Download or read book In the Shadow of Justice written by Katrina Forrester and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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."--

Download or read book Extending Liberal Political Philosophy written by Lukas H. Meyer and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Extending Political Liberalism written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in modern political philosophy, John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993) defended a powerful vision of society that respects reasonable ways of life, both religious and secular. These core values have never been more critical as anxiety grows over political and religious difference and new restrictions are placed on peaceful protest and individual expression. In her introduction to the volume, Martha Nussbaum discusses the main themes of Political Liberalism and puts them into the context of contemporary philosophical debates.

Download or read book Cosmopolitan Liberalism written by M. Sánchez-Flores and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmopolitanism in the contemporary debate is firmly based in the western tradition of liberal thought, which is culturally situated. The liberal conception of self alienates nature and childhood and its internal logic justifies colonialism and carries patriarchal and racialized baggage. Cosmopolitan Liberalism is a critique of the western tradition of liberal thought and an effort to overcome the philosophical boundaries of individualism towards a more inclusive and open conception. It seeks to expand the theoretical basis of individuality beyond its own limitations towards the ideal of universal love and the moral principle of compassion which are compatible with all world cosmologies - liberal and non-liberal. Cosmopolitan Liberalism is a reflection on what it is that all human beings owe one another in spite of the many humanly created borders that set us apart.

Download or read book Political Liberalism written by John Rawls and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-24 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Theology of Liberalism written by Eric Nelson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Understanding Liberal Democracy written by Nicholas Wolterstorff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Liberal Democracy collects Nicholas Wolterstorff's papers in political philosophy. The book includes some of Wolterstorff's earlier and influential work on the intersection between political philosophy and religion, and contains nine new essays in which Wolterstorff develops new lines of argument and stakes out novel positions regarding the nature of liberal democracy, human rights, and political authority. Taken together, these positionsare an attractive alternative to the so-called public reason liberalism defended by thinkers such as John Rawls. Of interest to philosophers, political theorists, and theologians, Understanding Liberal Democracyengages a wide audience of those interested in how best to understand the nature of liberal democracy and its relation to religion.

Download or read book Rawls s Political Liberalism written by Thom Brooks and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in modern political philosophy, John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993) defended a powerful vision of society that respects reasonable ways of life, both religious and secular. These core values have never been more critical as anxiety grows over political and religious difference and new restrictions are placed on peaceful protest and individual expression. This anthology of original essays suggests new, groundbreaking applications of Rawls's work in multiple disciplines and contexts. Thom Brooks, Martha Nussbaum, Onora O'Neill (University of Cambridge), Paul Weithman (University of Notre Dame), Jeremy Waldron (New York University), and Frank Michelman (Harvard University) explore political liberalism's relevance to the challenges of multiculturalism, the relationship between the state and religion, the struggle for political legitimacy, and the capabilities approach. Extending Rawls's progressive thought to the fields of law, economics, and public reason, this book helps advance the project of a free society that thrives despite disagreements over religious and moral views.

Download or read book A Theory of Justice written by John RAWLS and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

Download or read book Liberalism at the Crossroads written by Christopher Wolfe and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberalism at the Crossroads offers succinct, accessible, and well-written surveys of the ideas of the leading participants in the contemporary philosophical debate about liberalism. Christopher Wolfe brings together analyses of leading liberal thinkers from across the spectrum as well as influential critics of liberalism, including John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, Michael Sandel, Richard Rorty, Joseph Raz, and William Galston. For the second edition, each chapter has been thoroughly revised, and new chapters on Susan Moller Okin, Richard Posner, and John Finnis have been added to include representatives of liberal feminism, law and economics, and natural law. The result is an invaluable overview of contemporary political theory, ideal for both students and scholars.

