F.M. Barnard goes beyond the seventeenth-century understanding of the social contract by making national self-enactment contingent on public reasons for individual liberty within civic mutuality. He examines the possibilities and limits for a self-enacting, principled politics, acknowledging reason and self-enactment as central concepts of historical and political thinking. He argues, however, that reason must be seen as practical reason, which only indirectly acts as a cause, while self-enactment must be understood as operating in relation to reciprocity with the other. Reason and...