Abstract

Fifty years ago John Dewey asked: "What is freedom and why is it prized?" Charles Sherover raises that question again and answers it with the help of the theoretical traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, American pragmatism, and British idealism, which he relates to the traditions of civic-spirited republicanism from Greek antiquity to the American Founding. His ambitious presentation of a "systematically developed public philosophy" confronts a world experiencing an "accommodation with the universal appeal of freedom," yet one still lacking theoretical clarity about the grounds of that appeal and the character of the institutions that respond to it. Sherover's is a timely and novel defense of liberalism that exposes weaknesses in contemporary liberal thought and practice, attempts to define a new way between the libertarian, Kantian contractarian, and communitarian alternatives that dominate discussion today, draws learnedly on a wide range of sources in the Western heritage of political and moral reflection in this effort, and grounds its critical and positive discussions in an original theory of freedom that employs a Heideggerian analysis of the finite temporal horizon of human existence, with its dual character of dependence on a determinate past and openness to an indeterminate future.