the polity (or all group elites) to learn all the various languages present in the polity (including the languages of new linguistic communities that might be admitted to the polity); by establishing elaborate translation institutions in which the public declarations of various groups are put into all languages in the polity; by constructing a new language (perhaps something like Esperanto or Orwell’s Newspeak)

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to be used when people do the business of the public; or by encouraging bilingualism in the event two language communities dominate the polity. The first possibility seems rather unpractical; Kukathas’s claim that expediency recommends the adoption of a single, official public language makes a good deal of sense in this regard.23 Expedience and practicality would also seem to militate against the second and third options. Elaborate translation institutions will not only burden the public treasure, they will likely involve cumbersome processes that may well limit citizen discourse to formal, institutional channels alone. Similarly, it makes little sense to invent or develop a new public language that all citizens must learn when one of the natural languages already present in the polity would work just as well. Further, the construction of such a language is sure to be challenging and problematic. Translating one group’s convictions on some matter into this new language will prove to be difficult since the language may not as yet have the conceptual apparatus required to render these convictions intelligible within its own linguistic orbit. Building a language, as Orwell understood, is likely to prove destructive of a form of life rather than reflective of it. Efficiency and effectiveness thus recommend that the dominant language(s) of the polity, if such there be, be adopted as the official language of the polity, and minority groups (or minority group elites) should be required, in turn, to become (at least) bilingual.24 But the reach of a common language for the polity is naturally limited to the jurisdiction of the group that is the polity, that is, to discourse on matters associated with the political morality of the polity. As a practical matter, there are a good many multilingual polities that hang together rather nicely in spite of their distinctive linguistic communities. While these might not qualify as nations, they remain viable and stable polities. Of course, practical liberalism continues to put pressure on linguistic themes for disparate groups will need to be able to speak to one another in order to get the business of the polity accomplished. In any event, the minimal requirement of a common civil language does not do much to move us beyond civic nationalism and toward the thick sense of nationality defended by Miller. While a shared political language is important for the self-understanding of citizens as members in the group that is the polity, the reach and range of conceptualizations that define the proper bounds of fluency here need not be all that expansive, for in practice, this language will be the language of political discourse. But even a more comprehensively shared language does not necessarily do much to thicken the bonds of interpersonal identity. Normative rivals may speak the same language and still hold one another in contempt, as is readily apparent in the United States, and their mutual identification will

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end accordingly at the realm of civil association. The significant normative differences that make the fact of pluralism politically problematic exist within as well as between linguistic communities, and sometimes having a shared language only makes it easier to express one’s hatred for one’s normative rivals. It would seem then that linguistic commonality alone does little to establish the thick bonds of identification that Miller associates with his sense of nationalism. So his other criteria of nationhood—common culture and shared history—must do most of the heavy lifting if a pluralist polity is to meet the standards of nationhood. But these criteria also push us into dangerous waters. It is difficult to understand, for example, exactly how one could hope to reconcile the idea of a common culture with the fact of pluralism. If plural groups are culturally homogenous, just how plural can they be? Of course, even the tightest cultural communities are likely to have discord and disagreement over certain issues, but if we expand the amount of discord and normative difference allowable under the notion of a common culture in order to accommodate pluralism, one wonders what will happen to the thickness of the bonds of self-identification so crucial to Miller’s sense of nationality. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, when it comes to distinguishing between cultural communities we must draw boundaries and should not expect to find them. Miller again acknowledges that in a pluralist setting groups may have their own ethnic cultures and religious identifications.25 Disparate cultures, like distinct languages, can of course coexist within a common polity, a point that is central to the logic of practical liberalism with its vision of the polity as a “community of communities.” Horace Kallen’s vision of the hyphenated American offers one of the best illustrations of this sort of coexistence.26 While many Americans continue to conceive of themselves as ethnically Irish or Italian and to value the ethnic origins of their families, their identification with the principles and ideals of American political culture does much to account for their self-identification as Americans. If the right side of the hyphen is restricted to political commonalities, however, we move backward toward a form of civic nationalism and away from the thickened sense of national identification that matters to Miller. Michael Walzer has suggested that there may be more to the right side of the hyphen than civic ideals and principles, and if so, being an American would bring Americans together in more nonpolitical ways.27 There is almost certainly some, and perhaps a great deal, of truth to this, and perhaps this is reason not to take the image of the hyphenated American all that seriously any longer. But the nonpolitical commonalities associated with the American side of the hyphen that separate,

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say, Irish-Americans from the Irish do not necessarily move these IrishAmericans closer in their own minds to, say, Italian-Americans. Ethnic differences still matter, and ethnic rivalries still exist. Moreover, even if some group identifications that initially inspired Kallen’s concern for hyphenates have merged in the direction of what Walzer calls AmericanAmericans, new hyphenates emerge. If it is less common in America today to speak of Irish-Americans, it is still commonplace to speak of Hispanic-Americans or Native-Americans, and so forth. Additionally, enclave groups still struggle to defy assimilation into the “dominant culture” and avoid “Americanization” and often, as in the case of the Amish, with some considerable success. Further, regional differences within the country continue to put different accent marks on “Americanism” in spite of the homogenizing influences of national media and economic trends. We can ignore or diminish these differences of course and conceptually build any number of differences into the broad notion of a “common” culture, but the more we do, the more we preserve a “common” cultural identity at the expense of the thick interpersonal identification that Miller wants to emphasize as necessary to nationalism. At least when applied to pluralist polities, we have good reason to accept Avishai Margalit’s quip that “it seems that there is a great deal of truth in the clever remark that a nation is a collection of people who hate their neighbors and share a common illusion about their ethnic origin.”28 We are left, then, with the notion of a shared history to carry the weight of national identity within pluralist polities. But this notion, when measured against the logic of pluralism, is also problematic. How far back should this history reach? In the case of Great Britain, the case from which Miller draws most heavily, appeal to a common history may make a certain amount of sense, depending on how far back one wants to press the historical narrative.29 Things seem to work differently in the case of the United States, however, or perhaps this merely seems to be the case because the well of the American past is not nearly as deep as Great Britain’s. Suppose we consider some of the problems associated with thinking that Americans share a common history. Perhaps we can (as many do) begin to tell the story of American history by starting with the arrival of the Pilgrims and proceed through the historical struggles of the original colonies. (This omits the pre-European history of native Americans, of course, and this is so much the worse for the prospects of finding a common history here. In fact, reference to indigenous peoples as “native Americans” imposes an identity upon these people that is a part of their history only after the arrival of Europeans.) If we begin with the Pilgrims and proceed through the history of the British colonies, however, it would

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seem that we have said little that is distinctive about American history, for so far this is as much English history as it is American history. The linguistic and cultural practices of colonial America were English in nature, and insofar as America has continued with these linguistic and cultural practices, it makes as much sense to say that the United States belongs to the English nation as it does to say that it constitutes a nation in its own right. As the rebellious colonials saw it, they stopped being British subjects in 1776 (it took a bit longer for them to persuade the British of this), but this does not mean that they stopped being English nationals for a single nation can stretch over more than one state. The United States came into being, as a legal unit, with the implementation of the newly ratified Constitution, but this new state, as such, had no history. If the people of the land had histories, it was not an American history if “American” here is intended to refer to the political unit identifiable as the new state. The Constitution itself, along with the American Declaration of Independence, on the other hand, cannot be understood without some background in British history; they are, in many ways, the manifestation of this history as it was played out in the colonial setting. So, while there was in 1789 a newly formed American state, there could not also have been a newly formed American nation. If history matters to nationhood, then we must say that an element of the English nation managed its political independence and set up political shop in what was once a part of the British colonial empire in North America.30 But then, how much history of its own must a state have before it becomes a nation? Does it make sense to say that the dominant culture in the United States has now evolved sufficiently enough to have stopped being English and to have become distinctively American? If so, when (and how) exactly did this happen? Other commonplace troubles add additional barriers to thinking of a common history as a viable source of nationality in pluralist states. The United States again provides a salient case in point. As immigrant groups came to the United States, they brought their own histories with them. Depending upon their dates of arrival, however, they will have missed many if not most of the formative moments in the historical development of the land—the revolutionary moment, for example, the settling of the west, the Civil War, and so forth. These events, then, are not a part of their history, but they have their own events that are a part of their history—but not of U.S. history. Since their own sense of group identity, and their corresponding commitment to an extensive group autonomy, may well depend upon the uniqueness and character of these histories, it will naturally be important to these groups that they retain their own historical sagas. The stories they learn about U.S. history will tell them a

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bit about the past of the new state to which they now belong, but they will remain the story of this new state and not of the primary group to which they belong. To push the point further, it is worth emphasizing that U.S. history makes little sense as the story of a nation, for it is a history of intergroup struggle and conflict with commonality (if such there be) rooted only in political commitment and conviction—if even that. The story of the American Revolution, for example, is not a tale about a people (qualifying as a nation) asserting its independence against a foreign and imperialist oppressor; it is merely a tale of political separation inspired by those political convictions the colonials learned to cherish as British subjects.31 Perhaps more significantly, American history is marked by exclusion and injustice, and many if not most groups presently constitutive of American society have felt the sting.32 The history of racial oppression, anti-Semitism, and Indian removal has a variety of sides to it, and the various victims of these notorious injustices have reason to keep alive their own tellings, for the story of the struggle for inclusion provides an important galvanizing moment for these groups. Miller is aware, of course, that history invariably fades into myth, and in the process it becomes sanitized—or can become sanitized as groups blend into a common people. These myths, and their sanitizing consequences, are the stuff of nation building, in his judgment, for they become crucial links that connect past with present and place members of a nation in line with their shared ancestry. They tell a nation that it is “solidly based in history,” thus fixing national identity, and they “perform a moralizing role, holding up before us the virtues of our ancestors and encouraging us to live up to them.”33 But once the sanitizing aspect of myth making is recognized, it becomes apparent that these “new” mythic histories provide little more than an antiseptic rendering of the past that does little to transform a collection of distinct groups into a single nation.34 At one point in American history, to take but one prosaic example, the Battle of the Little Bighorn was presented to Americans as an epic conflict in which a heroic American warrior and his glorious Seventh Cavalry engaged the Sioux nation in order to defend and protect the spread of westward civilization against a savage population that threatened both national progress and the intrepid settlers who pressed ever forward to tame the frontier. Native Americans, of course, have their own story to tell about the events that transpired along the banks of the Little Bighorn River. Theirs is a story of national defense and self-protection directed against a powerful yet cruel foe, with imperialist designs and in search of riches, bent upon usurping their lands and constraining (if not ending) their way of life.

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Miller is fully appreciative of the fact that different groups will have different histories and different accounts of the events that surround their coming together. With this in mind, he insists upon the need to “strike a balance between the claims of the community’s historic faith and the claims of dissenters.”35 But this is far easier said than done. The story of the events along the Little Bighorn River are now told differently in the chronicles of American history; it is sanitized by integrating native American views with tales about the pressure of westward expansion, the pursuit of gold in the Black Hills, and the role the American military played in this complex clash of cultures. So we are left now with only the story of a battle in which an arrogant American commander of questionable competence had his command wiped out by an overwhelming force. Native Americans are no longer presented as hostile savages, and George Armstrong Custer is no longer presented as a heroic American. We have only a military blunder on one side and the last stand of an endangered people on the other. There is no moralizing role for such a tale to play; it now provides only a glimpse into the complexities of the intergroup struggle on display in American westward expansion. This is but one modest illustration of an important point: conflating the histories of intergroup struggle and conflict into the type of mythic tales that might blend these disparate groups into a common nation actually has a tragic demythologizing effect. Once this history has become suitably sanitized in order to guarantee that no group in the polity is demonized, there is little left to inspire commonality, little left to galvanize either side and move them in the direction of a common identity. The source of national pride and glory that Miller wants to associate with the cultivation of these myths is washed away, and we are left with precious little that a people, as a people, can rally around. Moreover, from the standpoint of practical liberalism there remains good reason not to overdo the recourse to sanitizing myths and to instead encourage disparate groups to tell their own story of their histories. Insofar as these stories differ, they will continue to illustrate the fact of intergroup conflict and struggle and the accompanying fact of oppression and injustice. It may be good for a liberal polity to keep the agonistic character of its past firmly in mind, for this past is itself a story of different and hostile groups struggling to find a way to live together. An appreciation for the value of political unity may be enhanced by the continued recognition of the conflict and struggle it is intended to overcome. But this too militates against the possibility of constructing, in a pluralist environment, the strong nationalism that matters to Miller. Further, allowing groups to tell the stories of their past in their own way remains a vital method for sustaining group identity and group loyalty,

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and this too matters from the standpoint of group autonomy. Groups should be allowed to cultivate and promulgate their own myths in order to preserve their group integrity. The so-called culture wars that broke out in the United States in the early and mid-nineties has caused much anxiety and consternation in educational circles because different minority groups wish to mythologize their own presence in and contribution to the formation of the land.36 At issue was whether group identity and self-respect mattered more than the “right way” to tell the story of American development, but what became apparent was the desire of different groups to tell the story in their own way. What has emerged from this, from the standpoint of practical liberalism, is that conflicting stories of group involvement in the formation of the land seem to be an inevitable consequence of the fact of pluralism. If there is no way to “get the story right”—or to see the story in objectivist terms, there is reason to appreciate the depth of disagreement produced by differing and competing stories. This invites an effort at unity in the face of difference; it invites recognition of disparate stories about the American experience. It politicizes, this is to say, the fact of pluralism, and this should encourage an appreciation of the need to cultivate a political identification throughout the land able to accommodate differing and conflicting histories of the polity itself. Civic Nationalism and Social Justice So it seems that if we accept Miller’s account of nationality, we should not hold out much hope that the liberal polity can qualify as a nation. If the bonds of civic identity are thicker in the liberal polity than Kukathas’s image of a liberal archipelago would admit, they are also considerably thinner than what Miller requires in order to transform the polity into a nation. In turn, the problem of balance is accordingly resolved in a manner that qualifies the liberal polity as an example of civic or political nationalism. But what is lost to the liberal polity if it fails to qualify as a nation in the strong sense of concern to Miller? The ready response from strong nationalists is that the balance between civic and group identities in the liberal polity jeopardizes the desired ends of social justice and deliberative democracy. Civic nationalism, it is argued, is too thin a reed to support citizen commitments to social justice and deliberative democracy. By way of defending his belief that a sense of nationality is important for the pursuit of social justice, Miller claims that members of a nation—citizens with a robust shared identity—will be more inclined to provide their fellow nationals with what they are owed as members of the

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nation.37 The logic behind this claim seems to be that people are more willing to share with those with whom they identify as a common people and more likely to participate fully in democratic processes if they feel a strong affinity with the fellow participants in this process. We may reasonably greet this view with some skepticism and question its empirical validity. But I want to put these troubles aside and focus instead on the type of incentive that might encourage members of the liberal polity to want to secure the ends of social justice and to participate in the democratic process even in the absence of a strong identification with one’s fellow citizens. Suppose we begin by asking why competitors in an athletic competition bother to play and participate fairly. One quick response might be that they don’t; impartial referees are required to keep players in line. Of course, we could press the issue and ask why referees are inclined to remain impartial, and so forth, but I think this reply overlooks an important aspect of competitive sport. Competitors do cheat at times, and it is possible that more would cheat more often if officials were not present to enforce the rules. But there is also an ethic of competition that just may make a substantial contribution to making athletic events go well. Competitors (usually) understand that to play a sport requires participating in good faith, that is, remaining faithful to the point and purpose of play.38 While players may, and most likely will, want to win, they can only really do so if they play fairly. Perhaps a player in, say, a tennis tournament can cheat and get away with it, and perhaps her cheating will enable her to “win” her match. But she knows full well that she hasn’t really won anything if she cheats; instead, she has made a mockery of the competition. It no longer serves its intended end as a test of skill, and her victory is hollow indeed. This demonstrates that things like athletic competitions have an end that is other than, and often opposed to, the particular ends players may want to realize when they enter such competitions. Players play, let us suppose, at least initially because they want to win. But winning is possible only if one dedicates oneself to the social end of the competition, namely, the demonstration of some sort of excellence. One can’t win by cheating; one can only come in first (if one is lucky). Competitors may not (and need not) know their opponents; they may not (and certainly need not) like their opponents. But they still need their opponents, for without them the enterprise is not possible. And the enterprise can go well—can achieve its social end—only if all competitors are dedicated in common to making the enterprise that is the competition work. Competitions, this is to say, are fundamentally cooperative endeavors.39 Consequently, competitors must also learn to regard one

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another as fellow cooperators, and to appreciate that their shared enterprise is possible only if all involved cooperate by dedicating themselves to the point and purpose of play. This gives rise to a type of moral relationship in its own right; it gives rise, that is, to what I have called elsewhere an associative morality.40 This parallels the vision of morality on display in Baier’s moral point of view. Though competitors may (and likely will) have self-interested reasons for playing the game, these interests are achievable only by adopting something like Baier’s moral point of view and recognizing oneself as a participant in a larger social enterprise. Competitors are thus united by a common goal—the desire to have a genuine competition—and they can conceptualize themselves as fellow participants in a shared social enterprise accordingly. And they are able, accordingly, to identify with one another as, say, fellow tennis players in spite of all that separates them. This uniting identity is itself the product of recognizing the sense in which competitors must also regard one another as cooperators in an enterprise each has independent reason to want to go well. Now, the analogy between civil union and athletic competition is hardly exact. Civil union, as we have seen, is more problematic than athletic competition because beliefs that matter greatly to groups, and not just group interests, are at stake in the former. Nonetheless, the logic behind associative morality remains in place, and given the significance of the end sought (namely, political stability and social peace) normative rivals have powerful reasons to embrace the cooperative spirit required to make civil association work. With this, the ability to foster a civil identity able to carry considerable associative importance is in place. The evolution of such an identity is not a given, of course, and it seems silly to think that it must necessarily emerge as a matter of course. The development of such an identity is not something that any political theory can hope to guarantee; theory must rest content if it can be shown at least to be a real possibility. Still, it is a possibility that the theorist can encourage a polity to work toward and to cultivate, and for reasons that anyone who recognizes the great good provided by civil association should readily be able to recognize. One way to offer this encouragement involves worrying less about the social incentive necessary to guarantee that citizens will pursue the ends of social justice and more about what these ends happen in fact to be. This is no doubt the first concern of social justice, but how should practical liberalism address the issue? There are, it would seem, some things that group members can be said to owe one another simply by virtue of their membership in the group. These are aspects of the associative morality that follow from group member participation in the civil enterprise; they

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are the necessary conditions of cooperation that must be met if the civil enterprise is to go well. Chief among these moral responsibilities are loyalty and commitment. Loyalty prohibits acts of betrayal of the group or acts that would endanger or compromise the well-being and sustainability of the group. Commitment, on the other hand, requires group members to provide the support and service necessary to the continued viability of the group as such. Neither loyalty nor commitment imprison members in the group, of course; associative attachment does not trump the right of exit. If, however, group members elect to stay in the polity (and thus accept the liberal principle, for this is what staying in the polity means here), loyalty and commitment are owed to one’s fellow citizens even if one disagrees with some of the practices or policies adopted by the polity as a whole.41 Group members remain free (as an integral feature of group autonomy) to decide for themselves how they will deal with their internal group politics, intragroup conflicts, and member disgruntlements. As we have seen, there is considerable reason under practical liberalism to appreciate the dynamics of intragroup conflict and internal political struggle. It is presumed, as an analytic feature of membership in a group, however, that continued involvement and membership in the group, regardless of political dissent, commits group members to the twin ends of loyalty and commitment to the group. What this entails in practice is left to groups themselves to decide according to their own internal standards of authority. Since the polity must also be conceptualized as a group, the analytic features of membership in a group hold for it as well. When these features are applied to the polity, it becomes apparent that citizens ought to practice a form of patriotism. They must acknowledge a loyalty to the polity that requires them to do things like pay their taxes and serve the security needs of the polity when necessary. These are basic requirements of membership that citizens owe to one another by virtue of their participation in a common and ongoing enterprise. Of course, acceptance of the liberal principle also generates a more specific obligation to practice toleration and deference within the polity. These obligations are fundamental to the point and purpose of civil association under practical liberalism. So then, if social justice involves understanding what citizens qua fellow cooperators in the public that is the polity owe one another, the requirements of social justice in the liberal polity involve meeting the demands of loyalty, commitment, toleration, and deference. This includes ideological groups, like anarchists and fascists, whose members might have independent reasons for rejecting the liberal principle. The members of these groups also have practical reasons for

