Customer Reviews

Liberalism with Honor

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This is a brilliant, learned, and wise book on why liberal democracies need honor, and how a supposedly outdated aristocratic ideal fuels movements for rights and justice. It belongs on the shelf next to the classic works on the rethinking of liberalism: Galston and Taylor, Rosenblum and Macedo and Walzer. With lovely prose and pinpoint analysis, Krause cuts across, through, and beyond the tired dichotomies--virtue vs. duty, self-interest vs. common concern--that characterize the debates among liberals and their critics. She is careful and convincing in responding to the usual (and reasonable) objections to an honor-based politics. The honor she defends is neither undemocratic, antimodern, nor opposed to the idea that everyone must play by the same rules. In fact, this book shows how honor was indispensable to the antislavery, suffrage, and Civil Rights causes: honor enables the great and risky actions we sometimes need to achieve equal liberty in the face of a larger society made passive by consensus and hopelessness. Krause thus helps us see that the system of rights and equal civic standing we rightly prize requires that we have at least some citizens, some of the time, who act on something more than narrow self interest--and less than altruism.

There are things one could object to in this book. Its antimajoritarianism may be a bit one-sided; its stress on honor may lead it to slight (unintentionally) the ordinary virtues short of honor that both movements and everyday life require. But these are quibbles. In its combination of canonical erudition, historical wisdom, and clear contemporary relevance, this book reminds us of how political theory can matter once more. Of more than academic interest, it helps us think through our political lives.