Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism. By Peter Berkowitz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 235p. $27.95

Kenneth L. Grasso

American Political Science Review, 2001, vol. 95, issue 1, 201-202

Abstract: "For quite a while," Peter Berkowitz notes, "leading aca- demic liberals and their best-known critics formed an unwit- ting alliance, promulgating the view that liberal political theory" ignores the whole subject of virtue and cultivation (p. 170). If that view is correct, this neglect not only would spawn "fatal theoretical lacunae" (p. 4) but also would raise serious doubts about liberalism's capacity to sustain the "qualities of mind and character" (p. 172) required for "the operation and maintenance" of "free and democratic institutions" (p. 6). In recent years, however, a new generation of liberals have challenged this widely held view. Thinkers such as William Galston and Stephen Macedo acknowledge that liberal re- gimes depend "upon a specific set of virtues," which "they do not automatically produce" (pp. 27­8). Their work points toward the "dependence" of liberal societies on "extraliberal and nongovernmental sources of virtue" (p. 28), such as "the family, religion and the array of associations in civil society" (p. 6). Simultaneously, they insist that "limited government is not the same as neutral government" (p. 173), and they affirm "that the liberal state, within bounds, ought to pursue liberal purposes" and, thus, "may, within limits, foster virtues" that serve these purposes (p. xii).

Date: 2001
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