Democratic theorists have been preoccupied in recent years with reconceptualizing the normative basis of political life in the aftermath of so-called postmodern critiques of foundationalism, rationality, metaphysics, and subjectivity. Political liberals like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas have sought a “freestanding” or “postmetaphysical” political theory freed from controversial commitments to comprehensive moral doctrines, while others like William Connolly and Charles Taylor have argued for the inescapability of “ontology” or “philosophical anthropology,” calling for critical acknowledgment of the normative sources that infuse political life and for attentiveness to their inherent contestability. Stephen White is a persuasive advocate of this latter strategy of “sustaining affirmation,” and his most recent book is an eloquent expression of what has been called political theory's “ethical turn,” displaying both the strengths and weaknesses of this theoretical preoccupation. More than previous books exploring this terrain, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen signals an emerging rapprochement between political liberals and (some of) their poststructuralist critics. While important theoretical and political differences remain between these approaches to democratic theory, many of which are explored with clarity and verve in this punchy manifesto, the book makes more of the underlying continuities between them.

At the center of White's argument is the concept of “ethos,” which he develops from the work of Michel Foucault and Connolly. An ethos approach is not as foundational as deontological norms based in an “emphatic” conception of practical reason (p. 11), but neither does it abandon normativity to the “unrelenting agonism” endorsed by decisionistic theorists (p. 35). Ethos is also more attentive to the aesthetic-affective and dispositional dimensions of political judgment and action. Rather than contrasting ethos with reason, however, as he claims some other poststructuralist advocates of ethos have done, White melds them together. The “ethos of “reasonableness” that he advocates has two principal components: attentiveness to the never fully articulated ontological sources that infuse ethical-political judgments, and moral self-restraint and presumptive generosity in the face of competing moral claims.

White builds this ethical orientation from a figuration of a nontheistic “weak ontology” that emphasizes the shared human experience of finitude, rather than building from the “strong ontology” of human autonomy and “capaciousness” that he associates with classical liberal conceptions of human dignity and respect (pp. 33–52). Alongside several other thinkers of the ethical turn, perhaps most notably Judith Butler, White seeks to replace the liberal humanism of rational mastery with one based in the shared exposure of “being in subjection to mortality” (p. 63). This alternative humanism, White argues, enables an ethically productive awareness of human limitation and constitutive interdependence missing from the liberal humanism it opposes. It works to diminish the “temptation to resentment born of the dynamics of identity/difference” (p. 108). The texture of this ethos can be traced in the very adjectives that recur throughout the text: chastened, attenuated, restrained, dampened, reluctant, tempered, and weak.

The book's central argument is structured around how the ethos of reasonableness responds to five interrelated dilemmas facing the late-modern citizen: 1) assessing the norms underlying the “basic structure” of social and political institutions; 2) encounters between competing sources of ethical-political judgment; 3) struggles for recognition; 4) transnational debates around human rights and global justice; and 5) arguments about the contemporary prospects for democratic renewal. In each contentious arena, White argues, the ethos of reasonableness offers a better means of navigating deep political disagreements than the influential alternatives offered by such contemporary political theorists as Connolly, Charles Larmore, Chantal Mouffe, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, and Taylor. White's engagements with these other theorists are often critical, but they are also invariably illuminating and exemplify the very ethos of presumptive generosity that he calls for in his book. White even gives fair hearing to objections to his approach that are, to my mind, quite persuasive, for example, the claim that the ethos of reasonableness “fails to adequately confront undemocratic movements and arrangements of power,” and that it cannot “adequately inspire democratic renewal” (p. 94). The danger with his new and improved exhortation to reasonableness is that it is too accepting of “living the structures” of contemporary neoliberalism (p. 95), addressed primarily to middle-class constituencies of “prosperous democracies” (p. 107), and too narrowly focused on the single, albeit important, democratic problem of responding ethically to difference.

The proximity of White's position to contemporary political liberalism is further suggested by the focus of his critique of classical liberals. Following Burke, White emphasizes the autonomous and domineering “figuration of subjectivity” characteristic of classical liberalism—a subject “disengaged from social background,” “oriented toward a mastery of the world,” and seeking through practical reason a “political consensus” around “universally applicable rules of justice” (p. 34). But the “soft collar of reasonableness” that White offers in its place, even though based in an alternative humanism of shared finitude and vulnerability, nonetheless accepts classical liberalism's faith that the conflicts and disagreements endemic to political life can be adjudicated by way of the theoretical articulation of norms (p. 22). He reworks “some of the basic figures of our modern political imagination, including the conception of the self, our core moral concepts … and our understanding of the character of citizenship and the tenor of democratic politics” (p. 2), but this reworking is still put to the service of what Raymond Guess has recently categorized as the dominant “ethics-first” approach to political philosophy (Philosophy and Real Politics, 2009).

White worries about the foundationalist hubris of classical liberalism but largely accepts its displacement of politics into the realm of the ethical. He criticizes Rawls's conception of reasonableness for disavowing its own entanglements with ontological reflection (p. 14), and faults Larmore's account of respect for not adequately addressing its own inherent contestability and for neglecting the “thick” aesthetic-affective dimensions of political life (p. 46), but he largely accepts the underlying theoretical project that animates these thinkers' work. Doing so, White embraces the importance of Foucault's later ethical writings for democratic theory, but largely neglects genealogy. If the former is oriented toward spaces of conflict resolution, the latter seeks to open up new spaces of conflict articulation. White is attentive to how “structures of power and privilege” may be rendered invisible by familiar appeals to reasonableness (p. 31). But bringing power back into the heart of democratic theory requires not only the articulation of a more critically self-reflective and decentering ethos but also the revitalization of a politicizing genealogical approach and perhaps other experimental approaches to democratic theory focused on the historical dynamics of democratic contention, alternative mechanisms of elite accountability, or the importance of inspiring new assemblages of collective, demotic power.

Without the critical counterbalance of these other approaches, White's ethos leans perhaps too far in the direction of familiar liberal turns to the reasonable, arguably much further than other influential advocates of the ethos approach. This is apparent, for example, when he objects to Connolly's questioning of the ontological hierarchy between human and nonhuman because of the moral risks involved, or when he calls for making the decentering ethos of presumptive generosity “equi-primordial” with classical liberal notions of dignity and respect (p. 50). The conciliatory approach that animates this study suggests that these invocations of generosity and respect do not, or need not, conflict, but they do. The “tempered agonism” that White advocates is settled within the assumed space of an updated humanism, for example, rather than being pulled in the direction of political contests over the meaning of that very designation. If the ethical turn aimed to sustain affirmation in the face of the perceived excesses of antifoundationalism, the reconciliation of poststructuralism and political liberalism envisioned by this study suggests that, to the extent that it succeeds, another correction will be needed. The ethical turn's displacement of politics will surely generate a further political response. In the meantime, however, this provocative contribution to the literature of the ethical turn has given us plenty to think about.