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Author: Ludvig Beckman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351325426
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
At the start of the new millennium there has been a growing awareness that traditional political institutions and ideologies do not correspond to the demands and aspirations held by many individuals and groups. Ideals and interests previously without much impact on the political debate have gained access to the public arena. These new claims include demands for recognition of homosexuals and their rights, affirmation of the particularities of indigenous peoples, sensitivity to the cultures and languages of immigrants, respect for children and their needs, solidarity with people of the developing countries and their fight for independence, care for nature, animals, attention to the social status of women, and so on. As a consequence, many governments now regulate and support many different conceptions of the good life and its virtues.In this volume, schematically divided into two parts, Ludvig Beckman challenges the common view that support for the good life, the politics of virtue, is in conflict with liberal principles. In clear, analytical language he addresses the question of what a state should do. Chapter 1 attempts to specify the meaning of "liberalism"; chapter 2 discusses the meaning of tolerance and makes more specific the notion of "virtue"; chapters 3 and 4 assess ethical and political liberalism as exemplified by the writings of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. In part two, chapter 5 discusses the clash between norms of justice and conceptions of virtue in the family; chapter 6 explores the meaning of the idea of an ethically neutral state; chapter 7 explores three different arguments for the neutral state as found in the work of Ronald Dworkin; chapter 8 presents an analysis of the idea of the neutral state with the theory of John Rawls put under scrutiny; chapter 9 explains why the attempt to justify the neutral state by referring to modified skepticism fails and proposes a distinction between being skeptical and being critical.Participating in the current debate on communitarianism, The Liberal State and the Politics of Virtue will be particularly interesting to people engaged in the public debate on ethics, morality and the state. It will also be of interest to teachers and researchers in the fields of politics and philosophy.
Author: Ludvig Beckman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351325426
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398
Get Book Here
Book Description
At the start of the new millennium there has been a growing awareness that traditional political institutions and ideologies do not correspond to the demands and aspirations held by many individuals and groups. Ideals and interests previously without much impact on the political debate have gained access to the public arena. These new claims include demands for recognition of homosexuals and their rights, affirmation of the particularities of indigenous peoples, sensitivity to the cultures and languages of immigrants, respect for children and their needs, solidarity with people of the developing countries and their fight for independence, care for nature, animals, attention to the social status of women, and so on. As a consequence, many governments now regulate and support many different conceptions of the good life and its virtues.In this volume, schematically divided into two parts, Ludvig Beckman challenges the common view that support for the good life, the politics of virtue, is in conflict with liberal principles. In clear, analytical language he addresses the question of what a state should do. Chapter 1 attempts to specify the meaning of "liberalism"; chapter 2 discusses the meaning of tolerance and makes more specific the notion of "virtue"; chapters 3 and 4 assess ethical and political liberalism as exemplified by the writings of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. In part two, chapter 5 discusses the clash between norms of justice and conceptions of virtue in the family; chapter 6 explores the meaning of the idea of an ethically neutral state; chapter 7 explores three different arguments for the neutral state as found in the work of Ronald Dworkin; chapter 8 presents an analysis of the idea of the neutral state with the theory of John Rawls put under scrutiny; chapter 9 explains why the attempt to justify the neutral state by referring to modified skepticism fails and proposes a distinction between being skeptical and being critical.Participating in the current debate on communitarianism, The Liberal State and the Politics of Virtue will be particularly interesting to people engaged in the public debate on ethics, morality and the state. It will also be of interest to teachers and researchers in the fields of politics and philosophy.
Author: John Milbank
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783486503
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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Book Description
Contemporary politics is dominated by a liberal creed that champions ‘negative liberty’ and individual happiness. This creed undergirds positions on both the right and the left – free-market capitalism, state bureaucracy and individualism in social life. The triumph of liberalism has had the effect of subordinating human association and the common good to narrow self-interest and short-term utility. By contrast, post-liberalism promotes individual fulfilment and mutual flourishing based on shared goals that have more substantive content than the formal abstractions of liberal law and contract, and yet are also adaptable to different cultural and local traditions. In this important book, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst apply this analysis to the economy, politics, culture, and international affairs. In each case, having diagnosed the crisis of liberalism, they propose post-liberal alternatives, notably new concepts and fresh policy ideas. They demonstrate that, amid the current crisis, post-liberalism is a programme that could define a new politics of virtue and the common good.
Author: Peter Berkowitz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400822904
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Virtue has been rediscovered in the United States as a subject of public debate and of philosophical inquiry. Politicians from both parties, leading intellectuals, and concerned citizens from diverse backgrounds are addressing questions about the content of our character. William Bennett's moral guide for children, A Book of Virtues, was a national bestseller. Yet many continue to associate virtue with a prudish, Victorian morality or with crude attempts by government to legislate morals. Peter Berkowitz clarifies the fundamental issues, arguing that a certain ambivalence toward virtue reflects the liberal spirit at its best. Drawing on recent scholarship as well as classical political philosophy, he makes his case with penetrating analyses of four central figures in the making of modern liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill. These thinkers are usually understood to have neglected or disparaged virtue. Yet Berkowitz shows that they all believed that government resting on the fundamental premise of liberalism--the natural freedom and equality of all human beings--could not work unless citizens and officeholders possess particular qualities of mind and character. These virtues, which include reflective judgment, sympathetic imagination, self-restraint, the ability to cooperate, and toleration do not arise spontaneously but must be cultivated. Berkowitz explores the various strategies the thinkers employ as they seek to give virtue its due while respecting individual liberty. Liberals, he argues, must combine energy and forbearance, finding public and private ways to support such nongovernmental institutions as the family and voluntary associations. For these institutions, the liberal tradition powerfully suggests, play an indispensable role not only in forming the virtues on which liberal democracy depends but in overcoming the vices that it tends to engender. Clearly written and vigorously argued, this is a provocative work of political theory that speaks directly to complex issues at the heart of contemporary philosophy and public discussion. New Forum Books makes available to general readers outstanding, original, interdisciplinary scholarship with a special focus on the juncture of culture, law, and politics. New Forum Books is guided by the conviction that law and politics not only reflect culture, but help to shape it. Authors include leading political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, philosophers, theologians, historians, and economists writing for nonspecialist readers and scholars across a range of fields. Looking at questions such as political equality, the concept of rights, the problem of virtue in liberal politics, crime and punishment, population, poverty, economic development, and the international legal and political order, New Forum Books seeks to explain--not explain away--the difficult issues we face today.
