Challenging Liberalism

Challenging Liberalism PDF Author: Lisa H. Schwartzman
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271045272
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Questions about the relevance and value of various liberal concepts are at the heart of important debates among feminist philosophers and social theorists. Although many feminists invoke concepts such as rights, equality, autonomy, and freedom in arguments for liberation, some attempt to avoid them, noting that they can also reinforce and perpetuate oppressive social structures. In Challenging Liberalism Schwartzman explores the reasons why concepts such as rights and equality can sometimes reinforce oppression. She argues that certain forms of abstraction and individualism are central to liberal methodology and that these give rise to a number of problems. Drawing on the work of feminist moral, political, and legal theorists, she constructs an approach that employs these concepts, while viewing them from within a critique of social relations of power.

Challenging Liberalism

Challenging Liberalism PDF Author: Lisa H. Schwartzman
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271045272
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Questions about the relevance and value of various liberal concepts are at the heart of important debates among feminist philosophers and social theorists. Although many feminists invoke concepts such as rights, equality, autonomy, and freedom in arguments for liberation, some attempt to avoid them, noting that they can also reinforce and perpetuate oppressive social structures. In Challenging Liberalism Schwartzman explores the reasons why concepts such as rights and equality can sometimes reinforce oppression. She argues that certain forms of abstraction and individualism are central to liberal methodology and that these give rise to a number of problems. Drawing on the work of feminist moral, political, and legal theorists, she constructs an approach that employs these concepts, while viewing them from within a critique of social relations of power.

Toleration and the Challenges to Liberalism

Toleration and the Challenges to Liberalism PDF Author: Johannes Drerup
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000210103
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This book explores the relationship between different versions of liberalism and toleration by focusing on their shared theoretical and political challenges. Toleration is among the most pivotal and the most contested liberal values and virtues. Debates about the conceptual scope, justification, and political role of toleration are closely aligned with historical and contemporary philosophical controversies on the foundations of liberalism. The essays in this volume focus on the specific connection between toleration and liberalism. The essays in Part I reconstruct some of the major historical controversies surrounding toleration and liberalism. Part II centers on general conceptual and justificatory questions concerning toleration as a central category for the definition of liberal political theory. Part III is devoted to the theoretical analysis of applied issues and cases of conflicts of toleration in liberal states and societies. Toleration and the Challenges to Liberalism will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in social and political philosophy, ethics, and political theory.

Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism

Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism PDF Author: John Christman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139444204
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political theory, the volume covers inter alia the following topics: the nature of the self and its relation to autonomy, the social dimensions of autonomy and the political dynamics of respect and recognition, and the concept of autonomy underlying the principles of liberalism.

Nixon's Court

Nixon's Court PDF Author: Kevin J. McMahon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226561216
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Most analysts have deemed Richard Nixon’s challenge to the judicial liberalism of the Warren Supreme Court a failure—“a counterrevolution that wasn’t.” Nixon’s Court offers an alternative assessment. Kevin J. McMahon reveals a Nixon whose public rhetoric was more conservative than his administration’s actions and whose policy towards the Court was more subtle than previously recognized. Viewing Nixon’s judicial strategy as part political and part legal, McMahon argues that Nixon succeeded substantially on both counts. Many of the issues dear to social conservatives, such as abortion and school prayer, were not nearly as important to Nixon. Consequently, his nominations for the Supreme Court were chosen primarily to advance his “law and order” and school desegregation agendas—agendas the Court eventually endorsed. But there were also political motivations to Nixon’s approach: he wanted his judicial policy to be conservative enough to attract white southerners and northern white ethnics disgruntled with the Democratic party but not so conservative as to drive away moderates in his own party. In essence, then, he used his criticisms of the Court to speak to members of his “Silent Majority” in hopes of disrupting the long-dominant New Deal Democratic coalition. For McMahon, Nixon’s judicial strategy succeeded not only in shaping the course of constitutional law in the areas he most desired but also in laying the foundation of an electoral alliance that would dominate presidential politics for a generation.

