The Postmodern Predicament

“Bruce Ackerman is one of the brilliant political philosophers of our time. He understands that we each have a multiplicity of identities in a digital age, and he is the first serious philosopher to grapple with what justice and political community look like considering our fragmented online and real-world identities. Ackerman has penned a magnum opus that attempts to answer the deepest questions of our humanity in a postmodern context.”—Congressman Ro Khanna, author of Dignity in a Digital Age

“To whom should I lie today: my boss, my kids, or my friends? Ackerman combines clear philosophical exposition with an immediate sense of the existential crises of contemporary daily life.”—Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School

“This amazing new book inquires into the most profound roots of the current democratic crisis. Surprisingly, Ackerman pushes the reader beyond the political to approach the crisis’s existential origins.”—Marta Cartabia, president emerita of the Constitutional Court of Italy

“With great clarity and bold imagination, Bruce Ackerman rethinks the very grounds and tasks of a liberal conception of social justice. His comprehensive argument for a project of democratic innovation based on the demands of ‘existential justice’ raises the urgent debate of what citizens owe each other to a new level. A masterpiece by one of the great thinkers of our time.”—Rainer Forst, Goethe University Frankfurt