Completed: 10/15/2023
Recommendation: Mildly Recommended
Recommended By: my wife
Review:
For most of this book, this seemed like an academic parsing of words. I guess I should have been ready for that from the title. Towards the end, there was a little bit more on the application. As theory books go, this was very readable and very approachable. Like most political theory, I felt that this book described what already happens rather than builds a coherent theory. I know that is unfair to this author who is a full fledged theorist and who went to great lengths to make this book coherent from a theoretical point of view. All the same, it sort of felt like using "liberal" as an adjective was pointed at, "what is the liberal version" of a lot of different types of politics. In addition, he did address what types of politics are simply incompatible with "liberal." I guess the heart of the issue is that the way that Walzer defines "liberal" (which may be entirely correct) was at odds with my understanding (which probably is closer to "progressive") so I frequently found his uses of the term jarring leading to less understanding and not more.
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