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accepting the liberal principle, and if they elect to do so, they commit themselves to the standards of social justice associated with the liberal polity until and unless they can persuade their fellow citizens to unite behind their own preferred views on civil association. Beyond these basic responsibilities, however, the ends of social justice become problematic for two reasons. First, groups within the polity may (and almost certainly will) have their own internal sense of their own requirements of loyalty and commitment to their own membership. Second, because groups will have their own internal normative convictions, they are likely to have divergent views on what else they are owed, or not owed, by the polity at large. Discussions of social justice are often driven by a specific moral viewpoint; these viewpoints generate lists of distributable social goods that are presumably owed, in some degree, by the polity to all its members.42 There is nothing objectionable about this in principle, but any list generated by a specific moral viewpoint will likely be controversial within the polity for the two reasons just mentioned. Some groups may not want some of the things on the list, or might think that these things should not be supplied or distributed by the polity. State supported health care, for example, will likely make the list for many liberals, but this will not matter much to those Pentecostal groups that don’t value the type of health care at issue, namely, the care provided by medical science.43 Similarly, special rights and privileges that enable some groups to endure and sustain their culture may not make the list of some liberals, but these things will matter greatly to those groups that sense the need for them. Nor do these considerations exhaust the possible points of contention surrounding the requirements of social justice in the liberal polity. Additional problems are bound to arise because group normative viewpoints are likely to bleed into the basic elements of social justice; all groups will be inclined to flesh out the demands of toleration and deference, for example, according to the standards built into their own moral theory of the human good. Thus what might look like sound social policy to one group may be viewed as an intolerable violation of group autonomy by others. While theorizing about social justice can do much to model the challenges posed by the twin commitment to toleration and deference, it cannot paint an exact picture of what an ideally just liberal polity would look like in much detail. Theorizing cannot settle questions of social justice; it can only inform and perhaps guide social discussion. To settle conflicts over what all owe to each and what each owes to all, group involvement and intergroup discussion are required. The details of social justice will need to be hammered out in the course of democratic discussion and deliberation. Under practical liberalism, the

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just polity is one where all elements of the polity must work together in free and unfettered exchange to draw the boundaries of the authority of the state and distinguish them from what groups wish to preserve as the authoritative parameters of their own jurisdictions.44

Deliberative Democracy and the Liberal Polity The complexities that swirl around the requirements of social justice thus require the liberal polity have a democratic structure. This conclusion is entailed by the logic of the liberal principle. As an integral feature of the group autonomy protected by the liberal principle, groups retain the right to have themselves heard in the public forum that shapes the standards of justice. Only in this way can the polity shape a sense of what toleration and deference demand in practice. Groups can be expected to want to have input into the collective and distributive policy issues that matter to them and affect their ability to live as they wish and to practice group ways accordingly. Thus adequate defense of group autonomy necessitates deliberative and democratic procedures with regard to collective decisions about (1) what is to count as a social good and (2) how such goods are to be distributed. So participation in the civil enterprise necessarily also involves (and should be understood to involve) engaging in a democratic process, and this too is a form of public spiritedness that needs cultivation throughout the body politic. But this is still a deliberative democracy with a difference, for it must proceed against the background limitations upon political authority established by the liberal principle. If toleration and deference take some things off the political agenda, they also require that other things be added to it. If social justice in the liberal polity is shaped by the process of deliberative democracy, the demands of social justice also establish the focus and boundaries of deliberative discourse. Deliberation remains powered by, and must stay within, the parameters of toleration and deference. These are the ideals to be shaped by discourse, and consequently, discourse must center around these ideals and address the question of how they are to be brought to life and put into effect in the polity. The majority—regardless of what groups come together to form it— cannot impose its will upon the minority if doing so evidently violates the liberal principle. Democratic process, in other words, does not supplant the liberal principle; instead, it functions only within the spirit of the principle. Here the courts in the liberal polity will have an important role to play in reviewing democratic decisions and weighing them against the evident requirements of the liberal principle. It doesn’t follow,

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however, that courts need be considered the final authority on disputes involving the requirements of toleration and deference. But courts can and should serve as a venue for the objections of groups whose members (or whose elites) believe that democratic politics has wandered, on specific issues, from the general aim of social justice, albeit presumably in the name of social justice. The judicial role remains ancillary, however, to genuine public discourse, and the weight this discourse carries for developing a comprehensive sense of social justice lends additional importance to the cultivation of a spirit of civility in the polity, for this spirit is the best defense against a (perhaps well-meaning) political decay toward dominant group imperialism. It seems then that there is a place of importance for both social justice and deliberative democracy within the liberal polity. While social justice introduces a vague ideal beyond the basics of loyalty, commitment, toleration, and deference, deliberative democratic procedures provide effective mechanisms for sharpening this ideal and adding meat to the bones of the general notion of social justice. In this sense, the civic nationalism on display in the liberal polity will not only support, but positively require, a strong commitment to social justice and deliberative democracy. It is, if fact, difficult to imagine a legitimate pluralist polity operating in the absence of these political requirements. Miller is certainly right to insist that social justice and deliberative democracy are hardly imaginable without a shared identity, but there seems little reason to think that the shared political identity to be forged by group involvement in the civil enterprise is insufficient to meet this end. The political identity to be forged from a commitment to the civil enterprise involves establishing the understanding that each member of the polity shares with her or his fellow citizens a common commitment to political principle regardless of language, ethnic, cultural, historical, or normative differences that might otherwise separate them. Without this identity, without this shared commitment, there is no polity; there is only intergroup conflict and contestation that chisels away at the legitimacy of the state. Here, as Thrasymachus would say, justice is simply that which is in the interest of the stronger, as more dominant groups impose their will, their beliefs, and their convictions on less powerful groups. Two objections to all this come to mind at this point. The first is the readily anticipated reply of the nationalist who will no doubt insist again that this case for civic nationalism, like its brethren, may capture the head but fails to reach the heart. Practical liberalism, the objection goes, still cannot guarantee political stability because it cannot offer assurance that citizens will be willing to sacrifice and perhaps even die for their polity. But as we noticed at the outset, capturing the heart is not

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an option open to the theoretical enterprise. Emotional attachment to one’s state of the sort that matters to the strong nationalist is something that happens only with time and experience. Yet the objection can be pressed in more theoretical guise by insisting that the desired attachment goes only to a people and a place, not to chilly and unsituated political ideals. While this may be true, it is also beside the point, for the ideals at issue under practical liberalism are hardly unsituated in practice; only the theory is unsituated. The manifestation of the theory must take place within actual polities in just the way that the actual commitment to an athletic competition must take place within the context of the sport itself. The questionable claim of at least some strong nationalists is that the sentiment toward nationhood must be found in some fundamental and pre-political attachments, that nationhood must precede, in some murky sense, statehood if the nation-state is to be stable. Miller and other strong nationalists typically let on that they are not very serious about this, of course, and largely because the claim makes little historical sense. This is why they invariably insist that the notion of nationhood rests, in practice, upon certain important and sustaining myths, that nationhood is, in the end, simply a very important contrivance.45 It is not, I have argued, a contrivance that is available to pluralist polities. But the importance of this contrivance can also be questioned is we elect to think that civil union can be forged not just by looking backward in search of a mythic nation but by looking forward and regarding the polity as a journey into the future. The notion of liberal political community as a journey has been thoughtfully developed by Derek Edyvane who invites readers to see political community as a quest undertaken by individuals who just happen to be friends.46 While Edyvane’s reliance upon the notion of friendship seems misplaced when measured against the fact of pluralism, his claim that the imagery of the quest can provide a unifying force for the liberal polity has a degree of merit. The challenge that citizens face is to make the civil enterprise work into the future in spite of everything that otherwise separates them. The quest, to put the point in Edyvane’s terms, is to bring the end of social justice alive into the future; this is the common enterprise that unites citizens and forms a community out of the various contesting communities extant in the polity. It is a community with limits, but all communities have their limits. Like any quest, the civil enterprise requires dedication and devotion, and a willingness for the questers to appreciate the common goal of stability and good order that sets them to cooperating. That the questers have their own self-directed reasons for undertaking the challenge together need not detract from the common

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understanding that the quest, though never ending, can go forward only if they appreciate that they need one another in order to proceed. This is the final demand of the problem of balance and the key to making a viable unum from the pluribus of disparate groups anticipated under the fact of pluralism. The second objection cuts in a different direction. This objection has been effectively presented by Paul Gilbert who thinks that civic nationalism approaches a form of republicanism that can make the state overly important. Gilbert gets to the heart of civic nationalism when he says, “What ties people together into a political community is that they work together through their public roles to realize certain values.”47 He fears, however, that these political values may well co-opt other moral values and push in the direction of some form of fascism. Citing E.M. Forster’s conviction that if he had to betray his friend or his country he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country, Gilbert concludes, “The danger of republican nationalism is that it substitutes, as sources of moral value, political relationships for the ordinary human ones Forster speaks of. Yet surely our political relationships within a state are to be justified by our human relationships, and not vice versa.”48 Given the fact of pluralism, however, this danger seems rather remote, and even if we could begin to understand the human relationships that Gilbert is worried about. That the political morality of the liberal polity can, and no doubt at times will, conflict with group moralities should hardly seem surprising at this point. This sets the stage for the type of moral conflict that individuals must struggle to mediate, and we can suppose that some tension between political and personal morality will endure into the future. This tension might prove healthy, however, if Gilbert’s worries are taken seriously. It guarantees that a zealous identification with the polity will not give rise to a vapid nationalism that inclines one to mindlessly insist “my country right or wrong.” The proper balance seems to lie somewhere between Forster and this sort of strong nationalism and is hardly something that can be given a satisfactory theoretical resolution. The liberal polity is premised upon the need to tolerate the moral sentiments of its citizens—sentiments linked to one’s primary group identification(s), but citizens in turn also need to appreciate the requirements of civic nationalism. This is, it seems, an unavoidable feature of the existential nature of trying to square the circle by preserving difference throughout the polity by crafting the type of unity that permits diversity to flourish. The great irony of the problem of balance is that each side of the equation depends in the end on the presence of the other. If a given social setting was not characterized by the presence of a plurality of differing

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and potentially hostile worldviews and moral theories of the human good, toleration as a political virtue would not have much to recommend it. But too, if a spirit of toleration does not infuse the polity, the ability of disparate groups to live as they wish and practice their moral theory of the human good as they see fit would be imperiled. This tension guarantees that group distinctiveness will not collapse into some form of nationalism, that an effective balance between Caesar and one’s primary group(s) can be struck. The balance seems best characterized in terms of civic nationalism, but this type of nationalism comes with a built-in tension between the duties that follow from one’s most basic moral beliefs and one’s responsibilities of citizenship. Though this may seem both naïve and optimistic, I’m inclined to think that this tension, when fully grasped and appreciated, can do a great deal to solidify the stability of the liberal polity.

Chapter 6

Liberalism and Democracy Mention was made in the last chapter of practical liberalism’s broadly democratic character, and I want now to explore the nature of this character more thoroughly. Although democratic process is an integral feature of practical liberalism, the theory still falls rather short of the democratic extremes favored by so-called deliberative democrats. This will seem wrongheaded to those thinkers who suppose that liberalism should endorse a stronger commitment to democracy than what is on display here. Thus an ancillary aim of the chapter is to consider the kinds of objections deliberative democrats push against liberal theories that advocate a more constrained form of democracy. Under practical liberalism, democratic process is not a necessary condition of political legitimacy. Instead, legitimacy rests upon the general acceptability of the liberal principle in conjunction with the governmental commitment to bring the ideal articulated by the principle to life in the polity. Democratic involvement is required here only to flesh out the system of social justice introduced and inspired by the liberal principle. A broader commitment to democracy is present in those thinkers, like Bernard Williams, who argue that people should be permitted input to those decisions that will affect them in some way.1 The defense of this view can make appeal to the notion of autonomy (respecting persons as autonomous necessitates permitting them input into decisions affecting them) or rational self-interest (people will naturally want to have input into those decisions affecting them). In either case, thinkers holding this view generally suppose that political legitimacy depends upon such a democratic condition. Political legitimacy, in other words, is here regarded as a condition of political process rather than as the outcome of adherence to a politics of principle.

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Practical liberalism falls somewhat short of this democratic ideal because it allows groups to set their own internal political standards for intragroup decision making, and some patriarchal or elitist groups might not share this democratic ideal. Democratic conversation is limited here to the articulation of the more precise requirements of social justice, and the right of group autonomy is correspondingly understood to be a given in this conversation and not a topic for discussion in its own right. However, democratic colloquy on social justice is just one of two conversations that will be ongoing in the liberal polity. The second involves the inevitable intergroup colloquy and criticism that will likely surround intergroup evaluation and critique of the practices and/or beliefs of some groups considered damned, disgusting, mistaken, or misguided by the members of outgroups. Conversations of this sort are natural and perhaps unavoidable consequences of the normative difference that characterizes pluralist political systems. Sometimes these conversations will involve outgroup support for dissident voices criticizing intragroup practices, and sometimes they will involve outgroup criticism of group practices generally accepted by the members of targeted groups. Much has been said already to indicate that under practical liberalism, these conversations are to be conducted according to the restraints required by social justice (toleration and deference), and government, for its part, is accordingly called upon to referee the intergroup disputes they generate in order to assure that the burden of toleration is met by all parties involved. These conversations, however, are not a part of the democratic colloquy characteristic of the liberal polity. They are indicative of what divides groups and thus do not belong to the realm of the group that is the polity, that is, to the intragroup conversation of the polity as a group in its own right. Yet this distinction is sure to make practical liberalism objectionable to those strong democrats who think it necessary or desirable to abandon a politics of principle for a more robust and open textured democratic process. By way of response, I shall offer some reasons to think that in the absence of some commitment to political principle, democratic process cannot establish or support the legitimacy of the state. As a prolegomenon to what follows, some conceptual housekeeping is in order. To begin, I want to say a bit about democracy in order to indicate the sense in which much democratic theory belongs to the camp of what I shall call a politics of process. This should help provide a clearer picture of the crucial distinction between a politics of principle and a politics of process. Democracy, regarded for the moment as a politics of process, is a method for making collective decisions and forming public policy. Though this process may be inspired by underlying moral or prudential

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concerns, it is neither guided by nor reducible to principled considerations; decision-making outcomes are valid if they are the product of proper procedures and cannot be voided or trumped by underlying principled concerns. Democracy, of course, is a many-splendored thing; theoretical visions of an ideal democracy may even approach in number the burgeoning versions of liberalism now extant in the literature on the subject. To bring some order to this welter of difference and disagreement, we might notice that deliberative democrats generally favor direct over representative democracy and wish to maximize citizen involvement in the ongoing colloquy by which a polity forms and informs itself. Representative democracy can be regarded as a practical qualification of the policy-making process necessitated by the intractable logistic problems of size and time.2 Deliberative democracy, on the other hand, does not rely upon elected elites empowered by their constituency to do the business of the public for them. Deliberative democrats are generally hostile to institutional concessions to logistical problems because some voices are bound to be lost in the representative process, and deliberative democrats prefer to maximize political involvement and participation rather than minimize it.3 From the standpoint of democracy regarded as a politics of process, a loss of voice (the failure to have viable input into the decision-making process) compromises the democratic ideal. Though it is possible to characterize democratic process in any manner of ways, it invariably involves three distinct stages that deserve specific attention: agenda setting, discourse and deliberation, and decision making.4 The decision-making process, which typically involves voting, is perhaps the most familiar aspect of democracy, but the heart of the democratic process is to be found in the first two stages of democratic activity—access to the agenda and the process of deliberation and exchange of viewpoint. This is where citizen interests and desires are given their most pertinent expression and receive the thorough exploration and consideration they require. In its most ideal form, decision making under a direct democracy becomes rather anticlimatic because the deliberative process generates consensus (or near consensus) in the demos. This certainly need not be the case, of course, and when it isn’t, there is no substitute for voting. Deliberation may not bring people together—in fact it may divide them—but deliberative democrats suppose that reasoned discourse is the best method for allowing all political interests a fair hearing in the public forum. Those defenders of democracy that place great importance on public deliberation and access to the agenda, and who hold that discourse and deliberation have healthy consequences for the legitimacy and justness of the polity, will qualify as deliberative democrats.5

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Democracy and Deliberative Discourse As imagined by deliberative democrats, the democratic process is anything but a free-for-all. It is governed by a set of rules that structure and control its most crucial elements. These rules govern such ticklish matters as (1) who is allowed to participate in the process (i.e., who belongs to the demos); (2) how the participants of the demos are to regard one another (namely, as free and equal members of the demos); and (3) what is to count as a reason for purposes of justifying or legitimating preferred policy positions.6 Once these rules are in place, the deliberative process permits people to hammer out policy decisions through open discussion and the presentation of reasons designed to justify individual interests and viewpoints. The realm of the political, in other words, is not predefined by principle; there are no principled restraints upon issues and subjects that may be introduced to or considered by the demos. Whatever matters to people, qua recognized members of the demos, is to be considered fair game for public discussion, and consequently, public policy formation. When it comes to deliberative democracy, the realm of the political is unbounded; what goes on in the polity, so to speak, is the business of everyone belonging to the demos. Some theorists, however, put a type of governor on the deliberative process by insisting that reasons introduced in public discourse must count as reasons for all elements of the polity. Personal or group-based reasons not recognized as sufficiently general or legitimate by other members of the demos are accordingly disqualified from public discourse.7 Unlike a politics of process (which opens up the political process, expands, the parameters of political discourse, and relies on open deliberation for the formation of the public will on specific and general policy matters), a politics of principle limits and focuses political discourse and deliberation. Under practical liberalism, as we have seen, the realm of political discussion is restricted to the construction, interpretation, and rearticulation of the liberal principle. Members of the demos (citizens of the polity) are charged with discussing and exploring what a commitment to the liberal principle means in practice. Democratic deliberation thus brings to life, and gives a practical construction to, the ideal of equal group autonomy. But discussions about internal group practices are not a part of the realm of public discussion. This characterizes, once again, the first of the two conversations that take place under practical liberalism. It is a distinctively political discussion and should be understood to involve all members of the group that is the polity, reasoning and deliberating (to paraphrase Rousseau) in their

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capacity as citizen. Ideally, the conversation that takes place in the public or political realm is civil in a dual sense. It is civil, first of all, in the sense that it involves working out the practical commitments all owe to each and each owes to all as fellow members of the polity. This is the civic business; the business of the polity considered as a group unto itself. But it should also be considered civil in the sense that it takes place among group members who recognize themselves as connected to one another in an important (albeit political) way. While group interests and concerns are necessarily expressed in this conversation, the discussion still involves an effort by all citizens to hammer out in practice the standards of association that are appropriate for them as fellow members of a common group. The normative, religious, and/or ideological differences that are the source of normative conflict are to be put aside at this point and one’s identification with the group that is the polity given pride of place. This is a feature of the balance between one’s identification with primary groups and one’s identification with the polity, discussed above, that must be forged and solidified under practical liberalism. Deliberative democrats are generally hostile to a politics of principle because it places what they consider to be unacceptable limitations on the realm of the political, and consequently hides from public view the concerns and interests of some individuals (presumably qualifying as members of the demos) that they think deserve an open hearing. By expanding political discourse, the argument goes, the traditional liberal distinction between the realm of the private and the realm of the public is done away with, and the realm of the private can no longer hide from public view injustices that should be brought to light in a just polity. Accordingly, deliberative democrats seem well positioned to argue that because practical liberalism restricts and focuses political discussion and discourse to the implications of the liberal principle it cannot meet its declared end of establishing the legitimacy of the polity. Minority or disempowered members of some (if not all) elitist, patriarchal, or authoritarian groups are denied the opportunity to be heard and to put their interests, troubles, and concerns before the demos for consideration, and consequently, these people have little reason to accept the liberal principle (since it permits the perpetuation of their political invisibility) or to acknowledge that a polity premised upon group acceptance of the liberal principle is legitimate. Seyla Benhabib’s criticisms of Rawls’s appeal to the notion of public reason within his conception of political liberalism mirror these concerns and suggest at least one way in which deliberative democrats may want to question the acceptability of practical liberalism. Benhabib distinguishes her own position on public reasoning on normative matters from Rawls

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by taking exception to Rawls on three different counts. First, she claims, with justification, that Rawls restricts the agenda of public discourse to “constitutional essentials,” thus narrowing objectionably the topics of conversation appropriate to the public. Second, she thinks Rawls’s notion of public reason defines an appropriate process of reasoning in a way that determines how people ought to reason about those concerns that properly belong to the public. And third, she supposes that the public sphere in which Rawls allows public reasoning to take place is limited to the state (“the legal sphere and its institutions”) and should be distinguished from the nonpublic reasoning that belongs to the “background culture” constitutive of civil society.8 The democratic requirements of practical liberalism parallel Rawls’s development of the notion of public reason in several ways. Rawls is surely right to notice that citizens in just polities have both a right and good reason to consider and discuss what he calls “the good of the public: what the political conception of justice requires of society’s basic structure of institutions, and of the purposes and ends they are to serve.”9 This is particularly crucial under practical liberalism for the fair and effective management of coordination and tolerance problems. In the case of the distribution of contested social goods (a coordination problem), for example, groups need to explain to one another the resources they require in order to sustain the group and practice their ways. The open exchange of information about needs in this context is crucial for others in the polity to understand and prioritize group demands on social goods. Public reason, in the sense employed by Rawls, is thus crucial under practical liberalism for the pursuit of social justice. The idea of public reason, as Rawls uses the notion, is best understood as a form of reasoning in public. When it comes to public reasoning in this sense, we should be concerned “with reason, not simply with discourse.”10 To reason, in the requisite sense, involves making a case for one’s position by offering an argument that can be weighed, evaluated, and critiqued. If we are to argue (in the philosophical sense) meaningfully with others, we will need to share at least some common understandings; in particular, we must share some basic sense of what it is that we are arguing about. Under Rawls’s notion of public reason, it is understood that we reason about the meaning and demands of social justice; this for Rawls, is the junction of commonality that defines the normative and ontological boundaries of the public (or the group that is the polity). The point and purpose of reasoning is to sharpen, clarify, and construct (at least under practical liberalism) the sense of social justice that orders citizens’ lives. The conversation surrounding public reasoning under practical liberalism is reminiscent of Rawls in this regard. It does not involve the propriety

