The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society

by Gerald F. Gaus

In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal , Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice―essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years―needs to change.

Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, Gaus points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society―with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives―have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. Gaus defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be.

Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, The Tyranny of the Ideal rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Social Science, Political Science

328 pages, Hardcover

Published May 31, 2016

About the author

Gaus was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and earned his MA and PhD in political science at the University of Pittsburgh. His career included fellowships at The Australian National University and professorships at Wake Forest University, the University of Queensland, the University of Minnesota, Tulane University, and since 2006, the University of Arizona, where he was the James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy. At Arizona, he was also head of the interdisciplinary Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.

Reviews

[Paul Crider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerald Gaus's Tyranny of the Ideal lays out a quite complex argument, much like his previous Order of Public Reason. But, also like that other work, it's immensely edifying and worth the effort. This review is as much my effort to collect my thoughts on the book as it is a proper review.

Gaus starts his discussion of ideal theory with the heroic and friendly assumption of a single worldview (or what he calls a perspective). If the world were simple and if we all agreed on a single perspective, then we could just incrementally increase justice until we reach utopia. But these world features, and our understanding of how these features map onto a comprehensive justice score (how principles of justice manifest in actual social contexts) interact with one another. For example, perhaps we can't just increase property rights to complete individual control without exception while holding everything else constant (like considerations of opportunity) because this might lock in a propertied oligarchy and serf class, a case of deeper injustice than the starting position. These interactions of social world features make the justice landscape rugged, with peaks and valleys on the path to utopia.

Diversity (even under a single perspective) can help us to navigate this rugged terrain. Individuals will still differ with one another about what features of the world are salient to justice and they will disagree about which social worlds are closer to one another, to our own society, and to utopia.
For example, two natural rights libertarians might have the same perspective, so they would evaluate the "total justice of a given society (say, the US) the same. But they might still disagree about which other societies are similar to the US based on what they find important about justice (is it strong property rights or an independent judiciary or the relative openness to immigrants)? These differences matter in terms of how to reform your society to get to utopia.

Gaus discusses how this diversity of understanding (even within one perspective) can help us avoid ravines in the justice landscape. Suppose we increase property rights protection until we can't increase them anymore without diminishing comprehensive justice. Then we "pass the baton" to another dimension, say the independent judiciary, and trudge up that vector until we can't go further without diminishing comprehensive justice again. Then we pass the baton to openness to immigrants, and so on, perhaps even circling around again to property rights protection, until we get to the peak of Mount Utopia.

But of course this has involved a simplifying assumption, namely that our differences (even under a single perspective) in how we understand the moral salience of different features of our society don't affect how we "score" the justice of our society. Of course our understanding of salient social features *does* affect those scores. Another simplification has come from imagining that we have some idea of where utopia is in the landscape. But unless we are very close to utopia, we likely have very little understanding of the social features of that world. More generally, it's most plausible to imagine we can understand the social world features of only those worlds closest to ours, with very similar institutions and social contexts. After all, it's difficult enough understand our own world! All this means that we can only optimize with any confidence within our "neighborhood". This leads to the possibility that we're optimizing in the direction of some local peak, and away from global utopia.

The lion in the room in this review and for the first 150 pages of the book is the brute fact that we don't share a single perspective, or anything close to it. The actual diversity of perspectives in play is staggering. We don't just disagree on abstract theories of justice. Our disagreements go even as deep as our ontologies. A New Atheist and an evangelical Christian don't even agree on the kinds of things that exist in the world (such as demons).

And yet we must get on and, surprisingly, we do in our own real world. In the second half of the book Gaus lays out the principles of a liberal society that take this deep diversity seriously. Such a society must have substantial agreement (or perhaps 'alignment' is a better word) on a public moral constitution, but can and should maintain differences on comprehensive theories of justice. The difference between the public moral constitution and a comprehensive justice perspective is that the former is socially created and consists of what a sufficient portion of the population have actually coordinated on (not explicitly "agreed" to). Its functional purpose is more for managing expectations rather than judging right and wrong.

