It is a commonplace to state that we live in a world characterized by deep cultural pluralism. But how can such pluralism be reconciled with the spirit of universalism that informs rights-based modern democracies? This question, which surely lies at the heart of the most important political theory of our time, is taken up anew in Alessandro Ferrara's engaging work on judgment and exemplarity. What makes his book distinctive in a field already overcrowded with attempts to reconcile universalism and pluralism is the focus on the problem of judgment.

The starting point for developing what Ferrara calls “judgment as a paradigm” is the now widely shared recognition that people do not have access to natural or universally given (that is, transcontextual) criteria of judgment. This is a consequence both of the development of modern science, which put the reliability of the senses into radical doubt, and the modern descriptive fact of value pluralism. The idea that all individuals reasoning properly will be led to the same conclusions is no longer credible—which is not to say that it is no longer tempting; the idea of perfectly attuned minds following the logic of reason dies hard. In any case, contemporary political theorists are writing in a context of a decayed rationalism, in which the rules for judgment are no longer obvious or given.

In Ferrara's account, the undoing of modern universalism finds its source in this loss of transcendent standards of judgment, which he traces back to “the critique, generated by the Linguistic Turn, of the whole range of versions of modern foundationalism” (p. 4). (This explanation might strike some readers as excessively philosophical, but it is compensated for in the later chapters, which astutely address the concrete political issues raised by deep pluralism, such as the future of Europe and the universality of human rights.) Responses to the Linguistic Turn and this loss of a natural or shared criterion of judgment, argues Ferrara, run the gamut from “new forms of naturalism—spurred by the achievements of the neurosciences, of genetic research, of computer science, of sociobiology” (p. 4)—to a stalled poststructuralist project that never gets beyond its otherwise valuable critique of “modern foundationalist universalism” to something approaching “a positive proposal of a new, truly postfoundationalist way of conceiving true and false, just and unjust” (p. 7).

This positive project of developing a nonfoundationalist universalism is what Ferrara attempts to initiate “from the perspective of judgment and its core notion of exemplary validity” (p. 7, Ferrara's emphasis). Although he shares with other postmetaphysical thinkers of universalism a deep worry about the relativistic consequences that seem to flow from the loss of transcendent standards, Ferrara wagers that his judgment approach provides a better way of developing a nonfoundationalist universalism than does, say, the proceduralism advanced by Jürgen Habermas. The main problem is still defined (with Habermas) as one of (nonfoundationalist) validity, but the approach to generating new terms of normativity is now conceptualized in terms of producing examples that resonate beyond the context in which they emerged to gain universal validity. The key questions, as the author observes, include: “How can something singular possess universal significance? What is the nature of the force exerted by exemplarity? How does it compare with the force of the law? How can it bridge the difference between different contexts that lie within its reach?” (p. 4).

Though it is not possible to capture the complexity of Ferrara's answers to these and related questions, the key to his argument, it seems fair to say, lies in his effort to reconstruct the meaning of “sensus communis” as it was developed by Kant in the Critique of Judgment. Especially appealing to Ferrara is Kant's refusal to reduce the validity of judgments of taste to the agreement of any given community or to the hermeneutic (e.g., Gadamerian) understanding of common sense that is given in a tradition or a lifeworld. Such an understanding, in Ferrara's view, does not facilitate critical thinking; rather, it validates prejudice and in effect confuses the “ought” with the “is.” In the third Critique, Kant offered a rather different account of sensus communis. In contrast with the hermeutical understanding of common sense, Kantian sensus communis is capable of transcending its context of origin and, thus, as Ferrara rereads it, of modeling—with appropriate modifications, as we shall see—a new kind of universality.

In the third Critique, Kant sought to explain the peculiar universality of aesthetic judgments, which do not rely on the compulsion associated with subsuming particulars under a given concept or rule, but which take the form of an appeal to what everyone else ought to feel when making aesthetic judgments of beauty. This ought (or justly anticipated agreement of all), which supports the “subjective universality” of such judgments, Kant argued, has its basis in an a priori subjective principle, namely sensus communis. Ferrara, for his part, appreciates Kant's refusal “to inject any kind of substance (historical, ethical, cultural) into our notion of sensus communis” (p. 25), but is wary of what he sees as the excessively naturalizing tendencies of the Kantian view. Rather than take for granted shared human receptive capacities, as Kant does, Ferrara tries to reconstruct the meaning of sensus communis by turning to Kant's description of the pleasure that is associated with judgments of beauty as generating a sense of “the promotion, affirmation, or enhancement of life (Beförderung des Lebens)” (p. 30). Examples that transcend their cultural context and attain universality, he argues, are those that generate in us this feeling that our life is being furthered.

Here is where things start to become rather confusing—at least to this reader—for Ferrara claims that this “universal capacity to sense the flourishing of human life and what favors it” does not suffer from the supposed defects of “the Kantian official version of the sensus communis” (p. 31), but offers, instead, a viable alternative to both it and the hermeneutic conception that the official version challenges. This claim is hard to square with the Kantian understanding of pleasure in the beautiful as the feeling of one's life being furthered, for Kant holds that this feeling can be legitimately attributed to others on the condition that they share the same cognitive faculties. Thus, it is not immediately clear how one could disentangle what Ferrara finds to be the appealing Kantian idea of life (and what promotes it) from the problematic (because presumably naturalistic) Kantian notion of shared sensibilities.

This problem is amplified when Ferrara talks about the promotion of life “in terms of self-realization or progress in self-realization or progress toward an authentic relation with oneself, where the expression ‘authentic relation of the self with itself’ designates an optimal congruence of an identity with itself” (p. 31, Ferrara's emphasis). Apart from conventional assumptions about the wholeness of identity that might make a psychoanalytic thinker wince, this idea of hermeneutical self-orientation as the basis for a political theory of exemplarity and judgment seems problematic: “If judgment … is about the appropriateness of some element to an identity, about whether something, be it an action, a norm, or whatever, fits or not with the whole of a relevant identity, then the authenticity or integrity of an identity, what is best for its flourishing, is the regulative ideal that makes judgment function” (p. 58). But how can I know that what counts as furthering life for me will count for someone from a very different culture, especially a culture that does not have these ideas of self-realization and individuality? And even if others take up an example that promotes in me this feeling of life, they may well do so for reasons that have nothing to do with that feeling.

In his critique of Hannah Arendt's reading of Kant, for example, Ferrara criticizes her for taking for granted the exemplary validity of Achilles as symbolizing courage. But Arendt's point was not to “presuppose a common culture encompassing the whole human species” (p. 60); it was, rather, to put forward an example with which others could publicly agree or disagree. If one was a Greek, one thought of Achilles, she argued—but not everyone is a Greek. The fact is that we put forward examples of what matters to us, our values, and other people either take them up or they do not. This is part of the practice of politics, which Ferrara has illuminated in new and interesting ways. If there is a shortcoming to his exposition, it may well be that, caught in the grip of the very demand for normative standards to which he rightly refuses any transcendental status, he still feels called upon to produce one normative standard. That the regulative ideal of life and the integrity of identity will fail to satisfy those thinkers who stand behind the demand seems clear. More important for the rest of us, however, is that to concede the demand risks undermining the otherwise very important contribution of Ferrara's book to a nonfoundationalist universalism and theory of judgment.