Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Civic Virtue

This paper explores the question whether perfectionism amounts to a political doctrine that is more attractive than liberalism. I try to show that an egalitarian liberalism that is open to questions of value and that holds a conception of limited neutrality can meet the perfectionist challenge. My thesis is that liberalism can be reconciled easily with perfectionism read as a moral doctrine. Perfectionism as a political doctrine equall stays within the value framework of liberalism. Finally, I try to show that liberalism can give an account of civic virtue that is a sufficient basis for developing the normative guidelines of a rich and meaningful social life

Liberalism and the Moral Significance of Individualism: A Deweyan View

A liberalism which scorns all individualism is fundamentally misguided. This is the chief thesis of this paper. To argue for it, I look closely at some key concepts. The concepts of morislity and individualism are crucial. I emphasize Dewey on the "individuality of the mind" and a Deweyan discussion of language, communication, and community. The thesis links individualism and liberalism, and since appeals to liberalism have broader appeal in the present context of discussions, I start with consideration of liberalism. The aim is to dispute overly restrictive conceptions and explore a broader perspective. To bring the argument to a close, attention turns first to Dewey on value inquiry, to Dewey's "democratic individualism" (cf. Dewey 1939, 179), and to the concept of moral community. Disputing the acquisitiveness of utilitarian influences in classical liberalism, a Deweyan argument from the nature of moral community supports re-emphasis on individualism in contemporary liberal thought

On Actualist and Fundamental Public Justification in Political Liberalism

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental. It is actualist in that it fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification

Sociology and Classical Liberalism

We advocate the development of a classical-liberal character within professional sociology. The American Sociological Association (ASA) is taken as representative of professional sociology in the United States. We review the ASA’s activities and organizational statements, to show the association’s leftist character. Internal criticism is often very uneasy about leftist domination of the field. We present survey results establishing that, in voting and in policy views, the ASA membership is mostly left-wing and devoid of classical liberalism. We sketch some ideas showing that sociology needs classical liberalism, and classical liberalism needs sociology.sociology; American Sociological Association; ideology; policy views; classical liberalism

Liberalism and Rationalism at the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1902–1903

This article reconstructs and analyzes a debate on “the crisis of liberalism” that took place in a prominent philosophy journal, the Revue de me´taphysique et de morale, in 1902–3. The debate was actuated by combiste anticlerical measures and the apparently liberal demand made by Catholics for freedom of instruction. Participants—all hostile to the church—sought to articulate a principled, rationalist liberalism that could respond to the needs of the republic in the post-Dreyfus era. Participants—including Célestin Bouglé, Dominique Parodi, Gustave Lanson, Elie Halévy, and Paul Lapie—balanced each in their own way the demands of rationalism, democracy, and modernity. The debate opens a window onto the transition between the Second Empire’s dissident, neo-Kantian, liberal republicanism and the antitotalitarian liberalism that Hale´vy and his student Raymond Aron would articulate in the interwar years

Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Urban Governance: A State Theoretical Perspective.

This paper discusses the recurrence and the recurrent limitations of liberalism as a general discourse, strategy, and regime. It then establishes a continuum of neoliberalism ranging from a project for radical system transformation from state socialism to market capitalism, through a basic regime shift within capitalism, to more limited policy adjustments intended to maintain another type of accumulation regime and its mode of regulation. These last two forms of neoliberalism are then related to a broader typology of approaches to the restructuring, rescaling, and reordering of accumulation and regulation in advanced capitalist societies: neoliberalism, neocorporatism, neostatism, and neocommunitarianism. These arguments are illustrated in the final part of the paper through a critique of the World Report on the Urban Future 21 (World Commission 2000), both as an explicit attempt to promote flanking and supporting measures to sustain the neoliberal project on the urban scale and as an implicit attempt to naturalize that project on a global scale

9. Economic Liberalism

Some of the classical economists thought that their function was to describe the general principles of economic life and not to prescribe the means of improving society. Wealth, not happiness, remarked Senior, is the economist\u27s concern. Others, who took more seriously the titles they chose for the books they were publishing, thought differently. [excerpt

XVII. The Transformation of Liberalism and Nationalism, 1871-1914

In the first half of the nineteenth century liberalism and nationalism were key concepts of the major political and economic movements within Western Civilization, As has been explained in the preceding chapter, by the end of the century new radical movements — socialism, syndicalism, and anarchism — had supplanted them on the extreme left of the political spectrum. By 1914 this new Left was a significant factor in many countries. However, it was still a minority movement and, for most people living in the Western World between 1871 and 1914, nationalism and liberalism were more important in determining the texture of politics. Even many conservatives now compromised with them. That these were not the same liberalism and nationalism which had been the watchwords of reform half a century before should not be surprising because the world in which they operated and often conquered had also changed. [excerpt

XIII. Political Liberalism and Nationalism, 1815-1871

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of two secular faiths which became key features of Western thought: political liberalism and nationalism- Their tenets were not wTiblly ne^ As~early as the lourteenth century when medieval feudalism was giving way to the rising national state, Marsiglio of Padua (c. 1275 - c, 1343) had announced that political authority was properly lodged in the people. The seventeenth century had produced in John Locke (1632-1704) a man whose ideas on government later became a wellspring for political liberalism. The same era also found nationalism accentuated by colonial rivalries and mercantilist doctrines. Later, the Enlightenment left a legacy to both political liberalism and nationalism. The philosophes had reflected on ways and means of broadening the basis for government founded to preserve those inalienable rights based on natural law. In addition, their attacks on Christian superstitions undermined popular respect for religion, thereby opening the way for a new object of reverence. [excerpt