This large and beautifully produced book is the third volume of papers by Nicholas Wolterstorff which has been published in recent years. It differs from the other two, not just in the fact that it is published by Oxford rather than Cambridge University Press, but because a little over half of the chapters appear here for the first time. Wolterstorff has written eight new essays to amend and amplify earlier material with which he had grown dissatisfied and, framed by seven previously published papers, these comprise the heart of the volume. The result is that, though all the chapters remain freestanding essays which can be read independently, the volume as a whole has greater unity than can be expected from a simple collection of already published pieces.

The topic of liberal democracy, its nature and foundation, has been the mainstay of analytical political philosophy since the publication of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice forty years ago. The ground has been very extensively trodden since then, almost, many think, to the point where everything that can be said has been. Inevitably, therefore, Wolterstorff surveys and explores topics which are so well known, his book rather rapidly runs the risk of losing the interest of the reader. Still, familiarity breeds oversight, and there is in fact a distinctive voice here, with some lines of thought which are genuinely novel.

To begin with, Wolterstorff rejects the kind of ‘public reason liberalism’ that Rawls articulates in his second major work, Political Liberalism, and which may be said to have become the dominant view. Many others have found it problematic, of course, but not many so emphatically reject it. The problem, as Wolterstorff sees it, is that public reason liberalism supposes that we can arrive at a standard of ‘reasonableness’ which underwrites a level of agreement sufficient for us to declare that everyone subject to laws can be said to be co-authors of those laws. No such level of agreement, Wolterstorff plausibly thinks, exists or will ever be reached. There are too many differences between citizens. Such differences, on the other hand, can be accommodated justly by any society which gives its citizens a right to a political voice which has equal weight with everyone else’s, where a ‘voice’ means more than simply a vote. This ‘right to an equal political voice’ thus becomes his proposal for the most basic principle of liberal democracy, and there is good reason to think that this idea is both distinctive and promising.

In subsequent essays he takes up another much discussed topic – the nature and basis of rights. Here he also pursues a line which, if scarcely original, is nowadays largely neglected, namely the superior merits of theism over secularism as the grounding of rights. One such right, he contends, is the natural right and duty that people have to worship God in accordance with their conscience. From this right, he drives the necessity of freedom of religion, and in the context of another exhaustively discussed topic – religion in public life – this too has the merit of originality.

So there is much in these papers that students of political philosophy will find interesting and new. The one topic where, as I see it, Wolterstorff is more complacent than is warranted, is democracy. Only one chapter is expressly devoted to this topic, and in it no sustained attention is given to the types of criticism of those – from Plato on – who have warned of the tyranny of democracy. It is broadly assumed that democracy is the friend of liberty, equality and human dignity, the concepts upon which Wolterstorff's arguments rely heavily. But what if, as there are at least some good reasons to suppose, democracy properly so called easily becomes the enemy of these? Perhaps the book is long enough already, but it would have been good to leave it with a stronger sense that this prospect is not simply being ignored.