Aurelian Craiutu begins his new book on political moderation by observing that it remains an understudied and underappreciated virtue. Craiutu has already explored the richness and complexity of political moderation in earlier books, and the current book represents a further installment in that ongoing project. His focus here is on the articulation of political moderation by a group of post–World War II writers whose thought developed in response to the rise of the extremist ideologies of communism and fascism. He devotes a chapter each to Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, and Michael Oakeshott and concludes with a chapter on the contemporary Polish intellectual Adam Michnik. For Craiutu, these writers reflect the different faces political moderation has assumed in the twentieth century, and one of his main points in the book is to show that “moderation has not one but many faces tied to various shifting contexts” (10). But he also claims that these writers can be seen as “belonging to a loosely defined ‘school’ of moderation that transcends strict geographical and temporal borders” (3). He likens this broad tradition of political moderation to an archipelago.

Let us begin with the archipelago. What are the defining features of the political moderation exemplified by the twentieth-century thinkers Craiutu has chosen to study? Though he claims that he has tried to move beyond the negative definition of political moderation in terms of opposition to extremism and fanaticism, Craiutu often characterizes this virtue in terms of what it is against. First and foremost, political moderation is opposed to the sort of ideological thinking that sees the world in terms of black and white or the Manichean opposition of good and evil. Such ideological thinking tends to seek the one best solution and is therefore prone to perfectionism and utopianism. The positive characteristics of political moderation are simply the inverse of the negative ones. It rests on a complex view of the world in which there are a plurality of values. Instead of pursuing the one best solution, the political moderate seeks to balance competing values and principles. Following Oakeshott, who follows the Marquess of Halifax, Craiutu adopts the figure of the trimmer—who shifts the cargo on a ship in order to maintain its equipoise—to capture the complex balancing act that the political moderate engages in.

As to the individual thinkers or islands that make up the archipelago of political moderation, Craiutu seeks to show that, while they all broadly share in the antiperfectionism or antiutopianism that defines political moderation, they do so in distinctive ways. The chapters on Aron, Berlin, and Oakeshott provide serviceable, if not remarkable, accounts of these well-known thinkers’ political philosophies in relation to the theme of moderation. The chapters on Bobbio and Michnik are more interesting because their political philosophies are less familiar and have received less scholarly attention. Despite Craiutu's professed aim of bringing out the differences between these thinkers, his accounts tend to dwell on similarities, sometimes to the point where the thinkers begin to blend into one another. Thus, with respect to Aron, he emphasizes the contrast between Aron's notion of “thinking politically” and ideological, black-and-white, Manichean, and utopian thinking; also the contrast between Aron's appreciation for the fallibility of human reason and millenarian or perfectionist politics. With respect to Berlin, Craiutu claims that political moderation “is key to understanding his political outlook,” even though Berlin never wrote explicitly about this virtue (74). Berlin's implicit commitment to political moderation is reflected in his rejection of monism, of perfectionism, and of the quest for certainty, as well as in his theory of the pluralism of values. Oakeshott's political philosophy, too, is animated by a “defense of moderation and lifelong opposition to all forms of ideological politics” (148), the latter being characterized by “a Manichean and monist conception of the world” (153). In addition to his antipathy for ideological politics, Oakeshott shares with Aron and Berlin an opposition to “the seduction of utopianism and extremism” (163). The chapters on Bobbio and Michnik repeat many of these same themes, but they are leavened by being placed in the concrete contexts of postwar Italian politics and postcommunist Polish politics.

Craiutu is not unaware of the potential pitfalls of his approach in the book. At one point he mentions the danger of underplaying “the differences between the ideas, agendas, and temperaments of the moderates studied here and overplay[ing], in turn, the affinities or similarities among them” (9). As my brief summary above suggests, I do not think he entirely escapes this danger. This can be seen in his treatment of the relationship between Berlin and Oakeshott, for example. At several points Craiutu alludes to the antipathy these two thinkers had for one another, but he nevertheless emphasizes the affinities between their critiques of monistic rationalism and defenses of pluralism. While there are certainly some similarities in the general positions Oakeshott and Berlin take in their political philosophies, the reasoning by which they arrive at those positions is actually quite different. Oakeshott's critique of rationalism does not rest on a wholesale rejection of monism, the master theme of Berlin's philosophy; and the liberal pluralism he defends is not of the radical, agonistic sort espoused by Berlin. In studying the history of political philosophy, Oakeshott always stressed the importance of looking at the reasons or grounds of a philosopher's arguments rather than the mere conclusions; the former point to what is distinctive and original in a philosopher, while the latter often contain only what is generic. In his accounts of the individual thinkers who exemplify the virtue political moderation, Craiutu does not always follow this methodological principle.

This raises a question about the usefulness of the general concept in terms of which Craiutu links the disparate thinkers in his book, namely, political moderation. Is this concept ultimately too broad to identify meaningful connections between the thinkers Craiutu has chosen to study? And in its breadth does it ultimately obscure important differences? The capaciousness of the concept of political moderation is reflected not only in the range of thinkers to whom Craiutu devotes individual chapters but in the wide variety of writers to whom he compares them: Judith Shklar, Arthur Schlesinger, and Leszek Kolakowski, among others. At one point, Craiutu wonders whether figures such as Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, and John Maynard Keynes might have been considered as well, adding: “Needless to say, there is no shortage of worthy candidates” (4). The abundance of such candidates perhaps suggests a problem.

There is one final, larger question Craiutu's book raises: To what extent is the virtue of political moderation, especially in the antiutopian, antiperfectionist form defended by postwar intellectuals, the one thing needful in today's postideological age? Craiutu makes a strong claim that “political moderation is particularly relevant and important in a postideological age such as ours, when … new forms of extremism are on the rise” (238). There is a continuing need, he argues, for “opposition to all types of moral absolutism … skepticism toward all forms of zealotry and agendas trying to simplify the complex reality of political and social life,” and a rejection of “all attempts to impose the rule of a single idea or program that defines itself as the single ‘best way’” (244). All this is laudable, especially given the hyperpartisan character of our politics today. But is it enough, or even the most important thing, in a skeptical and unbelieving age such as ours? That is the question Craiutu's book, in its passionate and eloquent defense of political moderation, never quite gets to.