Thick Moralities, Thin Politics: Social Integration Across Communities of Belief (review)

How do communities with deeply held moral beliefs enter the public sphere and confront other communities with equally deep but antithetical beliefs? Can they do so in a manner that avoids divisive cultural battles or political impasses that make impossible the formulation of public policies? Can we speak about the art of compromise in multicultural societies? These are the questions that Benjamin Gregg wrestles with and seeks to provide a novel answer to in his erudite, far ranging and ambitious book. At the outset, he describes his approach as an "unusual form of political communitarianism" (p. 4) and later as "communitarianism among communities" (p. 11) and "communitarianism among strangers." (p. 54) While the thesis he advances is complex and multifarious, with numerous side channels winding through the text, at its most elemental it contends that what pluralist liberal democracies need to construct, as far as possible, is a politics devoid of the imprint of "thick moralities."

One way this is achieved is by avoiding direct confrontations between morally opposing viewpoints. But if avoidance is preferred to confrontation – contrary to Habermas's goal of seeking consensual agreement based on rational discourse in situations characterized by undistorted communication – Gregg's goal is far more modest: accommodation, rather than consensus, is what he is after. It's based on a view that communities embracing thick moralities tend to resist engaging in dialogues that call into question those deeply held beliefs.

A bevy of theoretical heavyweights is marshaled in support of his position; some are likely candidates, others are somewhat surprising entries. Thus, Gregg makes use of the usual cast of classic theorists – Marx, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Mead and Parsons. Among the contemporary theorists that have lead roles are Bourdieu, Garfinkel, Geertz, Giddens, Goffman, Habermas and Luhmann. Curiously for someone staking out a communitarian position, little attention is given to the work of Etzioni and other figures associated with the movement (aside from Bellah). Given the focus of the book, one might have thought that pragmatists such as Rorty and multicultural theorists such as Kymlicka would be accorded something more than cameo appearances. Gregg's use of all of them is highly selective and at times his particular interpretations are subject to question. Too often his excursions into exegesis divert attention from the main thrust of the book rather than adding an explanatory dimension to it. A politics predicated on normative thinness is made possible by mutual tolerance, which involves at the very least a capacity on the part of competent social members to engage in, borrowing the term from Giddens, "mutual knowledge" – by which is meant a generalized capacity to imagine the worldview of the other. Furthermore, such a politics relies on the capacity of individuals to act autonomously and on the protections created by proceduralism. Underlying these ways of establishing normative thinness is the necessity of certain core values shared by all participants in the public sphere. Gregg is somewhat evasive about what values are essential and perhaps part of American values but not inherently necessary for thin politics to prevail.

An odd feature of this book is that so little attention is devoted to those "dogmatic communities" that, by claiming that their worldview has a universal validity that is not subject to question or doubt, resist being incorporated into a political sphere characterized by normative thinness. Gregg states simply that they cannot be socially integrated. The question he does not really face up to is how others ought to relate to those holding illiberal views. Simply put, if the liberalism of thin politics requires a spirit of cooperation and a norm of reciprocity on the part of participants in the political sphere, how does such a polity respond to illiberal ideologues? Moreover, what happens if ideologues are in a position to shape procedures? How does one prevent what Gregg calls "agonistic pluralism" from degenerating into tragic fragmentation?

Even more curious is Gregg's failure to genuinely take up the question: what's...