Gaus argues that even if we can't agree on comprehensive justice perspectives, we can (and have) for the most part agree that living together in peace is better than living in isolation or in violent conflict, though some fringe perspectives who can't agree must unfortunately be coerced or excluded (Gaus in a throwaway line suggests the thought that coercion itself can be fully extinguished from society is absurd). And while we live together in the Open Society, we can continue to learn from each other. The discussion of the advantages of diversity within a perspective apply to some degree to an open society of diverse perspectives as well. Importantly, this dynamic works not by the one true theory winning adherents over others, but by exchange of ideas between perspectives. I learn from the good ideas of *other* perspectives how to improve my understanding of my own comprehensive worldview. Gaus demonstrates this with a discussion of the various amalgamations of theories one sees in the wild (bleeding heart libertarianism, market socialism, liberal feminism, etc). And one sees certain modular ideas do gain a greater presence in multiple perspectives (most perspectives now maintain the equal worth of individuals regardless of sex or race, regardless of the origins of those perspectives).

In summary, the quest for the ideal is an impossible misadventure, and the best we can do is maintain the conditions of an open society that are conducive to diverse people living together in peace. But even that more modest goal is something truly worthwhile. And as a bonus, it's even possible.

[Autumn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerald Gaus's "Tyranny of the Ideal" presents a thought-provoking and challenging perspective that significantly altered my understanding of ideal theory and forced me to reevaluate my long-held beliefs, particularly those influenced by John Rawls's "Justice as Fairness." This book prompted a genuine identity crisis as I grappled with the implications of Gaus's political ideology, marking a common experience in the realm of political philosophy readings.

Gaus's argument is a departure from conventional approaches to ideal theory, pushing readers to confront the limitations and potential dangers inherent in pursuing utopian ideals. As someone deeply entrenched in Rawlsian thought, the book forced me to question the foundations of my political philosophy. Gaus contends that the pursuit of a singular, overarching ideal can lead to a form of tyranny, stifling the diversity of reasonable moral and political viewpoints within a society. His critique challenges the notion that a universally acceptable ideal can be achieved and maintained, suggesting that such aspirations may inadvertently undermine the very pluralism they seek to promote.

The intended audience for "Tyranny of the Ideal" extends beyond the casual philosophy enthusiast. This reading was assigned in a graduate course, and as a second-year undergraduate student, I found it to be a formidable challenge. Without the guidance of a knowledgeable professor, who happened to be one of Gaus's students, and the collaborative discussions with fellow classmates, many of whom were philosophy PhD candidates, grasping even a fraction of the material would have been immensely difficult. It is crucial for readers to possess a solid foundation in political philosophy, with Rawls serving as a recommended starting point.

For those willing to invest the effort, Gaus's work offers a unique and novel perspective that challenges preconceived notions about ideal theory. The author's reasoning, often diverging from mainstream political philosophy, provides a fresh and thought-provoking examination of the complexities involved in navigating political disagreement. I recommend this book to anyone seeking to confront and reconsider their beliefs on ideal theory, as Gaus's arguments are both intellectually stimulating and likely to provoke meaningful introspection.

[Erika RS · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book belabors some points and zooms by others, but I give it 5/5 for being delightfully thought provoking. Gaus explores two big ideas: whether or not we should orient our quest for greater justice in terms of realizing an ideal (rather than always choosing a local improvement in justice) and how we can build a shared moral contract in a world that is diverse. To some degree, these two ideas are separable. Even if one believes that orienting the quest for justice toward an ideal is the best way to improve the world, one might accept that, pragmatically, developing a shared moral contract that a diverse set of perspectives can accept is the best way to proceed. Thus, the second idea, on how to think about justice in a diverse world, is strongest when people deeply believe that they have something to learn from perspectives other than their own rather than believing their own ideals is near perfect.

A long-but-short summary of the argument follows.

An ideal theory orients the quest for justice by prioritizing moves toward the ideal state even if they may decrease overall justice in the short term. This requires two things: that we can evaluate the states of the world with respect to their justice and that we can tell whether we are moving closer to or further from the world that represents the ideal. Note that both of these are necessary. If moving toward the ideal was always identical to increasing justice, then we could just always make the move to increase justice. (These conditions are formalized via the idea of a perspective. A perspective consists of evaluative standards by which words are compared, features of the world which describe the justice relevant properties, a mapping function which applies the evaluative standards, a similarity ordering which compares worlds relative to their features, and a distance metric which determines how far any two words are from each other.)

