David Ingram situates his work within the tradition of critical social theory and traces its normative impulse to the young Marx's aspiration for human fulfillment. However, in order to avoid the trap of utopianism, he adopts a pragmatic attitude and highlights the importance of compromises. At the same time, by remaining cognizant of the price paid for normative compromises, he is able to maintain his pragmatic attitude without losing sight of the aspiration for human fulfillment and perfectibility that inspires his work.

This book is an attempt by Ingram to bring this impulse to bear on the “the problematic intersection of democracy and multiculturalism” (p. 2) in order to yield an understanding of a progressive identity politics consistent with democratic struggle. Democratic fairness, he argues, does not preclude attention to the special needs and claims of identity groups, nor does it necessarily reject the idea of group rights. To navigate this intersection, Ingram, following François Lyotard, offers two models of identity, each of which has applicability to individuals as well as groups. He distinguishes between a somewhat rigid “separatist-preservative” model of identity and a more fluid “synchretic-transformative” model, and finds occasion throughout the book to rely on both in different contexts. As part of his attempt to navigate the intersection of democracy and multiculturalism, he also offers a theory of rights that “supplements formal rights with substantive entitlements” (p. 9) and that is attentive to the disabling effects of capitalism everywhere, especially in the global North–South gap.

The bulk of the book is simply divided into three parts, one on identity, one on democracy, one on rights, and offers in one early chapter and concluding remarks a thin, abstract overall frame, which I have tried to reconstruct in the above paragraphs. The chapters within each of the parts deal in detail and very insightfully with different theoretical debates of great political significance under the topic at hand. For example, the part on identity contains an insightful chapter on race and one on disability. In each, Ingram makes a compelling argument for resisting the temptation to reduce all identity groups to the image of cultural groups demanding recognition. He argues convincingly that neither racial politics nor disability politics can be squeezed into that box. Furthermore, he argues for the need to distinguish between legitimate groups that can make demands for group rights and illegitimate ones whose identity is better comprehended along the synchretic-transformative model of identity. Here he uses the examples of whites in the United States and “deaf world” as identities that cannot be well understood via the separatist-preservative model and that do not have legitimate grounds for group rights.

The other two parts of the book offer equally compelling chapters, with the part on rights being more illuminating than the one on democracy. In dealing with international justice, Ingram makes a particularly insightful distinction between attempts at justifying human rights, on the one hand, and attempts at their democratic legitimation, on the other (p. 198). Justification is a tall order in a pluralist world, for it requires that people across deep cultural divides be rationally convinced of the truth and rightness of beliefs undergirding human rights. The democratic legitimation of these rights, on the other hand, merely demands that such people be convinced of the duty to act according to their dictates. Conviction of one's duty to act in a particular way may, but does not necessarily, involve questions of truth and rightness and certainly does not require consensus over the truth and rightness of any beliefs. Ingram's contribution to this intuition, which underlies John Rawls's idea of an overlapping consensus, is to bring in Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics and the democratic deliberative processes that it entails. The result of this move is to allow the participants in legitimating discourses over human rights to continue to aspire toward the ever-greater perfectibility of the human rights regime. In time, they can potentially seek agreement over a richer set of rights than the short list of basic rights that Rawls's overlapping consensus accounts for between reasonable peoples.

As the reader will have detected by now, Ingram has a very ambitious purpose and a project with multiple nodes that could have been approached in any number of ways. He could have set out to work out a theory for a politics of identity and subordinated discussions of democracy and rights to that purpose. Or, perhaps more promisingly, he could have focused on the challenges facing the discourse of human rights in a pluralist world and looked toward the questions of identity and deliberative democracy with that purpose in mind. He might even have chosen to make this a treatise on method and to make the tension between pragmatism and perfectibility the dominant theme of which all other discussions illuminate an aspect in a particular context.

Part of the attraction of Rights, Democracy, and Fulfillment in the Era of Identity Politics is that it refuses to succumb to any easy options. It does not explicitly follow any of the above paths or any dominant organizing principle that I could detect. But this is also its weakness. There is a way in which it constitutes a collection of interconnected insights and discussions, many of which are mutually illuminating, but which never quite gel into an explicit whole. I have found it rewarding to read the book as a collection of essays, and have been unable to reap the benefits of the author's apparent efforts to make it into something more. I am left with a sense of a missing level of theorizing to mediate between the overly abstract purpose articulated in the early and late chapters and the very detailed, rich, self-standing discussions in each of the three main parts of the book. Ingram clarifies a number of extremely important points about identity politics and theories of rights, including human rights, political representation, and theories of jurisprudence. He works out some important pieces of potentially larger claims and establishes a number of interesting distinctions, some of which I have alluded to. But the project has yet to take the shape of an elegant, explicit, well-developed theory of democratic politics in a pluralist world. I look forward with some anticipation to its future development in such a form.