Public Reason: Mediated Authority in the Liberal State. By Fred M. Frohock. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. 234p. $35.00

The hope of ordering collective purposes through rational speech stretches back to the earliest historical attempts at theorizing political practice. Public reason has been a particularly prominent theme in political theory for the last decade and is central to discussions of deliberative democracy. Recent work on public reason is motivated by the belief that contemporary political procedures lack adequate norms and spaces for public engagement in intelligent, informative civic debate sensitive to deep differences in values. Fred Frohock's thought-provoking book covers much familiar ground, yet it also contributes a number of key ideas and a dose of realism to a research program now in a stage of self-criticism.