Given the prominence of pluralist issues in contemporary public discourse—from ethno-cultural diversity to complex governance—the lack of a comprehensive history of twentieth-century debates on the topic is both a surprising and sorry omission. Yet, given the opaque meaning and restlessly shifting usage of the concept, it is little wonder no one has ventured to undertake such an endeavor. The relatively slim volume Modern Pluralism edited by Mark Bevir finally makes this move by offering a history of twentieth-century pluralist thinking (constrained to Anglo-American debates), thus putting some tentative order into the life story of a concept by now heavily over-burdened with multiple political agendas and diverse intellectual aspirations. In a lucid design of three time periods spanning from 1880 to 2010, the eleven contributors chart the life-course of three widespread patterns of thought—liberalism, socialism, and empirical political science. Their contributions trace the courses by which these traditions have fostered, respectively (1) the greater separation of political and religious spheres, (2) the promotion of the political role of trade unions and the rise of corporatism, and (3) the enhanced legitimacy of interest groups in democratic government, thus giving shape to the structured complexity of our contemporary societies. Mercifully, the authors do not proffer a conceptual clarification of the notion of pluralism. It is their chosen theoretical framework of radical historicism, and apparently an intellectual credo uniting the authors, that prevents them from such a futile exercise. The understandings of pluralism developed within the three reviewed traditions are treated as pragmatic concepts—concepts that find their content as well as historical significance within specific intellectual and political struggles. Herein resides the lasting value of the book: As they steer away from a master narrative on pluralism and link intellectual history to social, economic and political history, the authors shed light on the dilemmas in response to which the distinct traditions of pluralism have transformed, as well as mutually influenced one another.

Despite the authors' avowed intent to avoid postulating a core set of beliefs as defining pluralism, a permeating link does appear among the nine narratives composing the collection. This link is supplied by a tacit storyline one can discern with little effort—the storyline of the emancipatory, rather than politically constitutive, function the various intellectual traditions of pluralism have performed, in which they have been united by a shared suspicion of allegedly homogenous societies and states, and have thus continuously supplied an antidote to the oppressive effects of institutionalized power. The birth of modern pluralism is traced back to the disenchantment with modernity, namely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century disillusionment with the promise of rational progress in the wake of World War I. Perspectives of pluralism were then actuated by dissatisfaction with totalizing concepts of the state, defined by principles that had held sway in academic discourse through the dominance of developmental historicism in the preceding century. Thus, at its very inception, modern pluralism appears to be marked by an emancipatory effort directed at breaking the stalemate between the expansion of the central state with its homogenizing effects and the individualist challenge to the state. This nascent emancipatory trajectory unites (1) empirical political scientists' attention to factions and networks, (2) liberals' advocacy for group rights and constitutional pluralism, and (3) socialists' advocacy for guild and syndicalist modes of organization.

Modern pluralism's coming of age in the period between 1930–1970s is presented in the second section of the book in chapters authored by Jacob Levy, Marc Stears and Avigail Eisenberg respectively. This maturation of the three traditions of pluralism is marked by their endorsement of a certain political realism, while retaining their original emancipatory aspirations. In order to oppose the rising totalitarianism and still advance solutions to the social problems that had engendered totalitarian regimes in Europe, liberals shifted their focus from constitutional matters to the defense of the value of pluralism, socialists turned away from ‘utopian’ ideals of non-governmental fellowship towards corporatist institutions, and empirical political scientists offered accounts of distinctly pluralist democracy.

However, as we enter the contemporary age (1970–2010) in the third section of the book, it is no longer so easy to discern in the narratives offered here the pervading emancipatory trajectory that had rendered modern pluralism its malleable identity. Here Ruth Abbey's richly textured discussion of pluralism offers a much-needed respite from the painfully familiar debate between communitarians and liberal-individualists about the proper basis of social cooperation in complex democracies. Yet, it is hard to see how the agendas of justice reviewed here—from politics of recognition (in the style of Charles Taylor), to formulas of multiculturalism (in Will Kymlicka's and Chandran Kukathas's recipes)—maintain pluralism's emancipatory rigor beyond the welcome synergy they have achieved between communitarianism's most healthy insights about the social relevance of group identity and liberalism's appeals for the inclusion and rejection of social uniformity. Toby Reiner and Mark Bevir offer an insightful account of the two strands of socialist pluralism (the one endorsing associationism and the other, accommodation of difference) as emerging out of radical pluralism's coming to terms with the electoral success of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. It is from this particular perspective on radical pluralism that the untold story of the fading emancipatory potency of pluralism comes into view. One cannot but wonder how policies of accommodation of difference or forms of associationism might be adequate responses either to those societal concerns that propelled neoliberalism to victory or to those that have ensued from its reign.

