Pluralism
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compromise is not a suboptimal solution, for the kind of consensus and normative agreement that is often thought necessary for constitutional politics to work is both unrealistic and contrary to a political conception of pluralism. For his part, Olsen explores the question of whether a public philosophy emerges from the Convention proceedings and the draft constitution, and whether such public philosophy offers a reasonable vision of Europe. His answer, however, is that though the constitution-making process has contributed to the emergence of a democratic dialogue on a European public philosophy, this is far from settled and the discussion over the constitution must carry on. As for the contributions on the substantive values of the constitutional document, it is difficult to do justice to them in the brief compass of this review. The topics covered go from the idea of liberty (Dobson) to representation (Smisman) and transparency (Naurin); from the role of rights and judicial power (Attucci and Gargarella, respectively) to new practices of decision making such as the Open Method of Co-ordination (Tsakatika). As the editors remark in their conclusion, besides offering some illuminating insights on the legitimacy of the European integration process, the application of the normative approach to the European constitutional debate provides elements of reflection on political theory itself, and how many of the categories and distinctions that characterize more abstract debates are often presented in too stark terms, while the application of political theorizing to concrete situations may require a more nuanced adaptation so as to capture the multi-dimensional aspects of political reality. Dario Castiglione University of Exeter, UK.
Pluralism William E. Connolly Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 2005, 208pp. ISBN: 0 8223 3567 0. Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 122–125. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300292
William Connolly has written about pluralism for quarter of a century. Over the past 10 years, he has developed his own distinctive ‘post-Nietzschean’ conception of ‘multidimensional pluralism’. Pluralism resembles Connolly’s previous publications both in terms of its form and content. This is not a criticism, there is difference in Connolly’s repetitions, and this is an important Contemporary Political Theory 2007 6
Book Reviews
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contribution to his corpus. The originality of Pluralism is Connolly’s greater appreciation that pluralism is under threat. As the title of the book indicates, this is a manifesto. Pluralism outlines the ‘civic virtues’ appropriate to pluralism in the context of ‘aggressive campaigns against pluralism’, in the context of 9/11, Al Qaeda, the Guantanamo ‘Gulag’, and American-Israeli ‘humiliation’ of the Palestinians (pp. 5, 13–14, 53). The book is comprised of five essays that are linked thematically, although each can be read as a discrete unit. In Chapter 1, Connolly explores the relationship between pluralism and ‘evil’, commencing with an analysis of the ideas of
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