This book seeks to defend the idea of value pluralism set out in William Galston's earlier Liberal Pluralism (2002) against the various criticisms to which it has been subjected, and to explain the ways that this kind of pluralism can be given practical political application. The first of these tasks is efficiently done (in the final section), and as well as offering Galston the chance to modify some previous overstatements of his position (for example, to tone down his criticism of the idea of personal autonomy), the book provides a useful summary of the current state of various philosophical controversies surrounding the politics of liberalism. However the real interest lies in his attempt to make pluralism a practical political doctrine in its own right. Here, his success is mixed. His argument is most persuasive when he is criticizing excessively “monistic” or, as he calls them, “totalist” conceptions of liberal politics. The problem is that these criticisms often appear unobjectionable precisely because they are only weakly connected to a distinctively pluralist alternative.

For example, Galston understands value pluralism to insist that “there may be no way of judging whether decent polity A has a better form of organization than does decent polity B” (p. 117). We can tell the difference between a good constitution and a bad constitution (good ones must make realistic demands of citizens in a coherent way that does not go against the main current of a community's public culture), but we cannot know which is the best, nor which values should be given constitutional priority. Yet this essentially pragmatic, negative doctrine stops some way short of insisting that a good constitution must instantiate a pluralist conception of value, by placing the decent demands of any group on a par with the demands that might be made of that group by the state. This more positive conception of pluralism—which has its roots in the English political pluralism of the early twentieth century, something Galston acknowledges (pp. 41–42) but does not discuss in any detail—is much harder to sustain. He talks about the possibility of political and nonpolitical organizations being related “horizontally, not vertically.” The case against excessively vertical (i.e., one-dimensional) forms of liberalism is well made. The problem comes in understanding how a horizontal relationship between state and nonstate organizations would work in practice.

This problem is best illustrated in relation to the role of the state in regulating the affairs of nonstate organizations. Galston rightly argues against the view that liberties and freedoms of nonstate bodies should be seen as “grants” from the state: “Pluralist politics does not presume that the inner structure and principle of every sphere must mirror those of basic political institutions” (p. 2). But a horizontal conception of this relationship suggests the reverse, that the state must in some sense mirror the structure and principle of all the other spheres, because it has no special claims to priority over and above them. The author does not fully embrace this position (he leaves room for the priority of the state's claims in times of emergency), but nor does he clearly explain how his own position is distinct from it. It is a large step from rejecting group freedoms as a gift from the state to seeing the state's claims as comparable to those of other groups. The space in between is occupied by, among others, Hobbes, who recognized that the law might allow groups to acquire their own freedoms in their own way. Galston may be too quick to dismiss, as he does in Chapter 11, the common ground between Hobbesian liberalism and value pluralism.

Galston accepts that his version of political pluralism is best described as intuitionist. Its point is not to fix political arrangements in a particular form but to determine the burden of proof, in order to ensure that the presumption is always against the state encroaching on group life unless very good reasons can be found. So, he argues against those conceptions of liberalism that would allow the state to intervene to prevent the teaching of creationism in schools, on the grounds that the price of this kind of interference is invariably too high. In this respect, the pluralist position embodies an attitude toward this kind of controversy, rather than a definitive resolution of it—a value pluralist will understand that there is merit on both sides of the argument, and recognize that no resolution of it can be without regret for what has been forgone (in the creationist case, presumably, regret for not being able to provide the children concerned with more than a half-decent education).

Because Galston's pluralism is a question of temperament as much as anything—it depends on a temperamental ability to see both sides of a political argument without being rendered incapable of taking sides—it would have been helpful to hear more about the psychological costs of the position he adopts. The Practice of Liberal Pluralism contains an excellent essay on the value of toughness in politics, but it concentrates on the importance of toughness in an electoral context, and not the general wear and tear of political life. Galston does not discuss what damage his pluralism might do to the politicians who find that the burden of proof is always against them, nor how they are meant to sustain the loyalties and even the interest of the general public regardless. He sharply distinguishes between regret (a useful state of mind) and guilt (a destructive one) but does not explain how regret is to be given any political force if it cannot be acted upon. Nor does he explain how the groups that benefit from the reticence of the state are to manifest their regrets—who is going to insist that the creationists feel some regret for what they are doing, if not the liberal state. Galston's pluralism is an instinctively plausible doctrine that contains a strong streak of good sense. But the suspicion remains that beyond the good sense, the pluralism itself does not add much, and may take something away.