Surprisingly, in the last chapter pluralism seems to recover its emancipatory rigor. Here, Robert Adcock and Mark Vail narrate the life of contemporary empirical social science as a tale of overcoming the stasis of post-WWII interest-group pluralism (with its lasting authority established through the works of David Truman, Robert Dahl, and Gabriel Almond) in an intellectual rebellion that set in motion a continuous recasting of pluralism's agenda in view of the evolving political landscape in the United States and Britain. In this third section, one regrets that these invaluable historical accounts are insufficiently critical of their subjects. If pluralism is to retain its emancipatory realism, it should be able to challenge the hegemonies it helped to establish, such as the sanctification of multiculturalism by advocates of radical pluralism as a response to the destabilizing effects socio-cultural diversity has had on liberal democracies, or empirical pluralists' endorsing networks of private, public and voluntary organizations as ways to counteract the neoliberal reliance on the market in governing capitalist democracies. Isn't it the mainstreaming of pluralism (“we are all pluralists now”, as Mark Bevir notes), if not its rise to intellectual hegemony in recent years, that risks to transform it from a rebel with an emancipatory cause into a new totalizing discourse of rational progress? The answer to this question is the object of a missing concluding chapter in this invaluable volume.

“Who is afraid of pluralism?” could be the subtitle of Patti Tamara Lenard's Trust, Democracy, and Multicultural Challenges. This lucid investigation into the effect of ethno-cultural pluralism on democracy is framed by two mutually balancing intellectual sentiments: realism permeates the analysis and optimism drives the articulation of solutions. Casting a sober look at our complex democracies, the author audaciously asserts that ethno-cultural diversity is effectively dangerous for democracies as it erodes the widespread trust that is essential to supporting democratic practices. The work's main innovation consists in importing the issue of trust from social science disciplines, where it has been elaborately explored in the study of modern societies, into contemporary political theory and there applying it to the study of liberal democracies. Indeed, political theory has been deficient in its understanding of the way trust-relations among people (rather than between people and the institutions that regulate their lives) underpin political institutions. This monograph amply remedies this deficiency. The volume explores the effect of ethno-cultural diversity on democracy from the point of view of trust relations that extend in two directions: between citizens and their political representatives and among citizens themselves.

While the unabashed admission of the threat ethno-cultural pluralism constitutes for democracy triggers the analysis, solutions to the conundrum are seen to be a matter of the right kind of policies: “if the conditions are right, people will cooperate” (p. 142). These conditions, by way of revitalizing public culture, would engender inclusive and generalized trust.

The analysis of trust-generating conditions is particularly compelling because the author avoids typical normative political theory that demands idealizing assumptions about citizens' dispositions and cognitive capacities (such as reciprocity and equality). Instead, she adopts the methodologically safe assumption that trust is missing altogether. In the absence of a public culture that generates support for democratic institutions through trust, Lenard suggests, we need to resort to mechanisms of social cooperation that mimic the trust-building role of public culture. The proposal argues that in conditions of missing trust we need to create a highly controlled cooperative environment by way of (1) monitoring behavior, (2) sanctioning (cooperative and anti-cooperative behaviors are rewarded or punished), and (3) ensuring participant involvement in rule making. The success of these mimicking devices ultimately resides in their capacity to reduce the vulnerability connected to extending and reciprocating trust.

Two types of policy measures are endorsed as highly controlled trust-inducing mechanisms: properly structured deliberation and properly designed multicultural policies aimed primarily at mitigating the vulnerability felt by minorities. As the author places her faith in politically engineered conditions for reducing minorities' vulnerability, the omission of social policy is surprising. Redistributive policies are indeed addressed in a well-substantiated argument demonstrating that ethno-cultural diversity erodes the support to redistribution. However, since the discussion of trust-building conditions offered is not predicated on available societal support to trust-inducing policies, there is no reason for the author to overlook the utility of social policy enabling social mobility as an institutional mechanism to foster trust-building. As I have argued, multicultural policies have been failing not simply because diversity allegedly erodes support for redistribution, but because the lack of what I have called “a political economy of trust” (a political economy that dis-aligns social class and cultural background) prevents the politicization of cultural difference in the categories of threat to livelihoods (“Against the Politics of Fear: On Deliberation, Inclusion, and the Political Economy of Trust”, Philosophy and Social Criticism 37 [2011]: 401–412).

The laudable methodological realism of Lenard is a strange bedfellow for the commitment to democracy that drives this investigation. The proposed solution of designing trust-generating practices of social cooperation in the absence of trust sits uncomfortably with the formula of democracy deployed here, according to which trust is a constitutive feature, or foundational element, of a democratic political community. One cannot but wonder what kind of political regime the author tacitly entrusts with the implementation of trust-generating policies—this is obviously not a democracy. Yet, this is more of an entertaining contradiction than a concern, as it does not dent the argument that well-designed institutions fostering social cooperation can engender trust—and along with this—a stronger allegiance to democracy.

Spanning political philosophy and the social history of ideas, the two volumes combined offer a panoramic perspective on the contemporary debates about pluralism, without imposing a totalizing master-narrative. Highly informative as well as rich in insightful contradictions, these books are an invitation to endorse pluralism not as a final horizon or a political telos, but as a policy tool and a heuristic device with emancipatory powers.