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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2013
I am grateful to both William Galston and George Crowder for their thoughtful responses. In writing the original essay, I had two goals in mind. First, I wanted to give an accurate reading of Isaiah Berlin's philosophy and to challenge certain misconceptions about it. Second, I hoped to use some of Berlin's insights to contribute to the contemporary discussion of value pluralism and its relationship to liberalism. Neither Galston nor Crowder disputes my reading of Berlin. Galston writes that he “never set out to write as an interpreter of Berlin”; Crowder, too, simply brackets the question of interpretation (see his footnote 1). So I will focus these comments strictly on the problem of value pluralism's relationship to political liberalism.
1 The example of illiberal pluralism that I outlined there is meant to show that there is nothing incoherent about a value pluralist defense of illiberal institutions.
2 Galston, William, “Liberal Pluralism: A Reply to Talisse,” Contemporary Political Theory 3, no. 2 (2004): 141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 They could also offer the kind of illiberal, pluralist justification that I outlined in the original paper.
4 I am unsure, furthermore, why Crowder thinks that my view leaves us with “very little to say” to illiberal pluralists (see 109, above). In fact, in the final section (“Justifying Liberalism”) of my original essay, I explore some of the reasons that Berlin might have given to an illiberal pluralist to try to justify liberal institutions.
