A lot of modern political philosophy - at least in the English-speaking world, and in its dominant version, liberalism - sets about applying morality to politics. In what future writers may come to think of as the palmy days of political moralism, theorists have tried to imagine what politics would be like if it were redesigned according to a moral prospectus. It is not usually thought that actually existing politics shadows moral norms very closely; but, the political moralist maintains, surely it ought to?

LRB 9 July 2009 | PDF Download