LAUSR

Aurelian Craiutu’s book is an exploration, and a cautious defense, of the virtue of moderation. The author has in mind a political outlook rather different from conservatism, skepticism, or the centrist disposition to plump for the middle way. For Craiutu, the moderate can be a spirited defender of controversial views when the situation demands it. What defines the moderate is not so much the unwillingness to take a stand as the willingness to take it in a certain way: to question oneself, to avoid Manichean simplifications and ideological rigidities, to engage in dialogue with adversaries, and to resist the temptation of ethical monism (pp. 5, 20 ff.). More a sensibility than a defined body of commitments, moderation takes different forms in different contexts. Moderates have worn many “masks” over time (p. 9), and the challenge for the scholar is to convey the similarities. Craiutu does this through a series of sympathetic profiles of (white, male) thinkers associated with the virtue in question—Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, Michael Oakeshott, and Adam Michnik. Each of these faces of moderation, as he sees them, is the subject of a chapter that explores the contours and context of their political outlook. The book is framed by two more theoretical chapters that engage more abstractly with the concept of moderation, the methodological challenges of the project, and—very much in the spirit of moderation—the weaknesses to which the outlook may be prone (p. 233). The author’s selection of interlocutors underlines his contention that moderation is not to be assigned to any one ideological tradition. Bobbio and Oakeshott are presented as figures of the Left and Right respectively, and Berlin and Aron as thinkers “in the middle” (p. 10). Moderation, it seems, is a virtue that can be displayed across the political spectrum, and—perhaps more intriguingly—is compatible with the possibility of placing an individual thereon. Liberalism is the category one might instinctively associate with several of these figures, but Craiutu describes moderation and liberalism as not quite the same. Moderates do not see freedom as the first value, any more than equality. Indeed, they are reluctant to see any value as prior to all others, preferring instead to set their priorities according to context (see e.g. p. 158). Nor does moderation fit well with any “-ism,” if this means a doctrine that can be systematized and written down. It is a virtue displayed in practice—an art, as the subtitle has it. One of the challenges of Faces of Moderation is how to write theoretically about a practical virtue, and the choice of a series of individual portraits is an intelligent response. It is surprising nonetheless that much of the focus is on thinkers—on individuals who thought and wrote about politics, rather than people embroiled in politics in other ways. Certainly, interventions in public debate demand the exercise of judgment and can be a form of political action, and some of Craiutu’s interlocutors did more than just this. But one wonders whether the art of moderation is not practiced most critically in other places—by political representatives, decision makers, constitutional drafters, or even just street-level bureaucrats. It would be interesting to think further about what moderation entails in these practical settings. It would be worthwhile to explore whether moderation can be exercised collectively, or whether—as the structure of the book might suggest—it is the stuff of individuals acting alone. And what might it mean for the practices of ordinary citizens little versed in the skills of public deliberation? Craiutu’s is a study primarily of what eloquent individuals have had to say about moderation, and how they have spoken and written in moderate ways. As something other than an ideology or doctrine of beliefs, moderation resists being pinned down substantively. We are dealing with a large space of possible opinion, to which anything short of open violence can probably be credibly ascribed. The moderate voice, willing to take a stand but “without going to extremes and without displaying excessive zeal” (p. 21), is one that can say many things. Does that mean moderation is just in the eye of the beholder? Clearly, one suspicion will be that sometimes it is just a label by which to dignify a stance with which one agrees. (Indeed, if one does not already have some sympathy with the stance, perhaps it will always have a touch of the extreme and the zealous about it.) How does one avoid the notion of moderation becoming the kind of ideological weapon from which its adherents