In this book, Albena Azmanova makes a persuasive case for the critical, emancipatory power of reasoned public deliberation. Its power is shown to depend less on allegiance to universal moral norms than on attentiveness to how and when particular social conditions become politically relevant as issues of justice, and to the ways in which they are articulated as relevant. In critical engagement with political liberalism (John Rawls) and critical theory (Jürgen Habermas), identified as the dominant traditions of social critique, Azmanova calls for an approach that focuses on the social hermeneutics of deliberative judgment. She rejects the top-down, “ideal-theory” models of deliberative reason that she attributes to Rawls and Habermas, in which the norms providing the basis for a critical stance vis-à-vis actual social reality are specified in advance by the political philosopher. Thus, for example, Rawls stipulates that public reason abstracts from nonpublic concerns, while Habermas defines moral validity in terms of a consensus reached under conditions of an ideal speech situation as to the universalizability of norms and principles. Azmanova urges political philosophy to throw away the crutches of ideal theory, arguing that they prevent it from solving the “judgment paradox.”

The judgment paradox expresses Kant’s “Scandal of Reason”: the human compulsion to seek verifiable, secure knowledge and the incapacity of the human mind to achieve it. In its political form, it is the scandalous fact that reason is both an emancipatory and an ideological force, serving to challenge dogma and destabilize relations of domination but also to reinforce existing power relations. Paradoxically, therefore, the more ideal theory a model of judgment contains, the less applicable it is to political practice; but the less ideal theory such a model contains, the less morally rigorous and hence less reliable it becomes.

Azmanova holds that the judgment paradox can be solved if we relinquish our belief that we need abstract moral principles and adopt instead a realistic yet critical theory of political judgment. Taking her lead from Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, while holding on to key intuitions guiding Rawls and Habermas, she advocates a critical consensus model of judgment. The model is designed to entrust questions of justice to reasoning publics sensitive to power dynamics and strategic considerations, which are part of every public deliberation on political matters, and capable of adopting a critical stance on their own reasoning processes. The key elements of this alternative model of deliberative democracy are 1) the principle of critical relevance (“C”), 2) the proviso of reciprocity and articulation (“P”), and 3) the principle of generalization (“G”). Noteworthy, too, is a shift in emphasis from the force of the better argument—emphasized by Habermas but also implicit in Rawls—to “rendering account” (p. 220). This discursive technique consists not in providing the best argument for a norm or course of action but in giving reasons for having reasons—disclosing how one came to form a certain opinion. While P appears to be a development of Habermas’s idealizing assumptions regarding the conduct of deliberations (in particular, inclusivity, fairness, and openness), and G is similar to the principle of generalizability that operates as a decision-making principle in his account of legal/political discourses, C articulates the epistemic basis of validity of norms in a way that breaks with both Habermas, who speaks of truth and normative rightness, and Rawls, for whom the appropriate concept is “the reasonable.” C is “what divergent evaluative perspectives see as relevant in the critical sense of qualifying as an object of disagreement” (p. 194).

In rejecting ideal theory and emphasizing the reality of both interest-driven and value-driven political dynamics, Azmanova is part of a new realist turn within contemporary political philosophy. The new realists object to theories that first abstractly specify the requirements of justice, then attempt to push the world in the direction of the specified requirements, calling instead for a “bottom-up” approach (Axel Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit, 2011; Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 2008; John P. McCormick, Weber, Habermas, and the Transformations of the European State, 2009; Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, 2006; Ian Shapiro, The Real World of Democratic Theory, 2012). Azmanova’s distinctive and important contribution here is to highlight the prediscursive conditions of political deliberation, showing their relevance for the purposes of social critique. This is the backdrop to C. Drawing on Arendt’s analysis of spectatorial judgment, Wittgenstein’s discussion of a “form of life,” and Dewey’s treatment of cognition as orienting attention, Azmanova directs our gaze to the ways in which conflicting claims about injustice get articulated as such in the first place. Her rich and insightful account of the “phronetic constitution” of the public sphere, illuminated by judiciously chosen empirical examples, draws attention to the internal structure of public reason’s matrix of relevance—to the paradigms of articulation and signification that account for the prediscursive formation of the reasons expressed in public deliberations.

Taking seriously the phronetic orientation of judgment has major implications for theories of deliberative democracy, and for political philosophy in general. Azmanova is correct to hold that it undermines any attempt by political philosophers to stipulate in advance the norms and principles operative in political deliberation. She is also right to say that it brings into view the complex ways in which regime-dependent social factors determine political relevance: how they enable and prevent the articulation of experiences as matters of injustice and influence assignments of value in public debates. She is right, too, that it implies the need to shift emphasis from winning the game of argument by deploying the best reasons to giving an account of how one came to form the judgments behind these reasons.

Azmanova’s analysis suggests the need for a complementary critical model that systematically probes the social and cultural factors influencing phronetic orientation and identifies ways of facilitating politically relevant shifts in perception; in other words, a model that interrogates the constitution of the social syntax and explores possibilities for expanding and renewing it.

This raises the question of the role of theory in a critical model expanded in this way. An unwelcome result of Azmanova’s hostility to ideal theory is a failure to appreciate theory’s disclosive powers. Social and political theories offer diagnoses of the social-structural sources of injustice that enable participants in deliberation to identify the causes of their particular experiences of suffering, thereby helping them to render account: to give reasons for their articulation of these experiences as matters of injustice. Indeed, without input from theories, the narratives offered when rendering account would amount merely to personal testimonies; moreover, public deliberations would be unable to carry out the demanding work of ideology critique advocated by the author (pp. 230, 236). Theories can also help to incite the ethical imagination, opening up new ways of thinking about human flourishing and the social factors that impede and enable it. The contestability of their diagnoses and imaginative projections, and the need for constant critical interrogation of them, should not blind us to their disclosive functions.

Nor can the advocated model of political judgment easily dispense with truth. Azmanova’s principle of “Critical Relevance” is entirely immanent to particular deliberative processes: Actual public deliberations determine the validity of participants’ perceptions of relevance by way of a process of critique and contestation. But the point of idealizing constructions, such as Habermas’s idea of the ideal speech situation, is to free claims about injustice from the epistemic limitations of actual contexts of deliberation (attributable to power relations, lack of information, lack of education, and so on) and to enable us to make sense of the universal significance we attach to them. By contrast, the author appears to account for the universal aspect of justice-related claims by a prepolitical concept of suffering. “The capacity to experience injustice is all-human,” she writes; “[it] allows us to sense injustice even when we do not know what justice is” (p. 230). On occasion, at least, the reader has the impression that socially induced suffering is not just the basis for a postfoundational standard of validity (p. 144) but a prepolitical, primitive category that signals the need to revise established norms (p. 224), requires no justification, and cannot—indeed, should not—be challenged deliberatively.

The lack of any reference point for judgments of validity beyond particular contexts of contestation curtails the scope of the critical interrogation envisaged by Azmanova, limiting the critical power of political deliberation. It demotes the principle of Critical Relevance to a hermeneutic tool that enables clarity regarding the prediscursive formation of reasons for identifying a grievance as a matter of injustice, but allows for no critical assessment of the validity of these reasons beyond the particular judgment that emerges in the course of a particular deliberative process.

The Scandal of Reason is an impressive book. It is carefully argued, beautifully written, and thought provoking, inviting further reflection on the implications for political philosophy of the phronetic constitution of public reason. While its critical-consensus model has certain limitations, it provides a fruitful basis for developing a robustly critical, penetratingly diagnostic, and imaginatively exciting model of political judgment.