Author: William A. Galston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521422505
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
A major contribution to the current theory of liberalism by an eminent political theorist challenges the views of such theorists as Rawls, Dworkin, and Ackerman, who believe that the essence of liberalism is neutrality.
Author: Robert Boyers
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 198212718X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition. Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a “courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree” (Mary Gaitskill) insider’s look at shifts in American culture—most especially in the American academy—that so many people find alarming. Part memoir and part polemic, Boyers’s collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values, and covers such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.
Author: James Hankins
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674242521
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 769
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Book Description
Winner of the Helen and Howard Marraro Prize A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year “Perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought.” —Jeffrey Collins, Times Literary Supplement “Magisterial...Hankins shows that the humanists’ obsession with character explains their surprising indifference to particular forms of government. If rulers lacked authentic virtue, they believed, it did not matter what institutions framed their power.” —Wall Street Journal “Puts the politics back into humanism in an extraordinarily deep and far-reaching way...For generations to come, all who write about the political thought of Italian humanism will have to refer to it; its influence will be...nothing less than transformative.” —Noel Malcolm, American Affairs “[A] masterpiece...It is only Hankins’s tireless exploration of forgotten documents...and extraordinary endeavors of editing, translation, and exposition that allow us to reconstruct—almost for the first time in 550 years—[the humanists’] three compelling arguments for why a strong moral character and habits of truth are vital for governing well. Yet they are as relevant to contemporary democracy in Britain, and in the United States, as to Machiavelli.” —Rory Stewart, Times Literary Supplement “The lessons for today are clear and profound.” —Robert D. Kaplan Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Everywhere they saw problems. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; religious leaders preoccupied with self-advancement while feuding armies waged endless wars. Their solution was at once simple and radical. “Men, not walls, make a city,” as Thucydides so memorably said. They would rebuild the fabric of society by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft. A landmark reappraisal of Renaissance political thought, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker. James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than laws, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the precursor to our embattled humanities.
Author: Adrian Pabst
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509546820
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
Hyper-capitalism and extreme identity politics are driving us to distraction. Both destroy the basis of a common life shared across ages and classes. The COVID-19 crisis could accelerate these tendencies further, or it could herald something more hopeful: a post-liberal moment. Adrian Pabst argues that now is the time for an alternative – postliberalism – that is centred around trust, dignity, and human relationships. Instead of reverting to the destabilising inhumanity of 'just-in-time' free-market globalisation, we could build a politics upon the sense of localism and community spirit, the valuing of family, place and belonging, which was a real theme of lockdown. We are not obliged to put up with the restoration of a broken status quo that erodes trust, undermines institutions and trashes our precious natural environment. We could build a pluralist democracy, decentralise the state, and promote embedded, mutualist markets. This bold book shows that only a politics which fuses economic justice with social solidarity and ecological balance can overcome our deep divisions and save us from authoritarian backlash.
Author: Bican Sahin
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739147412
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138
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Book Description
More than anything, diversity is what characterizes societies of the 21st century. Our contemporary societies are marked by ethnic, religious, racial, ideological, moral, and sexual diversity. Cultural, moral, and ideological pluralism is a fact of our lives. While some people see this phenomenon as a source of richness and thus welcome it, others feel threatened by it. Those who feel threatened have two options before them; they will either learn how to live with diversity or look for ways to suppress it. While, this latter option causes social conflict, the former ameliorates social conflict. This option is called 'toleration.' Toleration: The Liberal Virtue is a defense of toleration as a remedy to societal conflict caused by differences. It examines four prominent grounds of toleration: skepticism, prudence, autonomy, and conscience which are illustrated through the works of four pioneering liberals, namely, Michel de Montaigne, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Pierre Bayle, respectively.
Author: George W. Carey
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 188292696X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
The long-running debates between between conservatives and libertarians are vigorous and highly charged, dealing with ideas about the very nature of liberty and morality. Like no other single work, Freedom and Virtue explores what unites and divides the adherents of these two important American traditions—shedding much light on our current political landscape.
Author: Stephen Macedo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Liberal democracy is often defended because it secures freedom, order, and prosperity. Without slighting these solid achievements, this book responds to those who worry that the theory and practice of free self-government neglect the importance of community and citizen virtue. Macedo offers a critical interpretation and original defense of the great tradition of individual freedom associated with John Locke and the founders of the American republic. He defends a theory of public justification, and explains how the legal and political institutions of liberal democracy embody a collective commitment to reasonableness. He concludes with the types of personalities and societies associated with life in a pluralistic, open, and tolerant liberal society. This provocative work will be of interest to scholars and laypeople concerned with the moral aspirations of contemporary democracy.
