This festschrift for Richard J. Bernstein succeeds in celebrating his career, not only through the editors' insightful introduction and the excellent biographical essay by Judith Friedlander but also through 13 significant essays and an excerpt from Shoshana Yovel's novel that speaks with keen philosophical insight on radical evil. As the editors say, one of the distinctive contributions of Bernstein to philosophy is a view of social critique that encompasses normative as well as empirical and interpretive dimensions and that employs a form of pragmatic reason both dialogical in nature and political in its implications (p. xiii). The contributors draw upon Bernstein's approach to salvage what Jerome Kohn, in his fine essay based on Kant's Critique of Judgment, understands to be a “common world” that is “fit for human habitation” (pp. 270–74). The latter is the location for self-creation and for the freedom that sustains it. Nonetheless, self-creation is threatened by the totalitarian mind, which is intent upon using its freedom to destroy all freedom. As a counter, the essays in this volume embrace what the editors refer to as Bernstein's “Deweyan view of philosophy as the self-reflection of democratic society” and thereby make self-creation the centerpiece of human flourishing (p. viii).

Jürgen Habermas points out that self-creation answers the question “what ought I, or what ought we, to do?” (p. 32). This question is addressed from either a moral or an ethical perspective. From the former standpoint, I think in terms pertaining to “what lies in the equal interest of everyone and what is equally good for all” (p. 32). But from the ethical viewpoint, I stress my own particular life, as I ask what is best “for me” or “for us” (p. 32). Here, I seek to overcome what fragments my life in the hopes of constructing an identity that embodies “continuity and transparency” (p. 35). As I pursue this course, I become responsible for the person I “would like others to know and acknowledge” (p. 35).

Richard Rorty argues that choices pertaining to self-creation should not be based on “redemptive truth,” which is found in both religion and philosophy and which would end the process of reflection on who we are, “once and for all,” by forcing all that we know about ourselves and the world to conform to a closed universe of knowledge (p. 7). Instead, he argues that only in literary culture do we capture, with fervid imaginations, a realm filled with expanding possibilities used by free persons in an “ever-living, ever-expanding, fire” of self-construction (p. 12). Geoffrey Hartman adds that the literary culture is heavily influenced by poets such as Emily Dickinson who revolted against the authority of whatever denies the freedom for self-creation (p. 59).

Despite this expansive view of self-creation, the modern self, because it is located in the “empirical-scientific approach to knowledge claims,” actually denies, as Charles Taylor rightly points out in his superb treatment of William James, any beliefs not supported by scientific methods (p. 87). This approach leads to unbelief, which causes many to sense that “some level of profound desire [has been] ignored, [and that] some greater reality outside of us has been closed off ” (p. 89). The remedy for James is to adopt a “will to believe,” by which people resolve to uphold beliefs that are the source of meaning, even if these beliefs cannot be confirmed by the methods of science (pp. 90–91).

Self-creation is possible only when beliefs arise from choice—as opposed to imposition. Yirmiyahu Yovel, in his outstanding discussion of Hegel, writes about “shadows of the dead God” in Hegel's quest for “absolute knowing” (pp. 96, 120). These shadows are the “greatest defect” of Hegel's thought because they suggest a theologically grounded view of history that imposes a fixed way of life designed to make it impossible for individuals to determine their identities (p. 120). For Joel Whitebook, however, Hegel emphasized as central to modernity the “recognition” of each individual's right to forge one's own conception of purpose, independently of traditional norms (p. 246).

Self-creation depends on the recognition from others of the lives we create ourselves. Nancy Fraser provides an exceptional discussion of recognition in which she suggests that it is best attained through the enabling of individuals to participate in groups “as full partners in social interaction” (p. 129). She rejects, as the basis of recognition, an identity politics model because it promotes “separatism and repressive communitarianism” (p. 128). Moreover, she rightly notes that overcoming a loss of recognition requires properly linking policies that remove economic barriers to policies that diminish discrimination against people merely because of their way of life (pp. 132, 141).

Fraser demonstrates that achieving justice as recognition depends on well-done normative theorizing about justice. As Thomas McCarthy emphasizes, this endeavor involves critiquing theories of justice like John Rawls's from an intention to discover if interpretations of universal moral principles “unjustly” exclude consideration of essential concerns like race (pp. 159, 163). This approach especially applies where normatively based, contested understandings of “markets, classes, gender roles, [and] global relations” are recurrent (pp. 165–66). Jacques Derrida pursues this avenue to theorizing justice when he discusses the death penalty in the context of a culture, like ours, in which “mourning must be impossible” (p. 216). This reality suggests a generalized nonconcern for the “dead other,” and thus moots analysis of the death penalty's legitimacy (p. 216).

The quest for recognition is also found in Seyla Benhabib's valuable discussion of Hannah Arendt's “right to have rights” for those who find themselves stateless (p. 175). Benhabib points out that despite the absence of enforcement mechanisms, the universal principles of human rights, while abstract in formulation, may be moving “slowly” from being viewed as mere statements of hopeful purpose to becoming well-established shared norms that can be enforced during the course of dealing with specific cases (p. 189).

Benhabib's measured optimism exists alongside other writers' less sanguine views on the “right to have rights” question. Agnes Heller discusses Freud's view that “instinct, violence and barbarism” are the bases of societies, but on some occasions, these factors can be subordinated to spirituality (pp. 241–42). Still, even this tenuous hope seems beyond reach given the radical evil of twentieth-century totalitarianism that caused millions of people, as Whitebook and Kohn point out in their respective essays, to become superfluous, and thus bereft of humanity (pp. 255, 285). Similarly, Carol Bernstein shows how for Jorge Semprun, the “unbearable” pain of radical evil at Buchenwald was the source of a “fraternal” coming together around the shared experience of savage dying—the consequence of a grotesque Nazi, antihuman world in which self-creation is denied completely (pp. 297, 300–301).

Absent from this volume are focused assessments of liberal democracy's capacity to avoid the reoccurrence of radical evil by ensuring self-creation and the freedom on which it depends. Given the present tendency to impose what Rorty called redemptive truth, and given Richard Bernstein's Deweyan view of democracy as a space that is richly endowed with multitudinous possibilities for self-creation, this omission mars what otherwise is a superb testimony honoring Bernstein's exemplary and truly brilliant career as a teacher, as a scholar, and as a public intellectual of democracy.