The debates over the extension of slavery between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in the late 1850s have been seen by prominent political philosophers such as Michael Sandel as foundational in their bearing on the evolution of modern liberalism. For Sandel, the degree of moral abdication evident in Douglas's concept of “popular sovereignty” – which effectively stipulated that the people of the western territories should decide on the slavery question for themselves – prefigures the bloodless proceduralism of John Rawls's late twentieth-century liberal political philosophy in so far as it seeks to bracket moral considerations from political deliberation. Lincoln, in his refusal to countenance this, Sandel argues, kept alive a morally charged “republican” ethos that underpinned a countertradition of communitarian politics (16–17). The communitarianism of the 1990s failed to survive the embrace of triangulating “third-way” politicians as well as certain well-worn sociocultural contradictions of capitalism but the debates remain a touchstone for many scholars of American political thought.

John Burt's book offers a more sustained and finessed attempt to engage with the relationship between morality and politics in this key historical context. Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism is a rigorous, learned and theoretically rich work which, whilst critical of the Civil War President at various points, nonetheless offers a compelling portrait of him as a man of ideas. Yet this is not quite a work of moral philosophy or a conventional study in the history of ideas. Burt's genre-defying aim is, rather, after the fashion of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution (1962), to present a “situated philosophy, or a philosophically aware history” (9). The key to understanding the significance of Lincoln's clash with Douglas lies in the former's awareness of what Burt, following H. L. A. Hart, terms the “implicitness” of “concepts” (roughly the prevailing overarching values of a constitutional settlement such as “liberty,” “order,” “equality” and so on) and the way these are articulated – though never to the point of semantic exhaustion – by specific “conceptions” of them (arrived at by later generations who always have to work out their meaning under different historical conditions).

In the American context what matters is the intuitive promissory note sounded by the unequivocal commitment of the Declaration of Independence to the equality of all – and not just some – men (and, “implicitly,” women). In this way, Burt claims, adherence to the Founders “is not expressed by repetition of their practices, but by allowing one's self to be rebuked by the promises they knew they could not keep but made anyway” (4). As phenomena such as the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Lincoln's own angry response to Dred Scot suggest, organizing political concepts in a democracy are prospectively rather than retrospectively sanctioned, deriving their meaning not from their rootedness in the past but from an implied capacity to support future reconceptions of them. This theoretical schema repudiates conservatives' veneration for institutions and “original-intent” constitutional hermeneutics, leading Burt to describe his approach as a form of “Reverse Burkeanism” (24).

In contrast to Harry Jaffa, who in his Crisis of the House Divided (1958) created an influential portrait of Lincoln as a Straussian moralist cut from classical political cloth, Burt interprets Lincoln as a modern. However, he also accepts that if Lincoln can be understood with reference to Kant and Rawls's ethical voluntarism (illustrated most obviously via his persistent claim that if slavery is a good it is a good no man has ever sought for himself), this does not quite explain the other dimension of his outlook. This is what Burt describes as his “tragic pragmatism,” a more chastened set of perspectives that find exquisite expression in those later speeches delivered as the war was winding down and a future in which a new “conception” (or “birth”) of freedom was on the horizon. Lincoln emerges as a conflicted centrist holding a chaotic ring in which pro- and anti-slavery absolutists took at least as many swings at those committed to compromise in their own sectional corners as they did at each other. Burt's study also contains a more psychologistic dimension that is keen to expose divisions within the political psyches of Lincoln and Douglas as representative figures. Some excellent close readings – Burt is a professor of literature – continually reveal the extent to which “the agents both know and do not know, acknowledge and do not acknowledge, the meaning of their conflict” (446). This is most glaring in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address when the nation is forced, finally, to accept that slavery was, “somehow, the cause of the war.” Thus the concepts of “freedom” and “equality” had been reconceived as no longer dependent on the “unfree” and “unequal” status of others.

It is a pity that the heft and detail-heavy character of Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism will deter some scholars from engaging with its provocative arguments. These are arguments that are clearly suggestive in ways that apply way beyond the particular moral–political quandaries thrown up by the American Civil War. It's possible that certain thick contextual undergrowth the reader encounters might have been pruned back. No sectional sub-controversy, it seems, be it the Toombs Bill or the Wyandotte Constitution, is left behind. It's also slightly puzzling that Burt fails to acknowledge the ways some of these ideas found their way into the prospective, pragmatist philosophies of John Dewey and William James. The latter, after all, famously claimed in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), that truth is something that “happens to an idea.” Nonetheless, this is a magisterial study of the limits of liberalism and of the possibility of consecrating moral value in consensus-seeking, democratic societies.