Volume 43, Number 12 · July 11, 1996
The Politics of Dignity
By Alan Ryan
The Decent Society
by Avishai Margalit, translated by Naomi Goldblum
Harvard University Press, 304 pp., $35.00
The Decent Society is a splendid book. It is serious without being ponderous, it is unassuming but ambitious, and it is engagingly unorthodox, both in its concerns and in the way it pursues them. At a time when the idea of decency appears in politics only in the mouths of politicians eager to keep sex off the Internet, it is a pleasure to come across an intelligent discussion of a much more serious subject, one that has had little attention from philosophers—how to build a society that doesn't humiliate its weaker members. How novel Margalit's book is can best be appreciated against the background of the kind of political philosophy practiced in our best graduate schools, and familiar to readers of these pages. The Decent Society is both a commentary on, and an alternative to, our prevailing orthodoxies—not an argument against them, let alone a denunciation of them, but a useful, imaginative provocation to our sensibilities.
Review, 4368 words
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