Ideal theory is useful when the justice landscape is moderately rugged. If it is too rugged, then moving toward the ideal is unlikely to move toward justice since only meeting the ideal exactly will realize high justice. If it is too smooth, the ideal is unnecessary because choosing to move in the local direction of greater justice will also move in the direction of the ideal. Moderately rugged landscapes are characterized by neighborhoods: areas where small changes in world features are correlated with small changes in justice. This high correlation between world features and justice means that we can be more confident in predictions we make about worlds within our neighborhood than worlds outside of our neighborhood. Within our neighborhood, we can be relatively certain about how changes to the world increase or decrease overall justice. Moving outside our neighborhood -- toward the ideal -- has the potential for even greater justice, but because we are making predictions about worlds outside our neighborhood, our certainty about those predictions decreases.

One way to confront this problem is to increase the set of worlds in our neighborhood. This can be accomplished by sharing the insights gleaned by diverse perspectives. Diversity improves outcomes. Under certain conditions, diversity can guarantee ideal outcomes when no single perspective could do the same. (This works, essentially, by a baton passing mechanism. When one perspective gets stuck at a local maxima, it conceptually passes the baton to another perspective for which the current world is not a local maxima.) However, in practice, different perspectives will have a hard time learning from each other. They will disagree not only on how to get from the current world to the ideal. They will also agree on what the ideal even is. This is because the different elements of a perspective -- how to evaluate justice, similarity of worlds, what features are justice relevant, etc., are themselves interconnected.

Getting to that point -- that the only way to really reach the ideal in the face of our inability to reliably predict the justice of worlds outside our neighborhood is to utilize diversity but that diverse perspectives will see the world in fundamentally different ways -- was the culmination of the first three sections of the book. The rest of the book discusses one way to deal with this tension.

The Open Society drops the constraint that perspectives must agree on the evaluation of justice or even on what world features are relevant to justice. Different communities can make up their own mind as to what is ideal and who they will learn from. In a world of diverse perspectives, is it possible to endorse a shared public moral constitution? Only if the participating perspectives give up on optimizing the world to best match their own conception of justice. People need to be willing to hold themselves and others to a set of rules which they do not deem optimal. This does not mean, however, that there is one normalized perspective on justice to which everyone must conform, even if they do not fully agree with it. Rather, what is important is that the public moral constitution has to be endorsable in the sense that all perspectives participating in the constitution need to consider it better than having no shared ruled at all.

Instead, progress is made in the Open Society by identifying the set of socially eligible rules. These are the rules that every participating perspective agrees are better than having no rule at all. (Note that "having no rule at all" is different than "doing nothing". This is critical but will also be key to my criticism.) Any rule from the socially eligible set is one that members of that society should be willing to endorse even if some (or all) of them think it is suboptimal. There is still a significant coordination problem here: all perspectives are incentivized to choose some rule from the eligible set but they generally would prefer different rules.

There is, however, one fundamental element of normalization required in the Open Society. All perspectives that participate in the shared moral constitution must be willing to give up the optimizing stance. They must be willing to say that if the shared moral constitution endorses some rule that they consider better than no rule at all, then they will abide by that rule. (Optimizing perspectives can exist in this society in so far as they can follow laws that they disagree with, but they do not participate in the creation of the constitution and they are often a source of tension.)

An Open Society must be stable; a stable set of rules is valuable because it reduces uncertainty which reduces the cost of coordination. However, it must also be open to change as new and changing perspectives participate in the generation of the shared moral contract. This semi-stability is the heart of the engine for moral change over time.

The upshot of this is that "The well-ordered society is a dangerous illusion. The very aim that the ideal theorist cherished, to know justice and just social states as well as possible, requires an open, diverse society, in which innumerable perspectives simultaneously cooperate and compete, share and conflict. In this society there will be a crisscrossing network of communities exploring and refining moral ideals and gaining insights into their own ideals by their interactions with others."

There is value in having a common moral framework; it allows us to have more predictable, lower friction interactions with others in society (whether they agree with us or not). However, instead of conceiving of the public moral framework as the reflection of a particular ideal (e.g., secular justice), we should think of it as a working agreement between many perspectives each with their own ideal. This is both more effective and less satisfying. More effective because it allows many different people to live together and, often, even learn from each other. But less satisfying because every perspective sees society as deviating from their (obvious, self-evident) ideal.

