Book Reviews|Political Theory: Liberalism in Practice: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Public Reason. By Newman, Olivia . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 216p. $37.00 cloth.

Liberalism in Practice: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Public Reason. By Newman Olivia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 216p. $37.00 cloth.

It seems ever more vital for political philosophers to understand the practical workings of liberal democracy. Liberal societies continually encounter fraught controversies on issues like same-sex marriage and the integration of different faiths. Polarized opinions on these matters call for deliberation based on public reasons, wherein simple appeals to fixed principles seem often to fall short. Different sides in the debates seem to offer views that appear reasonable from their own points of view. Against this background, Olivia Newman’s timely and clearly written defense of a “practical” liberalism advances an innovative view based on an internally differentiated concept of human psychology.

The central concern of Liberalism in Practice is that familiar accounts of liberal public reason underestimate the fact that people typically hold different values, and exhibit different character traits, across the many “domains” of life (Chapter 4). For instance, a ruthless CEO may be tolerant and generous in his or her personal life. This point leads Newman to question the generally held liberal assumption that the stability of political values depends on finding their source in citizens’ own “comprehensive,” nonpublic worldviews. While the assumption seems attractive, she astutely observes that it risks being exclusionary. Because liberals are committed to the fact of human diversity, it is exactly the citizens whose private worldview does not seem to yield liberal political values whom liberals should attempt to persuade into accepting a public ethic of fairness, equality, and reciprocity.

Newman responds to this predicament by drawing skilfully on recent developments in empirical and cognitive psychology. The insights of this literature lead her to query not only the “moralized” Rawlsian conception of public reason but also pragmatic, “modus vivendi” approaches, which characterize political commitment as a Hobbesian project of shoring up self-interested power. Considering both positions improbable, the author locates a third-way liberal justification that she views as “dispositional.” Because people can and do switch contextually between different values, it is possible to learn to practise political toleration. By drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, among others, her main claim is that the tendency for...