2025.02.15 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Blain Neufeld, Public Reason and Political Autonomy: Realizing the Ideal of a Civic People, Routledge, 2021, 183pp., $54.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781138737495.
Reviewed by Andrew Lister, Queen’s University
Blain Neufeld claims that public reason makes possible political autonomy in a pluralistic society. His starting point is an ideal of democratic freedom inspired by Rousseau. Freedom is not the absence of restrictions on whatever one happens to want, but to be the author of one’s own life, actively shaping it according to one’s own reasoning. Equal realization of autonomy requires laws regulating how we treat one another, so it also requires that legislation result from collective deliberation in which each can participate as an equal. This autonomy is threatened by the fact that even people fully able and willing to reason with each other will persist in espousing conflicting religious and philosophical doctrines. The solution is public reason.
Chapter 1 reconstructs Rawls’s theory of…
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