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).

Rawls's solution to this apparent dilemma was “political liberalism”—a polity grounded in an “overlapping consensus” on a set of liberal principles that could be comfortably nested within a variety of “reasonable,” competing “comprehensive doctrines” of the good life and that would guide public, if not private, judgment. These liberal principles would thus govern the exercise of “public reason,” the discourse of debate over political fundamentals, and citizens qua citizens would confine themselves to this reasonable discourse and leave the remainder of their particularistic comprehensive doctrines at home when they did. A president might pray all he wanted in the private quarters of the White House on his own time, but he would not publicly advocate the reform of Social Security as an act of Christian charity, rather than a requirement of secular justice.

MacGilvray shares Rawls's hope, if not his method. He too is after “a theory of political justification that would allow us to admit controversial social and political ideals as going concerns within a liberal polity without undermining the norms of fairness and respect for persons that define such a polity” (p. 5). But MacGilvray has a quarrel with the manner in which Rawls and other political liberals have gone about constructing such a theory, and he thinks pragmatism can help build a better political liberalism.

MacGilvray's objection to much of political liberalism is twofold. On the one hand, in order to limit conflict, it pursues a “minimalism” that seeks out a set of largely procedural moral commitments that will command widespread assent and, hence, tends to reinforce the status quo in order to avoid disagreement. On the other hand, despite this minimalism, it injects more than enough substantive ethical commitments into the “reasonableness” of its overlapping consensus to belie any claim to neutrality.

MacGilvray argues that minimalism and neutrality are fruitless pursuits, yet he nonetheless appreciates the impulse that underlies them. Like Rawls, he wants a public sphere governed by public reason, that is, arguments that are couched in terms that all citizens can acknowledge to be reasonable. By reconstructing public reason along pragmatist lines, he contends that liberals might forge a more robust and adventuresome conception of political justification that nonetheless promises greater consensus with less controversy.

Like most pragmatists, MacGilvray begins with “an appeal to the scientific method of experimental inquiry as a particularly reliable and effective means of resolving doubt,” including moral and political doubt (p. 117). For a pragmatist, as he says, “a belief in the validity of a moral norm or principle, like any belief, is justified on pragmatic grounds if and to the extent that no further doubts arise from acting upon it” (p. 12). Experimental inquiry of this sort, pragmatists contend, has proven far more successful than any other method we have designed for fixing belief, and they draw on “a historical narrative within which the enormous success of scientific modes of inquiry in achieving human ends sheds light on the proper aims of a democratic society” (pp. 237–38). Moreover, “because this narrative appeals to the authority of a set of practices to which the citizens of modern societies are all in some sense committed, it provides a point of orientation for discourses of political justification that we can reasonably expect them to share” (p. 238). For MacGilvray, who conceives of public reason as experimental inquiry, political liberalism requires that the proponents of various comprehensive doctrines consent only to deliberate as pragmatists in the public sphere. Here, “reasonableness” appears to require no controversial moral commitments, only a less controversial epistemological one: “Taken in itself, pragmatism does not provide a comprehensive set of moral commitments; it merely offers a particular way of orienting ourselves toward whatever commitments we do in fact adopt” (p. 13).

Nonetheless, this epistemological commitment does come bearing moral baggage, which MacGilvray, like many pragmatists, is quick to observe: “The pragmatic theory of inquiry carries as a corollary the claim that the experimental intelligence of each citizen should, all other things being equal, be developed and expressed, and that to be engaged as a pragmatist in normative political inquiry is therefore to be concerned with the problem of extending the exercise of this faculty in public life whenever possible” (p. 15). Because “the pragmatic theory of inquiry requires as its complement a moral commitment to explore the possibilities of human association in a way that respects the experimental intelligence of each citizen,” pragmatists end up in service of this commitment with a justification of many of the same principles of liberty and equality that Rawls embeds in his overlapping consensus (p. 15).

I am myself too much the pragmatist to find fault with much of MacGilvray's argument, though I am sure it will, as pragmatism usually does, raise the hackles of Platonists and postmodernists alike. But I do think (alas) that he considerably overestimates the prospects for wide assent to an overlapping consensus for the “pragmatizing” of public reason, even among the citizens of modern societies who have accepted the authority of science. For there are many such citizens, including pragmatists from Charles Peirce to Richard Posner, who look to science to settle doubts about the natural world but do not think that experimental inquiry can settle moral doubts or fix political beliefs. And although neopragmatists such as Hilary Putnam and Cheryl Misak have considerably improved on John Dewey's efforts to make the case that it can, this pivotal claim in what Putnam has called the pragmatist “epistemological justification of democracy” remains hotly contested, even among pragmatists.

I lack the space to salute adequately the other particulars of MacGilvray's neopragmatism, which include an admirable defense of William James's much derided “will to believe” and a judicious dissent from the naturalized Hegelianism that afflicted Dewey's political thought. Suffice it to say that there is much to chew on in Reconstructing Public Reason, even for those inclined to share rather than contend with MacGilvray's high estimate of the rewards of pragmatism.