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   It is with more than my usual pleasure that I introduce the current issue of Social Research.  The issue was occasioned by John Gray's provocative article which appeared in the July 3, 1992 issue of The Times Literary Supplement.  What struck me most forcefully about the article, "Against the new liberalism," was its immoderate attack on the current practice of political philosophy:

        There was a time when political philosophers were also political economists, historians and social theorists, concerned - as were Smith, Hume and Mill, for example - with what history and theory had to teach us... When these political philosophers of an older tradition were liberals, they were deeply concerned with the cultural and institutional preconditions of liberal civil society, preoccupied with threats to its stability and anxious to understand the deeper significance of the major political developments of their time.  The strange death of this older tradition has gone oddly unlamented, as political philosophy has come to be dominated by a school that prides itself on insulation from other disciplines and whose intellectual agenda is shaped by a variety of liberalism that at no point touches the real dilemmas of liberal society.  It is a measure of the distance from human life of the main current in recent political philosophy, of its innocence of history and its ignorance of social-scientific theory, and of its character as a degenerate research programme in political thought,  that it is certain to treat the greatest world-historical transformations of our age, the fall of communism, as irrelevant to its concerns and a mater of indifference for the ruling liberal ideal of equality.

   Since it would be difficult to underestimate the importance of liberalism and its agenda at a time when large areas of the globe are struggling to recreate themselves - to move beyond their repressive pasts into a more liberal and democratic future - this criticism seemed to warrant a response.  I therefore invited the authors whose articles appear in this issue to respond and reflect on the idea of liberalism and the liberal agenda in light of current political events and controversies.  I also invited John Gray to comment on the articles in the issue, and he agreed to do so.  His article appears last.

Liberalism

Introduction                                                                                                                                            489

Liberalism and the Right
to Culture                                                           Avishai Margalit and
                                                                            Moshe Halbertal                                                        491

Notes on Pluralism                                              George Kateb                                                            511

Civil Societies: Liberalism and
the Moral Uses of Pluralism                               Nancy L. Rosenblum                                                    539

Difference, Dilemmas, and the
Politics of Home                                               Bonnie Honig                                                                563

Liberalism for a World of Ethnic
Passions and Decaying States                           Stephen Holmes                                                            599

A Properly Defended Liberalism:
On John Gray and the Filling of
Political Life                                                       Ira Katznelson                                                            611

Unfinished Liberalism                                       Rogers M. Smith                                                            631

Liberalism: From Unicity to
Plurality and on to Singularity                           Richard E. Flathman                                                    671

The Singular and the Plural: On
the Distinctive Liberalism of
Isaiah Berlin                                                   Steven Lukes                                                                    687

After the New Liberalism                               John Gray                                                                        719

Richard E. Flathman is George Armstrong Kelly Memorial Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University.  He recently wrote Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics (1994).

John Gray is a Fellow of Jesus Collge, Oxford University.  He recently wrote Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (1993) and Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment.

Moshe Halbertal is philosophy at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He is currently writing People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority for Harvard University Press.

Stephen Holmes is professor of political science and law and editor of The East European Constitutional Review at the University of Chicago.  His most recent book is The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993).

Bonnie Honig is associate professor of government at Harvard University.  She is the author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993).

George Kateb is professor of politics at Princeton University.  His most recent book is The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (1992).

Ira Katznelson has been Loeb Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research since 1983.  He will join Columbia University in fall 1994 as Ruggles Professor of Political Science and professor of history.  His most recent book is Marxism and the City (1992).

Steven Lukes is professor of political and social theory at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.  He is the author of Moral Conflict and Politics (1991).

Avishai Margalit is professor of philosophy at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  With his co-author Moshe Halbertal he has written Idolatry (1992).  He is currently working on The Decent Society (forthcoming from Harvard University Press).

Nancy L. Rosenblum is professor of political science at Brown University.  She recently edited Liberalism and the Moral Life (1989).

Rogers M. Smith is professor of political science at Yale University.  His works include "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America" (1993).