John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993) is in the background throughout this book as the best available theory of the liberal state and as the natural starting point for any critique and reconstruction of contemporary liberalism. Like Rawls, Frohock believes that liberal states must face up to the demands of pluralism and accommodate, in their “governing language,” the multiple interpretations of the good that thrive in liberal societies. Unlike Rawls, Frohock rejects procedural solutions to the problem of pluralism. “Merit” forms of public reason that attempt to pare away from deliberation everything but what can be considered the “merit” of the particular political issue under debate fail because political disputes under conditions of pluralism are indeterminant. Some disputes, such as those between prochoice and prolife in the abortion controversy, stem from different ways of legitimately interpreting key terms such as “person,” “life,” and “harm.” Even advocates on both sides who wish to reach an agreement and who share the same moral and political language differ irreconcilably on their interpretations of these terms because of their different life experiences. Deliberative breakdowns are even more dramatic in cases where advocates do not even share the same conceptual language, as in the dispute between health-care professionals committed to biomedical models of thought and Christian Scientists who reject that model in favor of religious healing. Neither debate will be resolved by carefully sifting evidence and weighing the merits of competing arguments.

One of Frohock's targets is Rawls's attempt to distinguish, for the purposes of state action, comprehensive moral arguments from political claims. Like Gutmann and Thompson, whose very closely related work, Democracy and Disagreement (1996), he unfortunately does not engage, Frohock believes that moral disagreement is a legitimate feature of politics. In the abortion and religious healing cases there is no feasible way to distinguish the moral from the political, so suffused are the political issues in the moral experience of the disputants. Frohock is right to remark, “It is hard to see where the moral and political can be demarcated as these matters enter public space. Bracketing moral beliefs in these cases seems to remove the political dimensions also” (pp. 58–9). And he is right to point out the historically close connections between the languages of law, politics, and morality. It is probably necessary to admit, as Frohock encourages, that the state is “clearly a kind of moral undertaking” (p. 57). Harder to reach, at least without more argument, is Frohock's conclusion that when the state steps in to mandate lifesaving medical treatment for a child of Christian Scientist parents, it is rejecting the idea that prayer is a form of healing, and that when it permits the parents to decline such treatment the state is endorsing prayer as healing. Because officials and citizens in liberal states recognize the complicated trade-offs in cases like these, policy settlements simply do not place the state in one moral corner or another.

Under what conditions, then, can we expect legitimate resolution, if only temporary, for the long-term moral disagreements that mark our sharpest political debates? Frohock believes that closer attention to the narratives that shape individual lives is part of the answer. “Narrative conceptions of the self can also provide stories that summon common human experiences, and these stories may mediate the strong pluralism of liberal settings” (p. 100). Stories help unify selves and link people together through overarching themes. Frohock points out that the “great narratives of political experience can forge unity in describing and identifying the roles of persons in a universal political culture,” even though they often “relax literal truth in favor of metaphor, symbols of various types, myths even” (p. 105). This emphasis on narratives, and how they integrate the social and the highly personal, is an important addition to the literature on deliberative democracy, which tends to overemphasize the power of rational discourse in forging agreement between persons with divergent interests or values. Frohock leaves open many important questions about how, exactly, narratives challenge our “understandings of evidence, inference and public space” (p. 106). The ideal of public reason seeks the “peculiar merger of self and process” found in a good conversation and hopes to absorb individuals “into the talk that uses and crafts collective arrangements” (p. 113). This formulation is suggestive and warrants closer analysis of the constraints on and the risks of such an ideal under conditions of normal politics, where some narratives have been historically marginalized and others given unchosen and unreflective dominance.

Another solution to the problem of moral disagreement is mediation: “Connections among persons and outcomes in deliberative procedures often require third parties, figures who are to some degree outside of the relationships among persons seeking a collective outcome but are vital to a successful outcome” (p. 203). Mediators can “move the conversation to a deeper inquiry” that may motivate personal changes and help resolve disputes (p. 203). Mediation, therefore, can be “a powerful source of collective experience” (p. 204). The ideal of context-oriented, nonadversarial, minimally hierarchical mediation is the book's strongest positive contribution to research on public deliberation, which has much to learn from the role mediators play in actual contexts of conflict resolution. Frohock exemplifies mediation with the bioethics deliberations of hospital ethics committees, which seek to resolve disputes over treatment plans between patients and health-care workers. This well-chosen example shows how complex mediation is, however, and how vulnerable to the institutional context in which it is embedded. Frohock notes that bioethics mediation is limited by the traditional purposes of medicine—keeping people alive—and by legal constraints, but he pays less attention to the fact that this mediation is also limited by an institutional context that privileges the biomedical model above other “narratives” and grants the physician far more discretionary power than any other participant in mediation. Further, Frohock might have gone farther in discussing the great demands placed on mediators. In the case of medicine the bioethics consultant must be familiar with the language of medicine and the pluralistic languages of patients, must be attentive to the highly personal elements of patient care as well as their social dimensions, and must be aware of legal constraints on patient and physician decision. Such demands are not unique to mediators in medicine. Very similar demands are faced by mediators in the criminal justice domain, such as those who work in victim–offender mediation. Such complexity suggests that mediation may best be seen not as an individual role, as Frohock implies, but rather as something that requires a good deal of structural support.

A methodological merit of this work is its attention to ground-level cases of moral disagreement. Especially attractive is the use of examples drawn from the medical domain, with which Frohock is exceptionally well acquainted. This domain has had a flourishing normative discourse for more than three decades. Political theorists can gain much from paying more attention to the role of ethics consulation and the many political aspects of bioethics discourse in hospitals, clinics, and wider public arenas. Methodological merits and suggestive discussions of narrative and mediation aside, however, the book is difficult to recommend to someone with only a general interest in political theory because Frohock begins in media res with intricate discussions that demand a strong background in contemporary debates over liberalism. The book offers more to those with particular interests in liberalism and in public deliberation, though the latter audience will miss the wide and deep engagement with both critics and advocates of deliberative democracy that is needed at this stage of the research program.