The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism PDF Download

Author: Aaron B. Wildavsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781879383005
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Author: Aaron B. Wildavsky
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Author: Kai Nielsen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847675166
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Probably no issue is more confounding in the social policy arena or more closely argued among political philosophers than the question of the relationship between equality and liberty: are they compatible in a just society? In a systematic discussion that expands our understanding of what constitutes liberty, equality, and, especially, justice, Professor Nielsen puts forth a vigorous defense of an uncompromising egalitarianism based on a commitment to the belief that the interests of everyone matter, and matter equally. Marshalling the most persistent arguments against egalitarianism, the author presents accounts of Nietzschean elitism, meritocracy, and conservative libertarianism, as well as various shades of egalitarianism, and systematically responds to each opposing view. Followers of contemporary debates will especially welcome Nielsen's searching critiques of the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, and of the conservative libertarianism of Milton Friedman, Frederich Hayek, and particularly Robert Nozick.

Author: Felicity Aulino
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823292479
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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In this volume, leading scholars in anthropology, religion, and area studies engage global and local perspectives dialectically to develop a historically grounded, ethnographically driven social science. The book's chapters, drawing on research in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, are also in conversation with the extensive work of editor and contributor Stanley J. Tambiah: They all investigate some aspect of what Tambiah has called "multiple orientations to the world." The implicit focus throughout is on human cultural differences and the historically constituted nature of the political potentialities (both positive and negative) that stem from these. As a whole, then, the volume promotes an approach to scholarship that actively avoids privileging any one conceptual framework or cultural form at the expense of recognizing another--a style of inquiry that the editors call "radical egalitarianism." Together, these scholars encourage a comparative examination of contemporary societies, provide insights into the historical development of social scientific and sociopolitical categories, and raise vital questions about the possibilities for achieving equality and justice in the presence of competing realities in the global world today. Michael M.J. Fischer's Afterword provides a brilliant exegesis of Tambiah's multifaceted oeuvre, outlining the primary themes that inform his scholarship and, by extension, all the chapters in this book.

Author: Aaron Wildavsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351524615
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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As a result of a lifetime of incomparably wide-ranging investigations, Aaron Wildavsky concluded that politics in the United States and elsewhere was a patterned activity, exhibiting recurring regularities. Political values, beliefs, and institutions were neither endlessly varied, nor haphazardly organized. They tended to exhibit a limited range of variation, and were organized in discoverable, predictable ways. In Cultural Analysis, the fourth collection of his essays posthumously published by Transaction, Wildavsky argues that American politics, public law, and public administration are the contested terrain of rival, inescapable political cultures.Analysts of American politics distinguish liberals from conservatives and Democrats from Republicans, but do not explain how these categories of political allegiance develop, maintain themselves, or change. Wildavsky offers a cultural-functional explanation for ideological and partisan coherence and realignment. Wildavsky also felt that these dualisms did not adequately capture the ideological and partisan variation he observed on the political landscape. Like others, he detected another recurring strain of political allegiance: that of classical liberalism or libertarianism. People of this political stripe valued freedom more than equality (the primary political value of contemporary liberals), and also more than order, the primary political value of conservatives.The value of Wildavsky's reconceptualization of the ideological and social foundations of political conflict, compromise, and coalition is assessed here by Wildavsky's former colleagues and students at the University of California, Berkeley: Dennis Coyle, Richard Ellis, Robert Kagan, Austin Ranney, and Brendon Swedlow.

Author: Henry Phelps Brown
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191521523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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The belief that existing distributions of income and wealth are unjust has come to be widely held, and has prompted the inclusion of egalitarian measures in many political programmes. This work uses the methods of reasoned history and comparative statistics to arrive at an assessment of egalitarianism. After reviewing the outlooks of the ancient and medieval worlds, it traces the rise of egalitarianism from the Renaissance and Reformation onwards. A complementary approach is provided by a wide survey of actual distributions of income and wealth: what is known of them in the past, what form they take in contemporary societies, and the economic processes that generate them. These comprehensive studies lead to an inquiry into the authority of equality as a principle of social philosophy, and the practicability of egalitarian policy.

