Download or read book Living Under Liberalism written by Pam Stavropoulos and published by Universal Pub. This book was released on 2008-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Depression is prevalent throughout western society. But while identifying "risk factors," we rarely make the link to the liberal value system which so shapes the society in which we live. Freedom; equality; progress; respect for the "individual." What's wrong with liberalism? As residents of western liberal democracies, aren't we living in the type of society most conducive to happiness? Intellectually, we like to think so. We intone the liberal mantra "rationality defines a person," "my life is up to me," "liberalism is the best there is." But there are parts of ourselves that suspect otherwise, and that remain unconvinced. We become symptomatic. This book challenges individualist readings of depression which are still so dominant in western societies. This is in professional circles and the wider community alike. It also questions the viability of our conception of "mental health." While social models of health have been around for some time now, it goes further in contending that "living under liberalism" is itself a risk factor for depression. The liberal values we want to defend can also, and at the same time, lead to psychological strain. This is because they rest on an understanding of the "person" that is partial and distorted, and which involves us in multiple contradictions which we struggle to reconcile with the experience of everyday life. In contrast to the reading of depression as a pathological and individual "disorder," Living under Liberalism claims that depression may be a realistic, legitimate and healthy response to a social context which is itself pathological. The revised premise that "mental health" is a dynamic process in a society which cannot be assumed to be healthy challenges mainstream "treatments of choice" for depression. It also has major implications for health and healing. Drawing on a range of diverse material (from clinical and sociological to philosophical and popular) the book is designed for a wide audience. Combining social criticism with a practical approach to "self help," Living under Liberalism shows how what we regard as personal depression is far more political than it might seem. It is a book which will be of interest to clinicians, academics and the general public alike.
Download or read book Living Liberalism written by Elaine Hadley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-Victorian era, liberalism was a practical politics: it had a party, it informed legislation, and it had adherents who identified with and expressed it as opinion. It was also the first British political movement to depend more on people than property, and on opinion rather than interest. But how would these subjects of liberal politics actually live liberalism? To answer this question, Elaine Hadley focuses on the key concept of individuation—how it is embodied in politics and daily life and how it is expressed through opinion, discussion and sincerity. These are concerns that have been absent from commentary on the liberal subject. Living Liberalism argues that the properties of liberalism—citizenship, the vote, the candidate, and reform, among others—were developed in response to a chaotic and antagonistic world. In exploring how political liberalism imagined its impact on Victorian society, Hadley reveals an entirely new and unexpected prehistory of our modern liberal politics. A major revisionist account that alters our sense of the trajectory of liberalism, Living Liberalism revises our understanding of the presumption of the liberal subject.
Download or read book Liberalism written by Edmund Fawcett and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Why Liberalism Works written by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful and passionately written book explaining why a return to Enlightenment ideals is good for the world "Beginning with the simple but fertile idea that people should not push other people around, Deirdre McCloskey presents an elegant defense of 'true liberalism' as opposed to its well-meaning rivals on the left and the right. Erudite, but marvelously accessible and written in a style that is at once colloquial and astringent."--Stanley Fish The greatest challenges facing humankind, according to Deirdre McCloskey, are poverty and tyranny, both of which hold people back. Arguing for a return to true liberal values, this engaging and accessible book develops, defends, and demonstrates how embracing the ideas first espoused by eighteenth-century philosophers like Locke, Smith, Voltaire, and Wollstonecraft is good for everyone. With her trademark wit and deep understanding, McCloskey shows how the adoption of Enlightenment ideals of liberalism has propelled the freedom and prosperity that define the quality of a full life. In her view, liberalism leads to equality, but equality does not necessarily lead to liberalism. Liberalism is an optimistic philosophy that depends on the power of rhetoric rather than coercion, and on ethics, free speech, and facts in order to thrive.
Download or read book Why Liberalism Failed written by Patrick J. Deneen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Minoritarian Liberalism written by Moisés Lino e Silva and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-04-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favela in Rio, where residents articulate their own politics of freedom against the backdrop of multiple forms of oppression. Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights—usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois—at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ people, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is challenged by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. He calls such marginalized visions of freedom “minoritarian liberalism,” a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom—be they queer, favela, or peasant. Lino e Silva introduces readers to a broad collective of favela residents, most intimately accompanying Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). While many of those the author meets consider themselves “queer,” others are treated as “abnormal” simply because they live in favelas. Through these interconnected experiences, Lino e Silva not only pushes at the boundaries of anthropological inquiry, but also offers ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination.
