Suchergebnisse

In his book, Bruce Miroff provides a captivating account of the ill-fated 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. Indeed, given Miroff's access and diligence in interviewing many of the major players, this is likely to be the definitive study of that campaign for the foreseeable future. To read it is to relive the events of a crucial episode in the career of American liberalism—and also to relive the emotions of hope, anguish, frustration, and dismay that attended them. In addition to providing such a wonderful narrative and judicious assessment of this campaign, Miroff also wants to argue that these events marked the onset of and contributed in some ways to what he calls "the identity crisis of the Democratic Party."

My thanks to Bruce Miroff for his thoughtful comments. There is much we could discuss, but because our allotted space is quite circumscribed I shall settle here for trying to clarify a few points and to dispel a few misimpressions I may have encouraged—or at least not sufficiently forestalled—in my book.

Theories of social justice are either hegemonic (defending a single determinate standard), skeptical (finding social justice to be radically indeterminate if not meaningless), or pluralistic (claiming that we can disqualify all but a handful of standards, but that we cannot definitively adjudicate among these). I offer here a variation of the pluralistic view, arguing that a single standard cannotbe definitive because of what is termed the antinomies of social justice. These antinomies arise where the demands of justice collide with elements of the gratuitous that are morally valid or are practically unavoidable. Where this occurs, all possible distribution rules turn out to be unfair. An important implication of the argument is that liberal democracies cannot find their grounds for consensus, as John Rawls contends, in a common attachment to principles of justice. Instead, common interests and civic friendship will always be necessary supplements to the sense of justice as a source of social bonds in a free society.