Understanding Liberal Democracy Essays in Political Philosophy

Understanding Liberal Democracy presents notable work by Nicholas Wolterstorff at the intersection between political philosophy and religion. Alongside his influential earlier essays, it includes nine new essays in which Wolterstorff develops original lines of argument and stakes out novel positions regarding the nature of liberal democracy, human rights, and political authority. Taken together, these positions are an attractive alternative to the so-called public reason liberalism defended by thinkers such as John Rawls. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, political theorists, and theologians, engaging a wide audience of those interested in how best to understand the nature of liberal democracy and its relation to religion.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University. Currently he is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, at the University of Virginia. He has been President of the American Philosophical Association, and of the Society of Christian Philosophers; he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the lectures he has given are the Wilde Lectures at Oxford University, the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews University, and the Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary. He has published over twenty books including On Universals, Works and Worlds of Art, Art in Action, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, Divine Discourse, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology, Educating for Shalom, Lament for a Son, Justice: Rights and Wrongs and Justice in Love.

Terence Cuneo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. He works primarily in the areas of ethics and history of modern philosophy. In addition to having published numerous articles in these areas, he is the author of The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism (Oxford, 2007). He has also edited six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (Cambridge, 2004), Religion in the Liberal Polity (Notre Dame, 2005), The Foundations of Ethics (Blackwell, 2007), and two volumes of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers, Inquiring about God (Cambridge, 2010), and Practices of Belief (Cambridge, 2010).

Editor's Introduction
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: PUBLIC REASON LIBERALISM
1. The Paradoxical Role of Coercion in the Theory of Political Liberalism
2. An Engagement with Rorty
3. The Justificatory Liberalism of Gerald Gaus
4. What Are the Prospects for Public Reason Liberalism?
PART TWO: RE-THINKING LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
5. Liberal Democracy as Equal Political Voice
6. Exercising One's Political Voice as a Moral Engagement
PART THREE: PERSPECTIVES ON RIGHTS
7. On Secular and Theistic Groundings of Human Rights
8. Grounding the Rights We Have as Human Persons
9. The Right of the People to a Democratic State: Reflections on a Passage in Althusius
10. Accounting for the Political Authority of the State
PART FOUR: LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION
11. Why Can't We All Just Get Along With Each Other?
12. Freedom for Religion
13. Do Christians Have Good Reasons for Supporting Liberal Democracy?
14. A Religious Argument for the Civil Right to Freedom of Religious Exercise, Drawn from American History
15. Habermas on Religion and Postmetaphysical Philosophy in Political Discourse
Bibliography
Index