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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.
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.
In this tightly organized collection of essays, sixteen distinguished political theorists explore Shklar's intellectual legacy, focusing both on her own ideas and on the broad range of issues that most intrigued her. The volume opens with a series of varied and illuminating assessments of Shklar's conception of liberal politics. The second part, with essays on Descartes and Racine, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Laski, emphasizes the relation between individual freedom and moral psychology in modern political thought. The third part addresses contemporary issues, such as the role of hypocrisy, offensive speech, and constitutional courts in liberal democracies. The book concludes with an autobiographical essay by Shklar that provides a vivid sense of her singular voice and personality.
Comprising essays by Michael W. Doyle, Liberal Peace examines the special significance of liberalism for international relations. The volume begins by outlining the two legacies of liberalism in international relations - how and why liberal states have maintained peace among themselves while at the same time being prone to making war against non-liberal states. Exploring policy implications, the author focuses on the strategic value of the inter-liberal democratic community and how it can be protected, preserved, and enlarged, and whether liberals can go beyond a separate peace to a more integrated global democracy. Finally, the volume considers when force should and should not be used to promote national security and human security across borders, and argues against President George W. Bush’s policy of "transformative" interventions. The concluding essay engages with scholarly critics of the liberal democratic peace. This book will be of great interest to students of international relations, foreign policy, political philosophy, and security studies.
This book, a collection of eleven essays by one of the most interesting moral philosophers currently writing, is written from a perspective that is at once sympathetic towards and critical of liberal political philosophy. The essays explore the capacity of liberal thought, and of the moral traditions on which it draws, to accommodate a variety of challenges posed by the changing circumstances of the modern world. The essays consider how, in an era of rapid globalization, when people's lives are structured by social arrangements and institutions of ever increasing size, complexity, and scope, we can best conceive of the responsibilities of individual agents and the normative significance of people's diverse commitments and allegiances. The volume is linked by common themes including the responsibilities persons have in virtue of belonging to a community, the compatibility of such obligations with equality, the demands of distributive justice in general, and liberalism's relationship to liberty, community, and equality.
This book celebrates Andreas (Andrew) von Hirsch's pioneering contributions to liberal criminal theory. He is particularly noted for reinvigorating desert-based theories of punishment, for his development of principled normative constraints on the enactment of criminal laws, and for helping to bridge the gap between Anglo-American and German criminal law scholarship. Underpinning his work is a deep commitment to a liberal vision of the state. This collection brings together a distinguished group of international authors, who pay tribute to von Hirsch by engaging with topics on which he himself has focused. The essays range across sentencing theory, questions of criminalisation, and the relation between criminal law and the authority of the state. Together, they articulate and defend the ideal of a liberal criminal justice system, and present a fitting accolade to Andreas von Hirsch's scholarly life.
We take liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Confronted with unfamiliar cultures such as India, British liberals could only see them as backward or infantile. In this, liberals manifested a narrow conception of human experience and ways of being in the world. Ironically, it is in the conservative Edmund Burke—a severe critic of Britain's arrogant, paternalistic colonial expansion—that Mehta finds an alternative and more capacious liberal vision. Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, Liberalism and Empire reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.
Liberal Languages reinterprets twentieth-century liberalism as a complex set of discourses relating not only to liberty but also to welfare and community. Written by one of the world's leading experts on liberalism and ideological theory, it uses new methods of analyzing ideologies, as well as historical case studies, to present liberalism as a flexible and rich tradition whose influence has extended beyond its conventional boundaries. Michael Freeden argues that liberalism's collectivist and holistic aspirations, and its sense of change, its self-defined mission as an agent of developing civilization--and not only its deep appreciation of liberty--are central to understanding its arguments. He examines the profound political impact liberalism has made on welfare theory, on conceptions of poverty, on standards of legitimacy, and on democratic practices in the twentieth century. Through a combination of essays, historical case studies, and more theoretical chapters, Freeden investigates the transformations of liberal thought as well as the ideological boundaries they have traversed. He employs the complex theory of ideological analysis that he developed in previous works to explore in considerable detail the experimental interfaces created between liberalism and neighboring ideologies on the left and the right. The nature of liberal thought allows us to gain a better perspective on the ways ideologies present themselves, Freeden argues, not necessarily as dogmatic and alienated structures, but as that which emanates from the continuous creativity that open societies display.
Is liberal democracy appropriate for East Asia? In this provocative book, Daniel Bell argues for morally legitimate alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy in the region. Beyond Liberal Democracy, which continues the author's influential earlier work, is divided into three parts that correspond to the three main hallmarks of liberal democracy--human rights, democracy, and capitalism. These features have been modified substantially during their transmission to East Asian societies that have been shaped by nonliberal practices and values. Bell points to the dangers of implementing Western-style models and proposes alternative justifications and practices that may be more appropriate for East Asian societies. If human rights, democracy, and capitalism are to take root and produce beneficial outcomes in East Asia, Bell argues, they must be adjusted to contemporary East Asian political and economic realities and to the values of nonliberal East Asian political traditions such as Confucianism and Legalism. Local knowledge is therefore essential for realistic and morally informed contributions to debates on political reform in the region, as well as for mutual learning and enrichment of political theories. Beyond Liberal Democracy is indispensable reading for students and scholars of political theory, Asian studies, and human rights, as well as anyone concerned about China's political and economic future and how Western governments and organizations should engage with China.
In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.