The Yale University Press series Politics and Culture begins with the premise that self-government, the hallmark and glory of the United States, the West, and an expanding number of countries around the world, is ailing. Those who sense the ailment cannot agree on what it is, much less on how it is to be treated; and that disagreement, only deepening as time passes, is in fact part of the ailment. In the young twenty-first century, liberal democracy, that system that marries majority rule with individual rights, has entered a crisis of legitimacy. As practiced in recent decades, and as an international ordering principle, it has failed to deliver on its promises to growing, and increasingly diverse, numbers of mobilized and vocal people. The fate of liberal democracy would seem to be in the balance.
In the United States and across Europe, the discontented have multiplied, sorting themselves into political factions that are new, yet familiar too. Populisms of right and left, fed and channeled by new media, threaten to upend liberalism’s grand ambition to pull down all barriers to individual autonomy or emancipation. In recent decades, for example, liberalism has become allied with the forces of globalization and, in the process, has eroded barriers of national sovereignty with the free movement of goods, capital, and even people across national boundaries. This has generated all sorts of dislocations, most obviously in local economies and labor markets. Just as important, though, are cultural dislocations driven by the growing dominance of a secular, progressive cosmopolitanism that has acted like a solvent on local cultures. All of this carries disruptive political consequences on the left and on the right that have no obvious solutions. It is the absence of substantive political solutions that seem fair and just that explains why (among other reasons) such large swathes of the public are so restive.
William Galston is rightly known as one of the most astute political observers writing today. He is both a political theorist and a policy analyst and is equally at home in both worlds. In Anti-Pluralism he draws together a synthesis of philosophical insight, historical evidence, and empirical data in a cogent analysis of the complex difficulties facing liberal democracy in the early twenty-first century. Liberal democracy can survive its legitimation crisis, he argues, but its preservation requires its reform, and reformation requires reflection on what is to be preserved and what accretions and by-products of actually existing liberalism need to be shed. Readers of his previous books will recognize the fairness and judgment on display here. Any repair of the liberal project will require the kind of critical response Professor Galston mounts: he consults the sources, observes carefully, and proposes reforms large and small, listening throughout to all citizens, regardless of circumstance or conviction.
James Davison Hunter and
John M. Owen IV, Series Editors