Download or read book The Righteous Mind written by Jonathan Haidt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The acclaimed social psychologist challenges conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to conservatives and liberals alike—a “landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself” (The New York Times Book Review). Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
Download or read book The Retreat of Western Liberalism written by Edward Luce and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A panorama of the unravelling world order as riveting as any beach read' New Yorker 'Read this book: in the three hours it takes you will get a new, bracing and brilliant understanding of the dangers we in the democratic West now face. Luce is one of the smartest journalists working today, and his perceptions are priceless' Jane Mayer, staff writer on the New Yorker 'No one was more prescient about the economic malaise and popular resentment that has hit the United States than Ed Luce in his previous book, Time to Start Thinking. His new book, Retreat of Western Liberalism, broadens that picture to cover the Western world. It is a must read for anyone trying to make sense of the waves of populism and nationalism we face today' Liaquat Ahamed In his widely acclaimed book Time to Start Thinking, Financial Times columnist and commentator Edward Luce charted the course of American economic and geopolitical decline, proving to be a prescient voice on our current social and political turmoil. In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of democratic liberalism - of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a symptom. Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's losers, and complacency about our system's durability - attitudes that have been emerging since the fall of the Berlin Wall, treated by the West as an absolute triumph over the East. We cannot move forward without a clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Luce contrasts Western democratic and economic ideals, which rest on an assumption of linear progress, with more cyclical views of economic strength - symbolized by the nineteenth-century fall and present-day rise of the Chinese and Indian economies - and with the dawn of a new multipolar age. Combining on-the-ground reporting with intelligent synthesis of the vast literature already available, Luce offers a detailed projection of the consequences of the Trump administration and a forward-thinking analysis of what those who believe in enlightenment values must do to defend them from the multiple onslaughts they face in the coming years.
Download or read book Bleak Liberalism written by Amanda Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Lost History of Liberalism written by Helena Rosenblatt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry - and a term of derision - in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism," revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. It was only during the Cold War and America's growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms."--
Download or read book A Thousand Small Sanities written by Adam Gopnik and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author. Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history -- and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.
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 Can Democracy Work written by James Miller and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Of all the books on democracy in recent years one of the best is James Miller’s Can Democracy Work? . . . Miller provides an intelligent journey through the turbulent past of this great human experiment in whether we can actually govern ourselves." —David Blight, The Guardian A new history of the world’s most embattled idea Today, democracy is the world’s only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work? James Miller, the author of the classic history of 1960s protest Democracy Is in the Streets, offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. The ancient Greeks preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as inherently corrupt and undemocratic. The French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some even as it was taken from others. Amid the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, communists, liberals, and nationalists all sought to claim the ideals of democracy for themselves—even as they manifestly failed to realize them. Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished—and vexed—ideal.
Download or read book Infectious Liberty written by Robert Mitchell and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling powers of the market. Infectious Liberty focuses on such authors as Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth, who drew upon the sciences of population to develop a biopolitics beyond liberalism. These authors attempted what Roberto Esposito describes as an “affirmative” biopolitics, which rejects the principle of establishing security by distinguishing between valued and unvalued lives, seeks to support even the most abject members of a population, and proposes new ways of living in common. Infectious Liberty expands our understandings of liberalism and biopolitics—and the relationship between them—while also helping us to understand better the ways creative literature facilitates the project of reimagining what the politics of life might consist of. Infectious Liberty is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
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 Neutrality and the Gendered Division of Labor written by Gina Schouten and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book defends progressive political interventions to erode the gendered division of labor as legitimate exercises of coercive political power. The gendered division of labor is widely regarded as the linchpin of gender injustice. The process of gender equalization in domestic and paid labor allocations has stalled, and a growing number of scholars argue that, absent political intervention, further eroding of the gendered division of labor will not be forthcoming anytime soon. Certain political interventions could jumpstart the stalled gender revolution, but beyond their prospects for effectiveness, such interventions stand in need of another kind of justification. In a diverse, liberal state, reasonable citizens will disagree about what makes for a good life and a good society. Because a fundamental commitment of liberalism is to limit political intrusion into the lives of citizens and allow considerable space for those citizens to act on their own conceptions of the good, questions of legitimacy arise. Legitimacy concerns the constraints we must abide by as we seek collective political solutions to our shared social problems, given that we will disagree, reasonably, both about what constitutes a problem and about what costs we should be willing to incur to fix it. The interventions in question would effectively subsidize gender egalitarian lifestyles at a cost to those who prefer to maintain a traditional gendered division of labor. In a pluralistic, liberal society where many citizens reasonably resist the feminist agenda, can we legitimately use scarce public resources to finance coercive interventions to subsidize gender egalitarianism? This book argues that they can, and moreover, that they can even by the lights of political liberalism, a particularly demanding theory of liberal legitimacy.
Download or read book The Great Liberal Death Wish written by Canadian League of Rights and published by Flesherton, Ont. : Canadian League of Rights. This book was released on 1979 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
