Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of
Enlightened Localism. By Benjamin Gregg. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2003. 210p. $54.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.
Arguing in the tradition of pragmatists, such as John Dewey and
Charles Peirce, Benjamin Gregg proposes that sociotheoretic critique,
legal judgment, and public policy should find “criteria of
critical judgment this side of universal validity” (p. 8). By
this he means that while norms are always relative to particular
interpretative traditions, which, in turn, are necessarily
open-textured and indeterminate, normative indeterminacy does not
preclude the possibility of singular norms that adjudicate between
different local traditions (p. 86). Contra postmodernists (and certain
adherents of Critical Legal Studies), Gregg rejects the claim that the
indeterminacy of norms correlates with the loss of autonomy, on the one
hand, and universality, on the other (pp. 78–82).