Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics.

• Author: Klein, Shawn E.
• Position: Book review

Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-perfectionist Politics By Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 358. $25.00.

Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl do not shy from a fight in their latest defense of neo-Aristotelian liberalism. They bravely respond to a wide range of criticisms and more than twenty-five individually stated objections to their account of liberalism. Moreover, the book provides a thorough review of the arguments and objections in the growing field of neo-Aristotelian ethics. Thus, Norms of Liberty is an important contribution to both ethics and politics. Though the authors focus sharply on defending liberalism from its critics, the book is concerned primarily with a positive justification of liberalism. Accordingly, in this review, I focus on the two key elements of this account: what they term "Liberalism's Problem" and its "Metanormative Solution."

Liberalism's Problem

As in their earlier work, Liberty and Nature (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991), the authors set out to put liberalism on a firm Aristotelian foundation and in so doing see themselves as responding to--and resolving--the crisis of liberalism. In Norms of Liberty, however, they go much further in explicating what the crisis of liberalism is and who the critics are. Indeed, this approach is one of the main advantages of Norms of Liberty over Liberty and Nature: the new book lays out and answers the objections to the authors' arguments more thoroughly and rigorously.

Before proceeding, we need to understand what liberalism is meant here. It is clear that the authors understand liberalism as a broad political philosophy that holds to certain central tenets: "that political power is not something due anyone by natural right, that progress is possible, that the individual is the basic social unit, that people should have the freedom to pursue their own conceptions of the good life, and that the political/legal order should be limited to protecting individuals in the pursuit of their own conceptions of the good life" (p. 11). This view encompasses what many call classical liberalism, libertarianism, and modern or welfare liberalism. All these different versions of liberalism hold to these tenets, although they interpret and apply them in divergent ways.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl divide the critics of liberalism into three main (often overlapping) groups. The first group, including thinkers...