Liberal Individualism

2021 ◽  
pp. 17-44
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Individualism

scholarly journals Vulnerable bodies and invisible work: The Covid-19 pandemic and social reproduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 135822912110313
Author(s):  
Ellen Gordon-Bouvier
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
The State ◽  
Family Unit ◽  
State Response ◽  
The Past ◽  
Invisible Work ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Liberal Individualism

The restrained state has always sought to devalue socially reproductive work, often consigning it to the private family unit, where it is viewed as a natural part of female relational roles. This marginalisation of social reproduction adversely affects those performing it and reduces their resilience to vulnerability. The pandemic has largely shattered the liberal illusions of autonomous personhood and state restraint. The reality of our universal embodied vulnerability has now become impossible to ignore, and society’s reliance on socially reproductive work has therefore been pushed into public view. However, the pandemic has also exacerbated harms and pressures for those performing paid and unpaid social reproduction, creating a crisis that demands an urgent state response. As it is argued in this paper, the UK response to date has been inadequate, illustrating an unwillingness to abandon familiar principles of liberal individualism. However, the pandemic has also created a climate of exceptionality, which has prompted even the most neoliberal of states to consider measures that in the past would have been dismissed. In this paper, it is imagined how the state can use this opportunity to become more responsive and improve the resilience of social reproduction workers, both inside and outside the home.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Wallach
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Alasdair Macintyre ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of ◽  
Liberal Individualism

This essay discusses the contribution of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) to a generation of moral theory. Pitched as a critique of liberal individualism (e.g., Rawls), modernity (e.g., amoral bureaucracies), and the antagonism toward the history of moral theory evinced by analytical philosophers, MacIntyre’s book urges a return toward moral traditions embedded in local communities as the best route to avoid what he regards as the soullessness of modernity and the abyss of Nietzschean philosophy. But his failure to reflect on the political valence of traditions in general or the Aristotelian and Thomist ones he values, seriously compromises his complaints about modernity and his suggestions for ways out.

Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism

1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 129-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Jann
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Spiritual Health ◽  
The Political ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Central Characteristic ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
The Middle Ages

Critical attention to the dominant tradition of Victorian medievalism has stressed its essentially conservative tendencies. For representative proponents of this tradition – Carlyle, Ruskin, Young England – the imaginative value of the Middle Ages lay in their contrast with the political and social disorder of the present. The antidote to those modern poisons – laissez faire capitalism, Utilitarian ethics, Liberal individualism – lay in a resuscitation of medieval hierarchy, one which called on the Captains of Industry to form a new aristocracy, and the state to assume control over the economy and social welfare. For such thinkers, the spiritual health and organic order of medieval society depended upon its essentially undemocratic structure. The prominence of this analysis has unfortunately overshadowed the importance of two alternative treatments of Victorian medievalism, the Whig and the Socialist. While opposed in fundamental ways to one another, these interpretations are opposed in more significant ways to that dominant conservative tradition in that they created alternative myths of the Middle Ages to justify a more – not less – democratic society in the present and future. Such myths assisted the development of class consciousness by using the authority of history to sanction a social order which drew its moral and political strengths not from the ideals of the aristocracy, but from those of the middle and working classes, respectively. However, the following demonstration of the way similar historical points of departure can lead investigators to radically different conclusions ultimately reinforces the central characteristic of Victorian medievalism: that it represented less an attempt to recapture the past “as it really was” than a projection of current ideals back into time.

Virtue or Autonomy: Alasdair MacIntyre's Critique of Liberal Individualism

Polity ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 635-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis P. Hinchman
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Individualism

The practice of multispecies relations in urban space and its potentialities for new legal imaginaries

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (0) ◽  
pp. 148-161
Author(s):  
Teresa Dillon
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
Ontological Position

This article explores what it means to enact multispecies relations in urban space. This exploration is rooted in contemporary art practices that create living frameworks through which encounters with non-human animal cultures, histories, rituals and justice are manifested. Such works play with the legalities and categorizations of ‘animal’ and ‘nature’ by exposing the nested reasonings and protocols that continue to propagate hierarchical species logics. Consequentially such work, alongside scholarship on earth-bound legalities, looks to how law can foster more just multispecies orderings, which aspire to create more equitable conditions for all. To scaffold such transitions the article makes the case for how a constant, public, educational and social rehearsal that unknots histories of liberal individualism is required in order to shift the ontological position of the human species. This rehearsal is set against the backdrop of climate emergencies and the call for a more expansive notion of the urban commons. The closing reflections point to how the Earth’s inviolability must necessarily be placed at the centre of an approach to urban making that is complemented by an intersectional set of innovative cosmologies, actions, manners and ways.

A Victorian Wrenaissance: Historical Narrative at St. Paul's Cathedral

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-422
Author(s):  
Dory Agazarian
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Christopher Wren ◽  
Liberal Individualism

The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.

scholarly journals Normative Paradoxes of Privacy: Literacy and Choice in Platform Societies

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-198
Author(s):  
Paula Helm ◽  
Sandra Seubert
Keyword(s):  
Structural Dynamics ◽  
Privacy Protection ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
One Step ◽  
Liberal Individualism

Privacy scholars, advocates, and activists repeatedly emphasize the fact that current measures of privacy protection are insufficient to counter the systemic threats presented by datafication and platformization (van Dijck, de Waal, and Poell 2018: 24). These threats include discrimination against underprivileged groups, monopolization of power and knowledge, as well as manipulation. In this paper, we take that analysis one step further, suggesting that the consequences of inappropriate privacy protection online possibly even run counter to the normative principles that underpinned the standard clause for privacy protection in the first place. We discuss the ways in which attempts at protection run the risk of producing results that not only diverge from but, paradoxically, even distort the normative goals they intended to reach: informational self-determination, empowerment, and personal autonomy. Drawing on the framework of “normative paradoxes,” we argue that the ideals of a normatively increasingly one-sided, liberal individualism create complicities with the structural dynamics of platform capitalism, which in turn promote those material-discursive practices of digital usage that are ultimately extremely privacy-invasive.

scholarly journals THE ROMANTIC SOCIALIST ORIGINS OF HUMANITARIANISM

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 737-768
Author(s):  
NAOMI J. ANDREWS
Keyword(s):  
Power Dynamics ◽  
French Society ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Liberal Individualism

“Humanitarian” (humanitaire) came into use in French contemporaneously with the emergence of romantic socialism, and in the context of the rebuilding of post-revolutionary French society and its overseas empire beginning in the 1830s. This article excavates this early idea of humanitarianism, documenting an alternative genealogy for the term and its significance that has been overlooked by scholars of both socialism and humanitarianism. This humanitarianism identified a collective humanity as the source of its own salvation, rather than an external, well-meaning benefactor. Unlike liberal models of advocacy, which invoked individualized actors and recipients of their care, socialists privileged solidarity within their community and rejected the foundational logic of liberal individualism. In tracing this history, this article considers its importance for contemporary debates about humanitarianism’s imperial power dynamics.

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