Liberty, Equality, and Plurality

Liberty, Equality, and Plurality
Author: Larry May
Publisher:
Total Pages: 330
Release: 1997
Genre: Law
ISBN:

Voters as well as ethicists and legal experts are currently debating many of the issues inherent in balancing individual with majority and minority group rights, though often, there seems to be an inverse correlation between the two. May (Washington U.) chairs lively multidisciplinary discussions on: the (in)compatibility of liberty and equality (with responsibility being the wild card); law, morality, and limits on liberty (in regard to freedom of speech, poverty, taxation, and assisted suicide); and equality and the clash of cultures (in cases of hate speech, and religious freedom vs. refusal of medical treatment). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Liberty, Equality, Democracy

Liberty, Equality, Democracy
Author: Eduardo Nolla
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1996-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0814757782

This volumes explores the whole range of Alexis Tocqueville's ideas, from his political, literary and sociological theories to his concept of history, his religious beliefs, and his philosophical doctrines. Among the topics considered are: Tocqueville's beliefs about foreign policy as applied to American democracy; Tocqueville and Machiavelli on the art of being free; Tocqueville and the historical sociology of state; virtue and politics in Tocqueville; Tocqueville's debt to Rousseau and Pascal; Tocqueville's analysis of the role of religion in preserving American democracy; Tocqueville and American literary critics; and Tocqueville and the postmodern refusal of history. The different approaches to Tocqueville's classical work represented in this book, combined with the frequent use of unpublished sources, present a fresh and renewed vision of his classic Democracy in America, reinforcing after a century and a half its reputation as the most modern, provocative, and profound attempt to explain the nature of democracy. Contributing to the volume are: Pierre Birnbaum (University of Sorbonne), Herbert Dittgen (University of Goettingen), Joseph Alulis (Lake Forest College), Dalmacio Negro (Universidad Complutense, Madrid), Peter A. Lawler (Berry College), Catherine Zuckert (Carleton College), Francesco de Sanctis (Naples University), Hugh Brogan (University of Essex), Cushing Strout (Cornell University), Gisela Schlueter (Universitaet Hannover), Roger Boesche (Occidental College), Edward T. Gargan (University of Wisconsin), and James T. Schleifer (College of New Rochelle).

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
Author: Danielle Allen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2014-06-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0871408139

“A tour de force.... No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.” —Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize Winner of the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize Winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize (Nonfiction) Finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Hurston Wright Legacy Award Shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Selection Featured on the front page of the New York Times, Our Declaration is already regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation’s founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text” (David M. Kennedy).

Practice, Power, and Forms of Life

Practice, Power, and Forms of Life
Author: Terry Pinkard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022681324X

"In Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, philosopher Terry Pinkard interprets Sartre's late work as a fundamental reworking of his earlier work, especially in terms of his understanding of the possibility of communal action as genuinely free, which the French philosopher had previously argued was impossible. Pinkard shows how Sartre figured in contemporary debates about the use of the first-person and how this informed his theory of action. Pinkard reveals how Sartre was led back to Hegel, which itself was spurred on by his newfound interest in Marxism in the 1950s. Pinkard also argues that Sartre took up Heidegger's critique of existentialism, developing a new post-Marxist theory of the way actors exhibit the class relations of their form of life in their actions, and showing how genuine freedom is present only in certain types of "we" relationships. Pinkard argues that Sartre constructed a novel position on freedom that has yet to be adequately taken up and thought through in philosophy and political theory. Through Sartre, Pinkard advances an argument that contributes to the history of philosophy as well as contemporary and future debates on action and freedom"--

Liberalism and Value Pluralism

Liberalism and Value Pluralism
Author: George Crowder
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2002-04-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0826450482

Value pluralism is the idea, associated with the late Isaiah Berlin, that fundamental human values are irreducibly plural and incommensurable. Ends like liberty, equality and community are intrinsic goods which can neither be ranked in an absolute hierarchy nor translated into units of a common denominator. If that is true, how can we choose among such values when they come into conflict in particular cases? In particular, what reason is there to justify the value ranking characteristic of liberal democracy, favouring personal autonomy and toleration? Recent commentators have seen value pluralism as undermining the traditional claims of liberalism to universal authority, rendering it at best no more than one political form among others with no greater claim to legitimacy. Against that view, George Crowder argues that a strong distinctive case for liberalism as a universal project is implied by value pluralism itself. Reflection on the elements of value pluralism yields a set of ethical principles, including respect for universal values, rejection of political utopianism, promotion of value diversity, accommodation of reasonable disagreement, and cultivation of civic virtues. Those principles are best satisfied by a liberal form of politics characterised by a strong commitment to personal autonomy, by policies of moderate redistribution and multiculturalism, and by constitutional restraints on democractic politics. This is the first book-length defence of liberalism on the basis of value pluralism, complementing and extending the work of Berlin and others.

Liberty and Security

Liberty and Security
Author: Conor Gearty
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2013-04-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745669980

All aspire to liberty and security in their lives but few people truly enjoy them. This book explains why this is so. In what Conor Gearty calls our 'neo-democratic' world, the proclamation of universal liberty and security is mocked by facts on the ground: the vast inequalities in supposedly free societies, the authoritarian regimes with regular elections, and the terrible socio-economic deprivation camouflaged by cynically proclaimed commitments to human rights. Gearty's book offers an explanation of how this has come about, providing also a criticism of the present age which tolerates it. He then goes on to set out a manifesto for a better future, a place where liberty and security can be rich platforms for everyone's life. The book identifies neo-democracies as those places which play at democracy so as to disguise the injustice at their core. But it is not just the new 'democracies' that have turned 'neo', the so-called established democracies are also hurtling in the same direction, as is the United Nations. A new vision of universal freedom is urgently required. Drawing on scholarship in law, human rights and political science this book argues for just such a vision, one in which the great achievements of our democratic past are not jettisoned as easily as were the socialist ideals of the original democracy-makers.

Liberty, Equality, and the Market

Liberty, Equality, and the Market
Author: Борис Николаевич Чичерин
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 508
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780300072327

This volume brings the remarkable writings of Russian liberal thinker Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828-1904) to English-language readers for the first time. The collection includes key essays in which Chicherin addresses the central political and social problems that confronted Russia from 1855 to the opening years of the twentieth century. Chicherin's ideological alternatives to the Bolshevik plan for revolutionary transformation of Russia not only provide valuable historical insights, but also are highly relevant to current political discussion of liberalism in Russia and in the West. In a comprehensive introduction to the book, G. M. Hamburg discusses the development of Chicherin's thought and places it in historical context. Chicherin, Hamburg says, was a powerful and sophisticated but often misunderstood defender of civil and political rights. Like his fellow liberals in Russia, Chicherin was heavily influenced by German idealism and particularly by Hegel. He departed from many, however, in favoring a market economy and advocating that reform efforts be tailored to local conditions and traditions. In this collection Chicherin explores such contemporary issues as the abolition of serfdom, Russian education, and the need for a constitution. He also tackles broad philosophical problems--the nature of liberty and equality, styles of political discourse--and comments on such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx.

Political Philosophy

Political Philosophy
Author: Adam Swift
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2014
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0745652379

Bringing political philosophy out of the ivory tower and within the reach of all, this book provides us with the tools to cut through the complexity of modern politics.