Acknowledgments ix Introduction xiii CHAPTER ONE Political Liberalism 3 Motivational Foundations 3 Neutrality of Effect 10 The Ethical Culture of Political Liberalism 12 CHAPTER TWO The Boundaries of Political Theory 17 Alphabet People 17 Two Kinds of Cultural Defeaters 20 Free Erosion 26 Liberal Theory and the Doctrine of Double Effect 33 CHAPTER THREE Liberal Nonpublic Reason 40 The Limits of Justice 40 The Personal Uses of Public Reason 42 The Machinery of Nonpublic Virtue 45 Answering the Uneasy Citizens 55 CHAPTER FOUR Citizenship: Justice or Well-Being? 57 The Derivative Ideal 57 From Civic Humanism to Political Liberalism 61 A Different Approach 67 CHAPTER FIVE The Formative Project 73 The Substantive Ideal 73 Moral Development and Liberal Individuation 79 Rethinking Civic Education 85 Back to Tennessee 91 The Tax-Flattening Principle 100 Mind the Gap 105 CHAPTER SIX High Liberalism 108 The Intuitive Argument 108 Feudalism or Medievalism? 110 The Idea of Society 114 The Original Position and Cost-Free Guarantees 116 Liberalism beyond Justice 124 CONCLUSION 126 Notes 129 Bibliography 151 Index 161
This is a daring, inventive, and engagingly written book. Tomasi escapes the current liberal fixation with justice and legitimacy by asking searching questions about how truly good lives can be led under a just liberal regime. His answers will be controversial, but they command our attention because they test the very limits of the liberal tradition. -- Eamonn Callan, Stanford University This book raises important questions about the relation between justice and a fuller account of what gives meaning and value to life. Tomasi's argument asks liberals to become aware of the consequences of politics guided by liberal justice for different ways of life, and when possible to take responsibility for those consequences. This book challenges widely held understandings of liberalism and is sure to spark a fruitful debate. -- William A. Galston, Maryland School of Public Affairs Liberalism, as Tomasi conceives it, holds that moral questions are not always questions of justice, and moral answers need not and sometimes cannot take the form of building further guarantees into our institutions of political governance. For the sake of liberalism, Tomasi argues, we need to leave High Liberalism behind. A truly unsettling book, but also an admirable and much-needed book. -- David Schmidtz, University of Arizona
John Tomasi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His work has appeared in many leading journals, including Political Theory, Ethics, and The Journal of Philosophy.
"Tomasi insists that if political liberalism is to fulfill its aims its content must be revised to accommodate citizens who hold diverse but reasonable ethical commitments. His book constitutes a provocative challenge to much of the received wisdom about the content and place of justice within liberal thought. It will be read with interest by political and ethical liberals alike."--Matthew Clayton, Political Studies
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