Free Public Reason Making It Up As We Go [Hardcover]

Free Public Reasonexamines the idea of public justification, stressing its importance but also questioning the coherence of the concept itself. Although public justification is employed in the work of theorists such as John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Thomas Nagel, and others, it has received little attention on its own as a philosophical concept. In this book Fred D'Agostino shows that the concept is composed of various values, interests, and notions of the good, and that no ranking of these is possible. The notion of public justification itself is thus shown to be contestable. In demonstrating this, D'Agostino undermines many current political theories that rely on this concept. Having broken down the foundations of public justification, D'Agostino then offers an alternative model of how a workable consensus on its meaning might be reached through the interactions of a community of interpreters or delegates at a constitutional convention.

An excellent book....A real and important contribution to contemporary political theory. Both critics and defenders of liberalism will learn much from D'Agostino's penetrating analysis of public reason. --Gerald Gaus, University of Minnesota

D'Agostino's care in detailing the many dimensions of the concept of public justification moves us closer to being able to identify these goods and ideals as they are now exemplified and violated. --American Political Science Review