在《自由主义与现代社会》一书中，贝拉米检讨了自由主义思想在英国、法国、德国和意大利的演变，探讨了密尔、格林、涂尔干、韦伯和帕累托以及其他一些思想家的著作，将他们的理论与其各自的历史背景紧密地联系在 起，揭示了诸多隐藏存自由丰义思想之下的社会与道德假设的偶然性 现代社会在整个19世纪早经历了深刻的变革，贝拉米认为．这些变革从根本上破坏了自由主义的许多核心原则本书的最后一部分批判性地检讨了反映在哈耶克、诺齐克和罗尔斯这些当代政治哲学家著作中的自由主义思想，指出他们的自由丰义所立基的社会观念和道德直觉如今是时代错误的和站不住脚的 他丰张．只有 种建立存现实主义基础上的民主自由主义才能为现代世界复杂与多元的社会提供一种合理的政治理论。

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.

《西方公民不服从的传统》在选辑译稿过程中，不同篇目约请了分别的译者和作者，而各篇目的内容间有相互引录的现象，所以在整部书中，出现了同一段原文不同译法的情况，为了文意上的连贯性，也为了珍视译者各自独特的行文风格，书中留存了此类差别而未加丝毫凿作，对于此不算规范的做法，请读者谅解。
最后，要感谢《西方公民不服从的传统》的编者何怀宏先生，他于病中为《西方公民不服从的传统》的顺利出版做了大量的工作，特此致谢。

Equality is the endangered species of political ideas. Even left-of-centre politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In this new book the author insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution. What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles - first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life - to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, the author develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.

《凤凰文库•政治学前沿系列•至上的美德:平等的理论与实践》的作者是罗纳德•德沃金。《凤凰文库•政治学前沿系列•至上的美德:平等的理论与实践》收录德沃金自20世纪80年代以来深入思考政治哲学理论问题与美国社会热点问题的论文十四篇，关于道德价值的多元与共同体生活的相容性的论述，是《凤凰文库•政治学前沿系列•至上的美德:平等的理论与实践》的理论亮点。

2005年，布什提名约翰·罗伯茨和萨缪尔·阿里托出任最高法院大法官，人们普遍预测这将导致最高法院急剧右转。但是，没有人想到，这一过程如此迅疾，如此具有革命性。在本书中，德沃金考察了罗伯茨、阿里托的提名听证会，认为听证程序现如今已经形同虚设；他并考察了罗伯茨上任以来最高法院作出的“5比4”判决，指出，两位新任的大法官与安东宁·斯卡利亚、克拉伦斯·托马斯形成了一个牢不可破的集团，志在重新改写美国宪法。他们不受政治意识形态或者保守主义司法原则的指引，而是受党派的、文化的或许是宗教的忠诚所驱使，蔑视传统，蔑视先例，甚至蔑视法律推理，以偷偷摸摸的方式开始推翻几代大法官建构起来的宪法核心原则。
德沃金警告说，美国宪法历史上最黑暗的时代可能正在到来。