Conservative Counterrevolution

Conservative Counterrevolution PDF Author: Tula A Connell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098064
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In the 1950s, Milwaukee's strong union movement and socialist mayor seemed to embody a dominant liberal consensus that sought to continue and expand the New Deal. Tula Connell explores how business interests and political conservatives arose to undo that consensus, and how the resulting clash both shaped a city and helped redefine postwar American politics. Connell focuses on Frank Zeidler, the city's socialist mayor. Zeidler's broad concept of the public interest at times defied even liberal expectations. At the same time, a resurgence of conservatism with roots presaging twentieth-century politics challenged his initiatives in public housing, integration, and other areas. As Connell shows, conservatives created an anti-progressive game plan that included a well-funded media and PR push; an anti-union assault essential to the larger project of delegitimizing any government action; opposition to civil rights; and support from a suburban silent majority. In the end, the campaign undermined notions of the common good essential to the New Deal order. It also sowed the seeds for grassroots conservatism's more extreme and far-reaching future success.

John Rawls

John Rawls PDF Author: J. Donald Moon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442238283
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Donald Moon’s John Rawls: Liberalism and the Challenges of Late Modernity is distinguished not only by the originality of its contribution to the literature on one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century, but for an argument that will be accessible to students as well as scholars of justice and its complex array of controversial issues at the heart of our hyper-modern globalized world. Rawls’s work is often viewed primarily through the lens of liberal theories of social justice focusing on issues of income distribution and economic inequality. Moon allows for a more complete understanding of Rawls’ legacy by setting his account of social justice in the context of modern and increasingly pluralistic democracies. Moon’s reading of Rawls shows how his work breaks with political theory’s traditional aspiration to provide a general theory of politics, including a theory of justice, which can be rationally vindicated. Instead, Rawls views theorizing as itself a practical, political form of engagement, which offers a specifically political conception of justice and political principles more generally that speak to the conditions of modern, democratic citizens.

Bleak Liberalism

Bleak Liberalism PDF Author: Amanda Anderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226923525
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Bleak liberalism -- Liberalism in the age of high realism -- Revisiting the political novel -- The liberal aesthetic in the postwar era: the case of Trilling and Adorno -- Bleak liberalism and the realism/modernism debate: Ellison and Lessing

Why Liberalism Failed

Why Liberalism Failed PDF Author: Patrick J. Deneen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240023
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
"One of the most important political books of 2018."—Rod Dreher, American Conservative Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

Realm of Lesser Evil

Realm of Lesser Evil PDF Author: Jean-Claude Michea
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745646212
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Winston Churchill said of democracy that it was ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ The same could be said of liberalism. While liberalism displays an unfailing optimism with regard to the capacity of human beings to make themselves ‘masters and possessors of nature’, it displays a profound pessimism when it comes to appreciating their moral capacity to build a decent world for themselves. As Michea shows, the roots of this pessimism lie in the idea – an eminently modern one – that the desire to establish the reign of the Good lies at the origin of all the ills besetting the human race. Liberalism’s critique of the ‘tyranny of the Good’ naturally had its costs. It created a view of modern politics as a purely negative art – that of defining the least bad society possible. It is in this sense that liberalism has to be understood, and understands itself, as the ‘politics of lesser evil’. And yet while liberalism set out to be a realism without illusions, today liberalism presents itself as something else. With its celebration of the market among other things, contemporary liberalism has taken over some of the features of its oldest enemy. By unravelling the logic that lies at the heart of the liberal project, Michea is able to shed fresh light on one of the key ideas that have shaped the civilization of the West.

Liberalism and Prostitution

Liberalism and Prostitution PDF Author: Peter de Marneffe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199726108
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Civil libertarians characterize prostitution as a "victimless crime," and argue that it ought to be legalized. Feminist critics counter that prostitution is not victimless, since it harms the people who do it. Civil libertarians respond that most women freely choose to do this work, and that it is paternalistic for the government to limit a person's liberty for her own good. In this book Peter de Marneffe argues that although most prostitution is voluntary, paternalistic prostitution laws in some form are nonetheless morally justifiable. If prostitution is commonly harmful in the way that feminist critics maintain, then this argument for prostitution laws is not objectionably moralistic and some prostitution laws violate no one's rights. Paternalistic prostitution laws in some form are therefore consistent with the fundamental principles of contemporary liberalism.