Mark Redhead’s Reasoning with Who We Are: Democratic Theory for a Not So Liberal Era is an ambitious and adventurous work.

The Review of Politics

In this ambitious and engaging book, Mark Redhead works to retrieve a richer concept of public reason than the neo-Kantian one which dominates Anglo-American political theory. Critically appropriating insights from Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt, Seyla Benhabib, Michel Foucault, and William Connolly, Redhead coins and develops the idea of ‘reasoning through baggage’. His new, more realistic, more inclusive model of public reason calls upon individuals to actively wrestle with, rather than seeking to bracket, the religious, linguistic, national, ethnic, and other identities we inevitably bring into the public realm. Redhead raises a series of very pressing questions for contemporary political life – both domestic and global - and discusses them in an energetic, original, and highly accessible fashion.

Ruth Abbey, Political Theory, University of Notre Dame