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Author: Jacob T. Levy Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191026670 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
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.
Author: Jacob T. Levy Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191026670 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
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.
Author: Jacob T. Levy Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198717148 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
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.
Author: Pauline Phemister Publisher: Polity ISBN: 0745627439 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
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.
Author: James E. Fleming Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 147986885X Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
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.
Author: Milton Friedman Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0547539754 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 359
Book Description
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.
Author: Jacob T. Levy Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739142941 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
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.
Author: Kim R. Holmes Publisher: Encounter Books ISBN: 1594039569 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
A former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and currently Acting Senior Vice President for Research at The Heritage Foundation, Kim R. Holmes surveys the state of liberalism in America today and finds that it is becoming its opposite—illiberalism—abandoning the precepts of open-mindedness and respect for individual rights, liberties, and the rule of law upon which the country was founded, and becoming instead an intolerant, rigidly dogmatic ideology that abhors dissent and stifles free speech. Tracing the new illiberalism historically to the radical Enlightenment, a movement that rejected the classic liberal ideas of the moderate Enlightenment that were prominent in the American Founding, Holmes argues that today’s liberalism has forsaken its American roots, incorporating instead the authoritarian, anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist prejudices of the radical and largely European Left. The result is a closing of the American liberal mind. Where once freedom of speech and expression were sacrosanct, today liberalism employs speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, and shaming rituals to stifle freedom of thought, expression, and action. It is no longer appropriate to call it liberalism at all, but illiberalism—a set of ideas in politics, government, and popular culture that increasingly reflects authoritarian and even anti-democratic values, and which is devising new strategies of exclusiveness to eliminate certain ideas and people from the political process. Although illiberalism has always been a temptation for American liberals, lurking in the radical fringes of the Left, it is today the dominant ideology of progressive liberal circles. This makes it a new danger not only to the once venerable tradition of liberalism, but to the American nation itself, which needs a viable liberal tradition that pursues social and economic equality while respecting individual liberties.
Author: Jacob T. Levy Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191522821 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
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.
Author: Jacob T. Levy
Author: Jacob T. Levy
Author: Jacob T. Levy
Author: J. Judd Owen
Author: William James
Author: Pauline Phemister
Author: James E. Fleming
Author: Milton Friedman
Author: Jacob T. Levy
Author: Kim R. Holmes
Author: Jacob T. Levy