Reconstructing Public Philosophy

Reconstructing Public Philosophy is William Sullivan’s ambitious effort to recover a richer language of citizenship for American democracy at a moment of cultural exhaustion. Moving between philosophical analysis and cultural criticism, Sullivan examines how leading voices in liberal theory—from political philosophers to public intellectuals—frame questions of justice and policy in ways that reflect, and reinforce, America’s dominant ethos of radical individualism. He acknowledges the historical power of liberalism but argues that its premises—self-interest as the essence of human nature, politics as management of competing interests—cannot provide a convincing account of the common good. By situating these arguments within a broader cultural landscape, Sullivan shows how American public life has been impoverished by its reliance on liberal categories, even as alternative traditions remain latent.

Against this narrowing of political imagination, Sullivan turns to the civic republican tradition, with roots in Aristotle and renewed in the American founding, as a vital resource for rethinking self-rule today. Like Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, he insists that ethics and politics cannot be separated, and that freedom depends on cultivating civic virtue, shared responsibility, and a sense of the public good. Drawing on Tocqueville, Dewey, and contemporary social criticism, Sullivan makes the case for reviving republican ideals as a living “public philosophy” attuned to modern interdependence. At once critical and hopeful, the book delineates how a reconstructed civic tradition could address America’s crisis of legitimacy and restore meaning to democratic citizenship. Its enduring takeaway is that democracy flourishes not when politics is reduced to private interest but when citizens embrace public life as a moral project of mutual care and collective purpose.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.