Stephen Holmes in The Ideas Letter:
Today’s disheartening resurgence of authoritarianism, xenophobia, race-baiting, brazen sexism and religious zealotry, not to mention homicidal rampages in the name of ethnic identity, makes rallying to the defense of a beleaguered liberalism into an intellectual and moral imperative. Even Alexander Lefebvre, a delightfully entertaining Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sidney, acknowledges in an aside that “liberal institutions and values are threatened worldwide.” But his stylishly chatty and evangelizing new book aims to defend liberalism against a threat less grimly consequential than those making newspaper headlines. The danger to which he draws our attention is more bookish and professorial than blood-dimmed and existential. In making his eloquent case for liberalism, he says little about the malignant movements of the far right thriving on political confusion and division in the United States and the European Union. Instead, he concentrates his hostile fire on a fashionable but unjustifiably cramped interpretation of the teachings of his philosophical hero, John Rawls.
The mission he sets himself is to present Rawls’ thought in a new light and thereby overturn “the reigning orthodoxy of how to do political philosophy within the Anglophone academy.” The orthodoxy with which he takes issue is the idea that liberalism is an exclusively and narrowly political doctrine focused on organizing political institutions to guarantee the equal rights and liberties of all members of the community. He invites us to look beyond its strictly political aspirations and appreciate liberalism’s promise of personal fulfillment through fair and generous treatment of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues and the strangers we occasionally meet.
The charm of Lefebvre’s approach to Rawls lies in how he transforms the dense and conceptually innovative analysis of A Theory of Justice into a frolicking, page-turning “work of self-help for liberals.”
More here.
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