Volume 29, Number 21 & 22 · January 20, 1983
What Liberalism Isn't
By Ronald Dworkin
Social Justice in the Liberal State
by Bruce A. Ackerman
Yale University Press, 392 pp., $25.00; $6.95 (paper)
Liberalism has two aspects, and they are both under powerful attack. Liberals believe, first, that government must be neutral in matters of personal morality, that it must leave people free to live as they think best so long as they do not harm others. But the Reverend Jerry Falwell, and other politicians who claim to speak for some 'moral majority,' want to enforce their own personal morality with the steel of the criminal law. They know what kind of sex is bad, which books are fit for public libraries, what place religion should have in education and family life, when human life begins, that contraception is sin, and that abortion is capital sin. They think the rest of us should be forced to practice what they preach. The old issue of political theory—whether the law should enforce a state morality—is once again an important issue of practical politics.
Review, 3751 words
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