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Against the Current Essays in the History of Ideas . By Berlin Isaiah. Edited by Hardy Henry. (New York: Viking Press, 1980. Pp. liii + 394. $16.95.)

Second-best theory attempts to adjust to the absence in the real world of either a perfect will or a perfect ability to achieve justice. In place of the commander, Ackerman develops the institutional mechanisms of liberal democracy. In a world where all liberal rights cannot be secured, Ackerman proposes the principle of equal sacrifice: providing that no citizen may be asked to sacrifice more of his or her ideal rights in the real world than other citizens. The liberal state is obliged to take various forms of affirmative action to prevent and remedy such inequities. Ackerman attempts to justify his method of liberal dialogue via a lengthy critique of the contractarian and utilitarian traditions, which finds them both necessarily violating neutrality in a similar way. Ackerman's critique of his predecessors suffers, however, from his failure in the case of, e.g., Rawls to understand correctly the doctrine of the original position or even the second principle of justice (consider, for example, pp. 266-69). The core difficulty in Ackerman's book, however, lies in the tension between the commitment to dialogue and the Neutrality constraint. While he looks to Socrates as the paradigm of the liberal philosopher, he excludes at the outset the quest that animated Socratic dialogue—the quest for knowledge of the good. Neutrality rules out such knowledge in advance. He attempts to justify that exclusion via a route which this reviewer frankly finds unintelligible. In his last chapter he argues that a wide variety of routes, beginning at very different points, all lead to neutral dialogue. But then, he concedes, they don't necessarily lead there either. The argument from "liberal skepticism," i.e., that "there is no moral meaning hidden in the bowels of the universe," seems to have priority over other of the avenues to dialogue: Ackerman calls this position "the hard truth" (p. 368). But, echoing Nietzsche, Ackerman also concedes: "If God is dead, everything is permitted" (p. 369). Is Ackerman then merely a bright and decent law professor attempting to paper over the unresolved problem of nihilism as proclaimed by Nietzsche?