Faced with an unsettling expansion of executive emergency power in the United States, scholars have turned to the thought of Carl Schmitt to shed light on constitutional liberalism. Yet the resources for responding to Schmitt can be found in the very tradition that he urges his readers to overcome. Locke recognized what many liberal thinkers since have been hesitant to admit. Fixed laws can help restrain prerogative to a certain extent but cannot transform the irrational and unpredictable nature of political life nor eliminate the discretionary power necessary to respond to it. Consequently, the most important and most effective restraint on executive discretionary power is not legal but political. Both the judgment of the executive and the judgment of the people are essential extralegal elements of the constitutional order.

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Examining the social and political upheavals that characterized the collapse of public judgment in early modern Europe, this book offers a unique account of the achievement of liberal democracy and self-government. The book argues that the work of John Locke instills a civic judgment that avoids the excesses of corrosive skepticism and dogmatic fanaticism, which lead to either political acquiescence or irresolvable conflict. Locke changes the way political power is assessed by replacing deteriorating vocabularies of legitimacy with a new language of justification informed by a conception of probability. For Locke, the coherence and viability of liberal self-government rests not on unassailable principles or institutions, but on the capacity of citizens to embrace probable judgment. The book explores the breakdown of the medieval understanding of knowledge and opinion, and considers how Montaigne's skepticism and Descartes' rationalism—interconnected responses to the crisis—involved a pragmatic submission to absolute rule. Locke endorses this response early on, but moves away from it when he encounters a notion of reasonableness based on probable judgment. In his mature writings, Locke instructs his readers to govern their faculties and intellectual yearnings in accordance with this new standard as well as a vocabulary of justification that might cultivate a self-government of free and equal individuals. The success of Locke's arguments depends upon citizens' willingness to take up the labor of judgment in situations where absolute certainty cannot be achieved.

The current debate over the place of religious claims in public discourse has, to a certain extent. become a battle over "reasonableness. " In the wake of the influential work of John Rawls, several prominent political theorists have argued that citizens have a moral duty to limit their political deliberation to a particular set of propositions that can be recognized as reasonable, while critics respond that such a limitation is not only impracticable, it is exclusionary In this essay I return to Lock's A Letter Concerning Toleration and Kant ' s Conflict of the Faculties in order to show that the continuing struggle over the place of religion in contemporary liberal society is not simply the result of afailure to apply a liberal doctrine with the proper rigor and precision. It is the inevitable consequence of the enduring presence of moral disagreement that an appeal to doctrine can neither transcend nor dispel.

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