The negotiated shared moral constitution can, if it truly takes all perspectives willing to participate into account, also be a way to ensure that marginalized perspectives are not dominated by those perspectives with the most power. "If we look back on the incredible moral changes in the past century, we have seen the steady elimination of rules that marginalized perspectives never endorsed, but to which they were subjected by power—and very often the power of a dominant normalized perspective, insisting that it was the sole arbiter of justice."

In a world where diversity is inescapable, an understanding of how to build a shared moral constitution would be valuable even if one did believe that one's own ideal represented a true perspective on justice. However, the arguments in this book point to a broader change in perspective: justice is not some thing that is out there, for us to discover. It is not some ideal that, sadly, we humans are incapable of living up to. Rather, justice is how we live well together. If a standard of justice is one that real humans are unable to live up to, it is the standard that is wrong, not the humans. "Our ideals of justice are ideals about how our rather unusual species can live in ways that are good or beneficial to all".

That, in long, is a summary of the central argument. The argument against the ideal was not hard to convince me of. It did, however, crystalize many of the intuitions I had about why relentlessly pursuing one's ideal without listening to others is problematic. The description of how the Open Society can address the challenges of diverse perspectives was fascinating and largely new to me.

It was, however, not quite convincing. One criticism of this approach is that it only takes one perspective thinking that no rule is better than any rule to reduce the size of the socially eligible set to zero. On a case-by-case basis this is acceptable -- not all problems need be solved by a rule. However, if a perspective nominally gives up an optimizing stance but takes as a key element of their perspective that no rule is (almost) always better than nothing, then the Open Society will not be able to have a shared moral contract. This is not a theoretical concern; many Libertarians in the US do believe that no rule is generally better than any rule.

Another concern goes back to the critical difference between having no rule vs doing nothing. In the world as it exists, we have rules. These existing rules sometimes reflect an element of today's socially eligible set. Sometimes they reflect something that was once an element of that set but no longer is. Often, however, these rules reflect the forcing of one perspective on others. Those who have achieved the instantiation of rules that reflect their ideal will not be incentivized to rescind those rules in favor of something from the socially eligible set. Technically, this is doing nothing rather than having no rule, but the idea of utilizing precedent makes the distinction between the two more blurry.

Neither of this criticisms makes me feel that the overall model is less useful. The Open Society certainly seems like a better place to start from than that of a broad normalized perspective. However, it is itself an ideal and moving toward the realization of it would teach us many things.

I suspect one of those things would be the importance of just decision procedures. The argument in the book discusses that having a socially eligible set does not solve the coordination problem of actually choosing a rule to endorse. The lack of an obvious way to choose a rule is, in the view of the author, an advantage since it provides an engine of moral change as different perspectives work over time to have their preferred option be the one endorsed. This is an advantage. However, just because there is no one best decision procedure, it does not follow that the decision procedure does not matter at all. (Note: Gaus doesn't say it is irrelevant. He just does not address what makes a good decision procedures.) Having settled on the idea that choosing from a set of socially eligible rules will yield the strongest social contract, there is another necessary step: we need to make sure that the choice is made in such a way that people continue to endorse the process of the Open Society itself. For example, a bad way of choosing from the socially eligible set would be "which ever of the socially eligible options group X prefers." While any element of the socially eligible set is technically better than nothing, systematic bias in that choice will make the system overall seem unfair over time.

Overall though, this was a good read and worthy of the time I spent thinking about it. It also generated at least a half dozen books to add to my reading list.

[Justus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tyranny of the Ideal includes a lot of tremendously thought-provoking sections (and lots of fascinating sounding footnotes & references to look into) but it had long sections that felt tediously over-explained or with an unclear connection to the thesis. To top it all off...the conclusion is fairly underwhelming; it isn't going to blow your mind.

At some level, Gaus's argument is common sense to anyone who isn't a philosopher or ideological fanatic, which means much of the book is an extreme amount of detail on a point that most people don't really need to be convinced about. I feel like at this point we've all read a hundred articles about how diversity -- of viewpoints, of experience, of values -- improves decision making and, fundamentally, Gaus is just saying the same thing when it comes to setting the "social contract" that society runs on.

