Abstract

This book is best understood if one places it into the specific context of present-day debates about the shortcomings of American liberalism. With Alasdair MacIntyre and other communitarians on the one hand, and the "new constitutionalist right" on the other hand, mainstream liberalism in the United States reaching from Dewey to Rawls appears to be under pressure. Macedo does his best to salvage it without relying on support from left-wing communitarians or moderate defenders of social democracy such as Charles Taylor or M. Walzer. The title "liberal virtues" is, after all, almost provocative; at least we begin to hear it that way, having become accustomed to separating virtue from liberalism and attributing an almost premodern meaning to the term virtue. Therefore Macedo puts much effort into a reconstruction of the historical ancestry of American liberalism and shows that liberalism was integral to the constitutional history of the United States. He takes his argument through a consideration of a number of relevant Supreme Court decisions, all the while clearly recognizing that republican and democratic virtues have sources other than those available through constitutional adjudication. What interests the author is the relation between the public virtues of reasonableness, tolerance, critical reflection as moral virtues and their legal counterparts. He thus makes a case for a liberal public morality or ethos, without which political liberalism or liberalism in constitutional law cannot overcome a "shortfall of legitimacy and moral justification".