Author: Shaun P. YoungPublisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791461754
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
Leading theorists explore the concept of political liberalism.
Political Liberalism
Author: Shaun P. YoungPublisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791461754
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
Leading theorists explore the concept of political liberalism.
Political Liberalism
Author: John RawlsPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527535
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 588
Book Description
This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in A Theory of Justice but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines—religious, philosophical, and moral—coexist within the framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls' plans to revise Political Liberalism, which were cut short by his death. "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on A Theory of Justice...a decisive turn towards political philosophy." —Times Literary Supplement
The Idea of a Political Liberalism
Author: Victoria DavionPublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847687947
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
In this unique volume, some of today's most eminent political philosophers examine the thought of John Rawls, focusing in particular on his most recent work. These original essays explore diverse issues, including the problem of pluralism, the relationship between constitutive commitment and liberal institutions, just treatment of dissident minorities, the constitutional implications of liberalism, international relations, and the structure of international law. The first comprehensive study of Rawls's recent work, The Idea of Political Liberalism will be indispensable for political philosophers and theorists interested in contemporary political thought.
Rawls's Political Liberalism
Author: Thom BrooksPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149719
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Leading figures in politics and philosophy revitalize Rawls's prescription for a just society.
Enduring Liberalism
Author: Robert Booth FowlerPublisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 070063150X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Has the United States become more pluribus than unum? In terms of the nation's political beliefs, Robert Booth Fowler answers both yes and no. While his study affirms significant diversity among an elite cadre of public intellectuals, it vigorously denies it in a general public that collectively adheres to the same set of liberal core values. Enduring Liberalism pursues two objectives. One, it explores the political thought of public intellectuals and the general public since the 1960s. Two, it assesses contemporary and classic interpretations of American political thought in light of the study's findings. Fowler interprets the writings of public intellectuals like Robert Bellah, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Walzer, William Bennett, Seymour Martin Lipset, William Galston, and others, as well as survey data of American political attitudes, to spotlight this oft-ignored divide between citizens and high-profile commentators, whose contentious debates are mistakenly assumed to reflect countrywide rifts. Fowler's argument is straightforward, but the interpretation is controversial. He recounts how the consensus liberal view in post-World War II American political thought collapsed among public intellectuals during the tumult of the 1960s and remains so to this day. His book examines the resultant diversity among contemporary public intellectuals, focusing on three predominant themes: concern for community, worry about the environment, and interest in civil society. In marked contrast to these disputatious commentators, Fowler finds the realm of popular opinion to be characterized by much greater consensus. Indeed, there seems to be a trend toward an even more general embrace of the liberal values that characterize our attitudes toward the individual, individual liberty, political equality, economic opportunity, and consent of the governed. Liberal values-above all the celebration of the individual and individual rights-have revolutionized the so-called private realms of life like family and religious communities to an extent unimagined in the 1950s. From these conclusions, Fowler demonstrates that most interpretations of American political thinking have exaggerated the extent of conflict and diversity in our nation's often raucous policy disputes. But he also cautions us not to overstate the public's widely shared liberal values and, by doing so, miss opportunities to facilitate problem solving or to recognize the ways in which our reform efforts may be constrained.
Liberalism
Author: Edmund FawcettPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168393
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492
Book Description
A compelling history of liberalism from the nineteenth century to today Liberalism dominates today's politics just as it decisively shaped the American and European past. This engrossing history of liberalism—the first in English for many decades—traces liberalism’s ideals, successes, and failures through the lives and ideas of a rich cast of European and American thinkers and politicians, from the early nineteenth century to today. An enlightening account of a vulnerable but critically important political creed, Liberalism provides the vital historical and intellectual background for hard thinking about liberal democracy’s future.
The Theology of Liberalism
Author: Eric NelsonPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674242955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
One of our most important political theorists pulls the philosophical rug out from under modern liberalism, then tries to place it on a more secure footing. We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country’s most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls’s wake. Nelson starts by noting that today’s liberal political philosophers treat the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages as morally arbitrary. This arbitrariness, they claim, diminishes our moral responsibility for our actions. Some even argue that we are not morally responsible when our own choices and efforts produce inequalities. In defending such views, Nelson writes, modern liberals have implicitly taken up positions in an age-old debate about whether the nature of the created world is consistent with the justice of God. Strikingly, their commitments diverge sharply from those of their proto-liberal predecessors, who rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness in favor of what was called Pelagianism—the view that beings created and judged by a just God must be capable of freedom and merit. Nelson reconstructs this earlier “liberal” position and shows that Rawls’s philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of Pelagianism. In closing, Nelson sketches a way out of the argumentative maze for liberals who wish to emerge with commitments to freedom and equality intact.
In the Shadow of Justice
Author: Katrina ForresterPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216754
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 427
Book Description
"In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--
Liberalism Is Not Enough
Author: Robin Marie AverbeckPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146964665X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 151
Book Description
In this intellectual history of the fraught relationship between race and poverty in the 1960s, Robin Marie Averbeck offers a sustained critique of the fundamental assumptions that structured liberal thought and action in postwar America. Focusing on the figures associated with "Great Society liberalism" like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, David Riesman, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Averbeck argues that these thinkers helped construct policies that never truly attempted a serious attack on the sources of racial inequality and injustice. In Averbeck's telling, the Great Society's most notable achievements--the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--came only after unrelenting and unprecedented organizing by black Americans made changing the inequitable status quo politically necessary. And even so, the discourse about poverty created by liberals had inherently conservative qualities. As Liberalism Is Not Enough reveals, liberalism's historical relationship with capitalism shaped both the initial content of liberal scholarship on poverty and its ultimate usefulness to a resurgent conservative movement.
Liberalism in Practice
Author: Olivia NewmanPublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028794
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
An argument that draws on empirical findings in psychology to offer a blueprint for cultivating a widespread commitment to public reason. At the core of liberal theory is the idea—found in thinkers from Hobbes to Rawls—that the consent of the governed is key to establishing political legitimacy. But in a diverse liberal polity like the United States, disagreement runs deep, and a segment of the population will simply regard the regime as illegitimate. In Liberalism in Practice, Olivia Newman argues that if citizens were to approach politics in the spirit of public reason, couching arguments in terms that others can reasonably accept, institutional and political legitimacy would be enhanced. Liberal theory has relied on the assumption of a unified self, that individuals are unified around a single set of goals, beliefs, attitudes, and aptitudes. Drawing on empirical findings in psychology, Newman argues instead that we are complex creatures whose dispositions and traits develop differently in different domains; we hold different moral commitments in different parts of our lives. She argues further that this domain differentiation allows us to be good liberal citizens in the public domain while remaining true to private commitments and beliefs in other domains. Newman proposes that educational and institutional arrangements can use this capacity for differentiation to teach public reason without overwhelming conflicting commitments. The psychology and pedagogy of public reason proposed by Newman move beyond John Rawls's strictly political liberalism toward what Newman terms practical liberalism. Although we cannot resolve every philosophical problem bedeviling theories of liberalism, we can enjoy the myriad benefits of liberalism in practice.