The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest.

Skepticism in all its forms—philosophical, cynical, or post-modern—threatens that unity. The Galilean revolution once made the theological world of value safe for science. But the new republic gradually became a new empire: the modern philosophers inflated the methods of physics into a totalitarian theory of everything. They invaded and occupied all the honorifics—reality, truth, fact, ground, meaning, knowledge, and being—and dictated the terms on which other bodies of thought might aspire to them, and skepticism has been the inevitable result. We need a new revolution. We must make the world of science safe for value.

罗纳德·德沃金（Ronald Dworkin，1931～2013） 美国著名法学家和哲学家， 20世纪后半叶西方最重要的政治哲学家和法哲学家之一。曾任英国牛津大学法理学首席教授（1969～1998）、纽约大学法学院教授等。主要著作有《认真对待权利》《原则问题》《法律帝国》《生命的自主权：堕胎、安乐死与个人自由的论辩》《自由的法：对美国宪法的道德解读》《至上的美德：平等的理论与实践》《民主是可能的吗：新型政治辩论的诸原则》《身披法袍的正义》《最高法院的阵形：最高法院中的新右翼集团》《刺猬的正义》《没有上帝的宗教》。