Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
3-1996
Publication Information
26 Hastings Center Report, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 1996, at 47 (book review).
Abstract
Private Consciences and Public Reasons. By Kent Greenawalt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 225 pp. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
The central point of Kent Greenawalt's latest book is that the basic principles of liberal democracy do not resolve the question to which liberal democracy has been proposed as the answer. The question concerns how comprehensive accounts of the good - especially religious accounts - fit into public deliberation and decisionmaking in a pluralist society like ours. The earmark of liberalism, one has come to think, is a principled insistence that some exclusion or, in Greenawalt's words, "self-restraint," of religious world views is essential to political stability and religious freedom for individuals. Greenawalt accepts that some such restraint is necessary for us.
Recommended Citation
Gerard V. Bradley,
A New Liberal Identity?,
26 Hastings Center Report, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 1996, at 47 (book review)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1796