Can Value Pluralists be Comprehensive Liberals? Galston's Liberal Pluralism

Abstract

In this paper, the author engages William Galston's recent attempt to revive the Berlinian project of developing a comprehensive theory of liberalism from value pluralist premises. The author's argument maintains that, despite Galston's attempts, the value pluralist in fact has no resources with which to recommend a liberal political order over a variety of illiberal regimes, and that, further, Galston's own justificatory strategy is indistinguishable from the later Rawls's noncomprehensive, ‘political' liberalism. Although the argument engages the work of Berlin and Galston in particular, the primary aim is to preserve the intuition, common to Rawls, Brian Barry, Ronald Dworkin, and John Gray, that value pluralism is inconsistent with comprehensive liberalism.