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From Aristotle to Hobbes: William Galston on civic virtue.

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William Galston is a leading scholar who works at the intersection of political theory and public policy: his political philosophy is deeply informed by his immense knowledge of American politics and policy. He denies being a "philosopher," by which he must mean a logic-chopping hairsplitter or a ponderous exegete, since he displays considerable philosophical gifts in his political theory. Like a good philosopher, he seeks to see things whole, to comprehend. In Justice and the Human Good (1980), Galston discusses the full range of ethical and political issues at stake in a comprehensive account of justice. In that book, he claims to be "inspired by Aristotle" (1) and indeed, he does link the moral virtues of justice to an account of human goods and happiness. And in his later books, he often claims to offer a "comprehensive" rather than a narrowly "political" theory of liberalism. Galston insists that arguments about liberal politics always rest upon at least tacit assumptions about the worth of human life and the goods that make for happiness. Galston is too philosophical to ignore the deep structure of political argument, and he boldly surfaces his own views on the goods and purposes that make for human happiness and support the proper principles of justice. Very few political theorists, let alone policy analysts, dare to venture as far as Galston does into the terrain of axiology. He is to be commended for his intellectual courage.

Just as Kant's works are customarily divided into "critical" and "pre-critical" phases, so Galston's work can be divided into "pluralist" and "pre-pluralist" phases. In his article "Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory" (1999) and then in his book Liberal Pluralism (2002), Galston considers the implications of value pluralism for liberal political theory. (2) In assessing Galston's work as a whole, we must decide whether the late Galston of liberal pluralism is consistent with his earlier work on justice and liberal virtues. Certainly there are important continuities, such as Galston's insistence that liberal politics be grounded in a philosophical ethics; Galston consistently argues that a liberal state cannot and should not be neutral with respect to the different ethical claims of its members. But there are also important discontinuities. Galston attempts to order genuine human goods into a set of "the basic principles of human good" in his 1980 book, where he boldly assesses and ranks the worth of our developed capacities, our reason, and our happiness. By contrast, the axiology of his pluralist works is much more modest. Indeed, pluralism itself rests on the claim that there is no single rank order among the incommensurable goods of human life. Galston does not say whether his new commitment to pluralism leads him to reject his own "continuous class heterogeneous ordering of capacities." (3) In his pluralist works, moreover, he says very little about "the elements of human good": he neither lists the basic goods nor attempts to rank them, as he did earlier. Although he continues to claim that "any viable defense [of a political regime] must rely on some substantive conception of what is good for human beings," (4) he now says almost nothing about the human good or about how the state might promote it. Instead, his discussion shifts subtly but decisively to an account of...

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