Abstract

William M. Sullivan wishes to restore the themes of civic republicanism, responsibility, and human dignity to their high place in public life. The first two-thirds of the book makes familiar criticisms of selfish, individualistic liberalism in its political, philosophic, and psychological dimensions. The remainder presents the author's own alternatives. Surveying contemporary economic and social analysis, Sullivan maintains that "the present crisis of government is a general crisis of the liberal capitalist form of society". Due to its "contradictions" liberal capitalism can no longer distribute goods as it has, and in any event it cannot foster human dignity. But the real problem is that liberalism, with its roots in Hobbes and Locke, emphasizes individual freedom while having merely instrumental notions of social relationships, value, and reason. The modern philosophic tradition, including such critics of the earlier moderns as Rousseau and Kant, by and large failed to provide the proper "moral ecology" which connects individual motivation with communal "social interactions." Now, John Rawls at least possesses a more appropriate moral ecology, as evidenced by his difference principle. But in the end even Rawls's admirable effort repeats liberalism's failing. Morality remains disjointed in Lawrence Kohlberg's structuralist psychology of moral reasoning. For him "Moral judgment is... a practical application of a decision procedure which can be stated in a formal principle". Kohlberg's levels and stages exhibit a nihilistic "failure of moral imagination" which invalidates his claim to have established true formal principles; for instance, his moral reasoning scale slights women. Contrary to all these variants of liberalism, Sullivan seeks a politics and morality based on a social human nature; hence he makes Dewey an honorable exception to his critique of liberalism, as the book's title indicates.