Download or read book Rationalism Pluralism and Freedom written by Jacob T. Levy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intermediate groups— voluntary associations, churches, ethnocultural groups, universities, and more-can both protect threaten individual liberty. The same is true for centralized state action against such groups. This wide-ranging book argues that, both normatively and historically, liberal political thought rests on a deep tension between a rationalist suspicion of intermediate and local group power, and a pluralism favorable toward intermediate group life, and preserving the bulk of its suspicion for the centralizing state. The book studies this tension using tools from the history of political thought, normative political philosophy, law, and social theory. In the process, it retells the history of liberal thought and practice in a way that moves from the birth of intermediacy in the High Middle Ages to the British Pluralists of the twentieth century. In particular it restores centrality to the tradition of ancient constitutionalism and to Montesquieu, arguing that social contract theory's contributions to the development of liberal thought have been mistaken for the whole tradition. It discusses the real threats to freedom posed both by local group life and by state centralization, the ways in which those threats aggravate each other. Though the state and intermediate groups can check and balance each other in ways that protect freedom, they may also aggravate each other's worst tendencies. Likewise, the elements of liberal thought concerned with the threats from each cannot necessarily be combined into a single satisfactory theory of freedom. While the book frequently reconstructs and defends pluralism, it ultimately argues that the tension is irreconcilable and not susceptible of harmonization or synthesis; it must be lived with, not overcome.
Download or read book Rationalism Pluralism and Freedom written by Jacob T. Levy and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original account of the history of liberal thought, one grounded in an institutional history of medieval pluralism and the early modern rationalizing state, and explores the deep tensions that liberal political thought rests upon.
Download or read book Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism written by J. Judd Owen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledgments1. If Liberalism is a Faith, What Becomes of the Separation of Church and State?2. Pragmatism, Liberalism, and the Quarrel between Science and Religion3. Rorty's Repudiation of Epistemology4. Rortian Irony and the "De-divinization" of Liberalism5. Religion and Rawls's Freestanding Liberalism6. Stanley Fish and the Demise of the Separation of Church and State7. Fish, Locke, and Religious Neutrality8. Reason, Indifference, and the Aim of Religious FreedomAppendix: A Reply to Stanley FishNotesBibliographyIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Free To Choose written by Milton Friedman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 1990-11-26 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A powerful and persuasive discussion about economics, freedom, and the relationship between the two, from today's brightest economist. In this classic discussion, Milton and Rose Friedman explain how our freedom has been eroded and our affluence undermined through the explosion of laws, regulations, agencies, and spending in Washington. This important analysis reveals what has gone wrong in America in the past and what is necessary for our economic health to flourish.
Download or read book Federalism and Subsidiarity written by James E. Fleming and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Federalism and Subsidiarity, a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars in political science, law, and philosophy address the application and interaction of the concept of federalism within law and government. What are the best justifications for and conceptions of federalism? What are the most useful criteria for deciding what powers should be allocated to national governments and what powers reserved to state or provincial governments? What are the implications of the principle of subsidiarity for such questions? What should be the constitutional standing of cities in federations? Do we need to “remap” federalism to reckon with the emergence of translocal and transnational organizations with porous boundaries that are not reflected in traditional jurisdictional conceptions? Examining these questions and more, this latest installation in the NOMOS series sheds new light on the allocation of power within federations.
Download or read book Colonialism and Its Legacies written by Jacob T. Levy and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a half-millennium of European empires. The volume ranges from the beginning of modernity to the present day, examining colonialism and colonial legacies in India, Africa, Latin America, and North America.
Download or read book A Pluralistic Universe written by William James and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Multiculturalism of Fear written by Jacob T. Levy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-08-17 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Multiculturalism of Fear argues for a liberal account of multiculturalism which draws on a liberalism of fear like that articulated by Judith Shklar and inspired by Montesquieu. Liberalism should not be centrally concerned either with preserving or with transcending cultural communities, practices, and identities. Rather, it should focus on mitigating evils such as inter-ethnic civil wars, cruel practices internal to cultural communities, and state violence against ethnic minorities. This 'multiculturalism of fear' must be grounded in the realities of ethnic politics and ethnic conflict. It must therefore take seriously the importance which persons feel their ethnic identities and cultural practices to have, without falling into a celebration of cultural belonging. Levy argues against nationalist and multicultural theories that accord significant moral weight to cultural communities as such. Yet he also insists that the challenges of life in a multicultural world cannot be met without a recognition of the importance that particularist identities and practices have to individual persons and to social life. The book applies the multiculturalism of fear to a variety of policy problems confronting multiethnic states. These include the regulation of sexist practices internal to cultural communities; secession and national self-determination; land rights; customary law; and the symbols and words used by the state, including official apologies. It draws on cases from such diverse states as Australia, Canada, Israel, India, South Africa, and the United States.
