As the editor reminds us, until the early eighties Bernard Williams's very strong reputation was primarily as a moral philosopher (albeit he also contributed valuable work in epistemology). It was clear, however, that his views had important implications for politics and political theory (no more so than in the superb essay “The Idea of Equality,” the one earlier essay reprinted in this collection). And beginning in the eighties, perhaps influenced by his friendship with Isaiah Berlin and the influence of the latter upon his thinking, Williams focused his thinking increasingly both on quite practical politics and on major issues in political theory. His interest in moral questions never waned, but his reflections concerning them almost always made connections to political and/or political theoretical issues.

The essays collected in this volume range over a wide variety of topics, including liberalism, pluralism, legitimation, freedom/liberty, relations between liberty and equality, toleration, censorship, rights—including the right to intervene in the lives of other people and peoples—and the place of truth in politics. Several themes run through the collection. One of these is a tempered skepticism, particularly concerning the reach and efficacy of theoretical constructions, whether political theoretical or more generally philosophical, a theme that Williams developed at length in his earlier Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). This theme partly informs the “realism” of the book's subtitle and also the “In the beginning was the deed” in the main title. Throughout the essays, Williams is concerned with maintaining close contact with the actions that agents take in political life and the conditions that influence those actions: “[P]olitical projects are essentially conditioned, not just in their background intellectual conditions but as a matter of empirical realism, by their historical circumstances. Utopian thought is not necessarily frivolous, but the nearer political thought gets to action, as in the concrete affirmation of human rights, the more likely it is to be frivolous if it is utopian (p. 25). Williams is not quite a praxis theorist à la Herbert Marcuse or Jürgen Habermas, but in this respect his views have an affinity with theirs.

A second, related, theme concerns the notions of legitimacy and legitimation (LEG) and their relations with coercion, censorship, and human rights in “modern” societies. Williams acknowledges that a number of premodern polities that were neither liberal nor democratic could claim legitimacy in the sense that they were able, justifiably in the view of many of their subjects, to demand, including through coercion if necessary, the obedience to their laws and commands. But he argues that in modern societies, liberalism in one or more of its many formulations and “some kind of democracy, participatory politics at some level, is a feature of LEG for the modern world” (p. 15). Picking up on the previous theme, he argues, however, that theory cannot itself identify or determine the exact configuration of either liberalism or democracy appropriate to any particular polity. LEG is a “progressive project,” and “how much more” of either liberalism or democracy is “actually possible seems to me a question that belongs to level of fact, practice and politics, not one that lies beyond these in the very conditions of legitimacy” (p. 17).

With regard to LEG in modern states, Williams introduces what he calls the “critical theory principle” (p. 14). This principle “targets” the accepted social and institutional understandings on which legitimacy is based. Together with his rejection of the sweeping claims for legitimacy advanced by Rousseau and Hegel and his argument that Wittgenstein's thinking does not support a conservative attitude toward established arrangements (Chapter 3) he makes it clear that he is not an unqualified enthusiast or apologist for legitimacy and state authority. But he regards anarchism—and presumably any very robust antinomianism—as an irrelevancy or perhaps a distraction. This is consistent with his skepticism concerning utopianism, but in this reviewer's view, it does load both the theoretical and practical dice too heavily in favor of state authority. As J. S. Mill argued, and as experience with the current Bush administration in the United States indicates, governments confident of their legitimacy may become too prone to impose their preferences and their will in harmful ways.

Turning to liberalism, Williams's version of this multi-colored ideology is a combination of Berlinian pluralism and Judith Shklar's liberalism of fear (see esp. Chapter 5), together with a conception of basic human rights strongly reminiscent of Hobbes and Constant. He agrees with Shklar that the greatest evils are violence, coercion, physical suffering, and cruelty, that effective protections against these evils are the most important and least disputable of rights, and that governments, while necessary in order to enjoy these rights, have historically been the worst violators of them. Particular modern, legitimate governments may accord and enforce further rights, but this will be a matter of local history, values, and politics, and convincing generalizations concerning them are hard to come by. In this reviewer's judgment, these views warrant our acceptance.

It is also easy to agree with Williams's critique of various alternative versions of liberalism, particularly his opposition to autonomy-based theories such as Carlos Nino's (Chapter 2) and Thomas Nagel's (Chapters 2 and 6), strong rights-oriented theories such as Ronald Dworkin's (esp. Chapter 7), and aspects of John Rawls's “political liberalism.” The several essays present potent objections to these forms of liberalism, but perhaps the author's most general objection to them is that they fail adequately to make contact with political realities.

The chapters on toleration, censorship, and humanitarian intervention (10, 11, and 12) offer closely argued and quite restricted construals of these notions, construals that I find to be improvements on the abundant literatures on these topics. The final chapter, on “Truth, Politics and Self-Deception,” which presents the core of Williams's argument in Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Geneology (2002), features a distinction between sincerity and accuracy and argues that taken together, they demonstrate that both truth and truthfulness are essential elements in a decent politics. It is no doubt the case that the question of accuracy is important in many circumstances, but given the difficulties, in many domains, of establishing accuracy or even of deploying the concept in meaningful ways, sincerity seems to me to be the politically more important of these ideas.

Characteristically, all of the essays are closely argued, elegantly written, and strongly engaging. The book is a welcome addition to the literatures on the many issues it addresses.