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or acceptability of the internal practices or activities of the various groups present in the polity. This is off limits because such issues are not the business of the group that is the polity. Because it is group autonomy and not individual autonomy that receives protection under practical liberalism, the internal business of distinct groups logically cannot qualify as the business of the group that is the polity. Put differently, the internal politics of the group are not logically possible topics of discourse for the democratic process that does the business of the polity, and this is itself a basic condition of social justice in the liberal polity. Such matters belong to the second type of conversation that takes place in the polity. But this seems to leave practical liberalism vulnerable to the criticisms that Benhabib directs against Rawls. Practical liberalism limits the democratic agenda of public deliberation to the discussion of coordination and tolerance problems, in particular, and to the other policy questions that fall under the jurisdiction of the public that is the polity in general. In doing so, it also rules out of court some reasons that might be advanced in the public square to defend and support group interests. For the standard of measure that controls the propriety or impropriety of an argument advanced in defense of group interests in the public square is given by the liberal principle—this is the point behind identifying practical liberalism as a politics of principle. So, regardless of whether Benhabib’s democratic concerns trouble Rawls, they would seem rather evidently to trouble practical liberalism. Deliberative democrats might now wish to press for two conclusions. First, a polity’s commitment to the liberal principle can only achieve a form of civil peace at the price of possible (and possibly considerable) injustice within the groups whose autonomy is protected as a matter of political principle. Since those individuals victimized and oppressed by elitist, patriarchal, and/or authoritarian groups might be presumed not to support the civil arrangement that continues their plight, the polity cannot be held to be legitimate from their point of view. Second, a better strategy for the realization of political legitimacy is to move in the direction of a politics of process in which robust democratic debate permits the penetration of group boundaries and the corresponding involvement of those presently suffering from intragroup injustices. There are, however, good reasons to reject both these conclusions. For one thing, there is reason to question the logical coherence of the notion of deliberative democracy and the very possibility of a viable politics of process. But while we may elect to dismiss a politics of process as a way to avoid the problems deliberative democrats see with a politics of principle, this is hardly sufficient to save practical liberalism from the first problem noticed above. So, once the problems with deliberative democracy have

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been explored, it will be necessary to return (yet again) to the question of intragroup injustice that arises under practical liberalism and consider whether this issue really does undermine the legitimacy of the liberal polity as this is understood under practical liberalism. THE TERMS OF DELIBERATIVE DISCOURSE Built into deliberative democracy is the rather popular conviction that all interests in the polity qualify as political, or as the business of the polity itself. Consequently, all members of the polity should have a voice in the open discussion that surrounds moral, religious, cultural, and ideological disagreement, for such discussion is essentially political. Group norms, practices, and beliefs that become sources of controversy and concern for outgroups are accordingly to be placed on the political agenda and critically discussed by “giving good reasons in public” for sustaining or altering them.11 A “good public reason” in turn is generally understood as a reason that can count as a reason for everyone in the polity.12 Deliberative democrats are quick to point out that the process of open and unfettered political and moral discussion on contentious norms or practices will not necessarily generate consensus, though they often suppose that some degree of conversion can be reasonably anticipated.13 But public discussion and the open exchange of reasons for or against a contentious norm or practice should both help to build in the citizenry a heightened sense of “public reasoning and exchange,” and encourage the demos to reform things “if and when the democratic will of the participants to do so exists.”14 It is important to ask, however, whether there is good reason to think that a politics of process would be accepted as legitimate by all groups existing within a pluralist setting. The question should again be posed, for purposes of theoretical inquiry, in full view of the deep normative and ontological group differences presumed by acknowledgment of the fact of pluralism. Put in these terms, there is a fairly obvious sense in which deliberative democracy would seem unacceptable to at least some groups in the polity. Group beliefs and practices are in principle jeopardized by the politicization of group ways, that is, by opening group practices up to the general involvement of the members of the group that is the polity. Group autonomy (the opportunity for the group to govern its own internal affairs) is threatened under deliberative democracy in two ways. First, group beliefs are constrained in public discourse by the need to defend group ways only in terms of “good public reasons.” But what counts as a good reason for some theocratic community might not qualify as such when viewed against the standard of public reasons (namely, reasons

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everyone can recognize) endorsed by deliberative democrats.15 Second, group practices considered odious or obnoxious to a dominant majority after the deliberative process has been exhausted may be invaded and prohibited when decision times comes along.16 Although there is no reason to think that elitist, patriarchal, or authoritarian groups would care much about democratic process, there is an obvious sense in which this threat to group autonomy actually qualifies as undemocratic. One can always ask about the proper demos for considering a particular policy issue. Imagine a dissident minority in a particular group wanting to effect change in some group practice. Failing to gain a majority in its own group, this minority might enlarge the debate by bringing the matter, and the normative dispute underlying it, to the public that is the polity. If they gain the support of this larger group after a period of open discussion governed by good public reasons, they may be able to force a change in group ways by taking matters to a vote of the polity as a whole. But there is reason to wonder why an essentially intragroup issue should be expanded to involve individuals outside the group. Why should we think, as deliberative democrats do, that such seemingly internal group matters should be open to a larger demos that just happens to be the public that is the polity?17 Why, that is, should the polity as a whole be automatically considered the proper community of discourse here? Putting an effective answer to these questions is crucial to the construction of a viable democracy. If we think people ought to have input into decisions that affect them in order to satisfy the demands of democracy, we need to be clear on exactly who is affected by such decisions. But this seems to be a contentious issue in its own right. Imagine, for example, that a question about allowing women access to the Catholic priesthood was raised in the United States. Who should be allowed to participate in the resultant democratic colloquy? Is this something all women should be allowed to engage? All Catholics in the United States? All citizens of the United States? All Catholics on the planet? What precisely is the proper demos here? Aside from the fact that the Catholic Church hardly qualifies as a democratic institution and would not want to have Church policy made by democratic means, it seems odd to think that Protestants in the United States, even women Protestants, will be affected in any way by Catholic policy on this issue. Let me put the argument implicit in these remarks in more explicit terms. Suppose we agree, for the sake of argument, with deliberative democrats that all interested parties in a given policy issue should be allowed input into the decision-making process. It hardly follows from this that all members of the demos have an interest in all the internal

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policy concerns that might arise in specific groups. It hardly follows, that is, that all such matters are at heart a matter of public concern to be addressed by the public that is the polity. Thus there is something unsettlingly arbitrary about the claim that all disputes arising within the polity should be addressed by the demos as a whole. Groups will invariably value their own autonomy at this point for rather obvious reasons. Catholics could hardly be expected to welcome Protestant involvement in Church policy. Minority groups that practice ways considered unacceptable by outgroup majorities would be vulnerable to invasion and a form of majority tyranny. And all groups might wonder with considerable justification why their internal politics also happen to belong to the larger group constituted by the demos of the polity. How then can deliberative democrats justify their commitment to democratic process? Given the group based objection to deliberative democracy just noticed, it doesn’t seem they can do so by making appeal to the prudential interests of groups themselves, as practical liberalism does in defending the acceptance of the liberal principle. But deliberative democrats are generally hostile to this move in any event, preferring to anchor their defense of democracy in decidedly moral (and liberal) argument. Expansion of the suffrage and extension of the realm of the political are typically premised upon a set of emphatically liberal moral considerations. Benhabib, for example, follows Habermas in insisting that the basic presupposition of discourse ethics involves the norms of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity.18 She explains, Universal respect requires that we recognize the right of all beings capable of speech and action to be participants in the moral conversation; the principle of egalitarian reciprocity, interpreted within the confines of discourse, [sic] ethics, stipulates that within discourses each should have the same right to various speech acts, to initiate new topics, and to ask for justification of the presuppositions of the conversation, and the like.19

These are presumed to be the necessary preconditions of human interaction; that is, they constitute the necessary condition of the process by which human beings associate for purposes of living and getting along with one another. Here it seems best to let Benhabib speak for herself: Norms of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity already undergird practices of discursive argumentation; they must be presupposed in some form for practical discourses. This reflects not a vicious circle but a virtuous one: Moral and political dialogues begin with the presumption of respect, equality, and reciprocity between the participants. We engage in discourses with an assumed background, and we understand that these

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norms apply to all participants. Through discourses, the participants subject these assumed background interpretations to intersubjective validation. Discourses are procedures of recursive validation through which abstract norms and principles are concretized and legitimized.20

It seems, then, that the notion of discourse in Benhabib (and Habermas) is doubly normative. It involves a set of norms that indicate what counts as a discourse, and it is premised upon fundamental egalitarian concerns. Nonnegotiable coercive threats that elicit expressive protests, it would seem, fail to qualify as discourses on both counts; thus the debate at Melos made famous by Thucydides would not count as a discourse in any sense.21 Discourse, in other words, is hardly coterminus with dialogue or discussion since such speech acts may lack both universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity. For discourse to take place, all parties must engage the process with the appropriate governing moral attitude. But then, certainly not all verbal human interaction will qualify as discourse. So, it seems mistaken to suppose that we can derive these normative standards from the nature of human discussion itself, and consequently, these norms require some other method of justification. Normative Discourse and Political Legitimacy Both normative components of discourse identified by Benhabib seem to raise problems for the possibility of establishing the political legitimacy of her version of deliberative democracy. Both seem to be derived from a distinctive underlying moral vision indicative of a fundamentally liberal outlook. Benhabib not only concedes her commitment to this outlook; she also self-consciously accounts for it in terms of moral universalism (thus indicating that she belongs to that camp of theorists that derive a political theory from an underlying moral foundationalism).22 An unpacking of the basic norms that ground Benhabib’s commitment to deliberative democracy would almost surely involve the following liberal ideals. At the center of this scheme of norms is the ontological claim that powers virtually all variations of moral liberalism: a belief in the basic worth and dignity of the independent individual. From this grundlage a commitment to liberal individualism and a belief in the basic equality of persons follows rather mechanically. And this, in turn, enables Benhabib to articulate something that might be called a fundamental theory of the human good. It is good for people to have control over their own persons and to be involved as much as possible in the social enterprise that affects their fates and their futures.23

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Benhabib, to her credit, straightforwardly acknowledges her moral universalism and even indicates that she does not think this universalism compromises in any significant manner a respect for and appreciation of cultural pluralism.24 Nonetheless, this underlying universalism erodes the basic distinction between a politics of principle and a politics of process. The process of deliberative discourse rests, in effect, on a substantive moral outlook that can (and no doubt should) be articulated in terms of a distinctive political principle that might be given precise expression in the following form: “Democratic process is to proceed according to the strictures and standards of liberal morality.” From this principle the norms of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity (which now begin to look like substantive political principles) are easily derived. Nor can these norms be further regarded as analytic aspects of discourse; rather they are defining conditions of what is to count as discourse. They place moral restraints on the interactive process of dialogue and discussion that controls both who is allowed to participate in deliberative politics and how participants are to proceed and behave.25 Democratic process, then, is no longer an open conversation; it is guided and constrained by principles of liberal morality. If, however, illiberal and non-liberal groups are uncomfortable with and unwilling to accept the coercive might of the liberal state on the grounds that their moral vision of the human good is different from and perhaps inconsistent with liberal ideals, they will be just as uncomfortable with and just as unwilling to accept the process of deliberative democracy that is informed by liberal ideals. From their point of view, the deliberative process is rigged from the start, and their own moral viewpoints ruled out of court by liberal convictions. Illiberal and non-liberal groups will thus have reasons internal to their own worldview and moral theory of the human good to reject the deliberative process and the legitimacy of any state that happens to advocate it. It follows that a theory of deliberative democracy based on liberal convictions reintroduces the problem of political legitimacy at just the point where deliberative democrats would like to resolve it. If it is premised on underlying substantive, and hence controversial, moral premises that would be rejected by illiberal groups, there is no way to get a deliberative democratic polity off the ground and started, for illiberal groups would object to the enterprise at the outset. In short, deliberative democrats cannot provide illiberal and non-liberal groups with reasons they can accept regarding why internal group practices should be open to the public scrutiny of the demos constitutive of the polity. It seems, then, that deliberative democracy actually fails the test of political legitimacy in pluralist states. For some, the attraction of

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deliberative democracy is that it empowers voices that may be lost or suppressed within the internal dynamics of group life. But since this may be considered primarily a liberal concern, it need not be shared by illiberal groups and likely will not be shared by elitist, patriarchal, or authoritarian groups. Still, this is to be done with the matter too quickly, for it may also be something that the disempowered voices of group minorities do care about. This returns us to the primary complaint deliberative democrats are likely to raise against practical liberalism, namely, that it shrouds from view the legitimate concerns of group minorities who might suffer at the hands of group majorities or elites. If these minorities cannot look for help from group outsiders, they may, as we have seen, have reason to reject the legitimacy of the liberal polity. So, let me return at last to this issue. Situations where seemingly disadvantaged or oppressed minority elements of some groups wish to oppose group practices viewed with suspicion or derision by outgroup majorities offer the most promising cases for the deliberate democrat to exploit by way of opposition to theories, like practical liberalism, that remove intragroup disputes from the public forum. Thus it is hardly surprising to notice that these cases have gotten the most ink in recent years. Benhabib, for example, refers to the Shah Bano case in India involving a Muslim woman expelled from her home by the summary divorce of her husband in accordance with Muslim law. Shah Bano sought in state court alimony support from her husband to which she was not entitled under Muslim law.26 Benhabib tells us that that three basic norms became the center of attention as the dispute surrounding the issue grew in intensity: (1) the male right of unilateral divorce, which “asymmetrically privileges the male”; (2) the consequent dependence of the woman on her male relatives for support; and (3) the lack of any alternative means of support for the woman in the event her male relatives cannot support her.27 Reflecting on these norms, Benhabib writes, We have to ask ourselves whether these norms could still be upheld in a situation of hypothetical discourse in which all those whose interests were affected participated freely, including, above all, Muslim women of all ages to whom the norms apply. We would have to ask why women would freely put themselves in conditions of such subordination, vulnerability, and jeopardy. Bracketing fear of retribution, coercion, ostracism, and other punitive sanctions, which we assume would not hold in a discourse situation, the most frequent reason that women themselves give as an answer is that this is their tradition and their way of life.28

The implication of Benhabib’s “hypothetical discourse” is that women’s interests were not well represented at all by the norms at issue and would

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be altered if their interests were taken seriously. She notices that the case sparked a “national dialogue” about women and poverty and asks, “If the leaders of the Muslim community refuse to engage in this national dialogue, how can they publicly defend their position with good reason?”29 But as Benhabib herself indicates, the Shah Bano case did in fact do much to stimulate debate on the propriety of Muslim marital law within India, a debate joined by many voices both inside and outside the Muslim community, and the resultant debate did lead to revisions in Muslim practice, though not to the degree that Benhabib would apparently have liked to see.30 Of course, democratic discourse cannot guarantee the realization of one’s most desired outcome. A claim like, “If the concerns of the X’s would have been heard, the reasons the X’s would have asserted would have carried the day and their interests would have been realized,” must always remain conjectural. Democracy is a contest not just of reasons but of opinion, prejudice, and emotion as well, and discourse to the contrary notwithstanding, the will of the demos may not, and certainly need not, reflect the strength of reasons cherished by some. Nonetheless, the Shah Bano case raises several issues worth exploring. We should note first that the case captures the attention of liberal and feminist spirits not because of the particular interests that Shah Bano brought to court but because of what liberals and feminists take to be the manifest injustice of her situation. But it is one thing to think that Shah Bano’s interests were disregarded by Muslim marital practices and quite another to think that this constitutes an injustice. The latter normative judgment is something that groups with differing moral convictions may disagree about. While liberals might find something unjust about Muslim marital practices, the Muslim community might take exception to all this. The problem, of course, is that there is no universally shared underlying notion of justice to which we might appeal to settle such matters—thanks again to the fact of pluralism. Even if, say, the moral judgment of the liberal community was vindicated by finding it to be objectively true here, it seems highly unlikely that the Muslim community would concede to this. Such disputes will thus be engaged by differing groups each bringing their own normative viewpoint to the issue and reasoning about the issue in their own distinctive ways; the dispute, this is to say, will be transformed into a fairly typical normative intergroup conflict. Absent a shared standard of justice, any conversation about the propriety of some group practice is not likely to get very far; the groups in contention are simply going to speak past one another. Electing to vote on the matter at some point thus becomes just another example of majority tyranny, at least when viewed from the standpoint of the losing group(s).

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It remains possible, of course, that the Shah Bano case could raise an issue appropriate for political discourse even under practical liberalism. The obvious issue posed by Shah Bano’s legal action for practical liberalism involves the jurisdiction problem it introduces. Is this an issue that properly belongs to the concerns of the group that is the polity? Shah Bano’s claim, for example, might raise a coordination problem. If Muslim marital law cannot provide adequately for the support and sustenance of Muslim wives summarily divorced by their husbands, the government may need to assume a new financial burden to provide for these women, and this might burden the financial interests of the other groups present in the polity. From the standpoint of practical liberalism, the jurisdictional standard is met if a coordination problem can be identified; at this point, discussion of jurisdiction yields to a discussion of how best to resolve the coordination problem consistent with the requirements of the liberal principle. This is the realm of conversation that belongs properly to the public that is the polity. While the courts might decide both the jurisdiction question and any coordination problem that might be discerned, such results remain subject to democratic review and reconsideration. Perhaps additional discussion of the jurisdictional and coordination problems raised would change legal minds or bring about a policy shift driven by legislative response; perhaps not. The pursuit of social justice, in this sense, is always a work in progress. But the conversation that swirls around the jurisdiction and coordination problems raised by cases like Shah Bano’s should be kept separate from the secondary conversation that swirls around (in this instance) the moral propriety Muslim marital practices. This latter conversation may continue apace as well, and while this conversation does not belong to the realm of the political under practical liberalism, it still matters from a practical point of view. In the Shah Bano case, for example, conversation, both within the Muslim community and between this community and outgroups, may encourage the parties involved to reconsider group norms; Benhabib may be right to conjecture that social pressure might force a change in Muslim marital practices. Once again, practical liberalism is not hostile to such secondary conversations; nor should it be since it is the standard stuff of intergroup conflict. The political challenge posed by such conflict is not to end it but to domesticate it—to find a method by which it can continue, come what may, without decaying into intergroup violence or a form of majority tyranny. Conversations of this sort clearly matter, but they are also indicative of the kind of intergroup conflicts that necessitate a just resolution. Democratic process, I have argued, cannot supply such a resolution; it can only enable the big fish to keep eating the little fish.