Through the first three chapters, Gaus puts all of this in terms of a formal optimization problem. How do we know if we're really at the global maxima and not just stuck on a local maxima? If the global maxima is really far away, how much confidence do we have that we have charted the correct path there? Part of why I found this often tedious is probably down to my background; this is stuff that many Computer Science students cover in university.

The most interesting insight from these chapters was what he calls "the choice". At some point in our search for an ideal world we'll find ourselves at a local maxima. And the only way forward to the global maxima is to make something worse. Imagine you're climbing mountains and reach a small peak. You have to go downhill(!?) in order to be in a position to reach the real summit. Except we're talking about ordering an entire society affecting millions, billions, of people. We're talking about possibly removing some rights because that's the path forward. How confident are you about all this?

Even in democratic settings, we must seriously question an approach to political life that inherently encourages its adherents to neglect what, on their own view, are clear improvements in justice for the sake of pursuing an ideal, the pursuit of which gives meaning to their political lives or fulfills their dreams.

It is often interesting but simultaneously a slog to actually read. I nearly gave up after finishing Chapter 2. Chapter 4 was, on the whole, more interesting and kept me more engaged.

I think many readers would be better off by skipping to section 4 of chapter 3 (III.4), "Escaping the Tyranny of the Ideal", where he summarizes the book up to that point in about 10 pages. If you're really intrigued by something he summarizes then feel free to go back and read that part. But just reading that summary puts you in a position to engage with Chapter 4 while skipping 140 pages of frequently dull content.

Given that Gaus has left "ideal theory" and utopianism in tatters...what's the solution? He turns to Ryan Muldoon's work from Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance which Gaus says will

require that we conceive of the social contract as a set of dynamic, evolving bargains for mutual benefit, not a set of principles fixed "once and for all".

The key point is that everyone (well, almost everyone) will be able to negotiate a shared social contract that is better than not having one. No one will get what they want exactly. Everyone will be a bit disappointed. And then, a while later, you renegotiate it all again.

Gaus is pretty weak on the practicality of this, which makes part of this section feel hand-wavy and underwhelming. How does that "renegotiation" work in a real society? What happens if you don't get universal agreement on the bargain? They'd rather see the world burn than not get their way?

Still, even in this Gaus brings some insights. Any society requires some level of stability, simply so that I understand my rights & responsibilities and can weigh the costs & benefits of actions. But when this "renegotiation" happens, suddenly costs & benefits are being renegotiated, too. I can become paralyzed by indecision -- especially when the costs are clear and immediate and the benefits are vague and in the future -- which possibly explains why various groups push back against e.g. renegotiating the social contract with previous excluded groups like homosexuals, Muslims, women, minorities, etc.

In the end, it took me a long time to read this, even though it is only 200 pages. It is almost always dense reading and often somewhat painful. Enough so that I'm not sure I would recommend it. (Maybe just read Muldoon's book instead? I'm not sure.) But it also had enough good moments that I'm glad I spent the time on it.

[Haaris Mateen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Yet to pursue such an ideal ultimately is to turn our back on the dynamism and uncertainty of collective inquiry and so the moral improvements for which we all strive."

The Tyranny of the Ideal is a work of political philosophy that starts off by asking if seeking the "ideal" in theories of justice is really such a good idea. Consider first when all of us share the same perspective on justice. We give a score to each proposed world. If that's all there is to justice, we can improve our world by making local comparative judgments and picking the next step up. Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice tells us we don't need the ideal; we simply move to the next level. Therefore, if the ideal is at all an interesting and useful concept, we need another dimension: the closeness of two worlds to each other. (Formally attained by adding a distance metric.) A proposed world may offer an improvement in its justice score but may send us farther away from the ideal.

But hold on, Gauss says. Do we really know what the ideal is? Can we exactly pin it down by specifying its institutions and context and every other relevant detail? Gauss argues we cannot. What we know is about our own world and about small modifications we make to it. Things get imprecise and fuzzy outside this neighborhood. And so we face a dilemma: Do we take a gamble and go after something that leads to intermediate pain and an uncertain chance of reaching the ideal? Or do we stick to improving our own world?

