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WALSH, David. The Growth of the Liberal Soul. Columbia University of Missouri Press, 1997. ix + 386 pp. Cloth, $39.95-Those of us who live in the desert eventually realize that, contrary to appearances, the landscape is not a barren, lifeless place; it is a world full of a hidden beauty that only reveals itself to the patient observer. In The Growth of the Liberal Soul, hidden life is precisely what David Walsh hopes to uncover in the apparent wasteland of the liberal tradition. The task is a formidable one, for the tradition itself appears unwilling to cooperate. Liberal thought has long been understood as lacking in philosophic depth, for it finds its origins in a practical movement designed to secure public peace as the highest political achievement. Through the emphasis on innerworldly peace and its practical benefits, and through the medium of limited consent-based constitutional government, liberal thought hoped to free Western man from the oppressive and arbitrary will of theocratic and nationalistic political power. The price paid, of course, was philosophical coherence, for the liberal order has had to remain silent about its own moral foundations, and has had to reject the public importance of philosophical and religious speculation about the good. The discourse of the liberal society leaves little room for the language of moral absolutes, a fact which has occasionally left the tradition incapable of adequately articulating its own principles, and equally incapable of arresting the drift toward nihilism in both public and private arenas. The issue was presented clearly by Nietzsche: how successful can the liberal order be in its attempt to secure human rights, particularly in the face of its own participation in the destruction of the moral foundation that provided the reason for such rights in the first place? Does the impoverished account of man that attends to the liberal conception obviate the possibility of sustaining the commitment to human freedom and dignity that forms the raison d'etre of the whole tradition?