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From the standpoint of practical liberalism, there is little justice in this, and when viewed against the background of the consent requirement, we can conclude with some confidence that at least some groups will want to reject the legitimacy of this process as well. It follows accordingly that the complaint that practical liberalism allows for considerable intragroup injustice is misguided. Seen from inside one group’s normative scheme, the intragroup activities of some outgroup might seem unjust, but this merely indicates the existence of a normative rivalry and reprises the problem practical liberalism endeavors to address. Viewed against the prior concern of political legitimacy, complaints of injustice can arise only once the polity converges on a given sense of social justice that follows from the acceptance of some principled grounds that govern the ends of civil association. Claims of injustice of the sort at issue here, this is to say, belong to the realm of political morality, and this, I have argued, introduces a moral posture quite distinct from the various normative viewpoints that will be present in a polity characterized by the fact of pluralism. Deliberative Democracy and Intragroup Politics But we cannot leave matters at this, for it will likely be objected that the concern for group autonomy in evidence under practical liberalism is based upon a misleadingly shallow and unrealistic understanding of groups and intragroup life. Thus Benhabib may insist that the emphasis I have placed on group autonomy is indicative of a form of the cultural essentialism that has troubled several attempts by liberals to accommodate multiculturalism within the broader liberal tradition.31 The mistake of cultural essentialism, she claims, inclines theorists to see cultural communities (which for present purposes we can suppose belong to the larger category of groups) as complete and independent units characterized by tremendous normative and ontological homogeneity.32 The theoretical challenge posed by such groups, understood in these essentialist terms, is to compile a political strategy that enables them to live together amicably and not tread on one another’s space, a challenge that, as we have seen, resembles the theoretical agenda pursued by Kukathas.33 This conception of cultural communities is faulty, according to Benhabib, because it simply ignores or overlooks the fact that such communities will almost certainly have their own internal politics, contentious issues, and legitimation crises. Liberal theorists, in her judgment, have been so concerned with intergroup pluralism within the state that they have failed to fully notice and appreciate the fact of intragroup

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pluralism.34 But groups may, and likely will, contain their own internal differences, their own internal politics, and their own dynamic of dissent and disgruntlement that drives internal change and the reconstitution of group beliefs, ways, and practices. So, we might suppose that Benhabib would think practical liberalism commits the very mistake that she wants to protect against by appeal to deliberative democracy as a standard for addressing the challenges posed by multiculturalism. If so, it would fail to give adequate support for pluralist views within groups and would permit groups to practice a form of oppression and domination over their internal minorities and dissenters. The virtue of enmeshing democratic discourse within group practices—of politicizing internal group disputes by bringing them into the democratic process—is that it enables all members of specific groups to participate in the process by which groups rearticulate themselves. This view not only recognizes and respects the “fluidity, porousness, and essential contestability” of intragroup life; it also protects the political efficacy of individuals within the group. As Benhabib puts it, “So the goal of any public policy for the preservation of cultures must be the empowerment of the members of cultural groups to appropriate, enrich, and even subvert the terms of their own cultures as they may decide.” And by way of defense for this view, Benhabib insists, “Members of cultural groups cannot be autonomous if they are unable to participate in cultural reproduction and cultural struggle, including the transformation of some cultural traditions.”35 From a democratic viewpoint, the resultant oppression and domination of some group members by others necessitates a political solution by the state in order to guarantee that autonomous individuals are able to participate in all the decisions that will affect them, because all decisions that touch a person should be recognized as belonging to the realm of the political. Consequently, theories, like practical liberalism, that protect group autonomy and permit elitist, patriarchal, and authoritarian groups to practice their own undemocratic ways, suffer from a legitimacy crisis of their own. They cannot justify the exercise of power and authority within the context of the group if the standard of democratic involvement is not met by the group. So we return, once again, to the claim that theories like practical liberalism cannot meet the basic conditions of political legitimacy as articulated by Williams. Two responses to this argument are in order at this point. First, I want to affirm the vision of groups as fluid, porous, and politically contentious that is developed so effectively by Benhabib. Endorsing and embellishing this understanding of the nature of (much) group life does not suffice to justify Benhabib’s defense of democratic involvement in group affairs,

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however; so I also want to consider why Benhabib’s argument fails to hit its mark. I will take up the first response now and leave the second for the following section. The notion of a group (a religious, cultural, ethnic, ideological, etc., community) hovers close to the edge of conceptual obscurity in much theoretical discourse. On the one hand, it seems evident that people have attachments to larger communities from which they inherit a considerable component of their self-identity and some orientation toward the world.36 The inherited orientation involves some basic comprehensive worldview (i.e., some discernible epistemology and ontology) and some basic moral sense of the human good. Differences in worldview and moral theory of the human good introduce the boundaries that separate groups from one another and set key components of individual identity by establishing commonalities between the self (individual) and some others (fellow group members) and oppositions between the self (group member) and some further others (group outsiders). But if one wishes to affirm generalities of this sort, one must also confront a different set of generalities that cut in the opposite direction. Worldviews and moral theories of the human good are invariably rough around the edges; they are subject to individual interpretation and evaluation and the source of disagreement and contention. Further, they necessarily exhibit spheres of ambiguity and uncertainty that open up possible questions about their coherence and believability. Noticing that they are subject to individual interpretation and evaluation means that passing these things along from one individual to the next involves acts of judgment by the person learning to see and value things in the fashion of her or his group. Finally, acknowledging that these things are disputatious and contentious means simply that members of the community may disagree with or take issue with some (and perhaps a great many) of the group ways of seeing and valuing constitutive of the groups to which they belong. So then, as soon as one has offered a set of generalities about how the notion of a group should be understood, one must concede another set of generalities that seem to undermine the ability to think of groups as coherent social units. Groups will have their own internal skeptics, renegades, dissidents, and so forth, and the presence of these individuals within the group naturally blurs the edges of the group and transforms group membership into something of a family resemblance. This simple fact introduces a key dynamic in the character of human life, for group fluidity and porousness means that groups are best conceived as a type of organism—one that grows, metamorphoses, reproduces (both in the sense of reproducing itself and in the sense of producing progeny), evolves, and

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possibly at some point dies. Envisioning the group as a type of organism encourages a type of group essentialism; it invites one to see the group as an entity in its own right and the individuals that comprise it as separate cells of the organism whose lives and identities are understandable only against the background of their attachment to the organism that is the group. But it is easy enough to shift focus, target the cells of the organism with our gaze, and see group members as individuals engaged in conflict over things that matter (greatly) to them. When our gaze focuses on persons and we lose sight of the group, discourse that takes the group (and individual identification with the group) seriously may look like a mistake of group essentialism—an ontological confusion that carries with it normative confusion when and if one concludes not just that groups exist but that they matter in their own right.37 One corrective is to see group identifications as something like contingent aspects of individual identity that introduce not very meaningful boundaries to fundamental human struggle. Sometimes the struggle characteristic of human life takes place between these contingent collectives, and sometimes it takes place within them. If we make the mistake of accepting a kind of group essentialism, we will be able to notice as politically salient only struggle between collectives, and we will miss the political salience of struggle within these collectives. As theorists concerned with the deleterious effects of human struggle and as thinkers wishing to domesticate this struggle, we will miss an important dimension of this struggle, and this is reason not to make the mistake of group essentialism. Those attracted to this argument will think that the proper gaze for the theorist is the one that centers on the individual and regards groups as contingent collectives, and for the most part, this is the gaze that characterizes liberal political thinking. But it is still possible (and important) to ask if this is the proper gaze for the theorist to adopt. Is this the gaze that is appropriate for the theoretical enterprise associated with thinking about how human life might go well? One might insist it is because this is the gaze that allows us to cultivate a sense of the political that respects all persons as autonomous agents. But this response clearly won’t do. The problem is that the gaze itself secretes its own normative structure. If seeing, as Wittgenstein claimed, is always seeing as, part of the seeing as involves valorization of the seen.38 One cannot see persons as autonomous without also thinking that persons should be respected as such; this, as thinkers from Kant forward have insisted, is simply a matter of logical consistency between thought and action. But if the gaze secretes its own normative structure, any attempt to invoke this structure to justify the gaze will result in an invidious circularity. Put differently, the point is

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that one’s theoretical orientation already locates one in a particular group, namely, a community of individuals who share a common ontological outlook and concurrent normative structure. So, we are back to square one: Why adopt one gaze over the other? How should the theorist choose between a group-centered gaze and an individual-centered gaze? And what about other possible gazes that might also make a degree of sense, for example, the class-centered gaze that matters so much to Marxists? Since the gaze itself comprehends and legitimates any epistemic and normative ground that might be invoked to answer these questions, it looks, on its face, like any gaze that is chosen must be entirely arbitrary. Theory and practice are here caught in something like a hermeneutical circle, and this might seem like an unavoidable dilemma. But perhaps this need not be so. The operating presumption of practical liberalism, in any event, is that the focus of the theorist should be fixed not by prior epistemic or normative conviction (namely, by the assumption of a gaze), but by a practical appreciation for the nature of human conflict and struggle. The idea of a “practical appreciation” here implies that the theorist should understand human struggle and conflict in the terms of those actually involved in it. Insofar as some individuals value their group identities and see their conflict with others in terms of normative rivalries (namely, in terms of dealing with others considered damned, disgusting, misguided, or mistaken by virtue of who they are or what they believe), and insofar as this conflict characterizes some of the most familiar and intractable struggle that troubles humankind, intergroup conflict becomes a most salient political challenge for the theorist. Circularity between theory and practice can be avoided only if the theorist elects to step outside her or his own worldview and moral theory of the human good and notice the nature of intergroup conflict in a less blinkered fashion. This involves coming to recognize the practical implications of one’s own theoretical commitments, which should ideally lead to the realization that absent this move theorizing is itself little more than an instance of a form of intergroup conflict—and here my earlier reflections regarding the Shah Bano case offers a salient case in point. The theorist is hardly alone in needing to take this step, of course; practical liberalism suggests that all citizens in the liberal polity will need to take it as well. Otherwise the political morality inspired by acknowledgment of the liberal principle will have little command on anyone’s attention. But the incentive to take this step and recognize the need to see one’s own normative perspective and worldview as a contributor to intergroup conflict is possible only by first appreciating the historic problems and challenges generated by the fact of pluralism.

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Intergroup conflict, particularly in the form of the religious conflict that concerned Hobbes and that initiated his reductionist program, has been a constant in political life even after the emergence of the individualist turn in Enlightenment philosophy. If, however, the adopted gaze of the theorist went to the individual rather than the group during the Enlightenment and has tended to remain there, identity politics and the rise of multiculturalism have done much to place the propriety of this gaze in doubt. Groups have returned to prominence in theoretical thinking and it is now much easier to see human struggle in terms of intergroup conflict. The presumption of practical liberalism is that the individualist gaze is unable to see this conflict clearly and thus unable to address it effectively. By shifting our gaze to the group, this conflict becomes much more evident and the need to address it all the more apparent. But this is hardly the place to argue exhaustively for the claim that the most fundamental and politically salient form of human struggle under conditions of pluralism involves intergroup conflict. It must suffice for present purposes to note that practical liberalism is intended to examine what civil association might look like if and when we take intergroup conflict seriously and recognize it as a problem in need of theoretical scrutiny in its own right. But the theory also generates its own political practice, as all theories are inclined to do, and by calling attention to the circularity problem, the theory offers its own reason for a change of gaze and a corresponding alteration of practice—of how we think about and engage in civil association.39 If, however, there is reason to explore a viable theoretical response to intergroup conflict, it hardly follows that we should also close our eyes to the fact of intragroup conflict. To do so would indeed be to make the mistake of group essentialism by failing to notice that groups have their own internal dynamic that introduces an element of political instability into group life. This dynamic, moreover, means that the fate of the group is largely out of the control of group members, including group elites. One cannot know how internal political forces will affect the life of the group, perhaps causing the group to splinter, or to expand, die, or morph into something quite different than it presently is. In fact, practical liberalism relies upon this aspect of group uncertainty and instability, for where such uncertainty and instability exists, groups cannot be guaranteed that they can dominate their environment into the future.40 And this is reason for them to accept the liberal principle rather than take advantage of whatever momentary dominance they might have and practice strategies of elimination, segregation, or assimilation against their normative rivals.41 By recognizing intergroup conflict as politically salient, practical liberalism accepts the need to respect group autonomy. Insofar as groups have

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a sense of themselves as such and regard at least some outgroups as normative and allocational rivals, intergroup rivalry becomes an unavoidable and challenging aspect of human struggle. And insofar as groups have a sense of themselves as groups, it must be presumed that group autonomy will matter greatly to group members and that these members will do all they can to secure this autonomy. Thus groups matter practically, not because of some prior ontological conviction on the part of the theorist, but because these units drive a substantial amount of political conflict as it manifests itself today. While the state system has done much to deemphasize groups my claiming jurisdiction over what was once the prerogative of the group, it has not eradicated intergroup conflict in pluralist societies, and the challenge underlying practical liberalism is to take notice of this conflict and reconsider the legitimacy of government (thus reconceptualizing the state) in light of this conflict and the corresponding importance of primary groups in individual lives. Group Autonomy and Intergroup Discourse The argument thus far has suggested that meaningful democratic discourse can take place only against the background of some principled agreement on the basic normative foundations of civil association. This is possible only if there is general convergence on the basic purpose and fundamental nature of civil association. The articulation of the point and aim of civil association requires a politics of principle, for the principle(s) in question expresses the constitutive ideal that unifies disparate groups into a common polity and thus creates a unum out of group pluribus. Only when such a principle is in place can genuine discourse take place regarding how to bring the ideal expressed by the principle to life in the polity. This is not only what groups need to talk about, but also, and given the fact of pluralism, this is about all they can constructively talk about. Nothing in this is intended to be dismissive of those secondary conversations in the polity that are indicative and illustrative of intergroup conflict, but these conversations remain secondary, under practical liberalism, because they must be understood to take place against the background requirements of toleration and deference. Of course, this might still bother moral liberals and deliberative democrats who think that disempowered voices in authoritarian groups should be heard, and it might continue to bother those dissident voices in authoritarian groups as well, who may welcome a broader democratic intragroup discussion of the ways and practices to which they object. So, it seems worthwhile to offer a few further replies to this concern. Two points should be emphasized in this regard.

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First and as we have seen, the liberal polity supports a right of exit by dissident group members, either collectively or individually.42 While the liberal polity may not intrude into the internal group practices that reinforce membership against defection by punishing defectors (through means like shunning), it can provide compensation to group defectors that make their transition from the life in one group to life in a different group easier and less onerous. Group dissidents, in other words, should have viable options in the liberal polity, and the right of exit can prove to be a reasonably strong political influence on internal group politics, for it makes little sense for group elites to protect their practices at the price of the integrity and coherence of the group. This too is a classic dynamic of group morphology, evolution, decay, transformation, birth, and growth. We should not exaggerate the solace that the now familiar assertion of a right of exit can offer dissident group voices, but perhaps we should not underestimate it either. Dissidents do leave the groups to which they belong, and with appropriate state support, perhaps more would be willing to do so. But leaving a primary group is not something that people are likely to do easily or comfortably; if group identifications did not matter greatly to members, intragroup conflicts would hardly display the intensity they often do. Intragroup disagreement is challenging because some group members might prefer a revision of group ways to exit, and their call for revision might elicit sympathy from group outsiders. But sympathy is hardly a justification for the coercive interference in internal group practices. This is a price (but hardly the only price) of conceding the need to defend group autonomy in order to manage intergroup conflict; seen from the vantage point of civil association, it is a price for realizing and sustaining a legitimate—and thus stable and civil—polity. But is it a price that dissident voices in all groups should be willing to pay? Might it not prove to count instead, and as liberal critics will want to argue, against the legitimacy of the liberal polity? There are reasons why even dissident group voices should want to defend group autonomy. In the event they do opt for exit and elect to establish their own independent group, they would now have obvious reasons to prefer group autonomy over a political arrangement that permitted outgoup members to invade their group practices and force them to change their ways. But even if they elect to stay within their group, they still have reason to defend group autonomy, for an erosion of group autonomy that permits outgroups to come to their rescue on the issues of concern to them would correspondingly allow for the possibility of other outside intrusions into the group with which they might not be in sympathy. To permit intrusion on a specific issue is to endorse a policy that may well begin to erode group autonomy altogether.

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This brings me to the second point I wish to emphasize. We have also noticed that practical liberalism houses two conversations within the liberal polity: the conversation among the citizens on the subject of social justice and the conversation between the members of various groups on the moral propriety, desirability, decency, and so forth of certain intragroup practices. This second conversation permits the members of outgroups to object to group ways, support dissident intragroup members, and find methods, within the confines of the practice of toleration, to encourage groups to rethink traditional ways and practices. Though some reclusive groups may attempt to wall themselves off from the prying eyes of the polity, this is far easier said than done. Ways and practices considered unacceptable by more dominant groups often find their way into the press and become the subjects of public discussion. While this need not incline group elites or leaders to bring about change, it may get members of the group to thinking, generate more and more dissidents within the group, and encourage group leaders to reconsider their ways and practices in light of new considerations and issues.43 Once again, it is hardly possible to avoid conversations of the second sort in a pluralist environment, but it is necessary to domesticate them. While it may be a mistake to overestimate the success moral critique and public criticism may have on group practices considered odious and objectionable to group outsiders and intragroup minorities alike, it remains the case that group elites cannot simply “play ostrich,” as Benhabib puts it, when faced with such critique and criticism.44 Such discourse will continue within the liberal polity, and elites in patriarchal and authoritarian groups cannot prevent or prohibit it for this is inconsistent with the liberal principle. Whether it proves effective in particular situations, of course, no one can tell in advance. Similarly, illiberal groups may generate conversations that question and challenge liberal ways and practices, and these conversations may bring about revisions in liberal practice as well—but once again, no one can tell in advance. Although I happen to doubt that the members of all disparate groups in the polity speak the same language (i.e., have the same conceptualizations and understandings regarding the issues in contention) on all matters, this fact (if true as I think it is) will not, and certainly need not, stop such discussion and critique, even if it involves only people speaking past one another. Practical liberalism both tolerates and promotes free and unfettered discussion without qualifications about what is to count as proper human conduct and behavior, and it does so under the justification of a right of free speech that provides group members with ways to oppose, question, challenge, and critique the ways and practices of outgroups considered repugnant. The thrust and parry of argument at this

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stage of the conversation is thus open to the exchange of group-specific norms, reasons, and arguments.45 While this may enable groups to better understand one another and to embellish their own normative convictions with the insights and beliefs of outgroups that happen to make sense (or come to make sense) to their members, it may also simply lead to an awareness that sometimes the members of outgroups really cannot understand one another. In this conversation, the chips will fall where they may; perhaps pariah groups will change their ways, perhaps they won’t. Perhaps liberals will change their ways; perhaps they won’t. Practical liberalism neither advertises nor imagines a resolution to all manner of intergroup or intragroup dispute, but it does allow for a social environment rich in what Benhabib calls articulation and constestation.46 No doubt neither of these responses will make anyone who cherishes individual autonomy and a right of individual self-determination very happy. But then, practical liberalism is unlikely to make anyone very happy. How could it since it asks us to set aside acting on our cherished moral convictions in the name of a political morality we may dislike when faced with what we take to be considerable moral wrong? In the political world, however, matters are neither so simple nor the demands of morality so perfectly clear. Here again practical liberalism invites us to acknowledge and appreciate the complex character of moral relationships in pluralist polities noticed and explored so thoughtfully by Hampshire.47 Under practical liberalism, patriarchal groups, for example, must tolerate feminists, but feminists must also tolerate patriarchal groups. Such toleration does not preclude intergroup criticism; it does not preclude open discourse intended to encourage outgroups to change their ways. There is room under practical liberalism for individuals to pursue the dictates of their conscience, to expose what they consider to be the injustices of outgroups, and to advocate for change. Practical liberalism prohibits only coercive intrusion into group ways for the purpose of imposing the ways of outgroups on group members. Decision time is the coercive side of democracy in a political environment where the jurisdiction of government is not circumscribed by the requirements of a politics of principle. Such coercion is more likely to extend intergroup conflict than it is to end it. And this is why practical liberalism supports the priority of a politics of principle over a politics of process.

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Chapter 7

Politics, History, and Reason For some, practical liberalism will seem objectionable largely because it forsakes all moral foundations and attempts to build a theory of political legitimacy upon prudential considerations only. Much of the discussion of previous chapters has been occupied with addressing this concern. But practical liberalism might seem objectionable to others for entirely different reasons. Consider, for example, the worries of critics like Michael White and John Gray who in their own distinctive ways have challenged the rationalist and universalist character of traditional liberal theory.1 While practical liberalism is neither rationalist nor universalist in the strong sense typically associated with this manner of theorizing, it may still seem objectionable to critics of this stripe, and primarily because its reliance on prudence might seem to smuggle a controversial Enlightenment recourse to rationality into the theoretical equation. So, it might be argued that practical liberalism remains too wedded to Enlightenment rationalism and too mired in foundationalist thinking to offer much theoretical solace to genuinely pluralist polities. As prelude to some concluding remarks, I want now to consider how practical liberalism should address this concern. There are two aspects to this line of criticism that should be made explicit. According to the first, moral liberalism shatters on the rocks of value pluralism; the fact of value pluralism undermines what Gray calls the liberal syndrome by upsetting the liberal belief that reason can articulate a monistic moral theory able to serve as a foundation for the normative framework upon which moral liberals build their political theories.2 According to the second, the rationalist tone of moral liberalism simply gets the nature of politics wrong. It reduces civil association

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to something like a juridical enterprise in which objective principles—the revelations of reason—guide and inform civil life and replace the art of politics, an art that involves fashioning compromise out of the intractable and irresolvable ebb and flow of social conflict. These two arguments are not unrelated, of course; they may even reduce to a common liberal misconception, namely, that reason can identify fundamental and immutable principles of civil association that provide providential resolutions to the endemic conflict that would otherwise trouble the human condition. In the provocative words of Michael White, the liberal project—something we should understand for present purposes as the effort to resolve the problem of political legitimacy by appeal to basic principles binding upon all persons—involves an attempt to “Stop History” by articulating principled grounds upon which all human civil association should be premised for all time, and thus to justify and legitimate a specific form of civil association upon the immutable dictates of rationality.3 This, according to Gray, is liberalism’s inheritance from the Enlightenment, and its end is the articulation in theory of a vision of civil association organized and bounded by basic laws, ensconced in constitutional form, that order and manage society.4 Now, it is certainly possible to see at least some versions of moral liberalism as dedicated to finding rationally compelling and principled normative grounds upon which to organize pluralist polities, and thus to offer an account of civil association intended to endure for all times and all peoples. In the sense that matters to White, this does resemble something like an effort to stop political history. Practical liberalism embraces White’s suspicion about the propriety of attempting to stop history in this manner, but it is also simply agnostic on the topic of the existence of objective and foundational moral principles that might serve as the basis for arguments about political legitimacy. It endorses neither value monism nor value pluralism because, as we have seen, it does not proceed from any underlying moral theory of the good. Gray, for example, may be right to insist (1) that value pluralism is true and (2) that moral liberalism is undone by virtue of the truth of value pluralism, but from the standpoint of practical liberalism, this issue is neither here nor there. If we take the fact of pluralism to be problematic, moral truth, if there is such a thing, is largely irrelevant to the challenges that underlie political theorizing. Practical liberalism diverges from the Enlightenment project, understood for the moment as a moral endeavor, because the fact of pluralism indicates that there is no reason to seriously believe that disparate groups holding differing and conflict worldviews and moral theories of the human good can be brought together by the force of reason to endorse some comprehensive vision of the good life capable of receiving political

