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Books in Review

In A Theory of Justice and, subsequently, in Political Liberalism and the Law of Peoples, John Rawls has set the terms for a contractarian moral and democratic theory—a revival in Anglo-American universities of political philosophy—and then for a distinctively democratic or political conception. He has created the idiom in which a flourishing of and controversies in political philosophy have occurred. In this setting, Kok-chor Tan’s Toleration, Diversity and Global Justice argues carefully against Rawls’s political liberalism in international relations in defense of a more egalitarian and more individually tolerant “comprehensive liberalism.” Embracing the difference principle (that inequalities of income shall benefit the least advantaged), domestically and internationally, as well as focusing on individual freedom of conscience that transcends what even ideal “decent” hierarchical toleration of groups makes likely, Tan makes an important contribution to this unfolding debate. Of these two central points, Tan’s critique of Rawls’s weakening of the difference principle has greater force. To correct these weaknesses, Tan thinks, he must affirm, in Rawls’s terms, a comprehensive liberalism. But he does not consider the possibility that one might defend a refined political liberalism, with much more egalitarian implications than Rawls’s (very creative) version allows. Rawls aims to affirm a democratic, public agreement that secures his first principle of equal basic liberties for each citizen. Tan summarizes this agreement as one guided by “political autonomy.” But overlapping consensus means to further mutual regard among equally free citizens who are left to pursue diverse “comprehensive” or conscientious views. Reasonable views are those publicly tolerant of the views of others—those that do not use the state to impose their vision on others. Unreasonable views, for instance advocacy of racism or enslavement and harm to others, are ruled out by such a consensus. In the international sphere, Rawls hopes to foster a broadly similar toleration. Motivated by international experience and perhaps by realist theory, he seeks to avoid forcible imposition of liberal ideas on others, except