Reconstructing Public Reason. By Eric MacGilvray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 266p. $45.00.

Eric MacGilvray imaginatively puts philosophical pragmatism to work on the problems of “political justification”—that is, questions about “how we decide, or ought to decide, which ends to pursue as a political community” (p. 2). Above all, he seeks to make pragmatism a part of the engagement of contemporary political theorists with a familiar, vexing question posed in its most well known form by John Rawls: “How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?” (Political Liberalism 1993, p. 4).

Dewey's refusal to abandon his strong belief in the democratic ideal, which must materialize not via powerful political elites but rather through publicly created institutions and full participation of ordinary citizens, has been grossly misunderstood. Using Dewey's critics' own arguments that purport to show Dewey intentionally, or naively, disregarded the role of power in the relations of communities, Westbrook brings examples to reinforce the contrary view. Dewey's adherence to the view that war must be universally outlawed and sanctioned was targeted precisely on the international political elites in order to reduce their domination and to maintain the real power within the hands of the citizens.

The principal question we now face as a discipline may well be, “Can history recapture its romantic past?” The roots of that tradition are well known, extending back to Bancroft, Motley and Parkman, who came to the practice of history principally as men of letters. Avid readers of Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, these first American historians saw in their craft the obligation not to analyze history, but to recreate it, thus forging what Richard Hofstadter called their “imaginative relation with the past.…What they worked for was experience not philosophy… the moral drama of history was told in pictorial terms. The effort at historical discipline… rested upon the insatiable quest for the right, the relevant detail.…The technical… side of the work of these men came primarily to this: facts were valued not so much as ‘evidence,’ as proofs in some analytic scheme, but as veracious details for the recreation of some experience.”