Public Integrity. By J. Patrick Dobel. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 260p. $38.00.

Abstract

Integrity is a shifty, furtive concept. Philosophers have had a hard time defining the idea because it raises a couple of recurrent perplexities. First, consider former Speaker Jim Wright's remark that "integrity is . . . the state or quality of being complete, undivided, [and] unbroken," or the Oxford English Dictionary connotation of an "unbroken state" of "material wholeness." The problem is that integrity, so understood, seems to leave no room for the possibility of individuals whose lives display any kind of self-critical revi- sion, changes in course, or discontinuities over historical time, or for those who compartmentalize, differentiate, and assume conflicting roles across social space; in other words, for all of us. We need, as Amelie Rorty has written ("Integ- rity: Political, not Psychological," in Alan Montefiore and David Vines, eds., Integrity in the Public and Private Domains, 1999), a far better account as to how and where "integration and integrity . . . coincide".