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expression. Normative and ontological differences simply go all the way down, and while the A’s might really happen to have objective moral truth on their side, differences in worldview are such that they will be unable to get the B’s to recognize this. This is why practical liberalism reverses the relationship between moral philosophy and political theory, and why practical liberals reject the idea that theorizing about civil life can and should proceed from antecedent moral insights. So the first aspect of the challenge to moral liberalism does not trouble practical liberalism. But it might seem that practical liberalism shares something of a rationalist character with its moral brethren, and if so, it may also be susceptible to the charge of getting politics wrong. Practical liberalism, after all, is a politics of principle; it does make something like a rational appeal to a principled form of civil association in which all elements of the polity are united by a common effort to bring the liberal principle to life in their polity and to shape it in the manner appropriate for their polity. Our critics might now insist on the need to reject the possibility of finding any theoretical common ground with which to tie civil association together and suppose that any attempt to defend a politics of principle involves an effort to stop history. Since this includes prudential as well as moral approaches to the theoretical project, their arguments would now pose a challenge to practical liberalism. Insofar as a defining feature of liberalism is the effort to render civil association subject to something like the dictates of rationality broadly conceived (or at least conceived broadly enough to include prudential as well as moral reasoning), this criticism seemingly targets all variations of liberal thinking. Put somewhat differently, the criticism I am considering attacks the sense of the political that is central to liberal thinking, a sense that supposes civil association does necessitate some convergence on basic (though not foundational in an objective sense) normative ends. The rejection of this view would accordingly return us to a vision of politics that foregrounds the nitty-gritty, hard-nosed interplay of competing and conflicting interests. Politics thus understood spins not around a commitment to and concern for principled forms of association but around the familiar standards of conflict and compromise, with getting along by sometimes going along and by sometimes working out compromise as preferable to the costs of open warfare. Politics, in other words, is less about institutions and norms and more about an unregulated and unregulatable process—the sort of thing that happened to catch Machiavelli’s eye, or at least the eye of the Machiavelli of The Prince. Politics thus understood comprehends the story of a rough and tumble interplay between competing and contesting forces that must work out ways to live with one

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another because there is no alternative. It is best characterized in terms of the virtue of process (democratic or otherwise) in an inhospitable environment necessarily and inevitably bereft of guiding or governing principle. The actual characterization of the political environment to which groups are confined, and to which they must be resigned, varies from critic to critic. White, for example, imagines numerous tenuous modi vivendi between groups with roughly equal political resources, while Gray has now moved in the direction of viewing civil association in terms of a modus vivendi that foregrounds the need for tolerance as the basis of getting along and going along.5 But in either case, politics within states is simply bounded conflict and the contest of interests among groups encased within institutionally established guidelines. In the absence of the possibility of a politics of principle, these critics conclude, we had best acknowledge that we are stuck with a politics of process and learn to make the best of it. Here history will not end; struggle will continue; and politics will proceed as it always has. Principle and Justice in the Liberal Polity For some, this is not an overly sanguine view of politics, largely because it leaves everything as it is. Such a view may well make a good deal of sense to the studious political scientist who has assumed the posture of a neutral observer of the political realm. No doubt such a political scientist would see a good deal of conflict and compromise; no doubt she would see human beings muddling through in their political affairs, dealing with conflicts when they arise and settling disputes as best they can. She might even find something salutary in this vision of the political environment; if human beings are not destined to transcend the conflict and travail that typifies their life’s condition, they at least seem to have stumbled upon a modus operandi that enables them to go on. Such a chastened view of politics might encourage our political scientist to conclude that human beings ought not hope for too much in the political realm, and to suppose that if they do hope for something more they are merely kidding themselves. People should recognize that their lives are marked, politically speaking, by conflict and contestation, and they should find solace in the fact that they have managed from time to time and place to place to deal with all this in a reasonably effective fashion.6 But conflict and compromise are only part of what our political scientist would likely observe in the political realm. She would also see coercion, hostility, oppression, and possibly open (though perhaps benign) warfare. She would see instability, uncertainty, and at times

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violence, as the sorry saga of much human history makes evident. She might notice that conflict often becomes quite disastrous before some sort of compromise is finally achieved, and she might even conclude that, while the group conflict within many modern pluralist states of the west has generally (though not always) been balanced by moderating compromises, there is no real necessity about this. At some point, compromise might just fail in favor of the triumph of force of arms, leaving ongoing bitterness, seething hostility, and periodic eruptions of violence in its wake. When faced with this prospect there is reason not just to hope for something better, but to think about how things might actually be made better. This returns us to the problem of political legitimacy and issues an invitation to do political theory, to think about how things might actually be made better, to theorize the political, so to speak. If we take this challenge seriously, the primary challenge of political theory involves the effort on the part of the theorist to say something that might diminish, if not end, the instability and travail that surrounds the human effort to live together. This also suggests that a standard and operative presumption of political theorizing is to suppose that the problems of stability and social peace pose intellectual challenges that require, at least initially and partially, theoretical inquiry. If all this is at the center of much Enlightenment thinking, it hardly began with the Enlightenment and need not be surrendered in a self-proclaimed anti-Enlightenment era— if such this be. Those theorists who have assumed the duty of questioning and challenging Enlightenment optimism are certainly justified in pointing out that Enlightenment rationalism has not come terribly close to realizing the desired objective of putting an end to conflict and struggle in political life. By failing to take the fact of pluralism seriously enough, or perhaps by failing to understand it sufficiently, this sort of theorizing has managed only to add to the problem rather than direct attention to a viable resolution. It hardly follows, however, that we should bite the bullet and concede that politics is best conceived simply as a tale of misery in which compromise is the only end to be hoped for. Anti-Enlightenment argument does not necessarily require the abandonment of Enlightenment optimism, only the abandonment of Enlightenment rationalism. But then, how should the theorist proceed? If we put this question in historical context, we could say that one theoretical strategy is to identify some basic grundnorm, or a set of such norms, that hold for all persons at all times and in all places and give practical expression within a constitutional structure in the fashion imagined by Locke and perhaps Grotius before him. This move, at home in Enlightenment thinking as Gray has so aptly illustrated, has been resuscitated in recent years by John Rawls and it

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continues to inspire moral liberals working within his rather considerable shadow.7 It is a move that invites a reconceptualization of the political, a move that encourages the theorist to insist that politics involves a basic commitment to principle that can be formulated and implemented in terms of legal structure. But this seems to be precisely what anti-Enlightenment argument suggests cannot be done. Perhaps, however, this objection to the Enlightenment project is overly harsh and unsympathetic. We might reconfigure the objection by holding that the Enlightenment project has failed largely because those theorists who have undertaken the project have been unable to articulate and defend the basic grundnorm they require in an effective manner. They have failed to provide a galvanizing political morality capable of bringing all elements of the polity together because they have been unable to articulate a first principle of civil association that can (and not just should, as Williams would put it) hold for and against all persons at all times. This is a failure of ambition in a sense; a failure wrought by the mistaken belief that civil association is possible only if it is premised upon the foundation of moral truth. Anti-Enlightenment argument in this sense has done us a considerable service by demonstrating that Enlightenment rationalism is not a good way to vindicate Enlightenment optimism. But if we surrender Enlightenment ambition by abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and forsaking liberalism’s universalist agenda, must we also surrender Enlightenment optimism? That is, should we also abandon the search for a principled form of civil association? Practical liberalism joins this controversy by endorsing the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism but still embracing Enlightenment optimism. The aim is to craft a middle ground between postmodern hostility to Enlightenment rationalism and the Enlightenment commitment to a principled form of civil association. It accepts the Enlightenment conviction that social peace and political stability are possible only in the presence of a politics of principle, and it is worth dwelling for the moment on why this is so. To begin, we should consider the logical implications of the politics of process that is often preferred by anti-Enlightenment thinkers, a politics that understands civil association in terms of conflict and compromise. Compromise is, of course, a great political good, but for compromise of this sort to be possible, all parties in the polity must recognize that things go better for them if they operate as fellow cooperators within some comprehensive social practice—the practice of the political, we might call it.8 Compromise here is a way of settling differences in order to get along amicably with those with whom one shares a common social setting. If politics as process is to make sense, the argument goes, it must operate

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within a consensual and unified civil context. In the absence of such a context compromise offers only a lull in the ongoing warfare that would then characterize the social environment. This takes us back, of course, to Hobbes and his insistence that in the absence of political unity we are left with a state of war, even if open hostilities are not currently under way. Even in such an environment compromise is still possible, of course; one could still construct various modi vivendi, or treaties, in the fashion envisioned by White. Yet in the absence of some prior understanding by all parties involved that such things qualify as just and necessary, these treaties will be invariably unstable.9 Treaty arrangements not backed by a shared sense of justice will hold only if the power relation between the parties remains both relatively equal and relatively stable, and there is little reason for any party to think that this salutary condition will endure through time.10 Thus defection is always a real possibility. Defection is always a real possibility, of course, even under the politics of principle imagined under practical liberalism, but this is why practical liberalism does not leave matters at this. Prudential argument, supported by the fact of flux, adds considerable practical weight to the support of the modus vivendi signaled by the endorsement of the liberal principle. But practical liberals also recognize the need to defend political stability by offering a basis for the legitimacy of the government and fostering in the public a civic nationalism that values an operative theory of social justice.11 The social construction of the recognition and appreciation of social justice, as I have argued above, is crucial to the formation of a common polity and a central component of the politics of E pluribus unum imagined under practical liberalism. Absent these components of practical liberalism, treaty arrangements premised upon adversarial relationships will invariably involve distrust and uncertainty; even if A is not intending to defect, B may misunderstand or misinterpret A’s actions and take them to indicate that defection is under way or pending. Misunderstanding, even with the best of intentions, is sufficient to erode the treaty and send things back toward open hostility and general conflict. So a vision of the political that is content to glorify conflict and compromise can do little to support or solidify the great good of political stability. Gray’s awareness of this would seem to underscore his emphasis upon the need for some sense of nationality and national identity within pluralist states.12 Perhaps at this point we might have recourse to a common history or getting along and going along in order to establish the de facto conditions necessary to make sense of this sort of nationality. But this history is likely to involve considerable distrust and uncertainty as well, and this pulls against the galvanizing force of nationalist ties. If and when the stakes of the game increase and distrust

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continues, past adherence to treaty arrangements carries less weight and the perceived benefit of defection may well increase. As political realists have long emphasized, at some point the cost of compromise might just cut too deeply into individual group interests, and it becomes preferable to defect rather than compromise. Missing from this scenario is reason for fellow cooperators to trust others that are different and whose ways may be considered objectionable and intolerable. Missing, this is to say, is the foundation of trust that can be fostered by a shared sense of social justice to which all groups can appeal and that all groups can embrace. So there is reason to think that a modus vivendi arrangement based upon convergence on a theory of social justice inspired by the liberal principle offers a greater possibility of stability than any conceivable alternative. If the standard of justice introduces a civil condition that is preferred by all groups in the polity over the alternative of uncertainty and instability, if it provides grounds for social trust even among groups that remain normative rivals, and if it offers standards of dispute resolution dedicated to ends all groups can accept, stability would seem to be most promising. No theory of civil association can offer more in the face of the fact of pluralism. Liberal Institutions and Liberal Ideals At the risk of tediously belaboring the point, I want to dwell on the need for a politics of principle a moment longer. I do so primarily because it seems important to emphasize and defend my belief that social peace and political stability are hardly possible in the absence of such a politics, but doing so also permits me to distinguish some of the key elements of practical liberalism from some of Gray’s more recent thoughts on liberalism, thoughts that parallel in key ways some of the basic features of practical liberalism. In spite of these similarities, however, the differences that separate us matter from the standpoint of measuring the viability of practical liberalism. Perhaps it is best to begin by noticing several points of agreement between Gray and myself. First, we seem to be agreed that the acknowledgment of the realities of pluralism shifts the focus of political theory from the individual to groups or communities as Gray puts it. Though we arrive at this conclusion for different reasons, we share the view that this recognition of groups is crucial for the pursuit of civil peace.13 Second, we are agreed that civil society in pluralist settings must invariably take the shape of a modus vivendi, an arrangement that enables groups to sustain an always uncertain peace through the mediation of differences and disagreements. Moreover, the desired peace is not premised upon

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some transcendent super-value purported to have some objective moral validity. Third, we both move (or return) toleration to the foreground of liberal thinking as the primary strategy for reconciling group differences and sustaining social peace. In a tone that mirrors the spirit of practical liberalism, Gray says, “The task we inherit is refashioning liberal toleration so that it can guide the pursuit of a modus vivendi in a more plural world.”14 Finally, these commonalities lead us to adopt a similar account of liberalism, for we both see liberalism “as the enterprise of pursuing terms of coexistence among different ways of life.”15 In spite of these shared sympathies, however, Gray appears hostile to the idea of a politics of principle, and this is where we part company. Before turning to this, however, it seems worth mentioning a methodological difference between us that may have little theoretical but considerable practical importance. Gray, as we have noticed, derives his political conclusions from an underlying moral theory. His defense of value pluralism underwrites his claim that the traditional moral liberal search for some foundational super-value is pointless and misguided.16 Yet ironically, it seems to be this very “moral truth” that leads him to the conclusion that political life should be recognized and accepted as a modus vivendi among competing visions of the good. This, however, is unlikely to move groups, whose members think they have a different moral truth on their side, to embrace Gray’s vision of civil association. If we accept Gray’s account of morality, there is nothing left to do but admit that intergroup normative conflicts can be mediated only by appeal to some modus vivendi system. However, groups that happen to reject this view will not be moved by Gray’s argument to accept a modus vivendi arrangement.17 Consequently, Gray would seem to have little of practical importance to say to groups, whose members think they have moral truth on their side, about why they should compromise their moral beliefs by accepting a modus vivendi arrangement. Perhaps practical liberalism will not have much to say to these groups either, or rather, perhaps these groups will be disinclined to listen to what practical liberalism does have to say on this score. But the discussion of the relation of politics to morality provided in my opening chapters is intended to complicate the moral perspectives of all groups by questioning why these perspectives should be allowed to determine group understandings of civil association. But Gray does not need his moral theory to sustain his political convictions, and at times he seems very much aware of this.18 He speaks occasionally as if normative intergroup conflict is simply a fact of life, and it is the job of political theorizing to address this fact in the absence of any normative agreement on moral matters. When he speaks in this

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way, he again moves close to practical liberalism. But his political thought remains intertwined with his preferred moral vision, and in this sense, he returns to a form of political theory that is premised upon moral philosophy. This is the methodological orientation that practical liberalism rejects for reasons that are apparent when we take the fact of pluralism fully into account. This brings me to the most substantial reason why Gray would most likely elect to distance himself from practical liberalism. He rejects any appeal to moral super-values that might guide the process of mediating normative conflict and relies solely on the efforts of political institutions to deal with problems of this sort. In what becomes a leitmotiv in Gray’s more recent political thought, he claims, “We do not need common values in order to live together in peace. We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist.”19 He elaborates on the point by insisting, “The pursuit of modus vivendi is not a quest for some kind of super-value. It is a commitment to common institutions in which the claims of rival values can be reconciled.”20 And again, “For us, having a life in common cannot mean living in a society unified by common values. It means having common institutions through which the conflicts of rival values can be mediated.”21 The result is an emphasis upon political practice and a corresponding suspicion about the chance of establishing principled resolutions to normative rivalries. The nitty-gritty give and take of politics, linked with the integrity of political institutions, replaces principled inquiry on shared standards of social justice. One wonders, however, how normative intergroup conflict can possibly be resolved without some prior recourse to shared normative commitments of the sort introduced by the acceptance of the liberal principle. It is possible, of course, that groups would be willing to strike certain compromises, in the fashion of a modus vivendi, to settle their differences because they regard doing so as in their best long term interests. But such settlements are also likely to reflect existing power imbalances between these groups. At least some of these compromises might be the product of the superior strength of certain outgroups, a compromise premised upon the coercive might of a group’s rivals. This is hardly much of a compromise, and it leaves us with a terribly unstable political arrangement. Here it seems best to follow Williams in supposing that the aim of political practice must be the establishment of conditions of political legitimacy, a supposition that returns us to the search for a politics of principle. Perhaps Gray can meet this problem by having further recourse to political institutions. He may want to insist that it falls to these

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institutions to guarantee that coercive intergroup pressure does not lie behind the modus vivendi; institutions must fashion resolutions to intergroup conflict that can be accepted as fair and acceptable to all involved. In actual practice, however, this prospect seems dubious. Political institutions are often either controlled by or influenced by dominant groups, and dominant group norms, in the polity. They are not, this is to say, necessarily or invariably neutral arbiters of intergroup disputes. Instead, their decisions are frequently guided by the norms and beliefs of dominant groups whose members have managed to influence or capture the thoughts of institutional actors or managed to get their own members into institutional roles. When and if this is the case, institutional mediation of intergroup disputes will hardly qualify as fair, and institutional decisions will hardly be received as authoritative by outgroups. The problem of political legitimacy is still present under this scenario. It seems, then, that Gray’s appeal to common institutions remains rather hollow in the absence of some underlying normative structure. The point might be put by asking why widely different and conflicting groups would suppose in the first place that existent political institutions are authoritative. Before groups would be willing to converge on common institutions to settle disputes with their normative rivals, they would need to be persuaded that their interests will be taken seriously by these institutions and that standards their members can recognize as just will be used to resolve intergroup conflicts. The need for such standards, the need for some shared norms all elements of the polity can accept as just, logically precedes the acceptance of political institutions as authoritative arbiters of disputes. In his earlier reflections, Gray seemed aware of this issue. He notices, for example, that “we can live together in deep disagreement about abortion, but not if we also disagree about the propriety of using force on our opponents.”22 But how are we to reach agreement on this latter issue? If the A’s think abortion wrong, and if they have the might to impose this conviction on the B’s, the use of force in this instance would seem entirely justified. Perhaps the A’s will prove sufficiently astute to recognize that if all groups in the social setting feel similarly about their preferred moral outlook, social peace is jeopardized and their well-being is jeopardized accordingly. This is the logic that inclines both Gray and myself to hang our hopes for civil peace upon a modus vivendi arrangement. But now, sufficiently prudent A’s will want to be certain that a normative structure is in place that maximizes their basic interests. Rather than rely on ad hoc compromises and institutional mediation, it seems more reasonable for these groups to defer to a normative commitment that they, along with all other groups in the polity, can reasonably and profitably accept.

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It seems reasonable, that is, to commit to some basic standard of social justice, like that introduced by the liberal principle, and to a process of bringing this standard to life in the polity. Gray seems at one point to have been sympathetic to something like this move, but his aversion to super-values inclined him to temper his concerns with an appeal to a common culture. “There can be,” he argues in Enlightenment’s Wake, no form of allegiance that is purely political; political allegiance—at least when it is comparatively stable—presupposes a common cultural identity, which is reflected in the polity to which allegiance is given; political order, including that of a liberal state, rests upon a pre-political order of a common culture.23

Perhaps, then, the faith Gray has in the ability of political institutions to mediate intergroup conflict effectively can be justified by appeal to the belief that these institutions are informed by cultural values well suited to the adjudication of such conflict. In any event, in Enlightenment’s Wake, he recognizes the need for some normative commonality to sustain the polity, “This common culture need not encompass a shared religion and it certainly need not presuppose ethnic homogeneity, but it does demand a widespread acceptance of certain norms and conventions of behavior and, in our times, it typically expresses a shared sense of nationality.”24 He thus praises liberal institutions as well-suited to the task of dealing with normative rivalries, though he also insists that such institutions are hardly the only ones that might suffice in this capacity. But recourse to a common culture at this point seems a curiously conservative twist given Gray’s appreciation for disagreement and conflict over normative convictions. As I argued above, the fact of pluralism introduces immediate practical barriers to appeal to common culture as a strategy for finding the social glue required to hold a polity together. It is, at least in part, cultural difference and disagreement that makes a polity pluralist in the first place. I have argued already, and will not repeat the argument here, that cultural commonality in pluralist polities is exhausted by the construction and cultivation of a common political culture anchored in a shared political morality. For a culture to be shared, there must be convergence on something, and in a pluralist polity, the only thing that disparate and hostile groups can be expected to converge upon is a common/shared standard for the mediation and/or adjudication of normative and allocational conflicts—and this returns us to the liberal principle.

