The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community (review)

Over the past two decades, political theory has been animated by a debate between liberals and communitarians over how to organize public life. The paradigmatic liberal position, articulated by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993), proposes that in order for citizens freely to choose their own beliefs, goals, and preferences, society should adopt "justice as fairness" as its organizing principle and government should remain neutral in adjudicating between competing (private) interpretations of the good life. Communitarians for their part take exception to liberalism's abstraction. They contend that liberalism presupposes an impoverished conception of the person and of the relationship between individuals and their social worlds. Communitarians like Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer argue that individuals derive their identities from complex social and familial relationships and that people are deeply embedded in these meaningful relationships antecedent to choice.

The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community enters the liberal- communitarian controversy by drawing attention to the new liberal thinkers of the late- nineteenth century. Because new liberal theory (as represented in works by T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, Bernard Bosanquet, and John Dewey) accommodates traditional liberal concerns for personal autonomy and political rights to versions of sociability, editors Avital Simhony and David Weinstein argue that it provides a powerful antidote to the "dualism" plaguing current political discourse. The essays collected here are written by prominent political historians and theorists who examine the central tenets of new liberal thought in relation to contemporary statements. The editors' introduction and Michael Freeden's opening essay together set the agenda by maintaining that welfare and collectivist themes are evident in the liberal tradition, not alien to it; consequently, liberal and communitarian concerns can be regarded as "compatible and mutually reinforcing" (12). The essays that follow support this position. Two contributions on the work of Green, one by Simhony and another by Rex Martin, explore the connection between Green's idea of the common good and his conception of rights as a form of social or mutual recognition. John Morrow's essay focuses on the complex relationship between private property, sociability, and public policy in new liberal thought. According to Morrow, new liberals regarded property rights as crucial to self and social development and deemed it the state's responsibility to secure rights to property for all members in order to "give reality to the idea of a liberal subject" (93). Essays by Alan Ryan and Andrew Vincent trace liberalism's legacy into the twentieth century: Ryan presents Dewey as linking British with North American strands of liberalism, and Vincent tracks the modulations of "active" and "passive" citizenship styles in Britain after the First World War.

The distracting lobbyism of the volume is a minor drawback. Simhony and Weinstein insist that new liberalism "transcends the discourse of dichotomies" characterizing the liberal-communitarian controversy (1) and that new liberalism is "invulnerable to communitarian criticisms" of state neutrality and therefore "not guilty" of most communitarian "charges" (13). From the perspective of political theory, however, it is not at all clear that such dichotomies can or need to be reconciled; nor is it clear in what sense new liberals self-consciously engaged today's communitarian concerns and could be invulnerable to its criticisms. In addition, the contributors to the volume often rehearse the editors' views and refer to the same sources.

But there is also much to recommend in this collection. For example, Simhony's rigorous essay on Green reassembles the idea of the common good from his writings (Green never provided a full account of it) and argues that the common good is not only central to Green's philosophy, but that the concept entered modern liberal thinking with his work. Green's good society involves what Simhony calls "an ethic of joint self...