Maybe we can add multiple perspectives and we can get a lot of people together to share their discoveries and have a better idea of what's out there. But that's also difficult because people can disagree on the relevant aspects to be evaluated and even their perspectives on justice. People may simply talk past one another. Besides, how can additional perspectives get past the fog beyond our immediate neighborhood?

It is here that Gauss proposes his own theory. He eschews the ideal and proposes the Open Society. The Open Society encourages multiple perspectives and decentralized cliques. It requires a common moral foundation -- more like a set of ground rules people are willing to share. After that, people work it out, and a choice is made that is a compromise between different perspectives. It's a compromise people prefer. Gauss argues this society should get the right balance between stability and an openness to change.

It will take far too much time and space for me to get into it here but Gauss' solution, while interesting, is vague. Maybe that's the point. But there is something unsatisfactory about leaving so much to be organically decided. Constructing a society from scratch is hard. I suppose the theory's virtue is that it can be adapted to path-dependencies in existing societies. But in that case, it is not clear if we should be willing to accept such a wide gamut of societies as all being equally acceptable, at least in terms of justice.

I give it 5 stars because I enjoyed reading it: the book has a solid critique of existing theories and the author's proposal, while unclear, is interesting. I only recommend it for serious readers of political and moral philosophy. If you're looking for a start in this subject, go for Rawls first. And Sen next, because this book relies a lot on The Idea of Justice.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

The alternative view to us not being up to justice is that justice is up to us. Justice is the way our species has found to live well together, to prosper, and to discover. When one thinks one has hit upon a standard of justice, and finds again and again that attempts to construct "rules of regulation" to implement it have repeatedly led to disaster, the proper response is not to shake one's head sadly that the children are not yet up to JUSTICE. Rather, the embarrassing fact for the philosopher is he is the one who has erred. He got justice wrong. Only a philosopher or a theologian would think it obvious that, if their ideals lead to ruin, the flaw is not theirs, but in the creatures for whom the ideals were set.

Gaus has laid out a compelling case against the pursuit of an ideal well-ordered society in which everyone is on board with the same principles of justice. Instead, he favors an Open Society in which there will be permanent, yet enriching, disagreement. Inevitable normative ambiguity between moral communities will ensure better choices for the rules governing society. Overall, Gaus's book is thought provoking and well put together, but it leaves one wondering how John Rawls might have responded if he were still alive.

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gerald Gaus's unique fusion of Rawls, Hayek, Mill, and modern complexity theory is one of the most remarkable developments in political philosophy in the last half a century. It is no accident that he has spawned a whole "Arizona School" of liberal political philosophy that is still going strong. My own work in liberal political philosophy shares some considerable overlap with his, so I might be biased here, but I think that engaging with Gaus is (or should be) unavoidable for all young, aspiring philosophers today. Gaus rescues the key insights of late Rawls, combines them with his encyclopedic knowledge of classical liberal political philosophy (especially Hayek), and make them work in the service of his complexity-aware, diversity-aware, morally pluralistic theor(y/ies) of justice.

Gaus argues that the pursuit of the ideal only makes sense in a pluralistic, contested society where people can experiment with different conceptions of the good and learn from each other. He argues that the moral landscape is a complex and "rugged" one: we frequently do not know if we are getting closer to our ideal theory or moving away from it since our local approximation of a more just society might only be leading us to a local "peak" that, for all we know, might lie further away from our ideal than where we started from. He calls this the "Neighbourhood Constraint." We have more confidence exploring our local neighbourhood in a reformist fashion than trying to leap out, as revolutionaries, in search of the ideal theory of justice that lies further away from us. He employs complexity theory (Scott Page and others) to argue that the advantage of the liberal Open Society (on Hayekian, Popperian grounds) is that it enables us to simultaneously explore the farther reaches of the moral landscape (by tolerating a greater diversity of perspectives) while also enabling diverse agents to coordinate on a minimal set of basic, live-and-let-live rules. He acknowledges that the Open Society, although it employs maximal tolerance of diversity, may still not be welcoming to all perspectives, and it will probably still have to engage in some level of (coercive) suppression of divergent viewpoints (what he calls "normalization"). Nonetheless, he posits that the Open Society can be surprisingly robust (in the sense that it cyclically returns to a point of equilibrium, even if not always the same equilibrium) since a happy combination of motivations (self-interested and justice-interested) drives people to support it. His brilliant insight (partially taken from Muldoon) is that this can happen EVEN if people's perspectives are radically divergent to the point of mutual incomprehensibility (in terms of ontology or justice). In my opinion, even though Gaus does not fully "prove" that the robustness conditions of the liberal society are always sufficiently strong to produce long-term moral convergence, he makes a damn good case that the adaptive resources of the Open Society are manifold and still underappreciated - and this is just barely scratching the surface of the many brilliant insights in this book!