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So it would seem that all roads lead to a politics of principle, to the need for the acceptance of some basic normative structure that enables all elements of the polity to recognize political outcomes and institutional decisions as authoritative. This requires a process of democratic discussion and discourse to be sure; it requires a commitment on the part of all groups present in the polity to take the ends of social justice seriously. It requires, as I have said, the construction of a political unity based in normative agreement that takes a pride of place over the normative differences characteristic of a pluralist polity. Practical liberalism does not reject Gray’s reliance on political institutions. These institutions remain important components of the process by which normative rivalries are mediated. But these institutions can do the work required of them only if there is a prior acceptance of some principle or set of such principles—and for my money the most reasonable contender is the liberal principle—that provides them normative direction and guidance. It hardly follows, however, that this principle must be thought to have a universal or objective authority, or that it is morally true in some murky sense. Rather, the liberal principle is best viewed as a necessary conventional device that articulates the normative grounds of a cooperative venture preferable to ongoing intergroup hostility, civil unrest, and open warfare. It occupies an important middle ground between thinking that civil association must be premised upon moral truth and thinking that since there can be no such compelling moral truth we must place our hopes instead on a politics of process typified by contestation and possible compromise. Stopping History Still, the politics of principle defended here may continue to seem like an attempt to reduce politics to a form of rational insight and to replace political reality with theoretical simplicity. This returns me to White’s suggestion that the pursuit of something like a politics of principle equates to an attempt to stop history?25 I take White’s concern to mean that those political theorists who pursue, advocate, or endorse a politics of principle are attempting to transcend the rough-and-tumble world of politics by replacing it with the rule of objective, immutable reason, and to bring political change and development to a halt by locking humankind into an eternal present managed and controlled by rational insight. I also understand him to suggest that this is really quite naïve, that it evidences a special sort of naiveté belonging usually to myopically idealistic or utopian philosophical spirits. To this one might add that the only legitimate point to theorizing about politics is to expose, and thus remedy,

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this philosophical naiveté, that the aim of theorizing is to point out the mistaken utopianism of those theorists who propagate indefensible myths about governance according to principle. By way of a response to this, we should note first that it is a mistake to suppose that the recourse to political principle on display in practical liberalism constitutes an attempt to stop history or to impose objective and immutable principles of civil association upon all of humankind. The project of theorizing about politics is necessarily and inevitably bounded by both time and place, and the pertinence of what the theorist has to say is most certainly dependent upon and limited by these contingencies. It would be both silly and arrogant to suppose that the ebb and flow of historical change and the social, economic, and cultural flux that typifies the human condition could be thoroughly or even tightly controlled, managed, or otherwise choreographed. In this sense, the work of any political theorist is best understood as a product of history and place, a necessarily parochial reply to the problems, conflicts, and challenges of her or his particular moment on the historical clock and position on the planet. Perhaps all that it is possible to hope for at any such moment in time is to offer some thoughts on how the ravages of enmity, hostility, and contention in evidence at this moment and in this place might be domesticated, controlled, abated, or directed in more civil directions. But it does seem both possible and reasonable to hope for this, and there seems to be little reason to think that rejecting the project of moral liberalism should also call for the surrender of such hope. The troubles that set, say, Hobbes to thinking about civil association were specific to seventeenth century England, and the man’s presumptuousness notwithstanding, it would be silly for us to suppose that he wrote for his posterity as much as he did for his own people. If we find value today in what he has had to say, it is mostly because we recognize commonalities between his time/place and ours. He may help us think about our troubles, but this is because we can see applications of his views for our times and not because we share a belief in the existence of immutable rational truths that govern the human condition at all times and in all places. This, in any event, is the view at home in practical liberalism, which rejects the view that political legitimacy can be established by recourse to immutable moral insight but still supposes that it is possible to theorize a viable form of political unity—to nudge history a bit, though hardly to end it. It may be that political theorists who engage this challenge really are being naïve and that the political (the realm of the political actor) really is destined to remain untouched and uninformed by theoretical speculation. From a historical point of view, there is little reason to take such speculations seriously, for as John Maynard Keynes and others have aptly

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noticed, the ideals and institutional structures that configure our political present have largely been forged by the ideas and arguments of past political thinkers. Political theory finds its way into political practice, often for the good, but sometimes, one must concede, for the worse. Arguments and ideas take on a life of their own and often shape the political realm in ways neither intended nor anticipated by their authors. But history may not be such a solid guide at this point, for the contemporary effectiveness of political theorizing depends more upon the willingness of the political public—those who hold political power and those of us subject to this power—to appreciate, along with the political theorist, that political problems are, at least in part, intellectual problems that can and properly should be approached in a theoretical manner. In the past, political philosophers were listened to, and there is no reason why people should not continue to listen to them today. In the political realm, philosophy need not leave everything as it is; it can also inspire in a way that encourages and directs political change, hopefully in a direction that will make life a bit more worth living for all involved. If we abandon this hope and the intellectual challenge associated with it, we merely submit ourselves to the ravages of history and allow it to do with us what it will. The bit of hope offered by practical liberalism is that theoretical inquiry might be able to point the way to the development and establishment of a form of political unity, even if the face of the fact of pluralism, capable of meeting the strong demands of political legitimacy. This requires, once again, the manufacturing of a political morality that all groups in the polity can reasonably and willingly accept independent of, or in spite of, their fundamental normative convictions. If groups understand that this political morality offers them maximum protection for their way of life, they may be willing to cultivate this morality, instill its principles and ideals in their young, and craft an enduring allegiance to the polity that generates unity amongst difference. This does not even begin to stop history, of course. The prudential modus vivendi that underlies this political morality remains a modus vivendi—a way of getting along by acknowledging that adherence to norms of civil association protective of group autonomy is preferable to the thrust and parry of unregulated intergroup hostility and warfare. The political atmosphere anticipated by practical liberalism is one where many groups will remain judgmental and hostile adversaries. Groups can be expected to continue to be highly critical of what their members see as the injustices and indecencies outgroups impose upon (some of ) their own members. Such conflict is neither ended nor transcended under practical liberalism, but it is rechanneled. Under a polity dedicated to the liberal principle, intergroup conflict is no longer a free-for-all; groups retain the

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liberty to pursue their own normative agendas, but they must do so, so to speak, by adhering to something like the Marquess of Queensbury rules. What will emerge from this domesticated intergroup conflict is impossible to foretell. Perhaps with time groups will converge on some normative outlook or worldview that will inspire them to reconfigure their understanding of civil association. Perhaps the fascists or anarchists in the crowd will convince others to accept their views and transform their political relationships accordingly. But while this remains possible, it would also seem to be unlikely, for human history is more a story of emerging difference than a saga of general convergence. Such matters are purely speculative, of course, but we need only notice here that the forces that drive convergence, like the forces that inspire divergence, remain in place under practical liberalism. Because everything, including political theory, is a part of history, there is really no stopping it. Rationalism and Politics Liberal theory as a tradition of political discourse has grown up alongside the modern state system. An enduring end of liberal theorizing has been, and for the most part continues to be, a defense of the idea of the state, and hence of the state system itself. Suitably understood and properly conceived, the state in liberal theory remains a necessary condition of social peace and tranquility as well as a crucial vehicle for the pursuit of social justice. In this regard liberal theory stands opposed to any manner of anarchist and Marxist thinking that views the state as at least a component of the problem rather than an approach to the remedy for social strife and conflict. Seen historically, the general strategy employed by liberal theorists in pursuit of this end involved a theoretical effort to legitimize the state by demonstrating its necessity, and constraining its authority, by appeal to God’s moral law. Thus Samuel Pufendorf, the son of a Lutheran minister, worked to transform Hobbes’s prudential rationalism into moral necessity by insisting that the requirements of prudence offer insight into moral obligation.26 While Pufendorf slipped away from Hobbes’s methodological individualism, he continued, and helped institutionalize, Hobbes’s largely secular approach to political theory. He managed to do so, however, by replacing theological dogma with moral argument and thus transforming political theory into a form of applied moral philosophy. Reason, and not church authority, now offered insight into God’s law, and soon—and thanks largely to Kant—Reason became the author of universal law in its own right. Along the way, of course, Pufendorf ’s focus on the tribe disappeared, and Hobbes’s methodological individualism was

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replaced by a moralized individualism in which the independent (and hence largely abstract) individual became the locus of moral importance. The result of all this is a form of liberal theorizing characterized by three main attributes. First, it is highly rationalist in the sense that the human effort to coexist is considered to be an intellectual problem resolvable by means of rational inquiry. Second, it is individualistic in the sense that it regards the problem of human coexist as one in which independent individuals, each with her or his own interests at heart, struggle to get along with one another. And third, it is moral in the sense that it supposes the demands of reason that control and order the human effort to coexist hold with an objective and universal force.27 While practical liberalism rejects the second and third aspects of traditional liberalism thus understood, it remains committed to the first condition. So, while retaining the view that the challenges posed by conflict in social life can profitably be approached as intellectual problems, it rejects the inclination to link reason with moral insight and conclude that moral rules bind humankind with the force of an immutable law. The project of political theorizing, of course, has a dynamic relation with political practice. Political theory reshapes our understanding of political practice and invites us to conceptualize this practice is the ways advocated by theory itself. Thus political cultures heavily influenced by liberal theorizing tend to by highly individualist and to suppose that the dominant (liberal) moral visions in evidence there qualify as genuinely objective. But if theory can reconfigure political practice, it is not necessarily determinative of the kinds of troubles that make it difficult for human beings to coexist amicably. These troubles do not go away simply because they go largely unrecognized or remain misunderstood by the theoretical blinkers that orient dominant conceptions of the political. They remain present in even the most thoroughly liberal political cultures and become impervious to the traditional theoretical approaches to deal with them. This, according to practical liberalism, is the dilemma produced by the fact of pluralism in modern pluralist polities.28 In the United States, for example, the recent “culture wars” have done much to expose the great national fiction of the melting pot, and Americans are increasingly aware that the pot hasn’t melted as thoroughly as the assimilationist apologists would like to believe. Historically marginalized or enclaved groups have re-emerged to insist sometimes on greater inclusion and sometimes on greater group independence and selfcontrol. Though it is hardly alone in this regard, the American fiction of a homogeneous culture has been exposed as largely fraudulent, and groups whose members now insist on the freedom necessary to allow them to live as they wish pressures the land to rethink questions about group

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autonomy and its relation to state sovereignty.29 This might seem curious to those students of American culture who continue to believe in the image of the melting pot and in the related view that “ethnic differences have been on the wane” in the country.30 Nonetheless, intergroup conflict remains a constant problem in the land, and while it often seems to take place on the fringes of social life, it continues to insert a destabilizing presence into the fabric of American culture. That it continues to endure is perhaps a sufficient indication that traditional theoretical approaches have proven incapable of addressing the problems it creates in an effective manner. The increasing recognition that multiculturalism poses substantial problems for traditional liberal argument provides a degree of grudging philosophical awareness that the presence of intergroup rivalries necessitates a rethinking of the standard liberal approach to sociopolitical problems. This, in any event, is the posture behind practical liberalism. Thus an understanding of persons as beings whose lives are shaped by group identities—as beings who inherit a worldview and moral theory of the human good from primary group attachments—replaces the traditional emphasis upon liberal individualism. Similarly, an appreciation of the normative and ontological difference that separates persons qua group members and introduces sources of intergroup hostility and enmity necessitates the abandonment of a theoretical approach to political theory that builds a vision of civil association upon a specific group ontology or moral theory of the human good. But these comments are offered in the spirit of summary review only, for it is the first aspect of liberalism retained by practical liberalism that is the likely target of objection from those critics who worry about the rationalist component of practical liberalism. The objection I have in mind can be put as follows. Practical liberalism, like most moralized liberal argument, remains monistic in a crucial sense. It presupposes a shared sense of rationality and projects this sense onto all groups in the polity. While this rationality is not used to identify some universal and foundational moral norm, it still supposes that all cultural, religious, and ideological groups in the polity subscribe to a specific sense of prudence. Regardless of the ends adopted by any particular group, practical liberalism still supposes that group members can recognize ways of acting that are in the best long-term interest of the group. Strategies for the realization of group ends are thus presumed to be adaptable to the general welfare of the group, and the future well-being of the group is understood to be an issue for group members that can be examined and theorized independently of the group’s more basic normative commitments and convictions. So, the objection goes, practical liberalism remains within the liberal camp

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in one crucial yet flawed way; it remains at heart committed to a form of rationalism that it cannot coherently defend. The heterogeneity of existential reality simply cannot be squeezed into the rationalist paradigm that underwrites any manner of liberal argument, and for all its protestations to the contrary, practical liberalism also fails to take the fact of pluralism seriously enough. By way of a partial response, it is worth emphasizing that practical liberalism is practical in a rather Aristotelian sense. The prudential argument supporting the liberal principle does not equate to some form of knowledge claim; it remains practical (and not theoretical) in the sense that it presumes to provide a strong reason for group members to act in a certain way, namely, to adopt a standard of social organization that permits the construction of a stable civil order. But this is a partial and incomplete response only. It still supposes that groups will be willing to understand their choice predicament in the manner imagined by practical liberalism and be able to recognize and value an appropriately prudent response to this predicament. These suppositions, our critic might now plausibly insist, are simply naïve and unsupportable when one confronts the reality of normative and ideological difference among groups inhabiting the real world. Some groups, for example, may hold a deterministic view of history that inclines group members to be confident that they will eventually prevail against their normative rivals if they stick to their overt strategies intended to eliminate, segregate, or assimilate them. Some groups may hold religious or ideological convictions that persuade them that their preferred deity, or the forces of history, are on their side and guarantee victory in their normative struggle, thus obviating the need to accept the modus vivendi arrangement central to practical liberalism. Finally, some religious groups may think death preferable to living in a world not governed by their theological beliefs.31 If we take the fact of pluralism seriously, we must admit the possibility of such group beliefs and views, and it therefore follows that prudential argument will not reach these groups. Given the possible presence of such radical groups in the social environment, it follows that practical liberalism, like its moralized brethren, is unable to establish the legitimacy of the polity for all possible groups. The only viable response to this objection, it would seem, is simply to admit it, but also to question its strength. But if we concede the objection, defenders of a theory of politics as a form of process may conclude that we should continue to regard politics as a rough and tumble interplay of conflict and compromise. Yet this hardly follows, for groups that do hold deterministic or theologically or ideologically driven worldviews are unlikely to think much of compromise either, and they are equally

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as likely to be as hostile to a politics of process (outside of warfare) as they are to a politics of principle. There is, in effect, no viable way to deal with them; they stand outside even the most rough and tumble process of political conflict and compromise and remain in a state of war with the world around them. It seems tempting to say that the members of such groups are simply irrational, or in the terminology of the later Rawls, simply unreasonable, and therefore beyond the reach of theoretical inquiry, for theoretical inquiry must build on some supposed (or imagined) commonality among persons.32 Yet this seems like an inappropriately ungenerous and decidedly arrogant way to look at such groups. Given their own convictions and beliefs, there is little reason to think that their single-minded pursuit of their preferred ends qualifies as irrational; nor is there much point to characterizing them as unreasonable simply because they do not see things the way others do. But they stand outside the reach of political argument nonetheless, that is, if political argument is understood in terms of the effort to build in theory a vision of civil order amidst considerable and intractable diversity and difference. Because their beliefs and convictions are hermetically sealed within their worldview, because they have their own sense of what guides and controls the outcome of intergroup conflict and struggle, there is nothing that independent theorizing can meaningfully say to them. If, however, the possible presence of such groups in the polity is reason to reject practical liberalism, it must be because this possibility renders pointless and irrelevant the effort to imagine in theory a fully sufficient resolution to the problem of political legitimacy. If theoretical inquiry cannot reach such groups, why bother to theorize about civil association at all? The rationalist commitment of liberal theory in general is underscored by the belief that the ability of human beings to live amicably with one another is at heart an intellectual problem that can be efficaciously addressed by theoretical inquiry, a view that in the western intellectual tradition predates the evolution of liberal theory and has a basis in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Should the presence of groups whose members reject prudential as well as moral argument in favor of their own historical narratives or moral visions of the human good incline us to reject the idea that peaceful human coexistence can be facilitated by means of rational insight and theoretical inquiry? A proper response to this question may again be pressed in prudential terms, for it is simply not possible to foretell the efficacy of theoretical efforts on this score. We cannot know if things will go better for human beings sharing a common social setting if we engage in theorizing about the possibility of a legitimate polity, but we can certainly acknowledge that they might go better. It is always possible, of course, that theorizing about

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civil association might actually make things worse for human beings, though it seems impossible to make sense of the counterfactual hidden in this comment. But it is hard to imagine that the theoretical articulation of a form of civil association that would enable people to live by the values that matter to them and practice the ways that are meaningful for them, and that would therefore domesticate intergroup conflict over such matters, could possibly make things worse—and it might just make them better. This is not intended to suggest that theorists should make something like a Pascalian wager; it indicates only that there is some point to thinking that intergroup conflict should be viewed as an intellectual problem after all. And if it is approached as an intellectual problem, attacking it as such is bound to have a rationalist flavor. Given the fact of pluralism, a theory of civil association capable of approaching the ideal of political legitimacy must cast the widest possible net, even if it is necessary to concede that theoretical argument may not reach all groups in the social setting. If it is not possible for a theory of civil association to gain the assent of all groups, the theoretical project must settle for reaching as many groups as possible. Even if it is practically impossible to get everyone on the same side, political stability and social peace is promoted and enhanced by getting as many as possible on the same side. This, in any event, is the aim of practical liberalism. If this is about all we can hope for from a theory of civil association, it is also what we should expect in the name of social peace and good order.

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Notes Introduction 1. Perhaps the most insistent contemporary voice on this score belongs to John Gray. See, Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake (London: Routledge, 1995); Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000). 2. Cf. Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 3. Cf. Jeff Spinner-Halev, Surviving Diversity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univesity Press, 2000), 47–50. 4. See, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 190–7. 5. In recent years, an intriguing controversy has arisen in legal circles around the propriety of the so-called culture defense. Do cultural practices that might incline a group member to violate valid and standard American legal proscriptions offer grounds for a defense against criminal liability? In an accommdationist frame of mind, American courts are increasingly inclined to accept this idea at least to some extent, though the practice is not without its critics. Cf. Kay L. Levine, “Negotiating the Boundaries of Crime and Culture: A Sociological Perspective on the Cultural Defense,” Law & Social Inquiry 28 (2003): 39–86; Martin P. Golding, “The Culture Defense,” Ratio Juris 15, 2 (2002): 146–58. 6. The tension in evidence here hints at an incoherence within the liberal worship of individual autonomy. Some voluntary choices, it would seem, exhibit an exercise of individual autonomy, while others apparently evidence its abandonment. But how are we to decide which is which? Perhaps more importantly, who is to decide? If the dominant sentiments of the polity serve as the guide here, the traditional liberal defense of difference—or of liberality—is correspondingly jeopardized. 7. See, for example, Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995), 152–70; Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 164–92. 8. William Galston, “Two Concepts of Liberalism,” Ethics 3 (1995): 516–34. 9. See Craig L. Carr, The Liberal Polity: An Inquiry into the Logic of Civil Association (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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10. Ibid., 81–2. See also John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 147. 11. See Brian Barry, “How Not to Defend Liberal Institutions,” in R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good (New York: Routledge, 1990), 44–58. 12. One might profitably examine the historical shift from a feudal to an egalitarian political culture in terms of the philosophical struggle to manage social conflict at the dawn of the Enlightenment. By shifting the social focus from social class or religious group to the abstract individual, it became possible for the thinkers of the day to develop a theory of civil association that looked beneath the sources of conflict that otherwise seemed impervious to mutually acceptable remedy. 13. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 137–43. See also Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz, “National Self-Determination,” Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 439–61. 14. Carr, 73–4. 15. Ibid., 130–40. 16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 90–5. 17. The importance of group involvement in the formation of identities has been thoughtfully explored by both Will Kymlicka and Bhikhu Parekh. (See Kymlicka, 84–95; Parekh, 230–7.) For a thoughtful discussion of the structure of social identities, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 65–82; see also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 18. Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995). 19. Cf. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 213–9.

Chapter 1 1. Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. Robert Nozick has expressed this point rather well: Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of the state, or do to establish such an apparatus. The moral prohibitions it is permissible to enforce are the source of whatever legitimacy the state’s fundamental coercive power has. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 6.

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5. Williams, 3. 6. Ibid., 4 (italics in original). 7. Cf. Kymlicka, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 4–7. 8. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 137. 9. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, sec. 222. 10. See Rawls, xv–xvi. 11. In Political Liberalism, Rawls explains his aim in Theory to be the defense of a theory of justice superior to utilitarianism. He says, “I thought this alternative conception was, of the traditional moral conceptions, the best approximation to our considered convictions of justice and constituted the most appropriate basis for the institutions of a democratic society” (Rawls, xv). He moves away from insisting that justice as fairness is a comprehensive doctrine in Political Liberalism because as but one comprehensive doctrine among many in pluralist polities, it could not guarantee the assent of those holding alternative moral (yet morally reasonable) comprehensive doctrines. Thus the case he makes for embracing his theory of justice, and hence promoting the stability of the polity, he admitted, must rest on something other than a comprehensive doctrine—that is, the case for justice as fairness must be freestanding. But the theory of justice, complete with its claims of political legitimacy, remains moral in nature; it is but one component of a comprehensive moral theory. In Justice as Fairness: A Retsatement, Rawls further explains his position by noting that justice as fairness is not a comprehensive . . . doctrine—one that applies to all subjects and covers all values . . . . Neither political philosophy nor justice as fairness is, in that way, applied moral philosophy . . . . It focuses on the political (in the form of the basic structure), which is but a part of the domain of the moral.

12.

13. 14. 15.

Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 14. Rawls states in Political Liberalism, “In Theory a moral doctrine of justice general in scope is not distinguished from a strictly political conception of justice. Nothing is made of the contrast between comprehensive philosophical and moral doctrines and conceptions limited to the domain of the political” (Rawls, Political Liberalism, xv). I take this to mean that “conceptions limited to the domain of the political” are still moral in nature. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls, speaking of his conception of justice, says, “While it is, of course, a moral conception, it is worked out for a specific subject, namely, the basic structure of a democratic society” (Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 28). See William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 23.

