Justice, Democracy and Reasonable Agreement, by Colin Farrelly.

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John Rawls’s theory of justice has often been accused of being too detached from the complexities of real-world politics to offer useful guidance for policy decisions. Colin Farrelly’s new book works out a version of this line of criticism targeted at the deficiencies of what he calls ‘the principled paradigm of ideal theory’. Farrelly argues that this paradigm, with its heavy reliance on simplifying and idealizing assumptions, has seriously impoverished political theory. The position he defends is that we should turn to a form of non-ideal theory, reconnecting normative theorizing to the urgent challenges of everyday politics. Farrelly’s examination of the gap between normative theory and political practice vividly brings out how many forms of ideal theory fail to offer much of relevance to the most pressing disagreements and competing claims in present political debates. The book’s 11 chapters are primarily devoted to criticism of ideal theory in its many incarnations. Farrelly’s own positive views are not worked out in detail but he presents the contours of a ‘non-ideal theory’ called civic liberalism. This view is guided by a commitment to four main concerns: liberalism (limited government), distributive prioritarianism, deliberative democracy, and, finally, the need to leave significant room for relational duties (‘partiality’).