Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism. By Benjamin Gregg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 210p. $54.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Arguing in the tradition of pragmatists, such as John Dewey and Charles Peirce, Benjamin Gregg proposes that sociotheoretic critique, legal judgment, and public policy should find “criteria of critical judgment this side of universal validity” (p. 8). By this he means that while norms are always relative to particular interpretative traditions, which, in turn, are necessarily open-textured and indeterminate, normative indeterminacy does not preclude the possibility of singular norms that adjudicate between different local traditions (p. 86). Contra postmodernists (and certain adherents of Critical Legal Studies), Gregg rejects the claim that the indeterminacy of norms correlates with the loss of autonomy, on the one hand, and universality, on the other (pp. 78–82).