The Practice of Liberal Pluralism

Extract

The Practice of Liberal Pluralism. By William A. Galston. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 216p. $65.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

This book seeks to defend the idea of value pluralism set out in William Galston's earlier Liberal Pluralism (2002) against the various criticisms to which it has been subjected, and to explain the ways that this kind of pluralism can be given practical political application. The first of these tasks is efficiently done (in the final section), and as well as offering Galston the chance to modify some previous overstatements of his position (for example, to tone down his criticism of the idea of personal autonomy), the book provides a useful summary of the current state of various philosophical controversies surrounding the politics of liberalism. However the real interest lies in his attempt to make pluralism a practical political doctrine in its own right. Here, his success is mixed. His argument is most persuasive when he is criticizing excessively “monistic” or, as he calls them, “totalist” conceptions of liberal politics. The problem is that these criticisms often appear unobjectionable precisely because they are only weakly connected to a distinctively pluralist alternative.