Understanding Liberal Democracy

Terence Cuneo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. He works primarily in the areas of ethics and history of modern philosophy. In addition to having published numerous articles in these areas, he is the author of The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism (Oxford, 2007). He has also edited six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (Cambridge, 2004), Religion in the Liberal Polity (Notre Dame, 2005), The Foundations of Ethics (Blackwell, 2007), and two volumes of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers, Inquiring about God (Cambridge, 2010), and Practices of Belief (Cambridge, 2010).

Editor's Introduction ; Acknowledgments ; INTRODUCTION ; PART ONE: PUBLIC REASON LIBERALISM ; 1. The Paradoxical Role of Coercion in the Theory of Political Liberalism ; 2. An Engagement with Rorty ; 3. The Justificatory Liberalism of Gerald Gaus ; 4. What Are the Prospects for Public Reason Liberalism? ; PART TWO: RE-THINKING LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ; 5. Liberal Democracy as Equal Political Voice ; 6. Exercising One's Political Voice as a Moral Engagement ; PART THREE: PERSPECTIVES ON RIGHTS ; 7. On Secular and Theistic Groundings of Human Rights ; 8. Grounding the Rights We Have as Human Persons ; 9. The Right of the People to a Democratic State: Reflections on a Passage in Althusius ; 10. Accounting for the Political Authority of the State ; PART FOUR: LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION ; 11. Why Can't We All Just Get Along With Each Other? ; 12. Freedom for Religion ; 13. Do Christians Have Good Reasons for Supporting Liberal Democracy? ; 14. A Religious Argument for the Civil Right to Freedom of Religious Exercise, Drawn from American History ; 15. Habermas on Religion and Postmetaphysical Philosophy in Political Discourse ; Bibliography ; Index