After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy. By Glen Newey. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 253p. $68.00.

Extract

This is a very smart book that comes to some very questionable conclusions. Glen Newey takes issue with contemporary liberal philosophy on two counts: Not only does it fail to address the “real world of politics,” but it actually aims at the suppression of politics. Included in the list of those guilty of suppressing politics and failing to provide “philosophical reflection on politics—at least not on politics as it is” (p. 15) are John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Brian Barry, Joseph Raz, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Will Kymlicka, Amy Gutmann, and others. Clearly, a great deal hangs on what Newey means by “politics as it is,” and I will say at the outset that I found his definition wholly unconvincing. But along the way, Newey says some very intelligent things about the leading lights of liberal political philosophy. The book has two layers. In the first, Newey takes up particular philosophical arguments embedded in various liberal theories. At this level he shows us his considerable analytic skills in carefully argued, if somewhat technical, investigations of philosophical weaknesses. So, for example, his discussion of moral internalism and its problems is very good, as is the discussion of neutralist side-constraint as an insufficient reason requirement. Anyone interested in really looking under the hood of contemporary liberal philosophy can get something out of this book. But when Newey moves to the second layer, he tries to tie all his various arguments together under one big claim: the rejection of politics claim, and this is problematic.