David and Elaine Spitz Prize: 1997
Mark Kingwell's A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics
of Pluralism (PSU Press) is the 1997 winner of the Spitz Prize.
Kingwell shows how, despite wide disparities of perspective
and interest, participants in political conversation can arrive at shared principles
of justice. Beautifully written and powerfully (though politely) argued, A
Civil Tongue makes an original and important contribution to the conversation
of contemporary political theory.
"This book is about a widely shared desire,"
note the book's publishers, "the desire among citizens for a vibrant and
effective social discourse of legitimation. It therefore begins with the conviction
that what political philosophy can provide citizens is not further theories
of the good life but instead directions for talking about how to justify the
choices they make--for, in brief, "just talking." As part of the general
trend away from the aridity of Kantian universalism in political philosophy,
thinkers as diverse as Bruce Ackerman, Jurgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre,
and Richard Rorty have taken a "dialogic turn" that seeks to understand
the determination of principles of justice as a cooperative task, achieved in
some kind of social dialogue among real citizens. In one way or another, however,
each of these different variations on the dialogic model fail to provide fully
satisfactory answers, Mark Kingwell shows. Drawing on their strengths, he presents
another model he calls "justice as civility," which makes original
use of the popular literature on etiquette and work in sociolinguistics to develop
a more adequate theory of dialogic justice."