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Gerald Gaus, Public Reason and Diversity: Reinterpretations of Liberalism, Kevin Vallier (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 2022, 282pp., $32.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781316512593.
Reviewed by Sameer Bajaj, University of Warwick
The late Gerald Gaus was the most innovative and influential public reason liberal since John Rawls. Gaus is known primarily for a series of pathbreaking books that defend a version of the core public reason idea that moral or political rules must be justifiable to those over whom they claim authority.[1] Public Reason and Diversity: Reinterpretations of Liberalism is a collection of Gaus’s seminal essays, originally published between 1999 to 2018. If there is a common thread running through the essays, it is that public reason liberals (and political philosophers more generally) ought to embrace evaluative diversity—i.e., differences in the evaluative standards of reasonable and reflective people—and that doing so supports different kinds of political arrangements and different modes of…
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