Andrew Norris teaches political philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of Truth and Democracy (University of Pennsylvania, 2012), The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford, 2006), and Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (Duke, 2005), and the author of over thirty peer-reviewed articles on authors such as Wittgenstein, Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and Michael Oakeshott.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction Chapter One: Ordinary Language and Philosophical ConversionChapter Two: Skepticism and TranscendenceChapter Three: Community and VoiceChapter Four: Walden and the Foundations of True Political ExpressionChapter Five: Receiving Autonomy BibliographyIndex

This book provides an introduction not only to the political and practical dimensions of Cavell's thought, but also to the oldest and deepest layers of his philosophy as a whole, found in the essays he published in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), and in the first three parts of The Claim of Reason (1979) ... this is a deeply researched, clearly written, engaging and provocative book. There are insights on every page, and Norris is especially good at recovering the early California Cavell of Mates, Clarke, and Austin, integrating Rousseau's version of the social contract with ordinary language philosophy, and articulating and defending Cavell's Emersonian Perfectionism.