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16. Ibid. 17. William A. Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3. 18. Cf. William A. Galston, “Two Concepts of Liberalism,” Ethics 3 (1995): 516–34. Though he thinks his liberal theory offers a most capacious space for diverse social groups, he also concedes, “Liberalism is not and cannot be the universal response, equally acceptable to all, to the challenge of social diversity. It is ultimately a partisan stance.” William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 297. 19. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 100. 20. Cf. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 173–7. 21. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 55 (italics in original). 22. Ibid., 114. 23. Williams, 5. 24. Ibid., 6. 25. We can put aside for present purposes the ticklish question of whether rightful coercion qualifies as coercion at all. Williams works with a descriptive account of coercion (Cf. Williams, 22–6.), and the development of his argument requires us to stick with this. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. See, for example, Peter Winch, “Authority,” in Anthony Quinton, ed., Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 97–111; Richard E. Flathman, The Practice of Political Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25–33; Richard T. De George, The Nature and Limits of Authority (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1985), 26–62. 28. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 141–9. 29. Cf. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000), Ch. 1. 30. Of course, this gives Locke too much credit for transforming Hobbesian realism into liberal moralism. Credit here should be shared with Grotius, Pufendorf, and Cumberland.

Chapter 2 1. Cf. Richard Brandt, Hopi Ethics: A Theoretical Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954); John Ladd, The Structure of a Moral Code: A Philosophical Analysis of Ethical Discourse Applied to the Ethics of the Navaho Indians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). 2. Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View (New York: Random House, 1958), 126. 3. Ibid., 106 (italics in original). 4. Ibid., 107. Baier’s moral point of view no doubt owes much to preceding ideal observer theories of morality, which, in turn, call to mind Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. Cf., Roderick Firth, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12 (1952): 317–45.

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5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 8 7. For related arguments, see R.M. Hare, Reason and Freedom (London: Oxford University Press, 1963); Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). See also J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), Ch. 4. 8. Baier, 149. 9. Ibid., 154 10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday & Co., 1969), 526. Tocqueville actually uses the phrase “enlightened self-love” to describe what he calls self-interest “properly understood.” 11. See also David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 12. Following 9/11, one pundit exclaimed that it was impossible to know how to deal with terrorists, for someone who would commit suicide by hijacking a plane and flying it into a building clearly could not be rational, and there is just no way to deal with such irrationality. But from the standpoint and beliefs of the hijackers, their actions were perfectly rational. And once we appreciate this point, once we grasp the significance that normative convictions beyond the self can have for people, we can also begin to appreciate the substantial challenge that deep normative diversity poses for ordinary reflections on the nature of morality and questions about why one should be moral. 13. Baier, 154. 14. Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 105. 15. Ibid., 102. 16. Hampshire would seem to be in agreement with Baier on this point. He appeals to a process of reasoning, a process that involves hearing from and listening to others, in his thoughts on how to best address the problems created by normative conflict. Cf. Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 79–98. 17. Baier, 89. 18. Ibid., 113. 19. Following this strategy, Kant regarded political philosophy as simply a special branch of moral philosophy. Cf., I. Kant, The Metaphysical of Morals, trans. by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35–55. 20. Historically, this view of the relation of politics to morality, and of the social aspect of the moral law more generally, may be seen to emerge in the works of Pufendorf and Cumberland, both of whom took exception to the political realism of Hobbes and sought to strengthen the case for civil association by transforming this political realism into a form of moral necessity. On Pufendorf, see Craig L. Carr ed., The Political Writings of Samuel

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

NOTES

Pufendorf, trans. Michael J. Seidler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 136–57. For Cumberland, see Richard Cumberland, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Laws of Nature (London, 1727). See also Craig L. Carr and Michael J. Seidler, “Pufendorf, Sociality, and the Modern State,” History of Political Thought XVII, 3 (1996): 354–78. Hampshire, 108. Ibid., 168. Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 177. Ibid. Ibid. Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, 124. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Daniel Donno (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981), 28–42. Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, 124. Cf. Stuart Hampshire, Two Theories of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 44. Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, 118. Cf. Isaiah Berlin, “To Concepts of Liberty,” in Berlin ed., Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72. Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, 159. Ibid., 159–60. Ibid., 160. Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, 114–9. Ibid., 186. Hampshire’s views in this regard are reminiscent of Rawls’s recourse to a shared public morality that underlies his attempt to configure his theory of justice in order to diffuse moral and normative conflict. This, in effect, is the spirit behind Rawls’s political liberalism; yet Rawls’s focus upon political stability pushed him in the direction of a pursuit of reasonableness that actually exacerbates the problem he hoped to address. Cf. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 58–66. Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, 161. Ibid., 124; see also Hampshire, Justice is Conflict, 37. Hampshire seems rather mindful of this limitation. The rationality associated with his minimum procedural justice requires us to listen to one another; this is a requirement of fairness. But listening might not matter much if the other is difficult to understand because his views differ so significantly from ours. Listening, in short, just might not make much difference. As Hampshire notes, “Rationality is a bond between persons, but it is not a very powerful bond, and it is apt to fail as a bond when there are strong passions on two sides of a conflict.” Hampshire, Justice is Conflict, 94.

Chapter 3 1. Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4–6.

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2. See John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000), Ch. 1. 3. I have made a case for this sell elsewhere. See Craig L. Carr, The Liberal Polity: An Inquiry into the Logic of Civil Association (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 4. Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 5. Ibid., 10. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 10–11 (italics in original). 8. See Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Complacencies,” in Okin, 31–4. 9. Okin, 11; Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 34–47. 10. Cf. Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Complacencies,” in Okin, 31. 11. Ibid. 12. Okin, 13. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 22–3. 16. On the culture defense, see Daina C. Chiu, “The Cultural Defense: Beyond Exclusion, Assimilation, and Guilty Liberalism,” California Law Review 82 (1994): 1053–125; Deirdre Evans-Pritchard and Alison Dundes Rentein, “The Interpretation and Distortion of Culture: A Hmong ‘Marriage by Capture’ Case in Fresno, California,” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 4 (1994): 1–48; Doriane Lambelet Coleman, “Individualizing Justice through Multiculturalism: The Liberals’ Dilemma,” Columbia Law Review 96 (1996): 1093–167; Martin P. Golding, “The Cultural Defense,” Ratio Juris 15, 2 (2002): 146–58; Kay L. Levine, “Negotiating the Boundaries of Crime and Culture: A Sociolegal Perspective on Cultural Defense Strategies,” Law and Social Inquiry 28 (2003): 39–86. 17. Okin, 19–20. 18. See, for example, Golding, 148–53; Levine, 67–80. 19. See, for example, Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 50–7 and passim. 20. Sanford Gilman, “ ‘Barbaric’ Rituals?” in Okin, 56. 21. Azizah Y. al-Hibri, “Is Western Patriarchal Feminism Good for Third World/Minority Women?” in Okin, 45. 22. Bonnie Honig, “My Culture Made Me Do It,” in Okin, 36–7. 23. Gilman, 55. 24. Ibid., 129–30. 25. Ibid., 121. 26. Okin’s insistence that one ask the young women (and not the older women who may have been co-opted by their culture) whether they wish to be involved in those practices Okin finds objectionable casts some doubt on the confidence with which one can conclude that Okin wants to move in the direction of an objective moral claim. If these are objectively immoral

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28.

29.

30. 31.

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matters, one shouldn’t need to ask whether those who suffer from them would wish to not do so. From the standpoint of an objective moral argument, recourse to personal interests would seem to be neither here nor there. But I won’t bother to explore this complication here. On the question of state neutrality, see Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121–7; Richard C. Sinopoli, “Liberalism and Contested Conceptions of the Good: The Limits of Neutrality,” Journal of Politics 55 (1993): 644–63; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 191–4; Bruce Ackerman, “Neutralities,” in R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good (New York: Routledge, 1990), 29–43; Peter De Marneffe, “Liberalism, Liberty, and Neutrality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (1990): 253–74; Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,” Ethics 99 (1989): 883–905; and Michael J. Perry, “Neutral Politics,” The Review of Politics 51 (1989): 479–509. It doesn’t follow, of course, that it is not possible for the government to be neutral here; what follows is that government neutrality would privilege more powerful groups over less powerful ones. Thus, for example, the KKK would remain at liberty to prey upon African-Americans and Catholics, and consequently, government neutrality would not look good to either AfricanAmericans or Catholics. Such a political system would hardly be attractive to less powerful groups; so, it is unlikely that they would consent to such an arrangement—again introducing the problem of political legitimacy. This is certainly not the only way to engage the problem at issue, however. A second is suggested, for example, by Seyla Benhabib’s version of deliberative democracy. See Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). I shall consider Benhabib’s argument, and deliberative democracy more generally, in Chapter 6. I have discussed the notion of a politics of principle more thoroughly elsewhere. See Carr, 45–7. Ibid., 48–55. No doubt the most elaborate effort to construct a politics of principle has been undertaken by John Rawls; the pursuit of a principled politics is the centerpiece of his monumental theory of justice. Two features of Rawls’s argument seem particularly crucial to a politics of principle. The first is Rawls’s insistence that a theory of justice be freestanding (Rawls, 10–11). The second is introduced by Rawls’s claim that the right is prior to the good (ibid., 173–4). I have argued that Rawls fails to construct an adequate politics of principle because his principles of justice are not as freestanding as he would like them to be; components of moral liberalism are smuggled into their construction and interpretation. Under the notion of practical liberalism, on the other hand, the language of “right is prior to the good” is deliberately rejected in favor of a conception of political morality that moderates strategies groups can use in an effort to assimilate, segregate, or eliminate their normative rivalries. As we shall see,

NOTES

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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this does not mean that group members must conclude that their own primary moral convictions must take a backseat to a political conception of justice. Ibid., 68–82. See Mozert v. Hawkins County, Tennessee, 827 F.2d 1058 (6th Cir., 1987). See Village of Skokie v. National Socialist Party of America, 373 N.E.2d 21 (1978). See Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000). Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View (New York: Random House, 1968). Carr, 64–8. Ibid., Ch. 4. Rawls, 10–14. Practical liberalism seeks to eliminate intergroup conflict that is coercive, but it does not attempt to do so by appeal to some form of ethical relativism or some form of Rortyesque ironism. Put more generally, practical liberalism does not address normative intergroup conflict as a moral problem; it does not reach the level of moral inquiry that trades in moral absolutism or in the rationality of the pursuit of such an absolutism. If it did, it would not need to address the problem of bad moral faith. Instead, it takes a more sociological stance on these matters; normative disagreement is a source of socio-political conflict. This is the conflict political theory needs to address, but to do so effectively, it must step outside the moral domain and find an alternative mechanism for mediating this conflict—not as an exclusive but as an initial proposition. Cf. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 246–56. See Carr, Ch. 3. Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 124.

Chapter 4 1. For a more functional account of government offering an expanded, though by no means exhaustive, account of the jobs a polity will look to government to do, see Craig L. Carr, Polity: Political Culture and the Nature of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 36–45. 2. See, for example, David Miller, “In What Sense Must Socialism Be Communitarian?” Social Philosophy and Policy 6, 2 (1989): 51–73; Derek Edyvane, Community and Conflict (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 25–32. 3. Cf. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4–6. 4. See Craig L. Carr, The Liberal Polity: An Inquiry into the Logic of Civil Association (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Chs. 3 & 4. 5. John Neville Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, 2nd ed. (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914), 225.

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6. Lucas Swaine, The Liberal Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 38. 7. Ibid. 8. Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151. 9. Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 10. Ibid., 19. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. Ibid., 210. 13. Jeff Spinner-Halev, Surviving Diversity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 82. Less generously, Leslie Green has characterized Kukathas’s liberal archipelago as a “mosaic of tyrannies.” Green, “Internal Minorities and Their Rights,” in Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 270. 14. Kukathas, 263. 15. Ibid., 85. 16. Ibid., 86. 17. Ibid., 95. 18. Cf. Carr, The Liberal Polity, 56–61. 19. Kukathas, 64. 20. Ibid., 266. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Spinner-Halev, 81. 24. Kukathas, 132 25. Ibid., 143. 26. Spinner-Halev, 83. 27. In Joseph Carens’s thoughtful phrase, “culture is dynamic.” Joseph H, Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 257. 28. This imagery has been developed to good effect in the American context by Lawrence Fuchs. See Fuchs, The American Kaleidoscope (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1990). 29. For a discussion of the importance of the fact of flux for practical liberalism, see Carr, The Liberal Polity, 73–4. 30. As we noticed when discussing Galston’s defense of pluralism, so-called theories of comprehensive liberalism are committed to the eradication of perceived injustice when the substantive demands of liberal morality are compromised by intragroup actions. (See William A. Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 3.) But liberal theories that derive their defense of group autonomy from the notion of individual autonomy, will also be sensitive to intragroup injustices and necessarily so. Perceived intrusions upon the autonomy of group members by means of intragroup practices must be considered objectionable by

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

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these thinkers. Their problem, however, is to decide what the state should do about this sort of thing. Cf. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 94, 168. On the right of group exit under practical liberalism, and the problems associated with it, see Carr, The Liberal Polity, 116, and George Crowder, “Two Concepts of Liberal Pluralism,” Political Theory 35 (2007): 121–46. As Benhabib has noticed, there is reason to question whether a right to exit should also entail a right of entrance. If secession is not an option, and if some group wishes to leave the state, is there an obligation on other states, particularly those wishing to defend a right of exit, to take in wanderers? Here, I suppose, it makes some sense to insist that “ought” implies “can”; a right of entrance would seem to exist only if the host state is able to accommodate wanderers. It would also require, under practical liberalism, that immigrant groups be willing to accept the liberal principle and the standards of social justice it implies within the particularities of the host state. See Benhabib, 11. Kukathas, 34. Ibid., 133. Swaine, 51. To his credit, Swaine argues powerfully that theocrats must endorse something like a liberty of conscience, though they might not understand the nature of their commitment in these terms. (Cf. Swaine, 65–9, 148–56.) But I don’t see that his arguments succeed in getting the genie out of the bottle. Authoritarian theocrats may suppose that a faithful adherence to religious authority is a crucial element of their religious belief. They may, this is to say, conscientiously reject the idea of a liberty of conscience. Does this mean that they really affirm a liberty of conscience because this is what is required to reject the idea? If so, the liberty of conscience they affirm is specific to only one conscientious religious choice and not to the others Swaine seeks to allow for. Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 26–7.

Chapter 5 1. Cf. Craig L. Carr, The Liberal Polity: An Inquiry into the Logic of Civil Association (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Ch. 5. 2. See, for example, David Miller, “In What Sense Must Socialism be Communitarian?” Social Philosophy and Policy 6, 2 (1989): 60. 3. Cf. David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000). 4. Miller, On Nationality, 162. 5. For some of Miller’s more nationalist moments, see Citizenship and National Identity, Ch. 3; for his claim that nationhood can support pluralism, see ibid., Ch. 4, and On Nationality, Ch. 5.

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NOTES

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NOTES

6. Miller, On Nationality, 23–4. 7. Ibid., 10–11. See also Paul Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism (Boulder: CO: Westview, 1998), 14–19. 8. As we shall see, qualifications to the second and third conditions under practical liberalism involve (1) group rights of immigration and secession and (2) some consideration of the responsibilities and obligations that citizens of the liberal polity have regarding emigrant groups and their members. 9. For an expanded discussion of the nature of coordination and tolerance problems within the liberal polity, see Carr, 57–8. 10. See Miller, On Nationalism, 188–9; Citizenship and National Identity, 131. A traditional distinction between civic and ethnic nationality was introduced initially by Hans Kohn in 1944. (Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, a Study in Its Origins and Background [New York: Macmillan, 1944].) Miller finds little use in the distinction other than as a marker of extremes with ethnic nationalism on one end and civic nationalism on the other. (Miller, Citizenship and National Identity, 131.) See also A.D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: The Noonday Press, 1993); and Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 11. Miller, On Nationality, 189. 12. Miller, Citizenship and National Identity, 131. 13. Miller, On Nationality, 163. 14. The claim that outsiders will recognize this self-description is hardly a given, of course. Both Canadians and Mexicans, for example, also qualify as Americans at least in the geographic sense, though this is hardly the sense in which this descriptor is used by citizens of the United States. Mexicans, in particular, are reluctant to refer to citizens of the United States as simply Americanos, preferring Norde Americanos or Gringos—both of which might refer to Canadians as well as to citizens of the United States. 15. Miller, On Nationality, 163. 16. Ibid. 17. Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), 72. 18. See Gilbert, 76–90. 19. See Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 231. 20. Miller, On Nationality, 41. 21. Ibid., 189. 22. As Charles Taylor has observed, “The demands are for the right of a community’s language to receive the scope it needs to maintain or increase its expressive power, which in turn is seen as a common condition of identity of all speakers of the language.” Charles Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism, ed., Guy Laforest (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 49.

NOTES

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23. Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 234. 24. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has noticed, multilingual states have through time developed a number of strategic compromises on this issue, and the problem may actually be more of a theoretical red herring than a practical challenge. Where distinct languages have existed through time, people have learned to communicate with one another, typically by becoming multilingual. Where minority language communities immigrate to new lands, they tend to become multilingual with time. Here, then, is a case, where practice may make theory rather irrelevant, in spite of the peculiarities the case of Quebec has introduced into theoretical literature. Cf. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 99–105. 25. Miller, On Nationality, 130–40. 26. See Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924). 27. Michael Walzer, What Does It Mean to be an American? (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1992), 36–40. 28. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 160. 29. Cf. Canovan, 75–80. 30. Taylor has suggested, with some plausibility, that the American challenge involved creating a nation out of he fledgling state, and the result was a form of civic nationalism. (See Taylor, 43–4.) But this also rather ignores the significant sense in which early America was dominated by English culture. If the transition from being identified as British to being identified as American was primarily a political act, it was made all the easier by the cultural homogeneity of colonial America. 31. Cf. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 32. Cf. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955); Susan Herbst, Politics at the Margin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 33. Miller, On Nationality, 36. 34. For an elaboration of the mythic sanitization of history, see Smith, Civic Ideals, 160, and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 189. 35. Miller, On Nationality, 189. 36. See, for example, Arthur M Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 37. Miller, On Nationality, 169–72.

190

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38. Cf. W.M. Brown, “Procedures and Prudence,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport XVII (1990): 71–84; Robert L. Simon, “Internalism and Internal Values in Sport,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport XXVII (2000): 1–16. 39. See Craig L. Carr, On Fairness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 79–82. 40. Ibid. 41. This does not exclude the practice of civil disobedience, however. Honest and heartfelt dissent and disagreement with law and policy, even to the point of civil disobedience, is neither a failure of commitment nor a sign of disloyalty. In fact, just the opposite seems to be the case. The civil disobedient is often a loyal patriot sufficiently committed to the end of social justice that she is willing to take extreme measures to have her views heard and understood. 42. Michael Walzer’s lovely discussion of the spheres of justice is exemplary in this regard. (See Walzer, Spheres of Justice [New York: Basic Books, 1983].) Rawls’s duly famous notion of primary goods may belong to this category as well, but it raises slightly different questions. Primary goods, as Rawls understands them, are basic means to whatever other ends someone might have, and thus they are presumed to be things people want regardless of whatever else they happen to want. (See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971], 90–5.) This is still premised upon a specific moral viewpoint, of course, and it remains possible that some groups will not consider all Rawls’s primary goods as things they would like to see the polity distribute as a feature of what all owe to each and each owe to all in the polity. Similarly, the spheres that Walzer identifies are likely to be corrigible in a pluralist polity as well. Some groups might not value all the spheres Walzer notices, some might value additional spheres not recognized by Walzer, and some might even have a different list entirely. We can’t know this until we situate the discussion of social justice within a specific polity. In this regard, it makes some sense to extend Joseph Carens’s notion of a contextual analysis of group relations in pluralist polities to the discourse on social justice as well. See Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 43. State-supported health care need not be limited to traditional medical means, however. In the United States, for example, the federal government already provides some degree of support for nontraditional health practices like Navajo faith healing. 44. For the most part, liberal accounts of social justice proceed against the background of a given liberal morality and offer a vision of social justice that is buried within the context of liberal morality. In spite of the widely diverse accounts of social justice that have been offered in the wake of the “Rawls revolution,” all these accounts share a common liberal bias toward the independent individual—a kind of “persons chauvinism” as Robert Richman once put the point to me. Cf. Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1998); Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999);

NOTES

45.

46. 47. 48.

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Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2006.) While person-centered theories of social justice remain important, practical liberalism attempts to broaden the horizons of focus by prioritizing a group-centered account of social justice over person-centered concerns. As Liah Greenfeld has said, “The ideas of nationalism, which have forged social structures and suffused cultural traditions, were also produced by structural constraints and inspired by traditions that preceded them. Before nationalism was a cause of certain social processes, it was an effect of others.” Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 21. Derek Edyvane, Community and Conflict: The Sources of Liberal Solidarity (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 126–44. Gilbert, 82. Ibid., 90.

Chapter 6 1. Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 16. 2. Cf. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 213–32. 3. Cf. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117–38. 4. For an elaborate analysis of democratic process, to which my discussion is much indebted, see Dahl, 106–17. 5. See, for example, Barber; Juergen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Regh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996); Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Jeffrey Stout, Democracy & Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 6. See Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 105–22. 7. See especially, John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 216–20. 8. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 108–9 (italics in original). For a critical defense of public reason in political liberalism, see Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 158–63. 9. Rawls, 213. 10. Ibid., 220. 11. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 115.