Download or read book The Most Sacred Freedom written by Will R. Jordan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Most Sacred Freedom includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2014 A. V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the seventh annual conference sponsored by Mercer University's Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for America's Founding principles. Together, these essays explore the great principle of religious liberty by charting its development in the Western tradition and reconsidering its place at America's founding. The book begins with a comparison between the flood accounts in Genesis and the Mesopotamian Atra-Hasis and advances all the way to the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The intervening chapters examine the contributions of figures such as Emperor Julian, Roger Williams, Cecilius Calvert, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the American Founders. The major themes addressed include the theological and epistemological preconditions of religious liberty, the chief challenges to securing this liberty, the problematic but necessary role of religion in a free society, and the constitutional framework that has been handed down to us to help preserve this most sacred freedom. Book jacket.
Download or read book The Rationalists written by Pauline Phemister and published by Polity. This book was released on 2006-09-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz stand out among their seventeenth-century contemporaries as the great rationalist philosophers. Each sought to construct a philosophical system in which theological and philosophical foundations serve to explain the physical, mental and moral universe. Through a careful analysis of their work, Pauline Phemister explores the rationalists seminal contribution to the development of modern philosophy. Broad terminological agreement and a shared appreciation of the role of reason in ethics do not mask the very significant disagreements that led to three distinctive philosophical systems: Cartesian dualism, Spinozan monism and Leibnizian pluralism. The book explores the nature of, and offers reasons for, these differences. Phemister contends that Spinoza and Leibniz developed their systems in part through engagements with and amendment of Cartesian philosophy, and critically analyses the arguments and contributions of all three philosophers. The clarity of the authors discussion of their key ideas including their views on knowledge, universal languages, the nature of substance and substances, bodies, the relation of mind and body, freedom, and the role of distinct perception and reason in morals will make this book the ideal introduction to rationalist philosophy.
Download or read book Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries written by Milan Zafirovski and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about modern liberal society and its adversaries. The book rediscovers and rehabilitates much maligned, especially in America, liberalism as the ideal system of liberty in relation to anti-liberalism as one of un-freedom. It rediscovers liberal modernity as a free, equal and just social system and time, thus most compatible with and enhancing of human civilization ushering in the 21st century. It exposes anti-liberal adversaries, especially conservatism, as ideologies and systems most inappropriate with and destructive of civilization. The book rediscovers liberal modernity as the master process and destination of Western civilization, and its anti-liberal adversaries, notably conservatism, as the ghosts of a dead past. The anti-liberal rumors of the 'death' of liberalism are 'greatly exaggerated'.
Download or read book The Christian Structure of Politics written by William McCormick and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Christian Structure of Politics, the first full-length monograph on Thomas Aquinas's De Regno in decades, offers an authoritative interpretation of De Regno as a contribution to our understanding of Aquinas's politics, particularly on the relationship between Church and State. William McCormick argues that Aquinas takes up a via media between Augustine and Aristotle in De Regno, invoking human nature to ground politics as rational, but also Christian principles to limit politics because of both sin and the supernatural end of man beyond politics. Where others have seen disjoined sections on the best regime, tyranny, and the reward of the king, McCormick identifies a dialogical structure to the text - one not unlike the disputed question format - whereby Aquinas both tempers expectations for the best government and offers a spiritual diagnosis of tyranny, culminating in a sharp critique of civil religion and political theology. McCormick draws upon historical research on Aquinas' context, especially that of Anthony Black, Cary Nederman and Francis Oakley, from which he develops three themes: the medieval preponderance of kingship and royal ideology; the relationship between Church and State; and the intersection of Latin Christianity and Greco-Roman antiquity. While age-old concerns, recent research in these areas has allowed us to move beyond simplistic platitudes. For scholars of political theory and the history of political thought, De Regno will prove fascinating for the interplay of Aristotelian and Augustinian elements, undercutting the conventional wisdom that Aquinas was simply an Aristotelian. De Regno also includes an extended treatment of civil religion, one of Aquinas’ most historically-oriented discussions of politics.