Author: Katrina Forrester
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216754
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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"In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--

Author: Aaron Wildavsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351292064
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Aaron Wildavsky, along with Mary Douglas, identified what they called grid-group theory. Wildavsky began calling this "cultural theory," and applied it to an astounding array of subjects. The essays in this volume exemplify the theory's potential contributions to three seemingly disparate, but related, areas: the social construction of meaning, normative/analytic political philosophy, and a theory of rational choices. This book is the first in a series of Aaron Wildavsky's collected writings being published posthumously by Transaction. Wildavsky selected, sequenced, and grouped all but three of the essays included in Culture and Social Theory prior to his death. Some are presented here for the first time. Wildavsky's cultural theory provides ways to organize and interpret the world. In the first section, he shows how social scientists, particularly economists and sociologists, apply the theory. Wildavsky argues that concepts such as externalities, public goods, altruism, and even risk and rape are tools of rival, ubiquitous cultures engaged in perpetual struggle with one another. The second section deals with cultural theory as a way to interpret the works of normative and analytic political philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, on competing human objectives. Wildavsky argues that particular types of interaction among a society's cultures are necessary for effective realization of basic concepts such as democracy. In the third section, Wildavsky applies cultural theory in conjunction with instrumental rationality, the former as a theory of preference formation, the latter as a device for realizing preferences efficiently. High-priority objectives, and thus the character of norms and rational action, shift across cultures. The world and its various elements comprise a complex, frequently changing, and thus ambiguous reality, nowhere more so than in the dynamic contours of the United States. For cultural theory, individualistic, hierarchical, and egalitarian interpretations of the world are the only ones capable of forming and sustaining institutions and related patterns of social relations that will support human social groups. Wildavsky's central objective is to strip away the camouflage and to reveal varying domains of social life as fields of cultural competition. Culture and Social Theory will be a necessary addition to the libraries of political scientists, economists, and policymakers, not to mention all those who admire Aaron Wildavsky and his work.

Author: Murray Newton Rothbard
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
ISBN: 1610164628
Category : Libertarianism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Author: Shlomi Segall
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191637963
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Egalitarians have traditionally been suspicious of equality of opportunity. But the past twenty five years or so have seen a sea-change in egalitarian thinking about that concept. 'Luck egalitarians' such as G. A. Cohen, Richard Arneson, and John Roemer have paved a new way of thinking about equality of opportunity, and infused it with radical egalitarian content. In this book, Shlomi Segall brings together these developments in egalitarian theory and offers a comprehensive account of 'radical equality of opportunity'. Radical equality of opportunity (EOp) differs from more traditional conceptions on several dimensions. Most notably, while other accounts of equality of opportunity strive to neutralize legal and/or socio-economic obstacles to one's opportunity-set the radical account seeks to remove also natural ones. Radical EOp, then, aims at neutralizing all obstacles that lie outside individuals' control. This has far-reaching implications, and the book is devoted to exploring and defending them. The book touches on four main themes. First, it locates the ideal of radical EOp within egalitarian distributive justice. Segall advances there three claims in particular: that we ought to be concerned with equality in individual holdings (rather than merely social relations); that we ought to be bothered, as egalitarians, with unequal outcomes, and never equal ones; and that we ought to be concerned with disadvantages the absolute (rather than relative) badness of which, the agent could not have controlled. Second, the book applies the concept of radical equality of opportunity to office and hiring. It demonstrates that radical EOp yields an attractive account both with regard to justice in the allocation of jobs on the one hand, and discrimination, on the other. Third, the book offers an account of radical EOp in education and upbringing. Segall tries to defend there the rather radical implications of the account, namely that it may hold children responsible for their choices, and that it places quite demanding requirements on parents. Finally, the book develops an account of radical equality of opportunity for health, to rival Norman Daniels's Rawlsian account. The proposed account is distinguished in the parity that it creates between social and natural causes of ill health.