S. D. Chrostowska: Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. 215.)

Abstract

liberal value. By the book’s end, tempered liberalism is revealed to be a species of perfectionist liberalism, complete with prescriptions for how society could educate citizens so that they internalize pluralism (201). Sensing trouble, Cherniss denies that his view is perfectionist, claiming that it is “not a comprehensive ideal, but a specifically political ethos” (208). Yet this is belied by his earlier depiction of pluralism. There, pluralism is “a certain relationship to the moral life” (190) and is “connected to existential and epistemological/methodological pluralism,” which denies that there could be “one infallible method of intellectual framework” to make sense of human experience; Cherniss also claims that pluralism rejects the idea that “life can be rendered meaningful by reference to some single ultimate good” (201). Oddly, Liberalism in Dark Times ends where the later Rawls begins. The lingering question is whether there is a viable conception of liberalism that can accommodate the fact that liberal citizens will disagree persistently over fundamentals concerning the structure and content of liberal values. Ultimately, tempered liberalism stands as nothing more than another liberal doctrine that one hopes can join an overlapping consensus on specific institutional arrangements. That said, Cherniss is correct to think that the political project of liberalism would be on firmer ground amid the social turmoil we are currently experiencing if all liberals were committed to the same way of understanding how core liberal values fit together. But that is no response to the liberal predicament. Rather, it is simply another formulation of it.