192

NOTES

12. 13. 14. 15.

Ibid., 107. See Gutmann and Thompson, 352–60; MacGilvray, 29. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 115 (italics in original). See, for example, Lucas Swaine, The Liberal Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 10–26. Cf. MacGilvray, 159–60. Ibid. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 107. Ibid. (footnotes omitted). Ibid., 11–12 (italics in original). Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, eds., Jennifer Tolbert Roberts and Walter Blanco, trans., Walter Blanco (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998), 84–116. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 11–14. Ibid., 106–7. No doubt Benhabib would want to object to this construction of her position, which seems to reduce her discourse ethics to some familiar liberal concerns. But the justification for her concerns about universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity must come to rest somewhere, and my claim is simply that they come to rest (and must do so) in the familiar region of person chauvinism that also inspires the liberal fixation with autonomy. Ibid., 38–9. For a related criticism of Benhabib, see Nikolas Kompridis, “Normative Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture,” Political Theory 33 (2005): 318–43. See also Seyla Benhabib, “The ‘Claims’ of Culture Properly Interpreted: Response to Nikolas Kompridis,” Political Theory 34 (2006): 383–8, and Nikolas Kompridis, “The Unsettled and Unsettling Claims of Culture: A Reply to Seyla Benhabib,” Political Theory 34 (2006): 389–96. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 91. Ibid., 116. Ibid. Ibid., 117 Ibid., 93. Ibid., 61. The notion of a group involves a high degree of normative and ontological homogeneity in at least some spheres of life, and in this sense, cultural communities, traditionally understood in, say, the nationalist terms explored by Miller, qualify rather evidently as groups. But groups can be larger and more disparate collectivities under practical liberalism as well, as is illustrated by the fact that the polity itself qualifies as a group from this point of view. Ontological and normative agreement and identification, in other words, need not be exhaustive of an individual’s mental horizon, and if individuals happen to be both members of strict cultural communities and the public that is the polity, they will hold membership in at least two groups. Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

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34. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 4–5. 35. Ibid., 66. 36. Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 99–118; Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 114–23. 37. We might, of course, narrow our gaze even more deeply, as, for example, Hobbes does, and see persons as receptacles of divergent and conflicting forces, pressures, and influences. 38. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: McMillan Company, 1958), 193–208. 39. See Charles Taylor, “Social Theory as Practice,” in Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 91–115. 40. To reiterate a point made previously, the fact of flux plays an important role in the prudential argument for accepting the liberal principle. See Craig L. Carr, The Liberal Polity: An Inquiry into the Logic of Civil Association (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 73–4. 41. Cf. Carr, 171f. 42. Ibid., 111–5. 43. Something like this seems to have taken place within the Muslim community in India, for example, with regard to the Shah Bano incident. See Veena Das, “Cultural Rights and the Definition of Community,” in Oliver Mendelsohn and Upendra Baxi, eds., The Rights of Subordinated Peoples (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 117–58. 44. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 117. 45. Cf. Stout, 74. 46. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 115. 47. To repeat a point emphasized in previous chapters, moral life as Hampshire conceives of it is typified by conflicts between one’s private and one’s public convictions and commitments. (See, e.g., Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983], 121–4.) In the terms of practical liberalism, this conflict is evidenced in the conflict between the normative convictions linked to one’s primary group(s) and the moral point of view linked to the associative morality characteristic of one’s commitments as a citizen of the liberal polity. While practical liberalism emphasizes a pride of place for the demands of this associative morality, it does not attempt to resolve these conflicts for the moral agents that face them. It is sufficient only to acknowledge the nature of this conflict and to emphasize the importance of taking associative morality seriously if the enterprise of civil association is to remain viable.

Chapter 7 1. See, for example, Michael J. White, Paritsan or Neutral (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1995); John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies

194

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

NOTES

in Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1993); John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake (London: Routledge, 1995); John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000). John Gray, “What Is Dead and What Is Living in Liberalism?” in Gray, PostLiberalism: Studies in Political Thought, 283–328; see also George Crowder, “Pluralism and Liberalism,” Political Studies XLII (1994): 293–305. White, 30. See, Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 96–102. See White, 166–70; Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, Ch. 4. Cf. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). This seems, in any event, to have been Rawls’s initial agenda in Theory. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). On the notion of a practice, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 176–9; Richard E. Flathman, The Practice of Rights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 11–32. Cf. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 147–8. Cf. Brian Barry, “How Not to Defend Liberal Institutions,” in R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good (New York: Routledge, 1990), 44–58. Cf. Craig L. Carr, The Liberal Polity: An Inquiry into the Logic of Civil Association (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Ch. 5. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 36 As Gray puts it, “In polities that are plural and divided, the legal recognition of communities, and their distinct jurisdictions, may well be mandated on the Hobbesian ground that it promotes peace.” John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 203. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 1. Ibid., 33. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 200–4; see also Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, 287–313. Speaking of what he takes to be the traditional liberal view on toleration, Gray says, “Whereas our inherited conception of toleration presupposes that one way of life is best for all of humankind, modus vivendi accepts that there are many forms of life, some of them no doubt yet to be contrived, in which humans can flourish.” (Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 5.) But the notion of human flourishing is also, and necessarily, caught up in (or informed by) some distinctive moral theory of the human good; in Gray’s case, it is caught up in his own theory of value pluralism. Other moral theories of the human good, however, may take exception to this claim, and if they do, they may also take exception to Gray’s notion of a modus vivendi. If Gray’s modus vivendi hangs on his own moral vision, it is difficult to see how he can make

NOTES

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

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his preferred version of liberalism attractive to those plural groups that are of concern to him. Gray moves in this direction when he says, “It must be so, again, in that the forms of a pluralist modus vivendi may legitimately assume are dictated by pluralist theory, but are settled—if at all—in political practice.” Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 214. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 6. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 121. Ibid. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 120. Ibid., 36. White, Ch. 3. See Craig L. Carr, ed., The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf, trans. Michael J. Seidler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 163–4. While this account of liberalism differs slightly from the thoughtful account offered by John Gray, it is, nonetheless, consistent with Gray’s analysis. See John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xii. Cf. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). The dispute surrounding the so-called culture wars in the United States is but one manifestation of this intergroup struggle. Because it involves competing group efforts to control both the official stories about the American founding and the very conceptualization of what it means to be an American, this culture war has become the focus of considerable political as well as intellectual contestation. See, for example, Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All (New York: Penguin Books, 1998); and Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), 254. Cf. Lucas Swaine, The Liberal Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 65–9. The great virtue of Rawls’s notion of an overlapping consensus is that it does not require such commonality. (See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 164–8.) Rawls’s notion of an overlapping consensus, however, still requires a degree of moral convergence that supports acceptance of the constitutional essentials of his liberal regime, and this too is thrown into doubt by the fact of pluralism. Practical liberalism endeavors to overcome this problem by conceptualizing a convergence on a political morality that is driven by prudential rather than moral concerns.

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Index Ackerman, B., 184, 190 Al-Hibri, A. Y., 62, 64, 183 allocational rivalries, 10, 66, 106, 150 Amish, 61, 115 anarchy, 7, 8, 11 Appiah, K. A., 178, 185, 189 Aristotle, 16, 19, 173, 174 audience, problem of, 86 authority, 29, 30, 90, 91, 122, 145 of the state, 33, 42, 57, 82, 89, 107, 124, 170 autonomy cultural, 58, 83, 86 individual, 20, 24, 58–61, 129, 135, 145–7, 153, 177 see also group autonomy bad moral faith, 73, 74 Baier, K., 39–43, 45–7, 54, 56, 68–72, 99, 121, 181, 185 Bailyn, B., 189 balance, problem of, 80–3, 87, 88, 92, 101–5, 119, 127, 133 Barber, B., 191 Barry, B., 178, 194 Benhabib, S., 133–5, 138–47, 152, 153, 184, 185, 187, 191–3 Berlin, I., 51, 182 Boorstin, D., 189 Boy Scouts of American v. Dale, 185 Brandt, R., 180 Brown, W. M., 190

Canovan, M., 107, 188, 189 Carens, J., 186, 190 Carr, C. L., 177, 178, 181–7, 190, 193–5 citizenship, 79, 80, 94, 101 civic education, 109, 110 civic identity, 13, 14, 78, 79, 87, 119, 121 see also National identity; political identity civic nationalism, 107, 109, 110, 114, 119, 125, 127, 128, 161 language and, 111–14 civil association, 7–17 end of, 92, 122 theory of, 79, 84–6, 89, 149, 150, 162, 163, 175 civil disobedience, 190 civility, 97–9, 125 civil union, 12–15, 80, 82, 92, 101, 102, 109, 121, 126 clitoridectomy, 59, 60, 64, 73 coercion, 158 common culture, 166 common good, 39 community, 78, 87–9 of communities, 79, 82, 103, 114 of discourse, 137 loose federation and, 83 nationality and, 106 political, 103, 104, 109, 126, 127 polity and, 92, 97 of sentiment, 102

198

computational morality, 48 conflict, 92, 97, 148, 150, 156–61, 166, 170, 171, 173 moral, 74, see also intergroup conflict Connolly, W. E., 194 conscience, 84–6, 93–5, 97 freedom of, 95 consent, 19, 21, 26, 30–3, 55, 59 consent requirement, 20, 21, 27–9, 31, 33, 34, 54–6, 64, 77, 94, 144 cooperation, 98, 120–2, 126, 160, 162, 167 coordination problems, 9–13, 25, 106, 111, 112, 134, 135, 143, 188 Crowder, G., 187 cultural essentialism, 144 culture defense, 60–4, 177, 183 culture wars, 119, 171 Dahl, R., 191 Das, V., 193 deference, 92, 96, 106, 109, 122–5, 130, 150 De George, R. T., 180 deliberative discourse, 132 De Marneffe, P., 184 democracy, 129–37 deliberative, 15, 105, 111, 112, 119, 131, 135–41 intragroup politics and, 144–50 liberal polity and, 124–8 representative, 131 discourse ethics, 138 distributive justice, 10, 123 see also justice; social justice diversity, 80, 82–4, 86, 127 Dworkin, R., 98, 111, 187, 188 Edyvane, D., 126, 185, 191 Elster, J., 191 equality, 1, 84, 95, 110, 139 exit, right of, 94, 122, 151, 187 expressive liberty, 25

INDEX

fact of flux, 7, 92, 101, 161 fairness, 51, 52, 74, 120, 165 feminism, 57–61, 63, 64, 73, 75, 80, 93 Figgis, J. N., 79, 82, 185 Firth, R., 180 Flathman, R. E., 180, 194 Fortuna, 7 freedom, 24, 40 see also group freedom free speech, 94, 96, 110, 152 Fuchs, L., 186 Galston, W., 4, 24–7, 32, 177, 179, 180, 186 Gauthier, D., 181 Gewirth, A., 181 Gilbert, P., 127, 188, 191 Gilman, S., 62–4, 183 Gitlin, T., 195 Glazer, N., 189 Golden rule, 38 Golding, M. P., 177, 183 Gray, J., 56, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161–7, 177, 180, 183, 193–5 Greenfeld, L., 191, 195 Grotius, H., 159 group autonomy, 14, 58, 69, 70, 73 democracy and, 130, 132, 135–8 intergroup politics and, 144, 145, 149–53 nationhood and, 112, 116, 122–4 pluralism and, 77, 79, 80–3, 88, 89 group dynamics, 91, 92, 141, 145, 146, 149, 151, 180 group essentialism, 147–9 group freedom, 8, 9, 77, 79 see also liberal principle group identity, 62, 93, 103, 116, 119, 172 polity and, 74, 79, 80 group rights, 58–63, 112, 123

INDEX

groups notion of, 146–9 primary, 13, 15, 20, 57, 80, 87, 96, 99, 101, 102, 110, 117, 127, 150, 151, 172 group ways, 62, 66, 73, 79, 93, 94, 134, 136, 146, 151–3 Gutmann, A., 191, 192 Habermas, J., 138, 139, 191 Hampshire, S., 43–54, 57, 74, 96, 153, 177, 181, 182, 185, 193 Hare, R. M., 181 Herbert, S., 189 Higham, J., 189 Hobbes, 8, 19, 33, 34, 40, 42, 67–9, 149, 161, 168, 170, 180, 181, 193 Honig, B., 63, 64, 183 human rights, 78 human sacrifice, 25 Hume’s fallacy, 41 Huntington, S. P., 177, 195 identity politics, 78, 149 Ignatieff, M., 188 immigration, 3 intergroup conflict democracy and, 130, 142, 143, 148–51, 153 liberal institutions and, 163–5, 169 morality and, 65–70 nature of, 6, 7, 9–11, 13 political unity and, 74, 75, 78, 79, 91, 92 rationality and, 170–5 see also conflict jurisdiction problems, 9, 11, 13, 14, 143 justice, 51, 52, 56, 57, 67, 74, 75, 82, 84, 88, 142, 161 global, 78 procedural, 53, 54 see also distributive justice; social justice

199

Kallen, H., 114, 115, 189 Kant, 1, 27, 70, 147, 170, 181 Keynes, J. M., 168 Kompridis, N., 192 Kukathas, C., 15, 82–6, 88–94, 97, 98, 113, 119, 144, 178, 186, 187, 189, 192 Kymlicka, W., 58, 177, 178, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189 Ladd, J., 180 Larmore, C., 81, 184, 186 Levine, K. L., 177, 183 liberal individualism, 4, 20, 139 liberalism, 15, 16, 23, 24, 35, 59, 88, 129, 130, 155, 157, 162, 163, 172 classical, 1, 11 as comprehensive doctrine, 23–5 the good and, 2 political, 133, 179, 182 see also moral liberalism; practical liberalism liberal polity deliberative democracy and, 123–8 justness of, 24–7 nationhood and, 101–6 pluralism and, 79–83 practical liberalism and, 11–15 unity of, 86–93 liberal principle civility and, 96–8 democratic character of, 122–4 derivation of, 8–15 morality and, 69–72 liberal project, 156 liberal tradition, 1, 4, 108 Locke, J., 22, 23, 27, 33, 35, 159, 179 loyalty, 122, 123, 125 MacGilvray, E., 191, 192 Machiavelli, 7, 49, 157, 182 MacIntyre, A., 193, 194 Mackie, J. L., 181 majority tyranny, 138, 142, 143 Margalit, A., 7, 115, 178, 189

200

methodological individualism, 170 Miller, D., 15, 105–8, 110–119, 125, 126, 178, 185, 187–9, 192 Mill, J. S., 95 minority cultures, 58, 59 modus vivendi, 6, 7, 13, 66, 71, 77, 78, 82, 86, 90, 101, 102, 111, 158, 161–5, 169, 173, 194 moral foundationalism, 24, 56, 84, 85, 88, 99, 139, 156, 160, 171 morality, 51, 58, 61, 69, 75, 82, 84, 96, 163 associative, 121 conceptions of, 38 conflict and, 40, 42, 44, 68, 69 harm and, 39 manners and, 43–8 politics and, 31–7 private and public, 48–52, 127 reversibility and, 39 social norms and, 43, 44 universality and, 47, 48 virtue and, 48–54, 65, 66, 96 moral law, 47, 48, 52, 72, 170 moral liberalism, 7, 20, 22, 24, 25, 33, 55, 56, 72, 83–6, 94, 139, 155–7, 168 see also liberalism, practical liberalism moral philosophy, 1, 27, 38, 46, 56, 70, 157, 164, 170 political legitimacy and, 30–5 political theory and, 17–22 moral pluralism, 50, 51, 54 see also pluralism; value pluralism moral point of view, 38–43, 46, 47, 60, 69–72, 75, 121 moral principle, 6, 46 moral rules, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49 mores, 38

INDEX

Mozert v. Hawkins County, Tennessee, 185 multiculturalism, 4, 22, 57–61, 64, 144, 145, 149, 172, 183 national identity, 108, 109, 117, 161 nationalism, 103, 114, 115, 118, 127, 128 nationality, 106, 107, 113, 116, 119, 161, 166 nationhood, 15, 79, 104–11, 114, 116, 126 natural law theory, 47, 54, 70 natural rights, 22, 24 neutrality of the state, 6, 65 normative rivalries, 9, 66, 68–74, 96, 101–3, 113, 121, 144, 148–50, 164, 166, 167, 173 Nozick, R., 178 Nussbaum, M., 191 Okin, S. M., 57–64, 183 oppression, 7, 8, 11, 19, 20, 27, 28, 62–4, 69, 117, 118, 145, 158 Orwell, G., 29, 112, 113 overlapping consensus, 24, 30, 56, 109 Parekh, B., 177, 178, 193 patriotism, 122 Perry, M. J., 184 Plato, 1, 174 pluralism fact of, 2–6 morality and, 50–1 nationalism and, 111–19 political legitimacy, and, 20–4 political unity and, 81–3 problem of, 16, 144, 145; see also moral pluralism; value pluralism pluralist polities, 9, 13, 22, 27, 30, 34, 55, 67, 71, 72, 90, 105, 115, 126, 153, 155, 166, 167, 171 political argument, 174 political discourse, 132–4, 143

INDEX

political identity, 107, 125 political institutions, 164–7 political legitimacy: loose linkage and, 81–85; morality and, 19–31; normative conflict and, 64–68; normative discourse and, 139–44; political power and, 28–34, 52–55, 86 political morality, 8, 15, 27, 43, 50, 56, 57, 70–4, 91, 92, 96–8, 101–3, 106, 111, 113, 127, 144, 148, 153, 160, 166, 169 political realism, 27, 31, 32, 34, 42, 49, 52, 56, 162 political stability, 5, 14, 19, 32–4, 55–7, 64, 70–9, 88, 98, 102, 103, 105, 121, 125, 159–62, 175 political unity, 31–3, 70, 71, 78–83, 87–99, 103, 118, 161, 167–9 politics of principle, 8, 16, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 129–35, 140, 150, 153, 157–64, 167, 174 politics of process, 130, 132, 135, 136, 140, 153, 158, 160, 167, 173, 174 polygamy, 4, 59, 60, 64, 73 postmodernism, 16 practical liberalism civic nationalism and, 118–25 democracy and, 132–8 group autonomy and, 150–4 history and, 167–73 idea of, 5–16 justice and, 160–4 morality and, 69–75 nationhood and, 101–3 pluralism and, 110–114 political legitimacy and, 77–83 primary goods, 10 prudence, 41–3, 46, 50, 69, 72–7, 81, 82, 99, 102, 155, 165, 170, 172, 174, 190 public reason, 133, 134 Pufendorf, S., 170, 180, 181, 182

201

rationality, 155–7, 172 Rawls, J., 10, 15, 17, 21–4, 33, 56, 72, 133–5, 159, 174, 178–80, 182, 184, 185, 190, 191, 194, 195 republicanism, 127 Richman, R., 190 Rousseau, J. -J., 71, 132 Scanlon, T. M., 190 Schlesinger, Jr., A. M., 189 Seidler, M. J., 182, 195 Shah Bano Case, 141–3, 148, 193 Shapiro, I., 190 Simon, R. L., 190 Sinopoli, R. C., 184 Smith, A. D., 188 Smith, R., 188, 189 sociability, 43 social goods, 9, 10, 29, 79, 124, 134 social justice, 1, 6, 10, 34, 55, 71, 72, 75, 77, 82–4, 89, 101, 105, 109, 111, 112, 125, 126, 129, 130, 134, 135, 143, 144, 152 civic nationalism and, 119–24, 161 liberal polity and, 162–70 political legitimacy and, 21–8 political unity and, 92–9 see also justice social peace, 5–7, 12–14, 19, 70, 77, 88, 103, 105, 121, 159, 160, 162–5, 170, 175 social rationality, 25 sovereign jurisdiction, 78 Spinner-Halev, J., 83, 89–92, 177, 186 statecraft, 71 Steinberg, S., 195 stoicism, 47 Stout, J., 191, 193 Swaine, L., 81, 94, 95, 186, 187, 195 Taylor, C., 178, 188, 189, 193 terrorism, 30 Thompson, D., 191, 192

202

Thucydides, 139, 192 Tocqueville, A. de., 40, 181 tolerance, 9, 54, 79, 158 see also toleration tolerance problems, 9, 11, 13, 106, 111, 112, 134, 135, 188 toleration, 9, 23, 24, 59, 73, 83, 88–90, 93, 106, 109, 123–5, 128, 130, 152, 153, 160 burden of, 9, 130 as a feature of liberalism, 73, 81, 82, 92, 96, 122, 150 treaties, 90, 161, 162 trust, 162 value pluralism, 155, 156, 163 See also Moral pluralism; pluralism

INDEX

Village of Skokie v. National Socialist Party of America, 185 Walzer, M., 114, 115, 189, 190 warfare, conditions of, 29, 31, 32, 67–9, 81, 157, 161 Weber, M., 102 White, M., 155–8, 161, 167, 193–5 Williams, B., 17–23, 25–34, 47, 52, 55, 56, 61, 66, 75, 82, 86, 129, 145, 160, 164, 177–80, 182, 191 Winch, P., 180 Wittgenstein, L., 114, 147, 193 Wolfe, A., 195 women’s rights, 59, 60, 140–4 Young, I. M., 183