SOURCE: “Fine Word: ‘Legitimate’,” in National Review, Vol. XL, No. 18, September 16, 1988, pp. 48–50.

In the following review, Sobran writes that Barber's argument in The Conquest of Politics—that politics is an autonomous sphere that should not have to answer to philosophical ideals—is confounded by the lack of definitions of words such as “democracy,” “social justice,” “public,” and “private.”

Benjamin Barber wants to rescue politics from philosophy. “Inverting Aristotle's prudent dictum calling for a method appropriate to the subject under study,” he says, contemporary political philosophers “have sought a subject appropriate to the philosophical method at hand. When that subject—in this case, politics—has resisted the method, it is the subject and not the method that has been adjusted.” The result is “a distortion of our sense of the political,” harmful to both politics and political philosophy.

The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times concentrates on...