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Under Weber's Shadow: Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics in Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre . By Keith Breen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 253p. $114.95.

define the agenda of moral and political philosophers’ study of civic responsibility for years to come. Although other books have sought to treat the theme of citizen complicity in public wrongdoing, none approaches this one in its care, seriousness, and sophistication. While one could question many of Beerbohm’s assumptions, I found, astonishingly, only a single inconsistency in his argument. Out of a desire not to blame politically weak groups for public decisions they could do little to prevent, he claims that “[i]ndividuals whose share of political power has been seriously diluted—by a system where material wealth tracks political power—retain a prerogative to refrain from voting” (p. 11; cf. p. 248). But when discussing whether individuals in general should let themselves off the hook because their effect on the final decision is very small, Beerbohm denies it, calling it “deeply mistaken” to suppose that “wrongful action could be diluted as the number of participants increased. If anything, unjust collaboration can amplify blame.” It does not matter, he maintains, whether a “shared injustice” is “shared by two or two million” (p. 227). Surely, one kind of dilution cannot reduce responsibility if the other does not. I would submit that both do. One should, however, take note of this book’s method and its salient strengths and weaknesses. Beerbohm’s roots clearly lie in neo-Kantian moral philosophy (though he courageously dissents from some of that school’s orthodoxies, some of which, like the unrealistic ideal of the philosopher-citizen, he shows to be affirmed by the late John Rawls as well). His starting point is moral intuitions—ideally drawn from contexts outside politics because we are trying to find and apply moral principles, not maxims corrupted by “self-serving attitudes about our liability for state-sponsored injustices” (p. 12). He then searches for “a relatively small folder of moral principles that can explain and justify these particular judgments” (p. 202). He takes for granted that avoiding evil actions is more important than achieving good outcomes; in his view, the immense collective power of political institutions serves mostly to make politics more “hazardous” since the scale of injustice we can inflict through public life exceeds the evils any individual could do (p. 173). Finally, and most strikingly, Beerbohm’s treatment is, to a degree that will startle many, avowedly “nonconsequentialist.” His introspection, informed by Kantian or Rousseauian assumptions, tells him that we value democracy not because of the outcomes it produces or prevents but “for the web of relationships that it makes possible”; “democracy is fundamentally a way of relating to others as simultaneously coauthors and cosubjects” (p. 37). He concludes that “the problem of democratic citizenship” is therefore: “How can I avoid complicity with an unjust state of which I am putatively a coauthor?” (p. 62). One might dissent from this method at any point (a self-styled realist presumably would at every point). One could, like Hume, aim to draw moral primitives from what most people empirically value, rather than from the intuitions of those who have an extraordinary sensitivity to morality and a particular vocation for studying it. One could deny that the maxims for acting well are likely to be reducible to a few principles. One could seek out, rather than avoid, lessons drawn from political experience, on the grounds that self-serving bias often does less harm than ignorance of the way in which politics demonstrably works. One could be impressed by the ability of politics to produce public goods rather than its tendency to do public evils, and might question the degree to which most citizens even perceive the existence of democratic relationships (let alone cherish their egalitarian character). The result might be to stress the costs of moral and deliberative checks on politicians, not merely their benefits, and to emphasize the degree to which our greatest acts of omission often involve less a failure to take responsibility for the injuries we do than a failure to sympathize with interests and situations that we easily neglect. In response, Beerbohm would undoubtedly argue that too many concessions to political reality or personal comfort can mask a simple refusal to face up to the fact that injustices exist and that most of us could be doing much more to prevent them than we do. In Our Name may be more of a work of moral autobiography than the author realizes; his intuitions may reflect a highly acute sense of civic responsibility (and the guilt that goes with it) rather than a typical one. But if that renders his book less successful than it might be as an attempt to make sense of typical intuitions, it may render it more important than Beerbohm realizes as a work of moral critique. Even if we regard democratic politics not as a realm of egalitarian relationships but as a rough mechanism for achieving good political outcomes and forcing politicians not to ignore what people want, we might still have reason to want to reform a country where politics does not do that—or where, to the extent it does do that, gross injustices remain because too much of what too many people want is callous, myopic, or bigoted. Have we no tendency to the latter condition?