Download or read book Liberalism Without Perfection written by Jonathan Quong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberalism without Perfection offers an introduction to the debate between liberal perfectionism and political liberalism. This book is a new account and defence of Rawlsian political liberalism, one of the most discussed, but widely misunderstood and criticized theories in contemporary political theory.

Download or read book Liberal Perfectionism written by Alexandra Couto and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2014-01-31 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the recent literature on political perfectionism has focused on dealing with objections to this view. This book adopts a different approach: It attempts to highlight the intuitive appeal of liberal perfectionism by presenting a positive prima facie argument in its favour. The book starts by clarifying the relation between political perfectionism — a conception of politics — and prudential perfectionism and ethical perfectionism — a conception of the good life, and a type of ethical theory. It is crucial to start by selecting a plausible form of ethical perfectionism, as it makes an important difference to the plausibility of the political conception based upon it. Once appropriate distinctions are drawn and a plausible form of liberal perfectionism is endorsed, many of the standard objections to perfectionism are shown to fail to reach their target. Different arguments in favour of liberal perfectionism are then proposed and critically examined, but the resilience of some pragmatic arguments against liberal perfectionism is conceded. The book ends by showing that perfectionism can be surprisingly relevant for discussions of social justice and proceeds to draw a sketch of the perfectionist implications for questions of distributive justice.

Download or read book Liberalism Perfectionism and Restraint written by Steven Wall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are liberalism and perfectionism compatible? In this study Steven Wall presents and defends a perfectionist account of political morality that takes issue with many currently fashionable liberal ideas but retains the strong liberal commitment to the ideal of personal autonomy. He begins by critically discussing the most influential version of anti-perfectionist liberalism, examining the main arguments that have been offered in its defence. He then clarifies the ideal of personal autonomy, presents an account of its value and shows that a strong commitment to personal autonomy is fully compatible with an endorsement of perfectionist political action designed to promote valuable pursuits and discourage base ones.

Download or read book The Liberal Imagination written by Lionel Trilling and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

Download or read book Godless written by Ann Coulter and published by Crown Forum. This book was released on 2007-06-26 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If a martian landed in America and set out to determine the nation's official state religion, he would have to conclude it is liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law. Many Americans are outraged by liberal hostility to traditional religion. But as Ann Coulter reveals in this, her most explosive book yet, to focus solely on the Left's attacks on our Judeo-Christian tradition is to miss a larger point: liberalism is a religion—a godless one. And it is now entrenched as the state religion of this county. Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion. In Godless, Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us its sacraments (abortion), its holy writ (Roe v. Wade), its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal), its clergy (public school teachers), its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free), its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland), and its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident). Then, of course, there's the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But Coulter neatly reverses the pretense that liberals are rationalists guided by the ideals of free inquiry and the scientific method. She exposes the essential truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: it is bogus science. Writing with a keen appreciation for genuine science, Coulter reveals that the so-called gaps in the theory of evolution are all there is—Darwinism is nothing but a gap. After 150 years of dedicated searching into the fossil record, evolution's proponents have failed utterly to substantiate its claims. And a long line of supposed evidence, from the infamous Piltdown Man to the "evolving" peppered moths of England, has been exposed as hoaxes. Still, liberals treat those who question evolution as religious heretics and prohibit students from hearing about real science when it contradicts Darwinism. And these are the people who say they want to keep faith out of the classroom? Liberals' absolute devotion to Darwinism, Coulter shows, has nothing to do with evolution's scientific validity and everything to do with its refusal to admit the possibility of God as a guiding force. They will brook no challenges to the official religion. Fearlessly confronting the high priests of the Church of Liberalism and ringing with Coulter's razor-sharp wit, Godless is the most important and riveting book yet from one of today's most lively and impassioned conservative voices. "Liberals love to boast that they are not 'religious,' which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as 'religion.'" —From Godless

Download or read book Perfection the State and Victorian Liberalism written by D. Malachuk and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-08-19 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recovers and recommends the core conviction of Victorian liberal theory that human beings, with the help of the state, can achieve an objective moral perfection. The first half of the book considers the diverse modern biases that have blinded us to the merit of this core conviction and weaves together disparate new scholarship (primarily in political theory and Victorian Studies) to set the stage for a reconsideration of that conviction. The second half of the book is that reconsideration outlining the various policies the Victorian liberals (John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, primarily, with a half dozen other nineteenth-century British and American authors) recommended the state employ in the perfection of human beings.

Download or read book Liberalism with Excellence written by Matthew H. Kramer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-05 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past several decades, political philosophers have frequently clashed with one another over the question whether governments are morally required to remain neutral among reasonable conceptions of excellence and human flourishing. Whereas the numerous followers of John Rawls (and kindred philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin) have maintained that a requirement of neutrality is indeed incumbent on every system of governance, other philosophers — often designated as 'perfectionists' — have argued against the existence of such a requirement. Liberalism with Excellence enters these debates not by plighting itself unequivocally to one side or the other, but instead by reconceiving each of the sides and thus by redirecting the debates that have occurred between them. On the one hand, the book rejects the requirement of neutrality by contending that certain subsidies for the promotion of excellence in sundry areas of human endeavour can be proper and vital uses of resources by governments. Advocating such departures from the constraint of neutrality, the book presents a version of liberalism that can rightly be classified as 'perfectionist'. On the other hand, the species of perfectionism espoused in Liberalism with Excellence diverges markedly from the theories that have usually been so classified. Indeed, much of the book assails various aspects of those theories. What is more, the aspirational perfectionism elaborated in the closing chapters of the volume is reconcilable in most key respects with a suitably amplified version of Rawlsianism. Hence, by reconceiving both the perfectionist side and the neutralist side of the prevailing disputation, Liberalism with Excellence combines and transforms their respective insights.

