Our liberal democracy is incapable of generating its own moral guidance, say the critics. It articulates “rights” but not “the good,” says Michael Sandel. It has abandoned the virtues, says Alasdair MacIntyre, and the traditions that once guided a way of life. It has tried, argues Habermas, but cannot “administratively reproduce” the motivating morality on which it has always relied. As its formal justice presents issues in terms of individual rights or states' rights in the law, it frequently misses what is more deeply at stake. It is unable to give people their “just deserts,” insists Stanley Brubaker, to punish wrongdoing or reward merit, or to recognize the worthiness of those who work hard, pay their taxes, and answer first to their God. In the pursuit of its comforting legal abstractions, one might say, liberal democracy and its justice have ended the bitter feuds and religious wars that have threatened perpetual vengeance, but at the expense of the commitments and values that once made that democracy worth having.

I begin in partial agreement with this lament, yet with the suspicion that it paints its target too easily, aiming at the weak underbelly of certain theoretical constructs of liberalism when the real foe lies somewhere else. Liberalism surely is a body of thought that has tried to extricate itself from such local entanglements and to rise above particular cases.