"For quite a while," Peter Berkowitz notes, "leading aca-
demic liberals and their best-known critics formed an unwit-
ting alliance, promulgating the view that liberal political
theory" ignores the whole subject of virtue and cultivation (p.
170). If that view is correct, this neglect not only would spawn
"fatal theoretical lacunae" (p. 4) but also would raise serious
doubts about liberalism's capacity to sustain the "qualities of
mind and character" (p. 172) required for "the operation and
maintenance" of "free and democratic institutions" (p. 6).
In recent years, however, a new generation of liberals have
challenged this widely held view. Thinkers such as William
Galston and Stephen Macedo acknowledge that liberal re-
gimes depend "upon a specific set of virtues," which "they do
not automatically produce" (pp. 278). Their work points
toward the "dependence" of liberal societies on "extraliberal
and nongovernmental sources of virtue" (p. 28), such as "the
family, religion and the array of associations in civil society"
(p. 6). Simultaneously, they insist that "limited government is
not the same as neutral government" (p. 173), and they affirm
"that the liberal state, within bounds, ought to pursue liberal
purposes" and, thus, "may, within limits, foster virtues" that
serve these purposes (p. xii).