In 1859, two years after England crushed the Indian Uprising, John Stuart Mill explained why the rules of international morality do not apply to “barbarians”: “In the first place, the rules of international morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate. They cannot be depended on for observing any rules. Their minds are not capable of so great an effort, nor their will sufficiently under the influence of distant motives” (“A Few Words on Intervention,” in Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb, 1962).

Mill is particularly referring to Indians. Leaving aside the pomposity, what is stunning is the boneheaded ignorance. How could this learned, usually fair-minded man write something so blatantly false? It would be comforting if we could lay the blame either on imperialism generally or on Mill personally. More troubling is that he may have here disclosed a failing in the political philosophy of which he was the leading exponent: liberalism.

The suspicion is supported by the essay as a whole. Mill argues that the English are so fair-minded, so well-intentioned, so egalitarian—so liberal, in short—that colonized peoples should consider it a benefit to be ruled by them. And given the high level of their discourse, there is no compelling reason for them to listen to voices from outside.

Romand Coles sees a similar problem in contemporary liberalism: He accuses it of being a systematically bad listener. His chief target is John Rawls, who has argued that liberalism must set up strict rules for what kinds of reasons are admissible in public discourse. Especially repugnant are “comprehensive doctrines”—religious or philosophical systems of the sort that have “believers”: “[R]easons given explicitly in terms of comprehensive doctrines are never to be introduced into public reason” (Political Liberalism, 1996, p. 247).

Where, Coles asks, does liberalism get the authority to be the gatekeeper? It does so by claiming to be above the fray—not an interested party, but a disinterested set of rules. As with Mill, by claiming that liberalism is fairness itself, Rawls grants it hegemony over all other systems of thought, and establishes whole categories of people who need not be listened to.

The trouble, Coles points out, is that these are real people, with real concerns. Rawls, Coles says, legitimates “exclusion both of expressions of suffering and possibilities that exceed political liberalism's limits” (p. 12). Max Weber once held out the hope that some day new prophets would arise and show us the way out of the iron cage of industrial capitalism. But presumably prophecy also will be disallowed. This is how the gatekeepers enforce liberalism as the End of History.

Coles's book is a long argument that political theory, and especially liberalism, needs to pay attention not only to speaking and writing but also to listening. He introduces an interesting group of theorists to illuminate the subject. From Thomist Alisdair MacIntyre he draws the point that “only within a teleological horizon can we grasp and nurture a vulnerability to the ateleological aspects of human historicity” (p. 79), which I venture to restate as: Only if you believe something yourself will you be able truly to hear the unexpected words of the other. Put differently, the claim of liberalism not to be a comprehensive belief system may be one of the reasons for its inability to hear anything but its own voice.

This poses a dilemma: How do you both believe something and entertain the possibility, as a good listener must, that you might be wrong and the other right (Coles's “vulnerability”)? He finds MacIntyre the believer a better listener than Rawls the neutral umpire, but in the end argues that he falls into about the same trap, taking on “the unreceptive confidence of we-who-are-better-than-the-others-because-we-are-more-vulnerable” (p. 99). (Coles never fully explains how he himself is going to stay clear of this trap.)

In Mennonite John Howard Yoder, Coles finds an extraordinarily humble and flexible form of Christian fundamentalism. Jesus' teachings, Yoder writes, “deny absolute authority to any other epoch, especially to the present” (The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel, 1984, p. 87). This makes Yoder remarkably open to other non-Christian philosophies, but does not prevent him from supporting excommunication.

The chapter on Jacques Derrida is interesting but, I thought, took him somewhat off track. For example, when Derrida writes of being commanded by the other's secret gaze, and of being “bound [to the other] by an absolute, unconditioned obligation, by an incomparable, non-negotiable duty” because “the other is totally other” (The Gift of Death, 1995, p. 55), this is formulated at an entirely different level from that of political discourse. A gaze is not a statement of belief, and by “non-negotiable duty” surely Derrida does not mean the duty to accept the other's ideas as correct.

In the chapter “Feminists of Color,” Coles begins by introducing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s Disuniting America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1993), with which the subject changes from what kind of public arguments are permissible to what kind of cultures are admissible, and from thence to identity politics. In Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Coles finds an ethos far more accepting of difference than Schlesinger's assimilationism. It is worth mentioning, however, that the comparison is not between similar entities: Mestiza is not a country.

Coles promises a number of times that he is going to tell us how his political activism has contributed to his theorizing. For me, it was fairly anticlimactic to learn that by activism he means Saul Alinsky—style organizing. And in this chapter the theme again shifts, this time in an Alinskyite direction. It is no longer a matter of learning to listen to marginalized people, but of teaching them to listen to each other. And while earlier Coles seemed to argue, with MacIntyre, that honest listeners must be frank about their own beliefs, now, with Alinsky, we learn that the Organizers must set their own beliefs aside and defer to the needs of the organized. “Gated politics,” it turns out, means “the various physical, symbolic, visceral and psychological walls between neighborhoods, people of different races and classes, citizens and foreigners, and so on” (p. 223). The Organizer teaches people how to break through these, unite, and make their power felt at city hall. And yes, it usually is city hall where they end up. At the beginning of this book, Coles describes the “perfect storm” toward which democracy seems to be heading—“mounting waves of transnational corporate and financial power, myriad fundamentalisms, neofascist megastates, gargantuan media conglomerates, ruthless neocolonial power, bloody state and nonstate terrorism and environmental catastrophe” (p. ix). At the end, we are introduced to a mode of organizing that boasts such successes as getting a school bond issue passed or getting a job training program established. These are laudable goals, but hardly a response to the problem posed. (To his credit, the author does acknowledge this gap.)

Despite these quibbles, I found the book's main argument compelling. Discourse requires not only good talking but good listening, and for academics, politicians, and other wordmongers, the latter is far harder to do. And we need to take seriously Coles's disturbing argument that among political theories, liberalism may be one of the worst listeners of all.