Aurelian Craiutu’s book is an exploration, and a cautious defense, of the virtue of moderation. The author has in mind a political outlook rather different from conservatism, skepticism, or the centrist disposition to plump for the middle way. For Craiutu, the moderate can be a spirited defender of controversial views when the situation demands it. What defines the moderate is not so much the unwillingness to take a stand as the willingness to take it in a certain way: to question oneself, to avoid Manichean simplifications and ideological rigidities, to engage in dialogue with adversaries, and to resist the temptation of ethical monism (pp. 5, 20 ff.).

More a sensibility than a defined body of commitments, moderation takes different forms in different contexts. Moderates have worn many “masks” over time (p. 9), and the challenge for the scholar is to convey the similarities. Craiutu does this through a series of sympathetic profiles of (white, male) thinkers associated with the virtue in question—Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, Michael Oakeshott, and Adam Michnik. Each of these faces of moderation, as he sees them, is the subject of a chapter that explores the contours and context of their political outlook. The book is framed by two more theoretical chapters that engage more abstractly with the concept of moderation, the methodological challenges of the project, and—very much in the spirit of moderation—the weaknesses to which the outlook may be prone (p. 233).

The author’s selection of interlocutors underlines his contention that moderation is not to be assigned to any one ideological tradition. Bobbio and Oakeshott are presented as figures of the Left and Right respectively, and Berlin and Aron as thinkers “in the middle” (p. 10). Moderation, it seems, is a virtue that can be displayed across the political spectrum, and—perhaps more intriguingly—is compatible with the possibility of placing an individual thereon. Liberalism is the category one might instinctively associate with several of these figures, but Craiutu describes moderation and liberalism as not quite the same. Moderates do not see freedom as the first value, any more than equality. Indeed, they are reluctant to see any value as prior to all others, preferring instead to set their priorities according to context (see e.g. p. 158). Nor does moderation fit well with any “-ism,” if this means a doctrine that can be systematized and written down. It is a virtue displayed in practice—an art, as the subtitle has it.

One of the challenges of Faces of Moderation is how to write theoretically about a practical virtue, and the choice of a series of individual portraits is an intelligent response. It is surprising nonetheless that much of the focus is on thinkers—on individuals who thought and wrote about politics, rather than people embroiled in politics in other ways. Certainly, interventions in public debate demand the exercise of judgment and can be a form of political action, and some of Craiutu’s interlocutors did more than just this. But one wonders whether the art of moderation is not practiced most critically in other places—by political representatives, decision makers, constitutional drafters, or even just street-level bureaucrats. It would be interesting to think further about what moderation entails in these practical settings. It would be worthwhile to explore whether moderation can be exercised collectively, or whether—as the structure of the book might suggest—it is the stuff of individuals acting alone. And what might it mean for the practices of ordinary citizens little versed in the skills of public deliberation? Craiutu’s is a study primarily of what eloquent individuals have had to say about moderation, and how they have spoken and written in moderate ways.

As something other than an ideology or doctrine of beliefs, moderation resists being pinned down substantively. We are dealing with a large space of possible opinion, to which anything short of open violence can probably be credibly ascribed. The moderate voice, willing to take a stand but “without going to extremes and without displaying excessive zeal” (p. 21), is one that can say many things. Does that mean moderation is just in the eye of the beholder? Clearly, one suspicion will be that sometimes it is just a label by which to dignify a stance with which one agrees. (Indeed, if one does not already have some sympathy with the stance, perhaps it will always have a touch of the extreme and the zealous about it.) How does one avoid the notion of moderation becoming the kind of ideological weapon from which its adherents would presumably recoil? And what resources does one have to spot the impostors—those who adopt the moderate pose, but who have an agenda that is anything but? Such challenges are surely not unique to the study of moderation, but are more visible in the light of the claims made.

Another point of interest concerns the relation between moderates and others. Both conceptually and politically, one may wonder whether the virtue of moderation is not somehow dependent, even parasitic, on the existence of immoderation. Craiutu’s moderates all find themselves in the cross fire of contending opinion, the existence of which is the condition of their capacity to be moderate. Like Berlin, they find themselves inclined to step back from “the conflict of ideas and principles” (p. 109) that others intemperately engage in, and to look for the right equilibrium. The moderates come last to the feast, just in time to help clear up the mess.

Conceptually, this suggests that not everyone can be a moderate, certainly not all of the time—those with firmer commitments must always be there first (a point Craiutu acknowledges in passing; see pp. 21, 99). Politically, it suggests that moderation is a reactive position, always responding to tendencies and events initiated by others. In the darker times, is this sufficient to achieve a defensible society? Is it sufficient even to achieve just the minimum conditions of stability that the moderate is likely to value? If, as a mediating and pragmatic figure, the moderate denies him- or herself a self-standing intellectual framework of diagnosis and prognosis for society’s ills, preferring instead to trim in reaction to the views of others, what hope does he or she have to stand tall in the winds of prevailing opinion? Is it the fate of the moderate—as the case of Michnik might suggest—to oppose one ideological system only to end up inadvertently doing the work of another?

Dependent as moderates are on the commitments of others, there seem to be some substantive commitments to which they are drawn: among others, the rule of law, the separation of powers, political pluralism, the channeling of disagreement, and toleration. What do moderates do in a society in which these qualities are missing or underdeveloped? Must they become politically active on their behalf, and thus turn toward immoderation? Craiutu acknowledges that “sometimes we may even need to abandon moderation for a while” (p. 18; cf. p. 234). But are the circumstances that demand this really the exception, or part of the normal conditions of politics? Can the consistent, uncompromising pursuit of such commitments really be no more than a temporary stance, adopted just “for a while”?

Today’s political situation puts an interesting spin on these questions. The figures of moderation that loom large in the book are all figures of the twentieth century, concentrated in the Cold War period. Though Craiutu has explored themes of moderation in earlier periods elsewhere in his research, it is worth asking whether his thoughts on moderation have a particular affinity with the “age of extremes.” For the most part, his interlocutors are preoccupied in some way with communism and its adversaries. Moderation is their response to an era of clearly defined ideologies and dichotomies. How does the same outlook fare in the contemporary world, where the contours of opinion are arguably more irregular, and where a form of technocratic centrism has held sway until recently? Can a dominant neoliberalism be tempered with moderation in the same way that a standoff between communism and libertarianism might be? Or if the “alt-Right” now musters a serious challenge to neoliberalism in the Western world, is it enough simply to moderate between the two? Could it be that the present moment is one in which moderation is much less a virtue than it might have been in the Cold War context?

Craiutu writes thoughtfully and compellingly about a sensibility that is commonly overlooked and yet surely deserves its place. Nuanced and unwilling to overstate its case, the book is an exhibition of moderation in political theory. But is moderation the virtue that contemporary politics lacks most?