"For quite a while," Peter Berkowitz notes, "leading aca-demic liberals and their best-known critics formed an unwit-ting alliance, promulgating the view that liberal politicaltheory" ignores the whole subject of virtue and cultivation (p.170). If that view is correct, this neglect not only would spawn"fatal theoretical lacunae" (p. 4) but also would raise seriousdoubts about liberalism's capacity to sustain the "qualities ofmind and character" (p. 172) required for "the operation andmaintenance" of "free and democratic institutions" (p. 6).In recent years, however, a new generation of liberals havechallenged this widely held view. Thinkers such as WilliamGalston and Stephen Macedo acknowledge that liberal re-gimes depend "upon a specific set of virtues," which "they donot automatically produce" (pp. 27­8). Their work pointstoward the "dependence" of liberal societies on "extraliberaland nongovernmental sources of virtue" (p. 28), such as "thefamily, religion and the array of associations in civil society"(p. 6). Simultaneously, they insist that "limited government isnot the same as neutral government" (p. 173), and they affirm"that the liberal state, within bounds, ought to pursue liberalpurposes" and, thus, "may, within limits, foster virtues" thatserve these purposes (p. xii).