Liberal Pluralism
The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice
by William A. Galston
Cambridge University Press, 152 pp., $19


AMONG ACADEMIC LIBERALS and professional political theorists, William Galston is exemplary. In several fine books, he has undertaken extensive engagement with the work of his contemporaries. A professor at the University of Maryland, he is a good citizen of his discipline, bridging the divide between the philosophically and empirically oriented students of politics, regularly attending workshops and conferences, and commenting generously on the work of others. He has long been engaged in national politics, working as John Anderson's speechwriter in 1980, helping found the Democratic Leadership Council in the mid-1980s, and serving as deputy assistant for domestic policy during the first Clinton administration. And now, with his new book "Liberal Pluralism," he has distilled more than two decades of thinking about liberalism and its implications.

But "Liberal Pluralism," it must be said, is also marked by the distinctive limitations of academic liberalism and professional political theory--and here, too, Galston is exemplary.

Perhaps the best way to understand "Liberal Pluralism" is to note that it extends an approach Galston systematically laid out in 1991 with a volume called "Liberal Purposes," where he synthesized a great deal of scholarly writing by academic liberals and their critics (mostly critics of the left). His synthesis was strikingly informed by a teaching he traced back through Tocqueville to classical political philosophy: Every regime--liberal democracy no less than monarchy or aristocracy or, for that matter, the various forms of totalitarianism--inflects the beliefs, practices, and institutions that live under it.

Galston's appreciation of what he called the "regime effect" gave his book an unusual edge. He wrote as an enthusiastic and partisan liberal, confident that government had an indispensable role to play in caring for the poor and vulnerable, yet concerned about the need to guard against liberal democracy's libertine and radically egalitarian tendencies. "Liberal Purposes" stood to academic liberalism as the Democratic Leadership Council at the time stood to the rest of the Democratic party. The goal for both was to defend a more centrist vision.

For more than a generation, the term "liberal" among professors of political theory has been reserved for those who toil in the paradigm established by the 1971 publication of John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice." Many a career has been made elaborating the doctrines set forth in Rawls's seminal work, which provided a highly abstract justification for a state devoted to protecting certain basic, individual rights while engaging in extensive redistribution of wealth. When Galston wrote "Liberal Purposes," the only widely available criticism of this Rawlsian liberalism was communitarian--and the communitarian critics took the Rawlsians to task for supposing that individuals are separate and self-sufficient, without intrinsic ties to other individuals or associations, and free of unchosen duties and transcendent moral principles.



GALSTON BELIEVED that the communitarians brought to light genuine shortcomings in Rawlsian liberalism, but he also held that their critique was overdrawn and their conclusions misguided. Yes, the Rawlsians trivialized critical dimensions of moral and political life. Yes, they proclaimed as truths of reason what were actually tendentious views of the state's redistributive role. But, Galston argued, genuine liberalism was not limited to Rawlsian liberalism. Properly conceived, liberalism could give an account of the goods of community and purposes of the state that could meet valid communitarian criticisms while preserving liberalism's core commitments to individual freedom and human equality, which in one way or another most communitarian critics implicitly affirmed.
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