Liberalism And Modern Society

Download or read book Liberalism and Modern Society written by Richard Paul Bellamy and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new book is a wide-ranging analysis of the emergence and development of liberalism, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Bellamy examines the evolution of liberal ideas in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, discussing the work of Mill, Green, Durkeim, Weber, and Pareto, among others. He situates their theories firmly within their respective historical contexts, illustrating in this way the contingency of many of the social and moral assumptions underlying liberal thought. For modern societies have undergone profound changes in the course of the last century, and Bellamy argues that these changes have severely undermined many of the key tenets of liberalism. The final part of the book examines critically the elaboration of liberal ideas in the work of contemporary political philosophers such as Hayek, Nozick, and Rawls. Bellamy shows how the liberalisms of these writers rest on social views and moral intuitions that are now anachronistic and untenable. He maintains that only a democratic liberalism built on realistic foundations can provide a plausible political theory in the complex and pluralist societies of the modern world.

Download or read book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism written by Ronald J. Pestritto and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the political principles of Woodrow Wilson that influenced his presidency and the impact he had on United States and the progressive movement.

Download or read book The Making of Modern Liberalism written by Alan Ryan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Making of Modern Liberalism is a deep and wide-ranging exploration of the origins and nature of liberalism from the Enlightenment through its triumphs and setbacks in the twentieth century and beyond. The book is the fruit of the more than four decades during which Alan Ryan, one of the world's leading political thinkers, reflected on the past of the liberal tradition-and worried about its future.This is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory or the history of liberalism.

Download or read book Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries written by Milan Zafirovski and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about modern liberal society and its adversaries. The book rediscovers and rehabilitates much maligned, especially in America, liberalism as the ideal system of liberty in relation to anti-liberalism as one of un-freedom. It rediscovers liberal modernity as a free, equal and just social system and time, thus most compatible with and enhancing of human civilization ushering in the 21st century. It exposes anti-liberal adversaries, especially conservatism, as ideologies and systems most inappropriate with and destructive of civilization. The book rediscovers liberal modernity as the master process and destination of Western civilization, and its anti-liberal adversaries, notably conservatism, as the ghosts of a dead past. The anti-liberal rumors of the 'death' of liberalism are 'greatly exaggerated'.

Download or read book Uncivil Society written by Richard Boyd and published by Applications of Political Theory. This book was released on 2004 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil society is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary political theory. These debates often assume that a vibrant associational life between individual and state is essential for maintaining liberal democratic institutions. In Uncivil Society, Richard Boyd argues-through a careful reading of such seminal figures as Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Mill, Tocqueville, and Oakeshott-that contemporary theorists have not only tended to ignore the question of which sorts of groups ought to count as "civil society" but they have also unduly discounted the ambivalence of violent and illiberal groups in a liberal democracy. Boyd seeks to correct this conceptual confusion by offering us a better moral taxonomy of the virtue of civility.

Download or read book Why Liberalism Failed written by Patrick J. Deneen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the most important political books of 2018."—Rod Dreher, American Conservative Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

Download or read book Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism written by Peter Berkowitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtue has been rediscovered in the United States as a subject of public debate and of philosophical inquiry. Politicians from both parties, leading intellectuals, and concerned citizens from diverse backgrounds are addressing questions about the content of our character. William Bennett's moral guide for children, A Book of Virtues, was a national bestseller. Yet many continue to associate virtue with a prudish, Victorian morality or with crude attempts by government to legislate morals. Peter Berkowitz clarifies the fundamental issues, arguing that a certain ambivalence toward virtue reflects the liberal spirit at its best. Drawing on recent scholarship as well as classical political philosophy, he makes his case with penetrating analyses of four central figures in the making of modern liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill. These thinkers are usually understood to have neglected or disparaged virtue. Yet Berkowitz shows that they all believed that government resting on the fundamental premise of liberalism--the natural freedom and equality of all human beings--could not work unless citizens and officeholders possess particular qualities of mind and character. These virtues, which include reflective judgment, sympathetic imagination, self-restraint, the ability to cooperate, and toleration do not arise spontaneously but must be cultivated. Berkowitz explores the various strategies the thinkers employ as they seek to give virtue its due while respecting individual liberty. Liberals, he argues, must combine energy and forbearance, finding public and private ways to support such nongovernmental institutions as the family and voluntary associations. For these institutions, the liberal tradition powerfully suggests, play an indispensable role not only in forming the virtues on which liberal democracy depends but in overcoming the vices that it tends to engender. Clearly written and vigorously argued, this is a provocative work of political theory that speaks directly to complex issues at the heart of contemporary philosophy and public discussion. New Forum Books makes available to general readers outstanding, original, interdisciplinary scholarship with a special focus on the juncture of culture, law, and politics. New Forum Books is guided by the conviction that law and politics not only reflect culture, but help to shape it. Authors include leading political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, philosophers, theologians, historians, and economists writing for nonspecialist readers and scholars across a range of fields. Looking at questions such as political equality, the concept of rights, the problem of virtue in liberal politics, crime and punishment, population, poverty, economic development, and the international legal and political order, New Forum Books seeks to explain--not explain away--the difficult issues we face today.