What is less thrilling about the book is its presentation. Gaus suffers from an unfortunate tendency - common among a certain generation of analytical philosophers - to write even the most simple things in the most convoluted way possible. Gaus uses a good amount of logical and mathematical notation (including a few cases of game theory) - I think a bit too much. I am unconvinced that using formal notation at every possible opportunity makes the argument any better, even though more sporadically used it can help to clarify it. And even when he is not using formal notation, Gaus's sentences can be difficult to parse. In analytical philosophy, technical terminology and formal notation follow a Gaussian curve (named after a different Gauss!): just the right amount of technical jargon is conducive to clarity, whereas both too little and too much of it are conductive to obscurity. Several times in the book, Gaus finds himself beyond the optimum point. (This may be partly the fault of analytical philosophy rewarding people for formalizing everything.)

Overall, despite its occasionally lacking presentation, the book is masterful, insightful, and rewarding. Every chapter is a delight, a challenge, a provocation. There are dozens of great ideas in here. The suggested vision of a pluralistic Open Society may not be entirely new but its justification very much is. Forcing Rawls and Hayek to talk to each other is one of Gaus's many achievements. I highly recommend the book to undergrads looking for philosophical inspiration, PhD students looking for dissertation topics, and advanced scholars seeking a challenge. Gaus himself died too soon (R.I.P.) but he left us with a whole rugged, mountainous landscape of complex puzzles to solve. Reaching "peak Gaus" requires exploring diverse, innovative perspectives.

[Per Kraulis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easily read book. It assumes quite some previous knowledge about political philosophy on the part of the reader, and it occasionally formalizes its arguments that perhaps makes them more strict, but also harder to follow.

That said, its investigation and critique of "ideal theory", the notion that political and moral philosophy should attempt to find a blueprint or a set of criteria for a just society, is convincing. The main target of criticism is John Rawls and his theory about Justice as Fairness. Starting from an argument by Amartya Sen, Gaus claims that an ideal theory must contain some kind of orientation aspect, i.e. a statement on in which direction, so to speak, a just society lies. This statement must be something other than just saying that we given our starting state should move to the next available better state. Gaus argues that any ideal theory faces what he calls "The Choice", that is, there must be occasions where the ideal theory concludes that we should *not* move to the next available better state, because that would bring us further from the ideal state that is has previously identified. Gaus doesn't say so, but this actually boils down to the statement by Lenin that one must break eggs to make an omelet. Which highlights the problem with "The Choice".

Gaus goes on to argue that ideal theory has an additional difficult problem if the state that it identifies as ideal is very different from anything we know. If there is something that has been learnt over the last 200 years or so, it is that attempts at achieving some perfect ideal society inevitably goes wrong.

Gaus discusses the problems with the Open Society, drawing on arguments by Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, among others. He states that we should welcome the different views on justice that an Open Society brings. Different perspectives can search, share, debate and dismiss each other's insights while engaging in cooperative social relations. My concern here is the difficulty in maintaining those cooperative social relations. The last 10 years or so have seen an erosion in social relations in several Western democracies. This book, written before 2016, is, I fear, a little too optimistic.

In conclusion, there are many interesting arguments in this book, but it does not really add up to a standalone philosophy. His critique of political philosophy in general is at times ascerbic, but I must say I agree with him. Maybe Gerald Gaus last book, The Open Society and Its Complexities, will bring more to the table. I will read it next.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really nifty book that walks through how to explicitly model concepts in liberal political theory in a way that I think makes them a lot more accessible and concrete. Doesn't open up a ton of new ground but creates a neat framework in which to think about interactions between different aspects of political theory and the innate problems involved in them

[Luis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting idea, terribly written.