Download or read book The Liberal Archipelago written by Chandran Kukathas and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-06-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his major new work Chandran Kukathas offers, for the first time, a book-length treatment of this controversial and influential theory of minority rights. The work is a defence of a form of liberalism and multiculturalism. The general question it tries to answer is: what is the principled basis of a free society marked by cultural diversity and group loyalties? More particularly, it explains whether such a society requires political institutions which recognize minorities; how far it should tolerate such minorities when their ways differ from those of the mainstream community; to what extent political institutions should address injustices suffered by minorities at the hands of the wider society, and also at the hands of the powerful within their own communities; what role, if any, the state should play in the shaping of a society's (national) identity; and what fundamental values should guide our reflections on these matters. Its main contention is that a free society is an open society whose fundamental principle is the principle of freedom of association. A society is free to the extent that it is prepared to tolerate in its midst associations which differ or dissent from its standards or practices. An implication of these principles is that political society is also no more than one among other associations; its basis is the willingness of its members to continue to associate under the terms which define it. While it is an 'association of associations', it is not the only such association; it does not subsume all other associations. The principles of a free society describe not a hierarchy of superior and subordinate authorities but an archipelago of competing and overlapping jurisdictions. The idea of a liberal archipelago is defended as one which supplies us with a better metaphor of the free society than do older notions such as the body politic, or the ship of state. This work presents a challenge, and an alternative, to other contemporary liberal theories of multiculturalism.
Download or read book The Idea of Justice written by Amartya Sen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an analysis of what justice is, the transcendental theory of justice and its drawbacks, and a persuasive argument for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives.
Download or read book Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom written by Bruce Baum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin’s writings have generated continual interest among scholars and educated readers, especially in regard to his ideas about liberalism, value pluralism, and "positive" and "negative" liberty. Most books on Berlin have examined his general political theory, but this volume uses a contemporary perspective to focus specifically on his ideas about freedom and liberty. Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom brings together an integrated collection of essays by noted and emerging political theorists that commemorate in a critical spirit the recent 50th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin’s famous lecture and essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." The contributors use Berlin’s essay as an occasion to rethink the larger politics of freedom from a twenty-first century standpoint, bringing Berlin’s ideas into conversation with current political problems and perspectives rooted in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, democratic theory, and critical social theory. The editors begin by surveying the influence of Berlin’s essay and the range of debates about freedom that it has inspired. Contributors’ chapters then offer various analyses such as competing ways to contextualize Berlin’s essay, how to reconsider Berlin’s ideas in light of struggles over national self-determination, European colonialism, and racism, and how to view Berlin’s controversial distinction between so-called "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." By relating Berlin’s thinking about freedom to competing contemporary views of the politics of freedom, this book will be significant for both scholars of Berlin as well as people who are interested in larger debates about the meaning and conditions of freedom.
Download or read book The Quest for Community written by Robert Nisbet and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the leading thinkers to emerge in the postwar conservative intellectual revival was the sociologist Robert Nisbet. His book The Quest for Community, published in 1953, stands as one of the most persuasive accounts of the dilemmas confronting modern society. Nearly a half century before Robert Putnam documented the atomization of society in Bowling Alone, Nisbet argued that the rise of the powerful modern state had eroded the sources of community—the family, the neighborhood, the church, the guild. Alienation and loneliness inevitably resulted. But as the traditional ties that bind fell away, the human impulse toward community led people to turn even more to the government itself, allowing statism—even totalitarianism—to flourish. This edition of Nisbet’s magnum opus features a brilliant introduction by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and three critical essays. Published at a time when our communal life has only grown weaker and when many Americans display cultish enthusiasm for a charismatic president, this new edition of The Quest for Community shows that Nisbet’s insights are as relevant today as ever.
Download or read book The Morality of Pluralism written by John Kekes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversies about abortion, the environment, pornography, AIDS, and similar issues naturally lead to the question of whether there are any values that can be ultimately justified, or whether values are simply conventional. John Kekes argues that the present moral and political uncertainties are due to a deep change in our society from a dogmatic to a pluralistic view of values. Dogmatism is committed to there being only one justifiable system of values. Pluralism recognizes many such systems, and yet it avoids a chaotic relativism according to which all values are in the end arbitrary. Maintaining that good lives must be reasonable, but denying that they must conform to one true pattern, Kekes develops and justifies a pluralistic account of good lives and values, and works out its political, moral, and personal implications.
