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Why do men and women sometimes risk everything to defend their liberties? What motivates principled opposition to the abuse of power? In Liberalism with Honor, Sharon Krause explores honor as a motive for risky and difficult forms of political action. She shows the sense of honor to be an important source of such action and a spring of individual agency more generally. Krause traces the genealogy of honor, including its ties to conscientious objection and civil disobedience, beginning in old-regime France and culminating in the American civil rights movement. She examines the dangers intrinsic to honor and the tensions between honor and modern democracy, but demonstrates that the sense of honor has supported political agency in the United States from the founders to democratic reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr. Honor continues to hold interest and importance today because it combines self-concern and personal ambition with principled higher purposes, and so challenges the disabling dichotomy between self-interest and self-sacrifice that currently pervades both political theory and American public life.
After a century-long hiatus, honor is back. Academics, pundits, and everyday citizens alike are rediscovering the importance of this ancient and powerful human motive. This volume brings together some of the foremost researchers of honor to debate honor’s meaning and its compatibility with liberalism, democracy, and modernity. Contributors—representing philosophy, sociology, political science, history, psychology, leadership studies, and military science—examine honor past to present, from masculine and feminine perspectives, and in North American, European, and African contexts. Topics include the role of honor in the modern military, the effects of honor on our notions of the dignity and “purity” of women, honor as a quality of good statesmen and citizens, honor’s role in international relations and community norms, and how honor’s egalitarian and elitist aspects intersect with democratic and liberal regimes.
How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of postwar liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today. Liberalism and Its Discontents moves from a penetrating interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal to an analysis of the profound and frequently corrosive economic, social, and cultural changes that have undermined the liberal tradition. The book moves beyond an examination of the internal weaknesses of liberalism and the broad social and economic forces it faced to consider the role of alternative political traditions in liberalism's downfall. What emerges is a picture of a dominant political tradition far less uniform and stable--and far more complex and contested--than has been argued. The author offers as well a masterly assessment of how some of the leading historians of the postwar era explained (or failed to explain) liberalism and other political ideologies in the last half-century. He also makes clear how historical interpretation was itself a reflection of liberal assumptions that began to collapse more quickly and completely than almost any scholar could have imagined a generation ago. As both political history and a critique of that history, Liberalism and Its Discontents, based on extraordinary essays written over the last decade, leads to a new understanding of the shaping of modern America.
The definitive history of American postwar liberalism, told through the lens of those who brought it to life. Liberalism stands proudly at the center of American politics and culture. Driven by passion for social justice, tempered by respect for the difficulty of change, liberals have struggled to end economic inequality, racial discrimination, and political repression. Liberals have fueled their cause with the promise of American life and visions of national greatness, seeking to transform the White House; the halls of Congress, the courts, the worlds of entertainment, law, media, and the course of public opinion. Bestselling author, journalist, and historian Eric Alterman, together with historian Kevin Mattson, traces the history of liberal ideals through the lives and struggles of fascinating personalities. The Cause tells the remarkable story of politicians, intellectuals, visionaries, activists, and public personalities battling for the heart and soul of the nation. The first full-scale treatment of postwar liberalism, The Cause offers an epic saga driven by stories of grand aspirations, principled ambitions, tragic flaws, and the ironies of history of the people who fought for America to live up to the highest ideals of its history.
Glen Taylor's colorful political career, which ran its course from 1944 to 1956, saw him rise from a barnstorming musician to candidate for the vice-presidency of the United States on the 1948 Progressive party ticket. In this illuminating study, Mr. Peterson delineates the life and public career of this man who, though relatively unknown, articulated and fought for many of the policies that later became widely accepted by the American people-policies such as equal civil rights on the domestic front and the application of cooperation rather than containment on the foreign front. Taylor, a dedicated liberal and humanitarian, was devoted to such ideological causes to which, in part at least, he sacrificed his political future, when he refused to abandon them when they became unpopular. Elected to the United States Senate from Idaho on the Democratic ticket in 1944, Taylor became convinced that the social, economic, and political problems facing the country in the postwar period, such as unemployment, inadequate housing, and spiraling inflation, demanded a rapid renewal of the New Deal. He saw the role of the federal government as the initiator of reforms and the guarantor of individual rights. In the area of foreign policy Taylor earned for himself the label of "maverick liberal" by opposing the Truman administration's foreign policy. He criticized the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO as contributing to the Cold War. In the span of years that saw the rise of Joseph McCarthy, Taylor vigorously articulated his conviction that the United States and the Soviet Union not only should share the responsibility for troubled world conditions but should work together for a peaceful solution. For this stand many of Taylor's contemporaries categorized him as a Communist dupe. Of little more popular appeal in postwar America was Taylor's strong belief in civil rights, particularly as it related to black Americans-even at one time finding himself under arrest in Alabama for attempting to enter a segregated black church. In providing the details here of the career of this maverick figure in American politics, Mr. Peterson portrays a life that not only demonstrates the hallowed right to dissent but also dramatically proves that many persons discredited by their contemporaries contributed substantially to a quality life for all Americans.
Laurie Johnson investigates two Enlightenment-era reactions to honor in Locke and Rousseau. She provides an in-depth analysis of how political philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau react differently to the place and importance of honor in society. Locke continues the trend of rejecting honor as a means of achieving order and justice in society, preferring instead the modern motivation of rational self-interest. Johnson explores the possibility of an honor code that is compatible with Lockean liberalism, but also points out the problems inherent in such a project. She then turns to Rousseau, whose reaction to Enlightenment ideas reveals our own “divided mood.” Rousseau’s worries and ambivalence about honor are our worries and ambivalence, and his failed attempt to revise honor in a way that works within the modern system highlights how difficult any project to resurrect the value of honor will be. This book will interest anyone who wonders what happened to honor in our world today, including students of communitarianism. Johnson warns us that we cannot simply look to the past, to the ideals of Locke or other Enlightenment thinkers such as the American founders, for answers to our current family, social, and economic problems, because our problems at least partly stem from Enlightenment liberal thought. Instead we must fully recognize this connection before we can start to formulate a definition of honor that can work for us today.
For anyone who believes that liberal isn’t a dirty word but a term of honor, this book will be as revitalizing as oxygen. For in the pages of Reason, one of our most incisive public thinkers, and a former secretary of labor mounts a defense of classical liberalism that’s also a guide for rolling back twenty years of radical conservative domination of our politics and political culture. To do so, Robert B. Reich shows how liberals can: .Shift the focus of the values debate from behavior in the bedroom to malfeasance in the boardroom .Remind Americans that real prosperity depends on fairness .Reclaim patriotism from those who equate it with pre-emptive war-making and the suppression of dissent If a single book has the potential to restore our country’s good name and common sense, it’s this one.
Pursuing the Honorable argues that our modern understanding of honor, as seen through example of today’s military training, is deficient. To remedy this, the book returns to an understanding of the honorable good, especially manifested for philosophers like Aristotle and Cicero in a life of the human virtues. However, because honor as defined by the honorable good needs to be applicable to the 21st Century occidental world of liberal democratic values, the study includes careful attention to those conditions under which honor can once again become a live option. While special attention is given to military training, including concrete proposals for its renewal, what the study discovers extends to many forms of human life
A controversial call to put honor at the center of morality To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. It evokes Hamilton and Burr and pistols at dawn, not visions of a well-organized society. But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity, and gives a sense of living for something larger than oneself. Sommers shows how honor can help us address some of society's most challenging problems, including education, policing, and mass incarceration. Counterintuitive and provocative, Why Honor Matters makes a convincing case for honor as a cornerstone of our modern society.