This book is a collection of 14 essays dedicated to John Rawls, and all of them fit perfectly with the overriding concern with justice that lies at the core of Rawlsian theory. My review concentrates on some of these essays.

Danielle Allen opens the collection with “Invisible Citizens: Political Exclusion and Domination in Arendt and Ellison.” It offers a rigorous account of Hannah Arendt's and Ralph Ellison's views of justice and citizenship during an important moment of the Civil Rights movement. Arendt criticized the struggle against segregation as one that was self-interested and unheroic. Parents, in her assessment, used their children as shields to promote their social advancement without exposing themselves. Ellison, by contrast, understood what Arendt did not. For him, the parents “suffered the abuse of their children … to help assure that the law worked,” and they wanted “to render functional a legal system that had rejected segregation” (p. 39).

Ellison's view of American democracy presupposes that working from within the system of rights will force a moral crisis upon the dominators. According to Allen, “[f]rom Ellison's perspective, the central question for an effort to craft new citizenly techniques, then, is how to integrate into one citizenship the healthy political habits of both the dominators and the dominated” (p. 59; my emphasis). One aspect of Allen's discussion is particularly distressing. Her emphasis is on the sacrifices that the dominated must make and the extra mile they must walk. It is they who must render “functional” a legal system. It is not until the end of her essay that she expresses the hope that the dominators may begin to envision a new conception of a free people (p. 61). It is not clear why the onus and the burdens fall on the dominated. It is even less clear how long the dominated should continue hoping that the inherent ethical principles of American democracy will take them into account.

While Allen addresses the context of the dominated, Philip Pettit presents an abstract and elegant model of liberty whose intellectual roots he finds in the republican tradition. Pettit's main goal is to achieve nondomination, which he sees as “one of the central ideals in politics, if not the supreme political ideal” (p. 114). “An agent is dominated … to the extent that a group or individual is in a position to interfere arbitrarily in his or her affairs,” he argues. Arbitrary interference is defined as an “accessible and uncostly” action that “worsens an individual's choice situation” (p. 93).

Pettit has in mind a society whose “citizens or members” answer “to interests they avow or are disposed to avow” (p. 88). But this assumption needs to address a prior question: Who or what disposes them to avow some interests? Better still, why are they disposed to avow some interests and not others? Likewise, though arbitrary interference “intentionally worsens an individual's choice situation … contextual conventions and expectations may be involved in determining whether a certain act counts as a way of worsening that situation” (p. 93; my emphasis).

Once these issues are introduced into the model, the ideal of nondomination loses its categorical character and becomes entangled in a circular reasoning. If my society socializes me to treat the salvation of my soul as my overriding goal, and to respect the wisdom embodied in a religious establishment that is linked to the state, I will very likely entertain doubts about the centrality of freedom of conscience. Furthermore, I will prefer the arbitrary interference of the state in my “choice situation.” This interference will limit my choice of beliefs but will save my skin and spirit from eternal burning. It follows that I am not dominated. In one reading of Pettit's arguments, I am not dominated because my acceptance of the state interference takes away its arbitrary character. On another reading, however, I am dominated because my choice situation has been tampered with. This essay does not clarify the relationship between the context and the idea of nondomination. Which aspect is more important: the individual's range of options to choose from or the context that determines that my choice situation has been worsened?

While Pettit is confident that by following his theoretical paradigm, the state's arbitrary interference in people's lives will not be significant, James Tully adopts a refreshing attitude of suspicion not only toward the liberal state but, equally important, toward its theoretical underpinnings. Tully invites us to adopt an “agonistic” perspective, to acknowledge the economic and social inequalities spawned by a global economy, and to reassess the way we conceive of and practice political theory. He defends a view of legitimacy and freedom in which citizens will deliberate about, and agree upon, the legal principles regulating their behavior and the state's policies, but these principles should be subjected to the citizens' scrutiny. Tully writes: “The contestable character of constitutional democracy should not be seen as a flaw that has to be overcome” (p. 208). An endless conversation follows.

Michael Blake responds along the predictable lines of liberal theory. In certain cases, he argues, it is precisely the removal of some principles from deliberation that makes it possible to have any discussion in the first place. As an example, he mentions the examples of vitriolic views that call for the extermination of homosexuals or Jews. When the dignity of all people is treated as something settled, sexual, ethnic, and racial minorities have the opportunity to be part of any democratic deliberation. Blake is right.

Yet the validity of Blake's argument does not need to rely on the settlement of views. This is so because an agonistic democracy depends on three principles that demand an antecedent framework of individual rights that, so far, are best guaranteed by constitutional democracies. These principles are pluralism, contestability, and deliberation. There must be deliberation because people hold a plurality of different and conflicting views. And the deliberation must be constant because the political agreements are fated to be contestable, a contestability that extends to the way people see their own identity.

In other words, agonism itself relies upon certain normative premises. Tully does not seem to be aware that this is similar to the Rawlsian demand that public deliberations about justice must only include “reasonable” persons, that is, people who are already convinced or willing to accept “justice as fairness” as the principal virtue of both public institutions and their moral character.

All the essays in this volume mention, with different degrees of insistence, the importance of solidarity and communality within a constitutional order that protects human dignity through a system of rights. This insistence invites reflection on two issues. First, after more than two centuries in which liberalism has advanced as a theory and fountain of public policies, liberal societies keep reproducing structures of social and economic inequalities. Second, liberalism still presents itself as a utopia. The first issue provokes the question of whether there is something intrinsic in the liberal order that fosters different forms of domination. The second issue suggests questions of a quite different kind. Is liberalism still moved by a utopian impetus because liberal principles carry an inherent strength? Or is this utopian impetus a disguise to cope with an exhausted paradigm? This volume provides grounds for these interrogations. But more importantly, it brings to the forefront the hope of articulating theories and practices for a world in which the presence of domination and exclusion is so insidious. Granted, it is a fragile hope, but it is still a hope.