Download or read book Confucian Perfectionism written by Joseph Chan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of the right. Confucian Perfectionism examines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice. Confucian Perfectionism critically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era.

Download or read book Perfectionism and Neutrality written by Klosko and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past twenty years, the debate between neutrality and perfectionism has been at the center of political philosophy. Now Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory brings together classic papers and new ideas on both sides of the discussion. Editors George Klosko and Steven Wall provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible to everyone interested in the interaction between morals and the state.

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 Liberalism written by Michael Freeden and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Freeden explores the concept of liberalism, one of the longest-standing and central political theories and ideologies. Combining a variety of approaches, he distinguishes between liberalism as a political movement, as a system of ideas, and as a series of ethical and philosophical principles.

Download or read book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism written by Ronald J. Pestritto and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the political principles of Woodrow Wilson that influenced his presidency and the impact he had on United States and the progressive movement.

Download or read book Beyond Classical Liberalism written by James Dominic Rooney and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together diverse sets of standpoints on liberalism in an era of growing skepticism and distrust regarding liberal institutions. The essays in the volume: • Relate concerns for liberal institutions with classical themes in perfectionist politics, such as the priority of the common good in decision-making or the role of comprehensive doctrines. • Analyse how perfectionist intuitions about the political life affect our concepts of public reason or public justification. • Outline various moral duties we have toward other persons that underlie the liberal institutions or notions of rights functioning across the contemporary political landscape. • Explore various aspects of pluralism from within influential religious or philosophical traditions, applying insights from those traditions to issues in contemporary politics. The comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars, students, and researchers of politics, especially those in political philosophy and political theory.

Download or read book The Politics of the Real written by D. C. Schindler and published by New Polity Press. This book was released on 2021-03-10 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schindler shows that liberalism is wrong, not because it has simply “relegated God to the private,” but because it has inverted the world: giving us power without authority, in what becomes a closed, necessarily totalitarian, horizon. Here, nothing else can be done with the transcendent God but to find a quiet little place to keep him, harmless and out of the way. When we let God out, a cosmic hierarchy of act—of participation in Being Himself—explodes into view. And this changes everything. A true integralism, a true postliberalism, moves politics back into a cosmos that is itself analogically ordered to participation in the life of God. With The Politics of the Real, Schindler has elevated the postliberal conversation. — Andrew Willard Jones Director of Catholic Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville and author of Before Church and State

Download or read book A Companion to Rawls written by Jon Mandle and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wide ranging and up to date, this is the single most comprehensive treatment of the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls. An unprecedented survey that reflects the surge of Rawls scholarship since his death, and the lively debates that have emerged from his work Features an outstanding list of contributors, including senior as well as “next generation” Rawls scholars Provides careful, textually informed exegesis and well-developed critical commentary across all areas of his work, including non-Rawlsian perspectives Includes discussion of new material, covering Rawls’s work from the newly published undergraduate thesis to the final writings on public reason and the law of peoples Covers Rawls’s moral and political philosophy, his distinctive methodological commitments, and his relationships to the history of moral and political philosophy and to jurisprudence and the social sciences Includes discussion of his monumental 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, which is often credited as having revitalized political philosophy

Download or read book The Realist Turn written by Douglas B. Rasmussen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl maintain that a realist turn—namely, one in which the natural order is the basis for individual rights—is needed to bring about a proper understanding and defense of liberty. They argue that the critical character of individual rights results from their being tethered to metaphysical realism. After reprising their explanation and defense of natural rights, Rasmussen and Den Uyl explain metaphysical realism and defend it against neo-pragmatist objections. They show it to be a formidable and preferable alternative to epistemic constructivism and crucial for a suitable understanding of ideal theory.

Download or read book The Morality of Defensive Force written by Jonathan Quong and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides an account of the central moral principles that regulate the permissible use of defensive force. Quong argues that we cannot understand the morality of defensive force until we ask and answer deeper questions about how the use of defensive force fits with a more general account of justice and moral rights. In developing this view the book offers original accounts of liability, proportionality, and necessity. Quong also argues, contra the dominant view in the literature, that self-defense can sometimes be justified on the basis of an agent-relative prerogative to give greater weight to one's own life and interests. The book also provides a novel conception of individual rights against harm. Unlike some, who believe that our rights against harm are fact-relative, Quong argues that our rights against being harmed by others must, in certain respects, be sensitive to the evidence that others can reasonably be expected to possess. The final chapter provides an extended defense of the means principle, a principle that prohibits harmfully using other persons' bodies or other rightful property unless those persons are duty bound to permit this use or have otherwise waived their claims against such use"--