In Democracy's Discontent, Michael Sandel argues for a revival of the republican tradition in order to counteract the pernicious effects of contemporary liberalism. As in his earlier work, Sandel charges that liberals who embrace the ideals of political neutrality and the unencumbered self are engaged in a self–subverting enterprise, for no society that lives by these ideals can sustain itself. Sandel is right to endorse the republican emphasis on forming citizens and cultivating civic virtues. By opposing liberalism as vigorously as he does, however, he engages in a self–subverting enterprise of his own. That is, Sandel is in danger of undercutting his position by threatening the liberal principles upon which he implicitly relies. This danger is greatest when he presses his case against the unencumbered self, when he appeals to the obligations of membership, and when he treats republicanism and liberalism as adversaries rather than allies.

I am grateful to Professor Dagger for his insightful critique. He brings out the continuities and differences between Democracy's Discontent and my earlier work with subtlety and care. He writes in defense of liberalism, but not without sympathy for many of the ideals I invoke in the name of republicanism—civic virtue, encumbered selves, obligations of membership, the formative project. In fact, his republican sympathies are so expansive that I found myself unsure at times whether I could identity a fundamental disagreement.

Professor Dagger's basic objection, as I understand it, is this: I overstate the opposition between liberalism and republicanism, between autonomy and civic virtue; in drawing these distinctions too sharply, I fail to acknowledge the elements of liberalism I implicitly affirm. Professor Dagger accepts the importance of civic virtue and the formative project. But he considers it a mistake to oppose liberalism as vigorously as I do, and “particularly wrong to oppose republicanism to liberalism.” Instead, he favors a “hybrid” of liberalism and republicanism that combines autonomy and civic virtue. Any republicanism worth defending must include “a commitment to liberal principles, such as tolerance, fair play, and respect for the rights of others.”

Whether liberalism and republicanism are compatible doctrines depends on how they are conceived. At a certain level of generality, there is no necessary conflict: the liberal tradition stands for toleration and individual rights, while the republican tradition stands for government by the people. Liberal rights support republican self rule by preventing the majority from oppressing the minority, while the republican emphasis on civic virtue restrains individuals from abusing their rights and ignoring the common good.

Michael Sandel's response to my critical essay is thoughtful, generous, and characteristically elegant. I am not the only one, I am sure, who will welcome this clarification of his views. Yet I am inclined to think that what he does not include in his response is as important as what he does.

What Professor Sandel's response does not include is any attempt to sort out, qualify, accept, or reject the criticisms advanced in the “Sandel and the Self” section of my essay. He says in his second sentence that I bring out “the continuities and differences between Democracy's Discontent and my earlier work with subtlety and care,” but he fails to note that most of those continuities concern the unencumbered self he attributes to liberalism. We are left to wonder, then, what he makes of the three charges that I bring against his account of this self: that he mistakes the point of the unencumbered self in Rawlsian liberalism; that he trades on a false dichotomy between the encumbered and the unencumbered self; and that he neglects to notice a distinction, implicit in his as much as in Rawls's thinking, between the self in the abstract, general sense and the self in the concrete, particular sense.

This article critically analyzes the work of Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer, three of the most important contemporary political philosophers writing on issues of multiculturalism. It uses the Rushdie affair, and each theorist's interpretation of it, as the basis for an immanent critique of “multicultural liberalism,” a theory defined by the dual commitment to cultural rights for minority groups and certain core liberal principles, defended in different ways by Kymlicka, Taylor, and Walzer. It is principally concerned with Kymlicka, whose work is one of the most influential attempts to respond to communitarian criticisms that “atomistic” liberalism is inhospitable to community and culture. The article argues that Kymlicka's defense of “multicultural citizenship” is deeply problematic from the perspective of the Rushdie affair. It then considers Taylor and Walzer similarly, as representatives of the communitarian strain of multicultural liberal argument, and likewise finds their positions unconvincing. The article concludes with the suggestion that the Rushdie affair points to a potentially unresolvable tension at the heart of all three attempts to defend multicultural liberalism.

For both John Stuart Mill and Wilhelm von Humboldt, self–development is a central value that shapes much of their respective political philosophies. Despite this shared value, however, Mill and Humboldt came to quite different political conclusions. Mill defends an activist state that helps establish the material and institutional prerequisites for self–development, while Humboldt argues for a highly restricted state that provides only security. This divergence is explained by a number of factors: variations in their conceptions of self–development itself; their different views of the empirical prerequisites of self–development; their different views of the state and its relation to society; and their views of the relation between “positive” and “negative” goods.

This article explores the federal judiciary's use of eighteenth–century social contract theory in United States v. Verdugo–Urquidez (494 US 259) to interpret the constitutional rhetoric of “the people” for our time. The principal version of social contract theory at play in Verdugo recalls a republican ideology which forms an old and volatile current in American political thought, an ideology which supports a far more exclusionary standard of membership in the nation than has obtained for most of this century, and which has important implications for the construction of political authority it is enlisted to support.

Transitions from dictatorship to democracy often raise the perplexing question of whether a new government may punish actions which, although reprehensible, were considered legal under the old regime. In these instances, the desire for condign punishment of evil acts confronts the principle that forbids retroactive criminal prosecutions. After German unification, problems of this type arose in trials of East German border guards for the use of deadly force at the Berlin Wall, along with prosecutions of military and civilian officials higher in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) chain of command. In this article, the author discusses these prosecutions and analyzes the response of the German courts to the difficult problems of retroactivity that the cases raise. In its concluding section, the article suggests that these cases may evoke issues concerning the legitimacy of the GDR that were the subject of bitter debates during Germany's divided past.