The aim of this book is to counter the current pull toward abstract reasoning by suggesting that prejudice indeed does play a positive role in politics. Taking up Hans-Georg Gadamer’s discussion of the “prejudice against prejudice,” expanding its significance beyond the confines of philosophical interpretation, Adam Adatto Sandel shows how prejudice is an ineliminable part of who we are as engaged citizens in pluralistic societies. Sandel argues passionately that without acknowledging the constitutive role of prejudice, may or may not strike the right balance in our judgments about justice and fairness: “[C]ontrary to appearance, the prejudicial aspect of judgment is not some regrettable limitation. Certain prejudices … can actually enable good judgment rather than hinder it” (p. 3).

To develop this argument, Sandel proposes a distinction between two conceptions of judgment and understanding: the “detached conception” and the “situated conception” (pp. 2–3). Each conception has its own place in the history of Western philosophy. The detached conception is primarily a modern phenomenon, which emerges in conjunction with the age of the Enlightenment and the new natural sciences. Associated with thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant, the claim here is that reason must rise above its embodied circumstances in order to reach a firm ground on which to base the pursuit of truth and freedom. As the author shows, this claim prefigures prejudice as problematic in two ways: first, as a sign of bigotry and idolatry, and second, as an unreflective judgment clouding our ability to think freely and truthfully. The case against prejudice, we learn in Chapter 1, is based on both strands of argumentation; to overcome the prejudice against prejudice, we must therefore show why prejudice does not necessarily invoke a limited frame of mind, as well as how prejudice may be not only a fact of life but also a constitutive aspect of freedom and truth (p. 51).

Before elaborating on this project, however, Sandel shows how and why prejudice continues to haunt modern philosophers for whom prejudicial thinking is an obstacle to be overcome, rather than an ineliminable part of the human condition. Such a line of argumentation has certainly been tried before, and it often entails showing how the works of most Enlightenment thinkers were tainted by the parochial and sometimes even racist sentiments driving political discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is not Sandel’s argument, however. Rather than linking the detached conception of judgment to its political and historical circumstances, using the latter to attack the former, he instead shows how Enlightenment philosophy, with and against its own will, embraces the importance of prejudice. Building off a number of insightful readings of Bacon and Smith in particular, Sandel develops this point most succinctly in relation to Kant. Although Kant typically is read as the mastermind behind the contemporary case against prejudice, it is in fact possible to detect in his discussion of knowledge an implicit acknowledgment of a certain kind of prejudice—the kind that appears at the transcendental level of reflection and that Kant calls the “conditions of knowledge.” Without these conditions, which Kant says are assumed but not known in a detached manner, we would not be able to reason in the way most neo-Kantians want us to. Sandel uses this insight to build his own case for prejudice. Or as he puts it, “[the] idea of ‘conditions of knowledge,’ at least in a faint sense, gestures toward the idea that knowledge involves a certain kind of prejudice” (p. 52).

The author is careful to point out that this reading of Kant is not the most obvious. Yet if we do accept Kant’s claim that we cannot know the very conditions of knowledge, then we may also interpret his philosophy as the beginning of a return to a more satisfying conception of judgment and understanding—what Sandel calls the “situated conception.” The contemporary heirs of this conception, which reaches as far back as Aristotle, are Gadamer and before him Martin Heidegger. The bulk of The Place of Prejudice is an attempt to reassert the importance of these thinkers for contemporary political theory. From Heidegger, Sandel takes the notion of Dasein as a situated “being-in-the-world,” which is prejudiced, not in the sense of being bigoted and small-minded, but rather in the sense of being thrown into a world of finite experiences, which underpin our sense of meaning and value, and yet never become transparent to any detached mode of understanding. According to Sandel, this expanded approach shows why prejudice is constitutive of how we think and act. Moreover, since prejudice, on this account, is ineliminable, the challenge is not how to overcome it, but rather to embody it in a manner that aids the quest for truth and freedom. For this project, he turns to Gadamer and his hermeneutical rereading of Aristotle’s concept of phronesis: “Phronesis . . . is inescapably situated. … It involves the agent’s engaged understanding of a particular circumstance—an understanding embodied in the agent’s action … rather than represented in his or her mind” (p. 191).

Political theorists interested in deliberation, reasoning, and social differences will find much to learn from this argument; and the book as a whole is most certainly an important contribution to ongoing discussions about justice and fairness in pluralistic societies. Absent from the book, however, is a direct engagement with the politics of prejudice, in particular the way in which some but not all prejudices play an affirmative part in the construction of a just and fair society. Apart from a general distinction between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” prejudices (pp. 173 ff), and apart from an emphasis on the role of rhetoric in politics (pp. 22, 225), this issue is strangely mute in Sandel’s account of political life. A likely reason for this may be the move toward an expanded conception of prejudice, which helps us to understand why prejudice is an ineliminable fact of life but also obscures the different ways in which specific prejudices work in this or that context. In what way is the racist prejudice different from more ennobling prejudices? Can the same prejudice both aid and undermine justice and fairness? Who or what decides this question and how?

The main achievement of The Place of Prejudice is that it encourages us to ask these questions anew; the next step is to make them an intrinsic part of the concrete study of politics.