Download or read book Distributive Justice Political Stability and Liberal Rights written by Hun Chung and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation is a compilation of three independent essays in political philosophy. What unifies these three essays is not in their substantive content, but rather in their methodological approach. In each of these three essays, I construct a formal model to explore philosophical topics in distributive justice, political stability, and the implementation of liberal rights in a diverse society. Specifically, for each essay, I construct a formal model (using the tools of modern game theory, social choice theory, and welfare economics) that is designed to capture the main philosophical intuition behind the relevant situation of the given philosophical topic. I then carefully examine the philosophical implications of the main analytical results that have been logically deduced from each formal model. We will see that the analytical results of the formal models provide very important philosophical insights that would not have been so easily understood without the help of such formal analyses. Sometimes the results of the formal models reinforce our original philosophical intuitions; other times, they may force us to reconsider and reevaluate our entrenched philosophical presuppositions. In this way, formal models can serve as a test that could help us adjudicate among competing philosophical positions. In chapter 1 entitled "Rawls's Self-Defeat: A Formal Analysis if John Rawls's Theory of Justice", I provide a close formal examination of John Rawls's theory of justice. The main aim of John Rawls in his early years was to present an alternate theory of distributive justice that was superior to utilitarianism. Rawls's main worry was that utilitarianism (which was the dominant ethical theory of his time) can fail to secure the fair worth of one's most fundamental basic rights and liberties for the sake of maximizing average or aggregate social welfare. For such reasons, Rawls argued that the representative parties in the original position will not choose utilitarianism, but will rather choose his "justice as fairness", which he believed would securely protect the worth of everybody's basic rights and liberties. In this chapter, I construct a formal model of a liberal democratic society that incorporates all of Rawls's own assumptions. I then compare the distributional consequences of utilitarianism and justice as fairness under varying levels of social affluence. The formal results of the model demonstrate that, under Rawls's own assumptions, utilitarianism better protects the fair worth of people's basic rights and liberties in all social resource situations equal or above moderate scarcity. If we follow Rawls's own reasoning, this implies that the parties in the original position will actually choose utilitarianism over justice as fairness, which contradicts Rawls's own expectations. An important focus of Rawls in his later works was on political stability. When Rawls wrote Political Liberalism, his aim was to show how justice as fairness can be widely supported and stably maintained in a well-ordered society marked by what he called "reasonable pluralism." When writing about political stability, Rawls restricted his attention to what he called a "well-ordered society", where each citizen, despite affirming very different religious and moral beliefs, strictly complies with the requirements of the political conception of justice that his/her society adopts. Rawls called these type of people "reasonable" citizens. However, it is imperative for Rawls to consider how his well-ordered society can restore political stability and maintain social justice after the intrusion of "unreasonable" people that may be sufficient to destabilize political order. In chapter 2 entitled "Public Reason, Convergence Discourse, and the Well-Ordered Society under Crisis", I provide a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of restoring political stability in a well-ordered society offered in the public reason liberalism literature - viz. (a) using public reason or (b) using convergence discourse. The formal analyses offered in this chapter show that using public reason fails completely, while using convergent discourse, although doing better, has its own limitations. In chapter 3 entitled "The Impossibility of Liberal Rights in a Diverse World", I present a social choice theoretic analysis on the implementation of liberal rights in a pluralistic society. A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person's private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person's basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this type of diversity, which now goes by the name "perspectival diversity." This chapter extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by extending the domain to include individual perspectives alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to see or perceive the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the chapter imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society."--Pages xii-xv.

Download or read book Freedom written by Annelien De Dijn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PROSE Award An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year “Ambitious and impressive...At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever.” —The Nation “Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning...This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.” —Publishers Weekly “Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough “Brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject...New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.” —Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters For centuries people in the West identified freedom with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. The equation of liberty with restraints on state power—what most people today associate with freedom—was a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking. So what triggered this fateful reversal? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of Western thinking about freedom, Annelien de Dijn argues that this was not the natural outcome of such secular trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the French and American Revolutions. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries who created our modern democracies—it was first conceived by their critics and opponents. De Dijn shows that far from following in the path of early American patriots, today’s critics of “big government” owe more to the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.

Download or read book Liberalism and Distributive Justice written by Samuel Freeman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Freeman is a leading political philosopher and one of the foremost authorities on the works of John Rawls. Liberalism and Distributive Justice offers a series of Freeman's essays in contemporary political philosophy on three different forms of liberalism-classical liberalism, libertarianism, and the high liberal tradition--and their relation to capitalism, the welfare state, and economic justice.

Download or read book Reconstructing Rawls written by Robert S. Taylor and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Rawls has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment—more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. Rawls’s so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly toward cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. Robert Taylor believes that it is time to redeem A Theory of Justice’s implicit promise of a universalistic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory—a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed.

Download or read book Modus Vivendi Liberalism written by David McCabe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A central task in contemporary political philosophy is to identify principles governing political life where citizens disagree deeply on important questions of value and, more generally, about the proper ends of life. The distinctively liberal response to this challenge insists that the state should as far as possible avoid relying on such contested issues in its basic structure and deliberations. David McCabe critically surveys influential defenses of the liberal solution and advocates modus vivendi liberalism as an alternative defense of the liberal state. Acknowledging that the modus vivendi approach does not provide the deep moral consensus that many liberals demand, he defends the liberal state as an acceptable compromise among citizens who will continue to see it as less than ideal. His book will interest a wide range of readers in political philosophy and political theory.

Download or read book The Law of Peoples written by John Rawls and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book consists of two parts: “The Law of Peoples,” a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993, and the essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” first published in 1997. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times by John Rawls. “The Law of Peoples” extends the idea of a social contract to the Society of Peoples and lays out the general principles that can and should be accepted by both liberal and non-liberal societies as the standard for regulating their behavior toward one another. In particular, it draws a crucial distinction between basic human rights and the rights of each citizen of a liberal constitutional democracy. It explores the terms under which such a society may appropriately wage war against an “outlaw society” and discusses the moral grounds for rendering assistance to non-liberal societies burdened by unfavorable political and economic conditions. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” explains why the constraints of public reason, a concept first discussed in Political Liberalism (1993), are ones that holders of both religious and non-religious comprehensive views can reasonably endorse. It is Rawls’s most detailed account of how a modern constitutional democracy, based on a liberal political conception, could and would be viewed as legitimate by reasonable citizens who on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds do not themselves accept a liberal comprehensive doctrine—such as that of Kant, or Mill, or Rawls’s own “Justice as Fairness,” presented in A Theory of Justice (1971).

Download or read book Liberalism Diversity and Domination written by Inder S. Marwah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how distinctive liberalisms respond to racial, cultural, gender-based and class-based forms of diversity and difference.